Lucinda opened the door, and Cassie breezed into the room and plopped into the rocking chair. When Lucinda looked around, she saw that Vernon had quickly disappeared, just like he had done on that day in her classroom ten years earlier.

“Oh goody. A rockin’ chair. I jest love rockin’ chairs.”

“What’s the matter, Cassie?” Lucinda asked as she sat on the edge of her bed.

“I jest can’t stand it when Aunt Bertha’s havin’ one of her fits and mommy gits on to her.” The more she talked, the harder Cassie rocked.

“So you’re seeking refuge?”

“Yep.” The rocking became faster and faster.

“From my observations, I’d say Mrs. Godwin is a hysteric.” Lucinda did not mean this in a mean, gossiping way but rather as a cool, detached opinion, as teachers prone to do when they meet new students at the beginning of a school year.

“Yep. Mommy has to slap her to calm her down sometimes. I git mad at mommy all the time, but I don’t git carried away like Aunt Bertha does.”

“Cassie, dear, I know it isn’t any of my business, but what’s going to happen to you after your mother passes away?” Again, she did not mean her question as presumptuous intrusion into another person’s private life but as a means to offer the best, well-considered advice, which is one of the many duties teachers are not taught in college but develop on their own after years of practice.

Cassie stopped her rocking abruptly and looked at Lucinda blankly, without emotion. “Oh, she thinks she’s goin’ to have me put away in some mental hospital somewhere after she dies, but it’s not goin’ to happen.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep. I’ve been to daddy’s lawyer, and he says mommy can’t do that.”

Lucinda wrinkled her brow. “But—“.

“You see, I let the lawyer set up all these tests with psychologists and teachers and stuff to see if there was anythin’ wrong with me, up here,” she said, pointing to her head, “and they all said no.”

“And you haven’t told your mother the results of the tests?”

“Why bother?” Cassie shrugged. “She wouldn’t believe them anyway.”

“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I’m confused.”

“You thought I was crazy too.” Cassie smiled and nodded.

“Crazy isn’t the word for it.” Lucinda slipped into tutorially mode, as though helping a student find a more appropriate word for an essay. “How can I explain it?”

“Jest spit it out. I’ve heard worse from mommy.”

“Well, for instance, you sometimes act so silly, so much like a small child, you know, about the soup. Not at all like a woman would act.”

“Thirty-seven-year-old woman,” Cassie added. “I talk about silly things like chicken with stars soup because mommy won’t give me a fight over it.”

“Then why don’t you just leave?” Lucinda felt she had lived her life bound by a code of ethics and common sense, and she could not understand Cassie’s apparent insistence in wallowing in her mother’s domination.

“Daddy begged me to stay when he was alive. He said mommy was jest unbearable to be around without me to take up most of her time.”

“Then your father knew—“

“That I wasn’t crazy?” She started rocking again. “Oh sure. Daddy was smart.”

“Then why didn’t you leave after your father died?”

“It would’ve been just too hard to fight mommy over it. I guess she’s a whole lot like Aunt Bertha. She’s a hysteric too.”

“I don’t mean to sound cruel, but doesn’t it make you feel sad, knowing you’ve wasted your life like this?” She told Cassie she did not mean to sound cruel, but, of course, she knew very well it was a cruel question.

“Oh no. I haven’t wasted my life. I made daddy happy. That ain’t no waste. And, in a way, it’s made mommy happy to have me around to fuss and bother with.” She stopped the rocker to beam with pride. “And Nancy lets me baby-sit her little girl while she works. Isn’t Shirley jest a livin’ doll? It’s almost like havin’ my own little girl.”

“I suppose.” She gazed out the window, at a loss for offering words of insight.

“Mommy won’t live that much longer anyway, and I’ll still have my life to do with as I please.”

“For your sake, I hope you’re right,” she replied with a sigh.

“Oh, I know. I take after mommy’s side of the family, and they all live a long time. Grandma died when she was eighty-eight. Why, mommy and daddy didn’t have me until they were a little bit older than me now.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, mommy ain’t goin’ to live that long because of them cigarettes. And I think all that hate built up inside her is goin’ to cut some years off her life. That’s what her doctor told me, anyway.”

Lucinda considered whether it was proper for her to ask another deeply personal question. She did not pause long enough to consider it too seriously. “Why does your mother have all that hatred?”

“Gosh, I don’t know.” Cassie laughed. “She’s been mad about something ever since I was born.”

“I thought it had to do with your father’s death.”

“Oh no. She fussed daddy into his grave.” She laughed again and slapped the arm of the rocking chair. “Then he became a saint.”

