Sycamore Row

sauce with spicy sausage, and as it simmered she began practicing with a few elementary sentences in German. Portia responded slowly, sometimes repeating, often correcting. Hanna heard the strange words and came from the rear of the house. She was introduced to their guest, who greeted her with “Ciao.”
    “What does ‘ciao’ mean?” Hanna asked.
    “Among friends it means hello and good-bye in Italian, also in Portuguese, I think,” Portia said. “It’s a lot easier than ‘guten Tag’ or ‘bonjour.’ ”
    “I know some words in German,” Hanna said. “My mother taught me.”
    “We’ll practice later,” Carla said.
    Jake found an old corkscrew and managed to wrestle the bottle open. “We once had real wineglasses,” Carla said as she pulled out three cheap water goblets. “Like everything else, they went up in the fire.” Jake poured; they clinked glasses, said “Cheers,” and sat at the kitchen table. Hanna left them and went to her room.
    “Do you talk about the fire?” Portia asked.
    “Not much,” Jake said. Carla shook her head slightly and looked away. “However, if you’ve seen the paper, you know that one of the thugs is now back on the streets, or somewhere around here.”
    “I saw that,” Portia said. “Twenty-seven months.”
    “Yep. Granted, he didn’t light the match, but he was in on the planning.”
    “Does it worry you, now that he’s out?”
    “Of course it does,” Carla said. “We sleep with guns around here.”
    “Dennis Yawkey doesn’t bother me that much,” Jake said. “He’s just a stupid little punk who was trying to impress some other guys. Plus, Ozzie is watching him like a hawk. One bad move, and Yawkeygoes back to Parchman. I’m more concerned with the bad boys out there who’ve never been nailed. There were a lot of men, some local, some not, who were involved. Only four have been prosecuted.”
    “Five if you count Blunt,” Carla said.
    “He hasn’t been prosecuted. Blunt was the Klucker who tried to blow up the house a week before they burned it. He currently resides at the state mental hospital where he’s doing a good job of acting crazy.”
    Carla stood and went to the stove where she stirred the sauce and turned on the burner to boil the water.
    “I’m sorry,” Portia said softly. “Didn’t mean to bring up an unpleasant subject.”
    “It’s okay,” Jake said. “Tell us about Italy. We’ve never been there.”
    Over dinner, she talked about her travels throughout Italy, Germany, France, and the rest of Europe. As a high school student, she had made the decision to see the world, and to get as far away from Mississippi as possible. The Army gave her the chance, and she took full advantage of it. After boot camp, her top three choices were Germany, Australia, and Japan. While stationed at Ansbach, she spent her money on railway passes and student hostels, often traveling alone as she saw every country from Sweden to Greece. She was stationed on Guam for a year, but missed the history and culture, and especially the food and wines, of Europe, and managed a transfer.
    Jake had been to Mexico and Carla had been to London. For their fifth anniversary, they saved and scraped together enough money for a low-budget trip to Paris, one they still talked about. Beyond those trips, they had been homebound. If they were lucky, they sprang for a week at the beach at Destin in the summer. Listening to Portia trot the globe made them envious. Hanna was mesmerized. “You’ve seen the pyramids?” she asked at one point.
    Indeed she had; in fact, it seemed as though Portia had seen everything. The bottle was empty after the salads, and they needed more wine. Instead, Carla poured iced tea and they managed to finish the meal. After Hanna was in bed, they sipped decaf coffee, ate cookies, and talked about worldly matters.
    Of Lettie and the will and its related issues, not one word was uttered.

20
    Ancil Hubbard was no longer Ancil Hubbard. The old name and self had been discarded in a hurry years earlier when a pregnant woman found him and made allegations and demands. She wasn’t the first to cause him trouble, or a name change. There was an abandoned wife in Thailand, some jealous husbands here and there, the IRS, some type of police in at least three countries, and a cranky drug dealer in Costa Rica. And these were just the most memorable highlights of a chaotic and sloppily lived life, one he would have happily traded long ago for