"Faith," Renee said fretfully, "make Scottie stop. He’s driving me crazy with that whining."

Faith put aside the potatoes she was peeling, wiped her hands, and went to the screen door, where Scottie was slapping at the screen and making the little snuffling sounds that meant he wanted to go outside. He was never allowed to go out by himself, because he didn’t understand what "stay in the yard" meant, and he would wander off and get lost. There was a latch high on the screen, where he couldn’t reach it, that was always kept fastened to prevent him from going out by himself. Faith was busy with supper, though likely only she and Scottie would be here to eat it, and couldn’t go out with him right now.

She pulled his hands away from the screen and said, "Do you want to play ball, Scottie? Where’s the ball?" Easily distracted, he trotted off in search of his dogchewed red ball, but Faith knew that wouldn’t occupy him for long. With a sigh, she went back to the potatoes.

Renee drifted out of her bedroom. She was dressed fit to kill tonight, Faith noted, in a tight, short red dress that showed off her long, shapely legs and somehow didn’t clash with her hair. Renee had great legs; she had great everything, and she knew it. Her thick red hair was brushed into a cloud, and her musky perfume clung to her in a deep, rich red scent. "How do I look?" she asked, whirling on her red high heels as she attached cheap rhinestone earrings to her earlobes.

"Beautiful," Faith said, knowing it was what Renee expected, and it was nothing less than the truth. Renee was as amoral as a cat, but she was also a startlingly beautiful woman, with a perfectly formed, slightly exotic face.

"Well, I’m off." She bent to brush a careless kiss over the top of Faith’s head.

"Have fun, Mama."

"I will." She gave a husky laugh. "Oh, I will." She unlatched the screen and left the shack, long legs flashing.

Faith got up to latch the door again, and stood watching Renee get into her flashy little sports car and drive off. Her mother loved that car. She had driven up in it one day without a word of explanation about how she had gotten it, not that there was much doubt in anyone’s mind. Guy Rouillard had bought it for her.

Seeing her at the door, Scottie returned and began making his "go outside" noise again. "I can’t take you outside," Faith explained, endlessly patient though he didn’t understand much. "I have to cook supper. Would you rather have fried potatoes or mashed ones?" It was a rhetorical question, because mashed potatoes were much easier for him to eat. She smoothed his dark hair and returned once again to the table and the bowl of potatoes.

Lately, Scottie wasn’t as energetic as usual, and more and more his lips took on a blue tinge when he played. His heart was failing, just like the doctors had said would likely happen. There wouldn’t be a miracle heart transplant for Scottie, even had the Devlins been able to afford it. The few available children’s hearts were too precious to be wasted on a little boy who would never be able to dress himself, or read, or manage more than a few garbled words no matter how long he lived. "Severely retarded" was how he was categorized. Though a hard little lump formed in Faith’s chest at the thought of Scottie dying, she wasn’t bitter that nothing would be done about his failing health. A new heart wouldn’t help Scottie, not in any way that mattered. The doctors hadn’t expected him to live this long, and she would just take care of him for whatever time he had left.

For a while, she had wondered if he was Guy Rouillard’s son, and felt furious on his behalf that he wasn’t taken to live in the big white house, where he would have the best of care, and his few years would be happy. Because Scottie was retarded, she thought, Guy was happy to keep him out of sight.

The truth was, Scottie could just as easily be Pa’s son, and it was impossible to tell. Scottie didn’t look like either man; he simply looked like himself. He was six years old now, a placid little boy who was pleased by the smallest things, and whose security was rooted in his fourteen-year-old sister. Faith had taken care of him from the day Renee had brought him home from the hospital, protected him from Pa’s drunken rages, kept Russ and Nicky from teasing him unmercifully. Renee and Jodie mostly ignored him, which was okay with Scottie.

Jodie had asked Faith to "double date" with her that night, and shrugged when Faith refused because someone had to stay home and take care of Scottie. She wouldn’t have gone out with Jodie anyway; their ideas of fun were radically different. Jodie thought having fun was sneaking some illegal booze, since she was only sixteen, getting drunk, and having sex with the boy or group of boys who were hanging around her that night.

