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Vivian paced the front yard of her childhood home, picking up windfall pine cones and chucking them in a wheelbarrow.

Aunt Clelia would want them for kindling, Elizabeth said.

That Aunt Clelia, at nearly ninety, still lived on her own—Rosemary had been laid to rest nearly a decade ago—and that she was still both able and allowed to light her own fires, mystified Vivian.

“Well, who’s going to stop her?” said Elizabeth. “I can’t be over there all the time. I already take her shopping twice a week and drive her to church on Sunday, and let me tell you, the congregation would dwindle if I didn’t. She’d put them in the ground one by one, the way she drives.”

“I’m just surprised she still lives on her own, that’s all.”

“She has an open door here,” said Elizabeth. “One she refuses to walk through. But you see if you can convince her. Go right ahead.”

All of Vivian’s conversations with her sister had gone something like this. Vivian expressed surprise at something in Hahira that either remained the same or had changed dramatically. Then Elizabeth put up a stirring defense of her inability to prevent either the stasis or the transformation.

The house in Hahira—Elizabeth had inherited it when Clara Shaw passed away—had been sited to catch whatever scant sea breezes found their way so far inland. Its deep eaves covered a porch that circled the entire house. Elizabeth’s husband had screened its large windows to keep out the bugs.

Vivian loved the contrast between the dark, cool interior and the baking heat of the yard.

She loved the tall pines and the glossy camellias and the Lady Banks roses that frothed over the water tank behind the house.

She had decided, despite the heat, to tidy up the yard and to take a break from her sister, who liked to preface every other sentence with “Well, of course, you weren’t here . ..”

She’d go over to Aunt Clelia’s later, she decided, and see what needed doing there, away from Elizabeth’s watchful eye.

Whatever she did she’d do wrong, but effort ought to count for something.

She lobbed more pine cones into the rusting wheelbarrow, enjoying the clank of each one landing.

She was tempted to make a game of it. See how many she could get in from various distances in the yard, but Elizabeth was probably watching.

The hiss of a car pulling up to the curb made her look up. The latest Thunderbird, so new the whitewalls still gleamed. She knew who it was before he even stepped out.

“Well, if it isn’t Bobby Broussard. You come here straight from the dealer?”

“I remember how much you appreciate a good car, so I thought you’d like to see this one.”

Vivian gave him her southern-lady embrace.

A hug that wasn’t actually a hug—none of one’s own body parts made contact with the recipient’s body parts.

It was a disconcerting sort of hug if you hadn’t grown up with it.

Vivian had had to unlearn it living out west, where people seemed put off—baffled—by it.

Here, though, they understood. You finessed the impression of an embrace, without any actual physical contact, thus preserving the drape of someone’s blouse, the fresh hairdo, the pressed powder on a cheek.

The southern-lady embrace also served as a compliment: the woman on the receiving end was too fragile, too delicate, to be subjected to a true hug.

She was a lady, after all. Bobby Broussard wasn’t a woman, but he was—Vivian checked his left hand as he approached and noted the groove where a wedding ring had recently resided—most likely a married man.

In Hahira, those didn’t bear touching either.

“Vivian Shaw. It is still Shaw, isn’t it? I heard you were in town.” Bobby received the faux embrace without a hint of offense. He’d been raised right, after all.

“Just for a bit. My,” she said, taking in the suit and the shoes, “don’t you look prosperous. Elizabeth tells me you’re with the bank now.”

Bobby laughed. “Who would have guessed, right?”

Not Vivian. She led him up to the porch and sat him in the best rocker while she went in to pour them some iced tea.

“You never married?” he asked as she handed him his glass.

“No.” She blanched, thinking of Don, of his proposal, of his patience, which surely must have an end.

She hadn’t spoken to him in two weeks. She hadn’t told him she was in Hahira.

She could only suppose he’d been in touch with George, who also didn’t know where she was.

She’d never had anything nice to say about her hometown, so who would think of looking for her here? It was the perfect place to hide out.

She’d hoped Hahira would feel like a splash of cold water, that returning would wake her up, clear her thoughts. Help her see how best to help George. Because it was impossible that George was dying.

The best way to help George, she decided, was to keep her distance.

She lacked the caretaking ability that came so naturally to other women.

Women like Helen. And Ruth. Vivian would only make things worse.

Offer ice chips when broth was called for, tuck the blankets too tightly or too loosely, say and do everything wrong.

She would stay away a little longer. Give George time to rally.

“Very modern of you,” said Bobby. “But then, I always knew you would be. A modern gal, that is.”

“And you,” she said, nodding at his left hand, the indentation circling his ring finger. “Looks like if you’re not married, it’s a recent development.”

“Ah, that. It was just feeling a little tight today, I guess. The heat, you know.”

Right, thought Vivian. The new car, the too-tight ring, a visit to a modern gal. It all added up to one thing in Bobby’s mind. Some things never changed.

“And how is Mrs. Broussard?”

“Mrs. Broussard, my mother, is just the same as she ever was.”

Vivian was sorry to hear it.

“Mrs. Broussard, my wife, Sandy, is—well, we’re expecting an addition to the family in a few weeks, so she’s not feeling entirely herself.”

“Congratulations. How wonderful for you both.”

Bobby looked as if it were not, at the moment, quite such a wonderful development, but he sipped his tea and recovered himself. He was just leaning forward with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Remember when we ...” when Elizabeth stepped out onto the porch.

