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“Oh heavens, no. I got married at the courthouse, in a regular suit. Just me and your uncle Rudy, and Reece. That’s all.”
    â€œHow come you didn’t have a pretty wedding dress too?”
    She started wrapping the pictures in newspaper, and she didn’t look up when she said, “I was almost forty years old, Button. Why, I’d have looked pretty silly in a white dress made for a young girl, don’t you think?”
    â€œWell, how come there’s no picture here of you in your suit, then?” I asked, and Aunt Verdella shrugged.
    Aunt Verdella took all the pictures off of the walls and off of the tables. And as she did, she turned each one of them for me to see. “This here is your grandma Mae when she was still young, right before your daddy was born,” she said. Grandma Mae wasn’t smiling. Her face looked like a statue’s face. She had a pointy chin and eyebrows that looked like fur cuffs. She was wearing an ugly dress that was buttoned up so tight around her neck that it looked like it might have been choking her. “She doesn’t look young to me,” I said.
    Aunt Verdella laughed. “Well, your daddy was a change-of-life baby, so I guess she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. Still, it was taken while she still had some dark left in her hair.” She rubbed the dusty glass with her hand. “That woman sure didn’t have any time for kids. Not by the time I’d met her anyway. She just worked in her garden, or cleaned, or sewed, or canned, and she sighed every time your daddy had to ask her for anything. I don’t think I saw her give that boy a hug once. Not once.
    â€œWhen I married your uncle, Reece wasn’t more than ten years old. Cute as a bug’s ear too. One of them boys that never sits still.” Aunt Verdella’s eyes were full of laughs when she said this.
    While Aunt Verdella yammered on about my daddy in the old days, I tried to shrink him down in my mind to a little boy as cute as a bug’s ear. But no matter how hard I tried, the best I could see was a midget man, with arms like gunnysacks stuffed tight with rocks, and hair like fur crawling out of the top of his T-shirt.
    â€œI remember Rudy helped him make Mae a bird feeder for her birthday, that first summer after your uncle and I were married. Making it was my idea. Mae liked birds in her yard, cardinals especially, so I thought she’d like a feeder. That poor boy worked for days on that thing, making it all square and nice. Paintin’ it red so it would match the shutters on the house. It should have made her happy, but all she had to say was that it would be too much bother to traipse through the snow to keep it filled come winter, and that in the summertime, the birds could find their own food. She said the squirrels would just gobble up the seeds anyway. I was so mad!” Aunt Verdella’s lips puckered up like the top of a drawstring purse tugged tight, then her mouth fell open and she clicked her teeth with her tongue.
    â€œI didn’t blame that boy for smashing it to bits. Even though I would have taken that bird feeder myself and propped it right in the front yard, proudly.”
    Aunt Verdella shook her head. “Then she dared resent me, because that boy took to me. Your grandpa was dead by then, and your uncle Rudy had built our house across the road, because Grandma Mae said it never works, two women living under the same roof—even though Betty and Rudy lived with her the whole while they were married. So Reece just hung around Rudy when he wasn’t in school. He helped Rudy with the farm chores, and they’d go fishing and hunting together. Things like that. And I made him peanut butter cookies, and pancakes, and rhubarb pie, because those were his favorites. And I listened to him when he talked. Not like her. Before you knew it, he was spendin’ a night here and there with us, and little by little, his