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as more of a statement. If he felt any worry over my answer, he hid it well. That stung a little. How dared he be so sure of himself, after such a long absence? Did he think he could simply walk back into my house and claim me like a forgotten coat? And yet, beside the enormity of his wanting me, my anger seemed a paltry thing. If Henry was certain of me, I told myself, it was because that was his way. Meat should not be eaten rare. Blue is your color. Will you marry me.
    As I looked into his frank gray eyes, I had a sudden, unbidden image of Jamie grinning down at me as he’d spun me around the ballroom of the Peabody. Henry was neither dashing nor romantic; like me, he was made of sturdier, plainer stuff. But he loved me, and I knew that he would provide for me and be true to me and give me children who were strong and bright. And for all of that, I could certainly love him in return.
    “Yes, Henry,” I said. “I will marry you.”
    He nodded his head once, then he kissed me, opening my mouth with his thumb and putting his tongue inside. I clamped my mouth shut, more out of surprise than anything; it had been years since I’d been French-kissed, and his tongue felt foreign, thick and strange. Henry let out a little grunt, and I realized I’d bitten him.
    “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
    He didn’t speak. He merely reopened my mouth and kissed me again exactly the same as before. This time I accepted his invasion without protest, and that seemed to satisfy him, because after a few minutes he left me to go and speak to Daddy.
    W E WERE MARRIED six weeks later in a simple Episcopal ceremony. Jamie was the best man. When Henry brought him to the house he greeted me with a bear hug and a dozen pink roses.
    “Sweet Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad Henry finally came to his senses. I told him he was an idiot if he didn’t marry you.”
    Jamie had spoiled me for the rest of the McAllans, whom I met for the first time two days before the wedding. From the moment they arrived it was clear they felt superior to us Chappells, who (it must be said) had French blood on my father’s side and a Union general on my mother’s. I didn’t see much of Henry’s father that weekend—Pappy and the other men were off doing whatever men do when there’s a wedding on—but I spent enough time with the McAllan women to know we’d never be close, as I’d naïvely hoped. Henry’s mother was cold, haughtyand full of opinions, most of them negative, about everyone and everything. His two sisters, Eboline and Thalia, were former Cotton Queens of Greenville who’d married into money and made sure everybody knew it. The day before the wedding my mother gave a luncheon for the ladies of both families, and Fanny asked them whether they’d gone to college.
    Thalia arched her perfectly plucked brows and said, “What good is college to a woman? I confess I can’t see the need for it.”
    “Unless of course you’re poor, or plain,” said Eboline.
    She gave a little laugh, and Thalia giggled with her. My sisters and I looked at each other uncertainly. Had Henry not told them we were all college girls? Surely they didn’t know, Fanny said to me later; surely the slight had been unintentional. But I knew better.
    Still, not even Henry’s disagreeable relations could dampen the happiness I felt on my wedding day. We honeymooned in Charleston, then returned to a little house Henry had rented for us on Evergreen Street, not far from where my parents lived. And so my time of cleaving began. I loved the smallness of domestic life, the sense of belonging it gave me. I was Henry’s now. Yielding to him—cooking the foods he liked, washing and ironing his shirts, waiting for him to come home to me each day—was what I’d been put on the earth to do. And then Amanda Leigh was born in November of 1940, followed two years later by Isabelle, and I became theirs more utterly even than I was their