Chapter 3

I asked Marguerite for an hour on Tuesday and she gave me the whole afternoon, which frightened me more.

We sat in the front room of the house on Ledbetter Road, where I have lived since I was twenty-three, in the two chairs nobody sits in, and she had the ring in a saucer on the table between us like something served.

"You want to know about the rule," she said.

"I know the rule. I've watched you do it three times. I want you to say it out loud with just me in the room."

She folded her hands. She has arthritis in both of them now and she folds them anyway.

"Before I sign anything, the ring is read," Marguerite said.

I have watched it three times. Walter's mother's will, and then Carol's husband's, and then the year the barn went. The band comes off, somebody reads what's cut inside it out loud at the table, and the name that gets read is the name the lawyer writes down as the wife.

It is not a romantic custom. Nathan's grandmother could not hold a deed in this county in 1938 and she worked out a way to hold one anyway, and four generations of Barrow women have kept it going because none of them ever had a better idea.

"And Adrienne comes Sunday," I said.

"Adrienne comes Sunday."

"Then you'd read that." I nodded at the saucer. "In front of Frances and Carol and everyone, and Adrienne would write down what you read."

Marguerite did not answer, which was an answer.

I have made that woman's birthday cake for twenty-one years. I have driven her to the eye doctor in Ashford and sat with a magazine about boats. I have washed her hair in a kitchen sink after her hip and neither of us ever mentioned it again. And I sat in that room and understood, at forty-four, that I had spent two decades assuming the roof was mine because I was the one who cleaned it.

"Postpone Sunday," I said.

"Adrienne is eighty-one and she does not reschedule."

"Then let her come and don't sign. Put the pen down and ask your son where the six letters came from."

"He'll say I'm siding with you."

"He'll say worse than that."

I stood up. My knees were not steady and I stood up anyway, and I had to put one hand on the arm of a chair I have never sat in.

"I'm sleeping at the shop tonight. There's two rooms over it."

"Delia."

"I'll be back Thursday for Nell's things." The cold had got into my fingers and I pushed them into my coat pocket where the ring was. "And I'll keep making your bread. That's between me and the ovens."

Marguerite looked up at me then and her mouth had gone thin.

"Twenty-one years you've never once raised your voice in this house."

"I'm not raising it now."

I picked the ring out of the saucer and put it in my coat pocket, and at the door I stopped, because apparently it is a habit you catch off a family.

"Then don't sign anything on Sunday," I said. "Because the woman whose name is in that ring hasn't lived in this house for one day of her life."