Carolina Moon

conceived and birthed a male. She was happy enough to give the dealing with him over to my father for the most part. What did she know of boys, after all? I wonder if Cade felt this smooth and easy distance. I imagine he did, but somehow he became a whole and admirable man despite it.
    Because of it?
    Naturally, Mama schooled him in manners, saw to his cleanliness, but his education, his time, his lot in life were my father’s bailiwick. I don’t remember ever hearing her question Papa about Cade.
    Hope was her reward for a job well done. The daughter she could polish and mold, the child she would see from babyhood through to a proper marriage. She loved Hope for her sweetness and her quiet acquiescence. And she never saw, never, the rebel inside. Had Hope lived, I believe she would have done precisely what she pleased, and somehow have convinced Mama it was Mama’s own idea.
    She got around her with Tory. She could get around her with anything.
    God, I miss her. I miss that half of me that was bright and fun and eager. I miss her outrageously.
    Myself I was a trial to Mama. How often I have heard her say so, therefore it must be true. I had none of Hope’s sweetness, nor her quiet acquiescence. I questioned, and I fought bitterly over things I didn’t even care about.
    Notice me. Damn you all. Notice me.
    How sad and pitiful.
    Hope became friends with Tory a year before that summer. They were simply drawn together as some souls are. Even I could see the recognition between them, that click of connection. And they were, almost from the first, inseparable. More twins than my sister and I had ever been.
    For that reason alone I disliked Victoria Bodeen intensely. I turned my nose up at her and her dirty feet and poor grammar, at her big watchful eyes and white-trash parents. But it was her closeness with Hope that was at the root of it.
    I made fun of her as often as I possibly could, and ignored her the rest of the time. Pretended to ignore her. In fact, I watched her and Hope with hawklike concentration. Looking for a fissure, for some crack in their bond that I could pry wider so that their affection for each other shattered.
    They played together on the day she died, at our house, as Hope was strictly forbidden to go to Tory’s. She did so, of course, in secret, but they spent most of their time together in and around Beaux Reves, or in the swamp.
    Mama didn’t know about the swamp. She would not have approved. But we all wandered there, played there. Papa knew it, and only asked that we not go in after dark.
    Before supper Hope played jacks on the veranda. I was punishing her by not playing with her. When this didn’t appear to spoil her pleasure in the game, I went to my room to sulk and didn’t come down until I was called to supper.
    I wasn’t hungry, and I was still in a vile mood over Hope’s blithe acceptance of my anger with her. I took it out on myself by making an issue of the peas—though I continue to contend I had a right there—then ended up sassing my mother and being sent from the table.
    I hated being sent from the table. Not that I cared overmuch about the food, but it was banishment. I imagine a therapist would say that this tactic proved to me that I was not a part of the family as my brother and sister were. I was the outsider who on one hand reveled in my independence of them, and on the other wanted desperately to be part of the picture.
    I went to my room, as if that’s where I wanted to be in the first place. I was determined they would think so and not suspect that I was as mortified as I was angry.
    A small hill of peas was more important than I was.
    I laid on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and surrounded myself with resentment. One day, I thought, one day I would be free to do as I liked, when I liked. No one would stop me, least of all the family who so easily dismissed me. I would be rich and famous and beautiful. I had no clear idea how I would accomplish these things, but they were my goal. I saw money and glory and beauty as a kind of prize I would win while the rest of them stayed steeped in the traditions and the restrictions of Beaux Reves.
    I considered running away, perhaps landing on my aunt Rosie’s doorstep. That, I knew, would hit my mother where she lived as she considered her sister Rosie nothing more than an embarrassment. Somewhat like me.
    But I didn’t want to leave. I wanted them to love me, and that urgent and frustrated desire was my