So painstakingly it makes my eyes twitch, Amy thickens her lashes. I’m surprised she doesn’t blind herself with all that gook she puts on them.

“I’ve never heard you obsess the way you have about this Taylor family,” she says evenly.

“You’ve never mentioned them before.”

I lean back against the door sill and fold my arms against my chest.

That may be true, but the resentment was always there. And until now, I had never been in a position to do anything about it. When I got back to sleep after having gotten up to go to the bathroom after two, I had dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. All I can remember now is that she had looked sad.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” I say, realizing how much I have traditionally tried to cope with parts of my past by minimizing its bleakness. However, with Sarah, now a history major at the University (this month anyway), becoming curious about the South and her ancestry,

it is increasingly difficult to do. I realize I have never told my daughter how our family was treated by the county’s leading citizens.

Why? Embarrassment, I guess. We had seemed so weak and helpless. I didn’t want her to think of her grandparents that way. When we had gone over to Bear Creek in November, she had wanted to know if they were racists. Of course, I had told her. In those times we all were.

What I should have told her was that we were nothing like the Taylors.

We hadn’t owned slaves, we hadn’t cheated people out of their property or land. We hadn’t been hypocrites.

I notice Amy looking at me in the mirror. She says, “God, Gideon. You seemed to go into a trance.”

Feeling foolish, I force a smile, but it looks weak as it comes back to me in the mirror. Am I really still handsome as Angela said? Except for the gut and my bald spot, I haven’t aged too badly. I pooch out my bottom lip with my tongue, noticing the beginning of a fever blister on my lip. Damn. Why now in the middle of winter?