Emelina collected the plates and cups. She stood up and tied on an apron over her bathrobe, miraculously keeping the baby situated on her hip throughout the operation.

"Well, you're no worse for the wear of five children in fourteen years," I said, and she laughed, probably not believing it. Emelina was noticeably pretty. That combination particular to Grace, the pale blue eyes and black hair, never failed to be arresting, no matter how many versions of it you saw. The eyes were a genetic anomaly-in the first hours after birth, the really pure specimens of Grace's gene pool were supposed to have whitish, marblelike irises. I'd seen pictures. Doc Homer had written it up for the American Journal of Genetics, years ago.

"And John Tucker's a teenager," I said. "Are we that old?"

"I am. You're not." She started to clear the table with one hand. "Every minute in the presence of a child takes seven minutes off your life." I took the baby from her and she said, "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"They're your treasures, Em. You've got something to show for yourself."

"Oh, yeah. I know," she said.

The baby's name was Nicholas, but nobody called him anything but "the baby." I'd read somewhere that the brain organizes information in sets no larger than four-that's why Social Security and phone numbers are subdivided; possibly four children's names were the limit on parental memory. I sat in the rocker and settled nameless Nicholas on my lap, his head at my knees. My long thigh bones exactly accommodated his length.

Emelina scraped toast corners into a blue enamel pail and ran a sinkful of hot water. "I don't think I could stand to let Mason go off to kindergarten next year if it wasn't for the baby. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't."

"I remember you saying you were calling it quits after four."

"Famous last words."

While I watched her move around the kitchen, my fingers tingled with the pleasure of stroking the baby's fine black hair. It was longer by several inches than his big brother John Tucker's; someone had taken shears to that boy with a vengeance. Probably Emelina. A woman who beheaded her own chickens would cut her kids' hair herself.

Emelina washed and rinsed the plates and set them into the wire rack to drain. I sat feeling useless, though Nicholas seemed comfortable and was falling asleep on my lap. When that happens you feel them grow heavier, as if relaxation allowed them to be flooded with extra substance. A constriction ran across my lungs. I'd come close to having a baby of my own once, but I thought of it now so rarely that the notion of myself as a mother always caught me off guard.

In spite of the heat outside, Emelina's dishwater was fogging the window. A little collection of potted plants stood in a row on the windowsill. Prayer plants. I was struck with a sudden, forceful memory of Emelina's grandmother's house. Hallie and I called her Abuelita too, though of course she was no relation, and the old woman called us "the orphan girls," huerfanas. Nobody ever thought we could understand Spanish. The house had a stale, old-lady smell, but we loved her boxes of "pretties": cast-metal carts with broken wheels, lead soldiers, huge washers and carriage bolts, every species of unidentifiable metal part. Her dead husband was a blacksmith. There were also boxes of ancient dress-up clothes in satiny fabrics as brittle as paper. Our best playroom was the sunny alcove crammed with plants where we stalked lions through the parlor palms, dressed in our finery, more glamorous than Beryl Markham and the Baroness von Blixen could have managed to be in their dreams. We confronted real dangers in the form of rickety iron stands holding heavy, breakable pots and fragile plants. The African violets were furred like pets, and the prayer plants had leaves like an old woman's hands, red-veined on the back, that opened wide in the sun and folded primly together in the shade. Abuelita instructed us to sit and watch them, to try and catch them in the act of closing their leaves. Hallie always waited the longest, patient for enlightenment long after Emelina and I had returned to our rowdy diversions.

"You know, I'm so used to J.T. being gone," Emelina said, bringing me back. "I think he'd be underfoot if he were here. I'd give us about ten days, then I'd probably shoot him. Husband murder in Grace, oh boy." She seemed to be answering a question, however circumspectly, that I wasn't sure I'd asked.

"How long has he been on the railroad?"

"Just since the mine shut down, which was..." She frowned at the glass she was drying, decorated with white pigs in red bow ties. "Ten years, about."