“Did she have unfulfilled ambitions?” Lucinda wished she still had a blackboard on which to write her questions.

“I don’t know.” By her tone, Cassie did not care either.

“She never talks about anything she wished she could have done?”

“No.” Cassie paused to ruminate over the enigma that was her mother. “I always just thought of it as jest the way mommy was. You know, daddy was always a kind of bigger than life man who talked too loud and slapped you on the back too hard and got mad fast but felt guilty longer. And you’re the way you are because that’s jest the way you are.”

“Maybe life is that simple.” Lucinda decided if a student had made that observation in an essay she would have scrawled across the top, give this more thought.

“I don’t know. To say mommy’s the way she is because of something that happened to her a long time ago seems awful simple to me.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Lucinda knew she wasn’t, however. “How are you going to live after — I mean — financially?”

“Oh, daddy left me enough money in my insurance policy to live on.” Cassie’s face lit. “And then I git whatever he left mommy that she doesn’t spend. I’ll sell the house — of course, I won’t git much for it. It’s such a firetrap. Did I tell you how you can git out of this room if there’s a fire in the hall?”

“No. That might be useful information.”

Cassie stood to walk to the window and lean out. Lucinda followed her and peered out too.

“There’s a good sturdy drainpipe right outside here. You can climb down it. See, there’s even places to put your feet. Those thingies that strap the pipe to the wall.” She pointed. It’s right next to the honeysuckle trellis, but I wouldn’t try to climb down it. The wood is rotten.

“Are you sure the drainpipe would hold my weight?”

“Oh sure.” Cassie lost interest in looking at the pipe, walked back to the rocker and sat. “The reason I know is because when Nancy used to have this room she’d climb down the drainpipe at night after that goofy lookin’ Vernon Singleberry left after one of their dates. “She had that handsome guy from the movie set awaitin’ on her at his motel. She always said it was Warren Beatty but between me and you I think it was really his stand-in.”

“Who she said fathered her child,” Lucinda filled in. She returned to the bed to sit.

“You know what’s funny? He wasn’t even the father.”

“I know,” she replied softly.

“Yeah. You see, she told Vernon she was already married, but that guy wouldn’t marry her until after a blood test.”

Lucinda saw how Cassie relished the telling and the retelling of the juiciest gossip ever to emerge from her mother’s boardinghouse.

“And the test showed the baby was Vernon’s.”

“Yep, and that guy dropped her like a hot potato.” Cassie nodded and resumed rocking. “Then Nancy didn’t have the nerve to tell Vernon the truth.”

“Yes, I know.” Lucinda’s heart was breaking a little once again as she remembered Vernon’s numbing grief.

“Anyway, after I sell the house I’ll git me a nice apartment somewhere, maybe with a nice view of somethin’ pretty, like a lake, to look at.”

“Do you think you’ll get a job?” She resumed her questions on Cassie’s personal life so she would not have to think about Vernon any more.

“Maybe I’ll babysit. I like that.”

“You have the ability to do more. I know you do.” Playing the part of the cheerleader always lifted Lucinda’s spirits.

“It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late.” Clichés always were comforting.

Cassie stopped rocking. Her shoulders slumped. The thrill of the rhapsodic movement was gone. “I could have gotten a job doin’ somethin’ but mommy wouldn’t hear of it. You see, those doctors said I wasn’t crazy enough to go to a mental hospital, but they said I — I never learned — well, what most people learn to git along in life — you know, out workin’ and with adults. Now babies, I love to be around babies.

“I’m sorry.” Why she was sorry, Lucinda did not know, but the sentiment was genuine.

“I’ll be all right. It’ll be downright heaven to live where I want to and do what I like without mommy tellin’ me I can’t or shouldn’t.”

“So you’re just waiting for her to die.”

“If there’s one thing havin’ a club foot teaches you it’s patience.” Cassie cocked her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’s wrong. They’ve all stopped now. Aunt Bertha’s probably cryin’ in her room, and mommy’s off cleanin’ somethin’ or other.” She stood abruptly and went to the door.

“You don’t have to leave now, Cassie.” No matter how sad the conversation, Lucinda was enjoying it nonetheless.

“Oh no. It’s time for my soap operas.” And she was out the door.

“How sad. How terribly, terribly sad,” she mumbled to herself, allowing herself to fall back onto her pillow. “At least she took my mind off Vernon. I shouldn’t have kept my nose stuck in my papers that day. And I shouldn’t have been so flippant about his going to Vietnam. But it was true. More people are killed on the highway than in . . .” Realizing how foolish her rationalization sounded, Lucinda stopped in mid-sentence.