Louis brought out Mama's worst tendencies. She drank when she was around him, and my mother had never been a drinker. She was physical with him in a way I had never seen before, pushing, slapping, poking, she who had always insisted on her personal space. Sadlek appealed to a wild streak in her, and mothers weren't supposed to have a wild streak. I wished she wasn't pretty and blond, that she would be the kind of mother who wore aprons and went to church socials.

What bothered me as much as anything was the vague understanding that Mama and Louis's arguing and tussling and jealousies, the small damages they did to each other, were a kind of foreplay. Louis rarely visited our trailer, thank God, but I and everyone else at Bluebonnet Ranch knew that Mama was spending nights at his red-brick house. Sometimes she came back with bruises on her arms, her face worn from lack of sleep, her throat and jaw scraped red from unshaven bristle. Mothers weren't supposed to do that either.

I don't know how much of Mama's relationship with Louis Sadlek was pleasure and how much was self-punishment. I think she regarded Louis as a strong man. Lord knows she wouldn't have been the first to mistake brutishness for strength. Maybe when a woman had been fending for herself as long as Mama did, it was a relief to submit to someone else, even if he wasn't kind. I've felt like that more than a few times, aching under the weight of responsibility and wishing anyone was in charge of me except me.

I'll admit Louis could be charming. Even the worst of Texas men have that amiable veneer, the soft-spokenness that appeals to women and the flair for storytelling. He seemed to genuinely like young children—they were so ready to believe anything he told them. Carrington giggled and grinned whenever Louis was near, thereby disproving the notion that children instinctively know who to trust.

But Louis didn't like me at all. I was the only holdout in our household. I couldn't stand the very things that impressed Mama so, the masculine posturing, the endless gestures meant to convey how little things meant to him because he had so much. He had a closet full of custom-made boots, the kind the bootmaker starts by asking you to stand in your sock feet on a piece of butcher paper and trace around the edges. Louis had a pair of eight-hundred-dollar boots made of elephant hide from "Zimbab-way." They were the talk of Welcome, those boots.

But when Louis and Mama and two other couples went dancing at a place in Houston, the men at the door wouldn't let him bring his silver liquor flask inside. So Louis went to the side and drew out his Dozier folding hunter knife and cut a long slit right through the top of that boot, so he could wedge the flask inside. When Mama told me about it later, she said it had been a stupid gesture and a ridiculous waste of money. But she mentioned it so many times in the months afterward that I realized she admired the flamboyance of it.

That was Louis, doing whatever it took to keep up the appearance of wealth, when in reality he was no better off than anyone else. All hat, no cattle. No one seemed to know how Louis got his spending money, which surely amounted to more than the income from the trailer park. There were rumors of casual drug-dealing. Since we were located so close to the border, that was fairly easy for anyone who wanted to take the risk. I don't believe Louis ever smoked or snorted. Alcohol was his drug of choice. But I don't think he had any scruples about siphoning poison to college students who were home on break, or locals who wanted a more potent escape than could be found in a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

When I wasn't preoccupied with Mama and Louis. I was absorbed in Carrington. who had lurched into toddlerhood and had begun staggering around like a miniature drunken linebacker. She tried to stick her tiny wet fingers in electric sockets, pencil sharpeners, and Coke cans. She tweezed bugs and cigarette butts from the grass, and petrified Cheerios from the carpet, and everything went into her mouth. When she started feeding herself with a bent-handled spoon, she made such an unholy mess I sometimes had to take her outside to hose her down. I kept an oversized plastic dishpan from Wal-Mart on the back patio, and watched over Carrington as she played and splashed in it.

When she started to talk, the closest she could get to pronouncing my name was "BeeBee," and she said it whenever she wanted anything. She loved Mama, twinkled like a lightning bug when they were together, but when she was sick or cantankerous or afraid, she reached for me and I reached for her. It was nothing Mama and I ever talked about, or even thought much about, we all just took it for granted. Carrington was my baby.

Miss Marva encouraged us to visit often, saying her days were too quiet otherwise. She had never taken Bobby Ray back. There would probably be no more boyfriends for her, she said, since all the men her age were getting to be sorry-looking or feebleminded or both. Every Wednesday afternoon I drove her to the Lamb of God, because she was a volunteer cook for their Meals-on-Wheels program and the church had a commercial-rated kitchen. With Carrington balanced on my hip, I would measure out ingredients and stir bowls and pots, while Miss Marva taught me the basics of Texas cooking.

Under her direction I scraped milky sweet corn off fresh cobs: seared it in bacon drippings and added half-and-half stirring until the aroma caused tickles of saliva on the insides of my cheeks. I learned how to make chicken-fried steak topped with white cream gravy, and okra dusted with cornmeal and skillet-fried in hot grease, and pinto beans boiled with a ham bone, and turnip greens with pepper sauce. I even learned the secrets of Miss Marva's red velvet cake, which she warned me never to make for a man unless I wanted him to propose to me.

The hardest thing to learn was how to make Miss Marva's chicken and dumplings, which she didn't have a recipe for. They were so good, so rich and gummy and melting, they could almost make you cry. She started with a little hill of flour on the counter, added salt and eggs and butter, and mixed it all up with her fingers. She rolled it out into a flat sheet, cut the dough into long strips, and added it to a boiling pot of homemade chicken stock. There is hardly an illness that chicken and dumplings can't cure. Miss Marva made a pot of them for me right after Hardy Gates had left Welcome, and they almost provided a temporary' relief from heartache.