He had his job and relied on her. She could do figures, could conceptualize, think of things he couldn’t. She was lively and watchful. If they talked about dreams, what they would do or later seek, what was out of reach, what they remembered and regretted, what they feared, what delighted them—and of course they did—there were no records kept, no letters, diaries, no notes on the backs of photographs. It wasn’t thought necessary.

SOMEWHERE BEHIND THEM, of course, there was his difficult family and hers. My mother was pretty, black-haired, small, curvy, humorous, sharp-witted, talkative—and therefore difficult to accept in Atkins, though no one precisely said so. From his mother they kept a distance, even when they visited, and even though they slept in her house, the house left by the scandalous father, up the hill from Atkins with a view down to the highway and up Crow Mountain. His mother thought of her son differently now—as if he’d acquired airs with this new, possibly Catholic wife; had embraced ambitions; had met people one didn’t meet if one were from where he was from. The country. They’d been married by a justice, not in church. All was acceptable, but nothing precisely was. His sister loved him, her many children adored him, called him—Parker Carrol—“Uncle Par’Carrol.” But all was under the mother’s ceaseless eye. She kept her counsel, waited, ruled what she could rule, but did not mean to receive the new “daughter.”

For my mother, there were added matters to dwell upon—given her life, overseen by her own rattily Ozark parents. Her people were from the sticks—worse than the country. North Arkansas. Tontitown. Hiwasse. Gravette. Way up there. My father had not known such people growing up. My mother’s mother was only fourteen years older than her daughter, and was punitive, jealous. She’d divorced the father. He was gone. The pretty, blond-headed second husband/stepfather, Bennie Shelley, was a quick-witted gigolo—a talker, a club boxer, a railroader, a show-off—but a man with a future, whom my mother’s mother, Essie Lucille, intended to hold on to, even if it meant sending her vivacious, smiling daughter off to the convent school in Fort Smith when things with Bennie grew unwieldy. Which they did. At least until the two of them needed the pretty daughter to bring in a paycheck, at which point they took her out of school at sixteen and put her to work, too young, in the cigar stand at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, where Bennie now oversaw the catering department. Again, it was the Depression. They needed to salt money away. They were not to be held back.

For her, though—Edna—my father’s family might’ve been a real family. Irish or not, country or not, narrow with pieties, suspicions and misfortunes—all that set easily enough to the side.