“The naked savage. Teach her some girl stuff, will you, like how to wear clothes?”

“See you later, Dell.”

“Oh, listen. Did Millie tell you about the hog fry?”

Annawake sits up. “Another one? I’m going to get fat this summer. Who’s this one for?”

“Cash Stillwater, just moved back from somewhere. It’s down at Letty Hornbuckle’s over in Heaven.”

“Miss Letty, the one that used to run everybody’s business in the grade-school cafeteria? I haven’t seen her since I got breasts.”

“You have breasts? Let me see.”

Annawake makes a frightening face at her brother.

“So, you coming?”

“Cash Stillwater,” she repeats. “I think I went to school with his son, who was it, Jesse Stillwater? Real tall?”

“No, Jesse is Cash and Letty’s youngest brother. I think there was eleven or twelve of them. Cash had a daughter—remember that Alma, she drove herself into the river a few years ago?”

“Oh, yeah. Off that bridge.”

“They’re some kin to Johnetta Hornbuckle that drives the school bus. There’s Johnetta and Quatie. She married Earl Mellowbug.”

“Quatie.” Annawake thinks. “That’s right. Her mother was Mama’s girlfriend. Remember her, the beauty queen? Mama kept that picture of her that was in a magazine. I still have that thing somewhere.”

“I’ll be back around six to pick you up. Unless you get a better date.”

“We’ll be here, Dell. You’re the best I’m ever going to do.”

Annawake smiles, watching the bear shape of her brother duck out through the doorway. Annie has made no progress with female apparel in the meantime, but has fallen back to sleep. Annawake smooths the layers of covers, remembering from her childhood the noisy aunts who made those three quilts: they lived in one house, and could never agree on anything in this world except that love is eternal.

On the stone floor of Jax’s studio Lou Ann sits cross-legged, nervously tapping the toes of her athletic shoes while Jax frowns at his new amplifier rig. He picks up a yellow electrical cord and examines it closely. “Do you think this should be plugged into something?”

“Don’t ask me. Do I look like Mozart?”

“No,” Jax says. Today he doesn’t have the energy even to laugh at Lou Ann.

“Dwayne Ray, honey, don’t mess with Jax’s stuff.”

Dwayne Ray, a resolute child with disorganized mud-colored hair, is pulling an assortment of bamboo flutes out of a milk crate and laying them end to end.

“I’m making a space shovel,” he explains.

“No problem,” Jax says. “Take them out in the hall. You can line up the whole star fleet out there.”

Dwayne Ray happily drags the crate out the door. In the hallway he begins to accompany his industry with Indy 500 sounds. Lou Ann simply stares at Jax. He finds a socket for the yellow plug and then glances up, feeling her eyes.

“Jax, you never let him touch those before. You would have cut his little pecker off if he’d tried to use your music stuff for toys.”

Jax returns to his wires. “So, I’m feeling generous. Your male line has escaped dismemberment.”

Lou Ann’s blue eyes are wide. “Jax, honey, I miss her too, but you have got to get a grip.”

He puts down his pliers and really looks at Lou Ann. The sun from the high east window lights her upturned face and her electric blue leggings and the bag of tangerines she brought over, and Jax wishes merely to weep. All this color and worry focused on his welfare, and it’s going to waste.

He sits down next to her.

“Do you know,” he says, curling his long fingers through Lou Ann’s, “all her earthly clothing fit into two drawers in the bureau. Can you believe God made a woman like that?

And she saw fit to live with me?”

“Gosh, Jax, I could never be your girlfriend,” Lou Ann says, sounding hurt. “I’d get disqualified just on the basis of shoes alone.”

“I love you anyway. But you’ve got to let me wallow in my misery. This is not a situation that can be resolved through Welcome Wagon technology.” He leans sideways and gives her a kiss of dismissal.

Lou Ann stands up and, with one last worried look, leaves him. She steps over the electrical cords as if they might be napping snakes. In the hall she collects Dwayne Ray and the flutes. Jax hears the sounds of their internal wooden emptiness as she piles them back into their crate. He stands up again, facing the window, realizing how clearly these days he can hear the emptiness inside things. He lets his hands walk around on the keyboard, which is powerless, its internal circles of current still interrupted somewhere by an imperceptible fault line. It makes no sound at all as his fingers modulate their laments in one key after another.