“I’m so sorry,” Ginger apologized. “I was thinkin’ about how beautiful the table is today and got caught up in woolgathering. What were y’all talkin’ about?”

“Gladys Jones is coming by tomorrow to buy strawberry jam,” Betsy explained. “She arrives about this same time every year and buys a couple of jars, but what she’s really interested in is gossip. Edith will arrive next and will be the one to try to talk me into hiring a few girls to dress up in what she calls hooker clothes and sit on the front porch during the Rooster Romp. Poor old darlin’ thinks no one in town knows that she got pregnant before she married.”

“Not that we care,” Connie said, “but the way she puts our mother down for not having a husband grates on my nerves.”

Kate nodded and said, “Her son is the preacher at our church. We’re bettin’ on how long she’ll be here before she brings up the idea of us being the daughters of a woman of the night. Edith is one of those things that you have to take with a grain of salt and laugh about, or else you might want to kill it. You want in on the money?” Kate’s thought drifted over for just a moment to Max, Edith’s deceased husband. She’d really bet dollars to doughnuts that she’d cried more at his death than Edith had.

“Say no,” Sloan whispered.

“You hush!” Connie pointed her fork at Sloan.

“What’s the Rooster Romp?” Ginger asked.

“It’s our annual festival. Anyone who ever lived here or in Mission Valley, or who has kinfolk here, comes back for the Romp. We have a carnival for the kids, all kinds of vendors up and down the street from the church to the cemetery. The street is closed off to traffic, but there’s golf carts to take folks down to visit the graves if they want to go. People come from all over the county,” Connie explained.

“And why would Miss What’s-her-name want y’all to put hookers on the front porch?” Ginger asked.

“She’s watched too much television and thinks that Mama had her girls dressed in red satin and black garters. The Banty House wasn’t that kind of place. Men didn’t just come and go all through the night,” Kate answered.

“I’ll show you tomorrow what we’ll be wearing,” Connie said. “Since you’ve got to stay out of sight so that Betsy can draw out all this drama a little longer, you can help me let out one of the dresses that we wear on the day of the Romp.”

“Sweet Jesus!” Betsy rolled her eyes. “I thought you’d already let that dress out as far as it would go last year.”

“I’m planning to put a gusset in it,” Connie told her. “Just think how round I’d be if I didn’t smoke. I hear you gain about forty pounds when you give up cigarettes.”

“Those things are going to give you lung cancer,” Kate said.

“I’ll eat what I want, smoke as many cigarettes as I want, and die when I’m supposed to, so stop bitchin’ at me and pass the sweet potatoes this way,” Connie said.

“Changing the subject back to the bet . . .” Ginger tried to smooth things over. “Explain it to me again.”

“Edith won’t be able to keep her mouth shut about how we dress, and she’s coming tomorrow. So we’re betting on how long it’ll take her to get around to it when she gets here.” Betsy smiled.

Sloan could agree with Connie’s statement about not knowing what the future held when it came to eating or smoking. One day he was going out into the heat and sand to defuse bombs. The next week he was being sent to doctors and psychiatrists for severe depression and PTSD. Then he’d been told to pack his stuff, and he had been put on a plane and sent home to Texas with an honorable discharge and full disability from the United States Army. He didn’t want either. His dream had always been to go into the army after high school and make a career out of it. The future damn sure hadn’t brought what he’d wanted.

When the meal was over and they had finished the cleanup, the ladies all hurried off upstairs. They returned hatless and barefoot and carrying the same Easter baskets that Sloan figured they’d carried from their young days. Ginger was still wearing shoes when she came down the stairs, but not for long. When she noticed that the sisters were barefoot, she kicked hers off at the foot of the steps.

“Hunting in our bare feet is a tradition.” Betsy picked up a basket from the credenza, handed it to her, and said, “This was Mama’s basket. You can use it today.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Ginger protested. “What if I ruin it? I can just use a grocery bag.”

“Nonsense,” Kate said. “Mama would be glad for you to use it, and besides, we always take a picture at the end of the hunt to go in the album. It just wouldn’t be right for you to be holding a plastic sack in the picture.”

“Where’s your basket?” Ginger locked eyes with Sloan.

“Remember—I take the pictures and hide the eggs. I don’t hunt them,” he answered. “But I did like the excitement back when I was a little boy. One time, I even found the prize egg at the church hunt and got a bicycle. I put a million miles on that thing riding up to the Rooster store for snow cones in the summertime.”

“Okay, now you’ve got me wanting a snow cone,” Betsy said. “Maybe after supper, we’ll all take a walk to town and get us one. I like cherry. What’s your favorite, Ginger?”

Kate led the way to the porch. “My favorite snow cone is blue coconut. We don’t have a starting pistol, but after Sloan takes a picture of us all waiting with our baskets, we take off.”

“Cherry,” Ginger said as she followed behind them.

“Rainbow.” Connie took her place in the lineup.

Sloan walked out past them and into the yard, where he held up his phone and took several photos, including a couple of Ginger by herself. Those he quickly shuffled into a personal folder, where he kept pictures of his grandmother and his old team members.

Maybe you shouldn’t put her in that file, the voice in his head said. Seems like folks you put there don’t live much longer.

Or just maybe, she’ll be the one that breaks the pattern, he argued.

When the ladies looked at the pictures later and decided which ones they wanted, he’d send an order into a place in Hondo, and they could pick them up on Thursday when they went into town.

“All right. I believe we’ve gotten several good shots for y’all to pick from.” He raised his voice. “On your mark.”

Kate bent forward like someone who was fixing to run in a quarter-mile sprint.

“Get set,” he yelled.

Betsy put one foot out and tucked her elbows to her sides.

“Go!”

Connie threw both arms out to slow her sisters down and got ahead of them by ten feet. All dignity was thrown to the wind as they began to search for hidden eggs.

“I saw that one first,” Connie squealed when Kate picked one up right at her feet.

“Too bad. If you didn’t smoke, you wouldn’t be out of breath and you could get around faster,” Kate threw over her shoulder.

“Did you sample your shine while you were takin’ off your pantyhose?” Betsy asked. “That’s why your face is flushed and you’re so hyper, ain’t it?”

“I did not,” Kate protested. “My eyesight is better than y’all’s, that’s all.”

“Bullshit!” Betsy disagreed. “You have to have reading glasses just like Connie. I’m the one with good vision.”

Sloan fell in beside Ginger. “You just point at whatever you find and I’ll pick it up for you.”

“Thank you.” She smiled at him. “That bending over business is gettin’ to be a real problem.”

“Kind of like trying to get past a basketball under your dress?” he asked.

“More like a great big old watermelon.” Her smile widened.

“You sure you got just one baby in there?” Sloan asked.

“Nope. Could be a whole litter for all I know.” She stuck her toe on a bright-purple egg with lots of glitter on it.

He put it in her basket. “What would you do if it was twins or maybe even triplets? Would that change your plans?”

“I don’t know that I have anything to change to,” she answered.

“You could stay here in Rooster,” he suggested.

“And do what? I don’t even see a restaurant in town. I don’t have a car, there’s no public transportation to take me to Hondo, and I’d never make enough money to pay a babysitter”—she stopped and inhaled deeply—“for even one baby, much less two.”

“You can’t raise a child—or children—in a shelter or on the streets,” Sloan told her. “You know what will happen if you don’t have a home to take the baby to when it’s born. They’ll put it in the system.”

“Then I’ll just deliver it on my own.” Her tone went stone cold. “My child is never going in the system—not ever. The only way it will is over my dead body. I’m hoping to get a job where I can take the baby with me, maybe working at a day care center.”