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should have just gone over there. This is his wife and son we’re talking about.
    What’s he going to do, E-mail Caroline?”
    I said nothing. In the clear light of my father’s rage, it did sound shabby and feckless. I don’t know why I had not thought so earlier.
    Tee had called on Sunday afternoon, late, and said that he’d like to come by and talk to both of us. I said, “Fine,” as calmly and neutrally as I could, but my heart began the familiar galloping. If Tee didn’t come to his senses soon, I thought, I’d simply go into cardiac arrest.
    “So, okay, we’ll be by in about an hour,” Tee said, and I heard Teddy’s voice on the upstairs extension. I had not realized he had picked up.
    “What’s this ‘we’ shit?” Teddy said coldly.
    “I’m coming, too,” a woman said. Her. It was her. I had imagined a silky, tongue-flickering purr, but the voice of my enemy was oddly flat and without resonance, with the nasal twang of the wire grass under it. It was, somehow, disarming.
    Neither Teddy nor I said anything, and the voice went on:
    “It may be harder for all of us now, but it’s not fair to let Tee carry this alone. I’m part of it, too. We need to know each other, you-all and I. We can build something honorable and lasting if we start out that way.”
    She sat beside my husband, perhaps touching him, and spoke of honor. I could not draw a breath deep enough to get a word out.
    “Eat a shit sandwich,” Teddy said. “If either of you’s got anything to say to us, fax it.”

    60 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    “Teddy…” Tee began.
    “You heard the kid,” I said, and hung up. Teddy did, too.
    There was stillness, a silence from upstairs.
    “You want to talk?” I yelled up into it.
    “No,” he called back.
    We did not speak of the call again. I retreated into my white fugue. The fax came that evening.
    It was a long one, addressed to both of us and signed by both of them. Teddy read it and crumpled it up and threw it into his wastebasket.
    “I need to see it, too,” I protested.
    “No, you don’t,” he said, his back to me. “It’s two pages of New Age shit that ends up saying, essentially, that he’s leaving us and marrying her, and trying to make it sound like it’s some kind of cosmic wonderfulness that’s going to lift us all straight to heaven. He says he still loves us and will forever, and then she chimes in and says we can still be a family, a new kind of family. He says he’ll wait to hear from either or both of us. He can wait for me till hell freezes over.
    You do what you want. I hate him. I hate that fucking bitch.”
    He began to cry, the coarse, ragged sobs of a young man no longer a boy, and ran into the library and slammed the door.
    I stood outside it, my heart wrung with pain. I could not bear the sound of his grief. But I knew that this time I could do nothing to assuage it. Only Tee could do that. Finally I went up to our bedroom—my bedroom now—and sat down to call Tee back. Then I realized I did not know his new number. And I knew that if I could help it, I never would.
    I did not reply to the fax, either.
    Caroline called late that night from Memphis. He UP ISLAND / 61
    had just talked to her, he and Sheri, and she was furious, wounded nearly mortally, inconsolable.
    “How could he do this to me? How could you let him?
    My God, she’s only a few years older than I am; what is he thinking of? Aren’t you going to do something? Can’t you fight a tacky little trailer park slut? If he thinks he’s ever going to see his granddaughter again, he’s out of his mind. Not while he’s with her. My baby’s not going within a hundred miles of that piece of trash. My God, she sounds like a washer-woman…”
    Caroline was her daddy’s girl, just as Teddy had always been my boy, my miniature Tee. It had always seemed natural, comfortable, an almost Wally and June Cleaver arrangement. Only then did I see what it might mean, how the crippling old patterns had