Then Daddy stayed and we had pork sandwiches with Teensy and Chick and watched Ed Sullivan. Then Daddy left. I don't know where he went.

THEY WON'T TELL ME WHEN YOU ARE COMING HOME. I got mad. I sat in Caro's lap and told her made-up stories about the people on Ed Sullivan. I don't want to talk about the people on Ed Sullivan. I hate Ed Sullivan. I hate everybody.

Siddalee Walker May 23, 1963 Dear Mama, We are all staying with Necie now. Please come and get us. Necie's house is too loud. There are eleven kids here now, and I don't have any room to myself. I can't do my homework.

You need to come home now, OK? Lulu is chewing on her hair again and I can't make her stop. The other children miss you too bad. Little Shep got in a fistfight. He gave Jeff LeMoyne a bloody nose and the nuns punished him and made Caro come pick him up from school. Lulu won't wear her uniform to school anymore, even Necie can't make her. Baylor is acting like a baby again, Mama. He is talking baby talk and spitting and everything. So you see you have to come on back now, OK? We miss you. I am being so good you wouldn't recognize me, Mama! Come on back, you won't believe how sweet we are. I am sorry we made you mad and made you get sick. Are you having fun without us, because we aren't having fun without you. You will see when you return how we have changed. NO kidding! Ask Daddy or the Ya-Yas. Please, Mama.

Love from your oldest daughter,

Siddalee Walker

P.S. We got our report cards before Easter vacation. I made straight A's! (Except in conduct.) I did better than anybody!

June 6, 1963 Dear Mama, You didn't write me. I thought you were going to. I don't think it's very nice to leave and not write me. I am not writing you one more letter. School is out and you aren't home. I hate you.

Sidda June 7, 1963 Dear Mama, I'm sorry for my last letter. I'm sorry for everything. Everybody here misses you and wants you home. You would not recognize me, Mama. I am so good. Please come home. OK? Necie is going to take us to Spring Creek but I don't want to go without you. Pretend like I never wrote that other letter, OK?

I love you.

Your loving daughter,

Siddalee

Sidda folded the last letter back into its envelope. She felt hot and dizzy, flooded with anger toward the Ya-Yas for exposing her to such graphic reminders of the past.

But I asked for it.

She sat up and peeked her head over the top of the sofa. She could see the three Ya-Yas seated at the table, perhaps the first time she'd ever seen them together without nonstop conversation. Necie was working on a needlepoint, and Teensy was playing solitaire. Caro had found a jigsaw puzzle, which she was avidly working on.

They are sitting sentry, Sidda thought.

Teensy looked up. "How you doing, chere?"

Sidda nodded.

"Holler if you need anything," Teensy said.

"Want another pecan tart?" Necie asked.

"No, thank you," Sidda said. "I don't dare."

Looking up from her jigsaw puzzle, Caro said, "I find if I take my glasses off and kind of blur my focus these puzzle pieces come together more easily."

Sidda felt comforted by their presence. She hadn't realized until now just how alone she had felt. She reached for the second batch of letters.

There were three envelopes, one to each Ya-Ya, addressed in Vivi's hand. The envelopes were Vivi's personalized Crane stationery, and still had a soft plush feel after thirty years. But, as Sidda opened the first envelope, she saw that the letter itself was not written on her mother's stationery, but rather typed out on a piece of typing paper. Although the typing paper was yellowed slightly at the edges and the folds, the typing still looked strong, black, and immediate against the paper. The palms of Sidda's hands itched as she began to read.

July 11, 1963

2:30 A.M., my 9th day home

Teensy Baby- The only soul I could stomach at the Hospital That Nobody Calls a Hospital said it would be good for me to write about my feelings-since I seem to have trouble talking for the first time in my life. Thus my old Olivetti, which Shep went and got for me from Mother's attic. At least you'll be spared my hand, which isn't too steady.

Teensy, I cannot bear to tuck my children in these days. I cannot bear to hold them or hug them or watch them brush their teeth. I do not dare let myself get too close to them. Except when they are sleeping.

I wait until everything is quiet and then I tiptoe into their rooms. First into the boys' room with its little-man smell of spiciness and their leather baseball mitts hanging on the bedposts. I lean over Little Shep's bed. My fierce little trooper. He sleeps hard, that kid does. Plays hard, sleeps hard, does everything full-tilt. And then I watch my baby, Baylor. Oh, Teensy, he still sleeps curled into a little ball.

