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walking shoes, Naomi looked even tinier than Zeke remembered. Her hair had gone from deep brunette to a soft, pure white, but it was curled the same as always, in a lady’s do, short and neat. Although she never told anyone her age, everyone in Cedar Springs knew she was seven years younger than her famous sister Mattie. That made her seventy-five.
    She had Zeke sit in the front parlor on the antique sofa her father had always insisted came from the Hermitage, the Nashville home of Andrew Jackson. Jackson Witt had been the richest man in Cedar Springs. He’d owned the woolen mill where Zeke’s father and mother and brother had worked and had been a benefactor in his small town in the rolling hills east of Nashville. He’d died before the New South had made its big push into his corner of Tennessee. Cedar Springs was no longer the town in which Zeke had grown up. Farmland had been divided up into estate lots for huge brick houses, and old farmhouses and chicken coops bulldozed. Streetlights had gone in, as well as fast-food chains and discount department stores and vast supermarkets. Nobody shopped on the square anymore. West Main had been widened and built up, most of its houses converted into apartments and beauty shops and carpet stores and real estate offices. Naomi had once said her house, a beautiful Greek Revival but no longer the biggest and fanciest in town, would make a nice funeral parlor.
    The oven buzzer sounded, and she started toward the kitchen.
    â€œLet me help,” Zeke said.
    â€œNo, no, you just sit here and let me wait on you.”
    He’d known that would be her answer. “You don’t have to.”
    She smiled. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”
    Zeke didn’t argue. In Naomi’s world he was her guest and a man, and it was her responsibility—her pleasure, she’d say—to wait on him. She rushed off to the kitchen, playing the proper southern lady. Zeke knew better. Jackson Witt’s younger daughter usually managed to do as she pleased, afterward working her actions into her belief system. Like her scandalous affair with Nicholas Pembroke, her sister’s husband. It had lasted less than a summer but had cost her. It left her marriage to the vice president of Cedar Springs Woolen Mill and her reputation in her hometown in shambles. And it prompted her father to disown her, just as he’d disowned Mattie when she’d run off with Nick Pembroke more than twenty years earlier. Thenceforth, Jackson Witt maintained he had no daughters. Zeke had never liked nor understood the stern, uncompromising old man, but he’d never once heard Naomi complain about him, no matter how cruelly he’d treated her.
    She returned from the kitchen with a blue willow plate of her steaming, incomparable peach pie. She’d put a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. “I’m not having any,” she said, handing him the plate. “I have to watch my sugar.”
    Knowing she wouldn’t talk until he’d finished, Zeke downed the pie quickly, its filling juicy and as sweet as his best memories of growing up. A ceiling fan whirred, keeping the room remarkably cool. The parlor hadn’t changed. It was dark and crowded, with small, framed oval photographs of Jackson Witt and his long-dead, delicate, prim wife hanging above the marble fireplace. There were other photographs, of elderly cousins, friends, mill executives, but none of the dazzling Mattie Witt or the filmmaker she and her sister both had loved. None of Mattie’s only son, none of her long-missing daughter-in-law, none of her only granddaughter.
    Zeke finished his pie and tried the sun tea, cool and smooth and, like the pie, tasting of the past.
    â€œYou’re not an easy man to locate,” Naomi said without criticism. “Is that by design?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI suppose in your profession discretion is a matter of life and death.”
    He