Alice has finally gotten her fingers into the sheet of sugar that is spreading across the table. She draws a pig, then puts a fence around it. “It was noticing that about my cousin Sugar,” she says. “We were walking along and she saw some poke growing down in the ditch, and she just went right down there and got it. Didn’t care who drove by and saw.

I was thinking, ‘Now, I’ll eat poke if I have to, but I’d hate for anybody to see I was that hard up.’ ”

Annawake smiles, remembering summers of gathering greens with her uncle.

Alice puts another fence another around the pig.

“Your cousin Sugar was my mother’s best friend,” Annawake says. “Ask her sometime if she remembers Bonnie Fourkiller.”

“You had that brother that got sent away, didn’t you?”

Annawake is startled to feel tears in her eyes. “How did you know that?”

“It was in that letter you wrote Jax. He read it over the phone.”

Annawake wipes her nose with her napkin. “My other brothers are still around here, and a slew of nieces and nephews. My dad is still living, he’s over in Adair now. What about you? Do you have other kids besides Taylor?”

“Nobody but Taylor. No son, no daddy, and no husband to speak of.”

“None to speak of?”

“Well, I had me one, Harland, but he never talked. It was like trying to have a conversation with a ironing board. He just wanted to watch TV all the time. That’s what ruint him, really, I think. TV does all the talking for you, and after a while you forget how to hold up your end.”

Annawake smiles. “Interesting theory.”

“So I left him. I doubt he’s noticed yet. Now it’s just back to me and Taylor and Turtle. Seems like we’re doomed to be a family with no men in it.”

“Could be worse. You could have a family with no women in it, like I grew up in.”

“Now that’s true, that would be worse.”

They fall quiet. The window gives their eyes a place to go when they need to take a rest from each other.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Alice pipes up, “what’s going on with that tree over there?”

“That’s Boma Mellowbug’s bottle tree,” Annawake says.

“Our little thing of beauty. Boma is, I guess you’d say, the town lunatic.”

“I think maybe I saw her. In a dress and a ski hat?”

“That was Boma. You really have to be sure you don’t run over her with your care. Sometimes she’ll stand in the middle of the street and have a conversation with the oaks. But everybody’s crazy about Boma.”

“She did all that by herself?”

“No. She got it going. Back when I saw little, she started sticking old empties down over the ends of the branches of that redbud. And pretty soon somebody else would come along and add another one, and then we all got into it, keeping our eyes peeled for something special. Once I found an old blue milk bottle in a ditch, and another time, one of those fancy glass cups they used to have up on the electric lines. I couldn’t wait for Uncle Ledger to drive me over her in his truck so I could put my things on the tree.”

“Well,” Alice says, “it’s different.”

“Not for here. For here it’s just kind of normal.” She laughs.

“One time in law school we were discussing the concept of so-called irresponsible dependents. That a ward of society can’t be a true citizen. I wanted to stand up and tell the class about Boma and the bottle tree. That there’s another way of looking at it.”

“What’s that?”

“Just that you could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Annawake shrugs. “There are things I can’t explain to white people. Words aren’t enough.”

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” Alice says. “If we could get it across, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Earlene comes back carrying two bowls of soup and grinning from ear to ear. “Oops,” she says, “I forgot to get up that sugar.” She lumbers briskly away singing, “Here comes the bride!”

Annawake stares at Alice, the woman from the family without men, and hatches the most reckless plan of her life.

23

SECRET BUSINESS

LETTY IS STANDING IN HER garden with a butcher knife when Annawake drives up. She looks formidable, but Annawake kills the engine anyway and makes her way through the bean patch. She waves Letty’s pie plate in the air. “I’m returning this to you,” she says.