And then I go in my girls' room. The minute you step in there, you know it is a little girls' room with their smell of powder and Crayolas and some scent like vanilla. There is Lulu, who kicks all the covers off her bed every night of her life. She lies there, her little darling chubby body, asleep on her stomach, wearing that lovely nightgown you bought her with the yellow roses. She loves that gown. Willetta can hardly get her out of it long enough to wash it.

And then there is my oldest. On the nights she doesn't wake gasping from her nightmares, Sidda sleeps with all the covers pulled tight under her chin, a second pillow clenched in her arms, her right arm flung over her head. That beautiful white gown you gave her. How did you find something so perfect? It makes her look like a little girl-poet. Underneath that gown is a scar on her shoulder blade that I put there. Oh, God, she took it the worst. She is still taking care of the others, a little bitty mama. The nurse at the hospital told me to write even if I am crying; she said to keep on writing. Necie told me how you picked Sidda up and took her to the movies with you once a week, just the two of you. And how you had to convince her that it was okay for her to just sit there in the dark and watch Hayley Mills and sip her Coke and run to the lobby to use the phone to check on the other kids. Oh, I want to thank you the most for Sidda's nightgown because it reminds me that she is a little girl.

I have to be so careful, Teensy.

Merci bien, merci beaucoup, mille mercis, tata.

Vivi

Sidda put down the letter and pressed her palm against her chest to calm her breathing.

I want to thank you the most for Sidda's nightgown because it reminds me that she is a little girl.

Sidda wanted to hide. She stood up and feigned a stretch. "I'm getting a little uncomfortable on the sofa. I think I'll go in the bedroom."

"You vant to be alone?" Teensy asked, in a Garbo voice.

"Yes," Sidda said, "I do."

"Well, then, we'll just follow you into the bedroom," Caro said.

"That's right," Necie said. "We'll just bring ourselves right in there with you."

Hueylene looked up from where she lay, and gave her tail a loud thump on the floor. Sidda felt surrounded; her usual retreat into isolation when faced with pain was being thwarted.

"You've been out here long enough on the edge of nowhere," Teensy said. "We just arrived. Do you want word to get back home that you were a poor hostess?"

Try good manners.

"Absolutely not," Sidda said. "May I go to the bathroom unaccompanied?"

"No, you may not," Teensy said, grinning. Dropping her cards on the table, she went to Sidda's side, and stuck there like glue as Sidda tried to walk in the direction of the bathroom. When Sidda stopped to stare at her, Teensy pulled Sidda to her in a tight embrace.

"There is nowhere you can hide from the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," Caro called out.

Laughing in spite of herself, Sidda kissed Teensy on the cheek.

When she came back from the bathroom, the ladies did not look up. Sidda tucked herself under the cotton throw, and picked up the letters. Before she began to read, she took a moment to absorb the room she was in, the sights and sounds around her. The playing cards lightly slapping the wooden table, the breathing of the women, the sound of Hueylene's gentle snoring, a loon crying somewhere along the lake path. Sidda let these sounds enter her before she returned to that dark Lent season that extended long past Easter.

The next letter read: July 14, 1963 Caro Dahlin- My dearest friend-I am-maybe for the first time in our lives together-at a loss for words to thank you for all you have done for me and my gang. Taking care of my boys for almost three solid months. (Months that for me were not so solid.) Having Shep over for dinner, when he could be found. You are one of the few people he feels comfortable enough to talk to. When I got home, he said, "That Caro is no bullshit." That is praise of the highest order from a man who used up his stock of compliments sometime around 1947.

Buddy, it is all such a cloud. I remember you standing next to me somewhere in a hallway in the hospital that nobody calls a hospital. I remember you holding my hand. Shep told me you were the one who came first, after I did what I did, after I did what I will never forgive myself for. After I dropped my basket and could not pick it up.

Willetta brought my girls in yesterday evening to kiss me goodnight, and after they left, I said a prayer that they would be lucky enough to have a friend like you. Some women pray for their girls to marry good husbands. I pray that Siddalee and Lulu will find girlfriends half as loyal and true as the Ya-Yas.

I think of you, Caro, when I climb in my bed. When I wrap my arms around my shoulders and rock myself to sleep like you did that first night I was home. Shep might seem gruff sometimes, but since I have been back, he has surprised me. The way he asked you to spend that first night with me. I think he suspects that he will never be as essential to me as you and the Ya-Yas. We have to keep these men in the dark, you know, or the whole world would fall to pieces. Just ask me, I am an expert on falling to pieces. And you are an expert in helping put the pieces back together.

I love you, Caro. I love you, my Duchess Soaring Hawk.

