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from Emily. She looked at it for a long time, her head bent over it.
    “Yes,” she said, raising it to look at Emily. There was a sort of pinched look around her nostrils that Emily associated with sick people.
    “That’s us, all right. I haven’t seen this since…I guess right after it was taken. What would it be… 1969 ? 1970 ? Where did you find it?”
    “Stuck behind this dog picture on the mantel,” Emily said. “I wonder why? It’s a great picture of you and Daddy…”
    “I wonder why, too,” Jenny said. “Well, come on, let’s get these trophies polished and go have a cup of tea or a Coke. I feel like I’ve swallowed a bale of cotton.”
    She set the picture smartly down on Walter’s desk and went out of the room. In the kitchen, Emily stared at her. Her aunt moved quickly and with sharp movements, not at all with her usual lazy, flat-footed grace. Emily remembered that Jennifer Carter had studied ballet at the College of Charleston. Jenny kept her face turned away.
    “Who took the picture?” Emily said. “Did…my mother take it?”
    “No,” her aunt said. “She was still at Converse. I don’t even think she’d met your dad yet. Our daddy brought him home from a field trial the day it was taken. I’d just met him.”
    Emily could hear unsaid words. She came sometimes to know, usually unwillingly, the thoughts of others. Her place in the world depended on it; her father and brothers made almost none for her. She looked at her aunt’s straight back and thought, “She was in love with him. He was her beau first. You can see it on her face in the picture. How did it get to be my mother he married?”
    But she knew the answer. Caroline Carter had come home from school with her curls and curves and lilting laughter and set her great hazel-gold eyes on Walter Parmenter, and that was that.
    “I guess she married ol’ Truman Raiford on the rebound,” Emily thought. “What a mistake that was. I don’t think…I wish my mother hadn’t done that.”
    “But then where would I be? And where would Walt Junior and Carter be? Would there ever have been Buddy?” She opened her mouth to ask more questions, and Jenny said, still not looking at her, “Let it alone, Emily. It was a long time ago.”
    Emily might have persisted but for the rattling sound of the Dodge pickup in the front drive. Car doors slammed and men’s voices spun briefly out into the cold, pale air, and then there was the sound of a heavy, expensive SUV purring to life and retreating down the driveway, and then silence. A long silence.
    “What on earth are they doing home so early? I thought your dad said sundown…” Jenny said.
    A lump of ice began to form in Emily’s chest. She stood still and silent.
    The front door flew open and she heard her father’s heavy footsteps come into the foyer. They did not stop at the kitchen, but went straight up the stairs. A door slammed, and then there was silence again.
    In a moment Walt Junior and Carter came into the kitchen. Their faces were raw with cold, and they did not have the look of happy hunters home from the hill. Behind them, on Carter’s left heel, Elvis padded obediently. He looked up at her. There was no life in his golden eyes, and his stumpy tail did not wag. He merely sat down quietly in front of the boys. He would not look up at Emily. The silence spun out again, as palpable as the dust motes in the slanting afternoon sunshine.
    “What happened?” Emily whispered finally, around the lump of ice in her chest. “Where’s Mr. Thing?”
    “Mr. Thing has gone home to quote, think it over,” Carter said. “You ought to put that stuff somewhere out of sight.” He gestured at the shining decanter of sherry and pierced silver platter of warm benné biscuits. “I don’t think Dad’s going to want to see it.”
    “Carter…” Emily began, desperately.
    “Elvis wouldn’t hunt,” her brother said briefly. The muscles beside his mouth twitched. “He did it all