“Hello, Bobby. How is Sandy doing? His wife,” she said to Vivian. “Second wife, that is. Has she turned twenty-five yet, Bobby? The first one ran off to Waycross.”

Elizabeth cut the poison of her words by smiling a sweet southern-lady smile. Bobby turned a brilliant shade of pink.

Elizabeth continued: “Saw her the other day at Winn-Dixie, and she looked about ready to pop.” Vivian’s jaw dropped. No one referred with such directness to a woman’s—a lady’s—pregnancy. Elizabeth did not want Bobby Broussard on her porch.

Bobby knew it too. He rose from the good rocker. “Just turned twenty-seven. I’d better check in on her before I head back to the office.”

“Give her my best,” said Elizabeth.

“I’ll do that. Certainly will. And Vivian, maybe I’ll drop by later so we can catch up properly.”

“Oh,” said Vivian. “I’m over at Aunt Clelia’s tonight. Giving her a hand with a few things.”

“News to me,” muttered Elizabeth.

Aunt Clelia still stored her sweet potatoes layered in pine straw in a wooden bin on the shady side of the house.

Vivian fished out two and baked them with the chicken legs that Elizabeth had sent over with her.

Elizabeth had also insisted that she bring a congealed salad and part of a peach cobbler, and Vivian, being a modern gal who left most of the cooking to Don, had happily complied.

Aunt Clelia complained that Elizabeth’s offerings took up all the space in her icebox, that she had no room for her own food anymore.

But all Vivian found on the shelves was a jar of pickles and a ham slice long past its prime.

When Clelia wasn’t looking, she took the ham slice and tossed it into the bushes for the raccoons.

“You’re taller than I even remembered,” said Aunt Clelia. It wasn’t a compliment. “Still flying those airplanes?”

“Yes,” mumbled Vivian.

“What?”

“Yes, ma’am. I have my own plane now,” she shouted.

“Nonsense,” said Aunt Clelia. She went back to picking at her food but not actually eating much. Vivian, on the other hand, had devoured her serving and looked forward to polishing off whatever her aunt didn’t finish.

They dined in the living room, in front of the blaring television.

Aunt Clelia insisted she had perfect hearing.

The volume of the television suggested otherwise.

Vivian had a headache. Not just from the noise but from the space heater pumping out waves of kerosene-fumed heat next to Aunt Clelia’s chair.

It was over eighty degrees outside, and Vivian had suggested they eat on the porch.

Clelia had snugged her cardigan closed and sniffed that it was much too chilly for a picnic.

After dinner, Vivian scraped the remaining cobbler straight from the dish into her mouth—a reward for washing up.

She must remember to tell Elizabeth what a good cook she was.

And she wouldn’t say one word about the kerosene heater.

She wondered if she could manage to turn it off while Aunt Clelia snored in front of the television.

It seemed dangerous to leave her aunt alone with it in an old wooden house.

Though Vivian supposed Clelia and the space heater had lived happily together without incident for years.

Back in the living room, she shooed the tabby cat off the sofa, thinking she’d doze a bit herself before heading back to Elizabeth’s.

But an image on the television caught her attention.

The nose cone of a plane—it looked like a C-5—lay on its side in a rice paddy.

Funny, thought Vivian, how everyone in America knew what a rice paddy looked like now.

And far too many people recognized a C-5 when they saw one too.

The camera panned. Yards away lay the upper deck of the plane, and then the tail.

The cargo deck. Smoke still billowing. A track gouged into the paddy where the plane had bellied down.

Another set of tracks, farther back, where it had first touched down before losing its landing gear and then getting a bounce that lifted it back into the sky.

“One hundred and thirty-eight dead,” intoned the anchorman. “More than seventy of them children. While almost everyone on the passenger level was saved, few on the cargo level survived.”

The camera panned across the segments of the C-5, and Vivian thought how neatly it had fractured into its assembly line components. She shivered in Aunt Clelia’s stuffy parlor. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Ivy.”

The young men drove out from Moody two days later. Their shoes gleamed like Bobby Broussard’s tires. They’d spotted her sitting on the porch and had carefully arranged their faces into solemnity before they emerged from the sedan.

Was this how they were spending their war? wondered Vivian. Or had they drawn the short straw today and been rousted from their desks to deliver news that there was no good way to deliver?

“Miss Shaw?” one of them asked.

“Yes?”

“Miss Shaw, I’m afraid we have some sad news about your daughter.”

Elizabeth stepped out, wiping her hands on her apron. “What on earth are you talking about?” she said. “Vivian doesn’t have any children.”

One of the men—so young he looked as if he shaved maybe every other week—consulted his clipboard. “Ivy Shaw. Stationed in Saigon with the US Army Special Services. She lists you, Miss Shaw, as her next of kin. As her person to be notified in the event ...”

Oh, Ivy, thought Vivian. And then, Oh, Georgeanne.

“This must be a mistake,” said Elizabeth.

Her youngest son had come back from Vietnam three years before.

He wasn’t himself, but at least he was home.

Well, he was in Macon, which was close enough.

Closer than Quang Tri, that was for sure.

And Elizabeth had expressed relief that her days of dreading the arrival of solemn-faced men from Moody had passed.

She scowled and made a shooing gesture at them. “Vivian, tell them this is a mistake.”

“This is a mistake,” said Vivian. “This has all been a horrible mistake.”