Your Vivi The final letter, as Sidda suspected, was written to Necie. It read: July 23, 1963 Dear Dear Necie, I do not know how you do it, Countess Singing Cloud. We kid you about your pink and blue thoughts, we laugh about your ditziness, and yet you are the one of all of us who manages to stay organized and do it with style.

I cannot talk about what happened. My life was a basket and I dropped it.

You were the one who kept my world running while I was gone. How did you do it? The ten thousand basketball games and altar-boy practices and Girl Scout and Brownie meetings and dentist appointments and God knows what else. Baby doll, you must have lived in your station wagon between taxiing your kids and mine.

Welcoming my girls into your already huge household. Tucking them into that darling attic room with the big windows and the canopied beds. Feeding them, keeping Lulu's hands away from her hair munching, listening to Sidda practice her endless piano. Handling my mother in her attempts to "calm" my kids. Your novenas, your countless rosaries.

And Shep. He cooked me a steak the other night after the kids were asleep. Poured me a drink-a short one-and told me what all you did for him. He is ashamed of how he acted after taking me to the hospital nobody will call a hospital. For the drinking. He told me how you drove out to the duck camp when nobody could find him. How you sobered him up and got him back to town. Kept him sober for the Easter-egg hunt.

Darling Girl, you have an admirer for life in my husband. Please be patient with him because I'm sure he will only show his thanks in the most bumbling ways. But maybe that's all any of us have, bumbling ways of giving thanks.

Thank you from my clumsy heart. You are most dear to me and I am your Grateful Vivi Sidda lay very still for a moment. Then she carefully tucked all the letters back in the manila envelope, and placed it on the coffee table. Turned over on her stomach, leaned her head over the edge of the sofa so she could see the Ya-Yas.

"Hey, yall," she said softly.

All three women looked up.

Only then did Sidda start to cry.

Sobbing, she stood up, with her pillow in her hand, and crossed to the table. Her hair was smashed against her head where she had been lying down. She looked sleepy and sad and lost.

"I changed my mind," she said, in between sobs. "Can I please have some more coffee and pecan tarts?"

"Of course," Necie said, heading to the kitchen. "I brought eighty-four thousand."

Clearing away her game of solitaire, Teensy looked up at Sidda. "Ma Petite Chou," she said, "come sit. Bring your pillow and come sit by me."

"So, Pal," Caro said, "how're you doing? Sure you feel like staying up late with the alleged grown-ups?"

"I want to know the truth," Sidda said.

"We don't deal in truth," Caro said. "But I've got some stories. Will that do?"

"That'll do," said Sidda, as she bit into one of the tarts Necie handed her. "That'll have to do."

27.

Caro closed her eyes for a moment, gathering strength. Then she opened them and began to speak.

It started just before Mardi Gras. The four of us had all decided to give up drinking for Lent. Necie took it seriously-she was the only one who stayed on the wagon the whole time. I saw the whole thing as a test of will. Teensy amended abstinence to mean every day except Sunday. Then your mother modified it to mean every day except Sunday-or any time at all if we happened to be outside of Garnet Parish.

Well, Pal, we put a lot of miles on Teensy's Bentley-driving to Lafayette, Baton Rouge, or even Tioga, just to have a drink. Anything to cross the parish line. Then one weekend your mama and Teensy lit out for Marksville. I would have gone too, but one of the boys had strep throat. They left early that Saturday. Hit a few of the Cajun dance halls, where dancing and drinking beer start at nine o'clock in the morning. They went all day and into the evening. On the way back they put the Bentley in a ditch. Nobody hurt, just the car in a ditch and the two of them too smashed to deal with it. They called Necie to come get them because they were too scared to call Chick or Shep, and they knew I had a sick kid.

When Necie found them, Vivi and Teensy were at Dupuy's Lounge eating boudin balls, sipping gin-and-tonics and acting up. This was the second week of Lent. Maybe the third, I don't know. Lent is a long stretch, Pal, a long desert of a stretch.

Necie called a tow truck for the Bentley, then drove them back to Thornton.

The next thing I knew, your mama had gone to some new priest-I've blanked out his name. He sent her to Dr. Lowell. A big Knights of Columbus man, had priests referring patients to him right and left. I'd never heard of the man till Vivi got the prescription. Dexamyl. I'll remember that name until the day I die, half Dexedrine, half Miltown. Shot you up and threw you down. It was supposed to get your mama off alcohol and make her a better Catholic all at the same time.

Vivi adored those pills, couldn't stop raving about them. Gave her energy, she said, kept her mind off drinking, no appetite at all, and she could get by on four hours' sleep. Flying high. Too high.