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not Bell, as mine were said to be. He had her delicate, porcelain features, and not the strong, carved ones I shared with my father. When he began to toddle, it was with her flat-footed, straight-spined dancer’s gait. Even his tantrums were silvery and

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    somehow theatrical. They made her laugh, as mine never did, and even my father smiled to see them. When Mother held him in her arms they seemed a Degas portrait: Mother and Child. Indeed, Dad once parted with a breathtaking amount of money to have a distinguished professor from the Atlanta School of Art paint them so, both of them bare-shouldered and bathed in dappled purple light from the blooming wisteria vine that sheltered our front porch. It is pure summer to look at; early summer, just before coarsening ripeness begins to swell. It hangs now in the living room of the condominium, as it did in the front room of the house on Peachtree Hills Avenue, where we sat when visitors came.
    Kevin and his wife wanted it when they first married, but Mother would not part with it. I knew of little else she had refused him.
    So our paths were laid down from the beginning, and so we have continued since, in lockstep, four people destined and doomed to bear on our shoulders the living, holy ark of The Family. When I think of my mother’s voice, it is this that I hear her say: “Family comes first, always. Blood is everything.”
    I told what I could of this to Livvy Bowen that morning.
    “Your mother’s obviously read too much William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams,” Livvy said. “I can just see her in Williams. God. ‘Blood is everything’ my ass. Who does that make Tee and…what’s Kevin’s little wife’s name again? I can’t ever remember. Chopped liver? Official consorts? Does she include them in this family stuff? Do you?”
    “Sally. Her name is Sally,” I said, obscurely annoyed. My attempt to explain The Family to Livvy had obviously fallen short. “Of course she includes

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    them. Of course I do. Tee is family for me, just like Sally is for Kevin. Tee and Caroline and Teddy for me; Sally and Amanda for him. There was never any question in Mother and Daddy’s minds that we would marry and have children.
    That’s what makes family.”
    But did it? Mother was drawn to Tee from the beginning, I knew that; she teased and flirted with him, charmed his conservative northside parents, shone as if klieg-lit when we invited her to the driving club, was the focus of all eyes at the parties we gave in Collier Hills and later in Ansley Park.
    Tee gave my mother the one thing her foreshortened career had not: social status, a chance to show what she could have been if not burdened early with a gigantic daughter and dancing lessons in her garage.
    But I don’t think she ever approved of my marrying him.
    Tee should have been a woman. Then Kevin could have had him, and so had the matched consort that Mother had always envisioned for him. The only time Kevin ever really defied her was when he married Dresden-exquisite, utterly conventional Sally Hardy from below-the-salt Lakewood. Mother ceased excoriating Sally—delicately, of course—only when Kevin threatened to move with her to Nashville or Charleston or somewhere out of firing range. I don’t think Mother ever saw that Kevin could not have lived with a woman who was Tee’s equivalent in money, charm, and assurance. Where would he have drawn his audience then?
    No, I think Mother somehow thought he would marry her.
    His mother, that oldest love. I don’t think she ever forgave Kevin Sally, any more than she did me Tee Redwine. The order should have been

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    reversed. Both of us, in our choices, threatened the sleek skin of The Family.
    “Well, the pattern has held, hasn’t it?” Livvy said, nuking our cooling coffee in the microwave and producing pastries from Harry’s in a Hurry, just up the street on Peachtree Road.
    “You’re still the good girl, the