Alice recalls mention of sons in and out of trouble, and in their last correspondence, ten years ago, an account of sur-gery for breast cancer, but Sugar still has a pretty smile and eyes you look at twice. She wears her snow-white hair the way she did as a girl, in an Andrews

Sisters roll across the back, and she has an almost flirty way of talking that makes Alice think of the Andrews Sisters shaking their fingers, making round “o’s” with their mouths:

“No, no, no, don’t you sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me-ee!”

“Harland is his name,” Alice confesses. “The fellow I married. It didn’t amount to much. I finally just couldn’t stand the quiet.”

“Oh, honey, don’t I know. I think Roscoe used up his whole vocabulary when he asked me to marry him. All that’s left now is ‘Where’s it at?’ and ‘When’s dinner?’ ”

Alice breathes a little deeper. Sympathizing over the beha-vior of men is the baking soda of women’s friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.

They pick up their feet and walk on past a Shell station and a building covered with pockmarked yellow siding that advertises HEAVEN MACHINE TOOLS NEW & USED. Then they are beyond the pale of what Alice would call town. It’s small all right, but even so she feels Quatie underestimated the amount of paint called for.

“Where did the name Heaven come from?” she asks Sugar.

“Well, that’s for the blue hole. A great big water hole down in the crick where the kids love to go jump in and fish and all. Catch crawdads, that kind of stuff. The grownups like to go too, really. It’s the best place around. They used to just call it ‘The best place,’ in Cherokee, and when they went to turn that into English somebody thought people was talking about Heaven. But they wasn’t, they just meant the best place around here.”

“Isn’t that the way,” Alice says. She feels relieved to know that “Heaven” as a value judgment is only relative.

“How about your girl?” Sugar asks. “Where’s she now?”

It stuns Alice to realize she has no earthly idea. And can’t go into it with Sugar, which makes her sadder still. “She’s living out in Tucson, Arizona. Taylor’s my pride.”

“Oh, sure, they are. When they don’t give you no trouble, they’re a blessing.”

The road becomes a lane, passing under a tunnel of locust trees. A creek runs beside them in the thick woods; Alice can hear its satisfied rush. Birds sing loudly in the trees, and there seem to be dozens of terrapins in the road. The trucks that come along swerve to miss them, and they pull in their heads and sit like rocks, their small hearts surely pounding from another near miss. But somehow they must make it across, otherwise the roads would be lined with box turtle tragedies.

“Well, look, there’s poke,” Sugar says, suddenly animated.

She pulls a wadded plastic bag from her purse and shakes it open as she steps sideways down the bank. There in the ditch she squats and picks handfuls of new green leaves. A truck passes, and Sugar waves. Alice doesn’t know what to do with herself, and half turns her back, as if her cousin were going to the bathroom down there. She knows you can eat poke, has known it all her life. But she has also known for many years what people would say about her if they saw her collecting her salad greens from the roadside.

Sugar climbs carefully back up the bank, triumphant, her bulging sack the size of a lumpy basketball. “There used to be a world of poke right up behind our place, where they cleared the woods out under the power lines,” she tells Alice as she falls into step beside her, catching her breath. “But a few year ago they started coming along and spraying something poison under those lines that kilt all the poke. Now, why do you think they’d do that?” she asks.

Alice doesn’t say, “To kill the weeds, what do you think?”

She says, “It’s hot, isn’t it?”

Sugar wipes her brow. “I was just thinking how hot it used to get, back in those summers when we were kids. The grown-ups would live on the porch, and not hardly move.”

“It was hot,” Alice says. “It was Mississippi.”

“My mommy wouldn’t want the baby on her lap because it was too hot. We’d take the babies on our laps because we were big britches, playing mommies. I guess we didn’t feel the heat so much, any more than we knew the half of what it was to be mommy.”

Ahead of them, a huge black snake parts the weeds and starts to slide into the road, thinks better of it, loops back over itself like a shoelace, and slips away into the bush.