Everything in Faith shuddered in revulsion at the thought. She had seen Jodie come in, stinking of beer and sex, her clothes torn and stained, giggling at how much "fun" she had had. It never seemed to bother her that those same boys wouldn’t speak to her if they met her in public.

It bothered Faith. Her soul burned with humiliation at the contempt in people’s eyes whenever they looked at her, at anyone in her family. The trashy Devlins, that’s what they were called. Drunks and whores, the whole bunch.

But I’m not like that! The silent cry sometimes welled up in Faith, but she always held it in. Why couldn’t folks see beneath the name? She didn’t paint herself up and wear too short, too tight clothes like Renee and Jodie. She didn’t drink, didn’t hang around rough joints trying to pick up anything in pants. Her clothes were cheap and ill made, but she kept them clean. She never missed a day of school, if she could help it, and she had good grades. She hungered for respectability, wanted to be able to walk into a store and not have the clerks watch her like a hawk, because she was one of those trashy Devlins and everyone knew they’d steal you blind. She didn’t want people to make comments behind their hands whenever they saw her.

It didn’t help that she resembled Renee far more than did Jodie. Faith had the same thick, dark red hair, as vibrant as a flame, the same porcelain-grained skin, the same high cheekbones and exotic green eyes. Her face wasn’t perfectly proportioned like Renee’s; her face was thinner, her jaw more square, her mouth as wide but not as full. Renee was voluptuous; Faith was both taller and leaner, her body more delicately made. Her breasts had finally grown, firm and pert, but Jodie, at the same age, had been wearing a bra cup two sizes bigger.

Because she looked like Renee, people seemed to expect Faith to act like her, too, acd then never looked beyond their own expectations. She was tarred with the same brush that had painted the rest of the family.

"But I’ll get out someday, Scottie," she said softly. "See if I don’t."

He didn’t react to the words, just kept patting the screen.

As always, when she needed to cheer herself, she thought of Gray. Her painful feelings for him hadn’t lessened in the three years since she had seen him making love to Lindsey Partain, but rather had intensified as she had matured. The awestruck joy with which she had watched him at eleven had grown and changed, as she had grown and changed. When she dreamed of him now, physical feelings mingled sharply with the romantic ones, and with her upbringing the details were far sharper and more explicit than other fourteen-year-old girls could have been expected to know.

Her dreams weren’t colored just by her own surroundings; that day at the summerhouse when she had seen Gray with Lindsey Partain – Lindsey Mouton now – had given her a great deal of knowledge about his body. She hadn’t actually seen his genitals, because at first his back had been turned to her, and then when he had gotten on top, their legs had blocked her view. It didn’t much matter, though, because she knew what one looked like. Not only had she taken care of Scottie all of his life, but Pa and Russ and Nicky, when they were drunk, were just as likely as not to pull it out of their pants and take a pee off the front step as they were to use the toilet.

But Faith knew enough details about Gray’s body to heat her dreams. She knew how muscled those long legs were, and that black hair grew on them. She knew that his buttocks were small and round and tight, and that he had adorable twin dimples just above them. She knew that his shoulders were broad and powerful, that his back was long, with the groove of his spine deeply indented between the thick layers of muscle. There had been a light dusting of black hair on his wide chest.

She knew that he made love in French, his deep voice soft and dark and crooning.

She had followed his career at LSU with secret pride. He had just been graduated with a double major in finance and business administration, with an eye toward taking over the Rouillard holdings someday. As good as he had been at football, he hadn’t wanted a career in the pros, and instead had come home to begin helping Guy. She would be able to catch glimpses of him year round now, rather than just during the summer and holidays.

Unfortunately, Monica was home for good, too, and was as spiteful as ever. Everyone else was merely contemptuous; Monica actively hated anyone with the name of Devlin. Faith couldn’t blame her, though, and sometimes even sympathized with her. No one had ever said that Guy Rouillard wasn’t a good father; he loved both of his children, and they loved him. How did Monica feel, hearing people talk about Guy’s long-standing arrangement with Renee, knowing that he was openly unfaithful to her mother?

When she was younger, Faith had daydreamed that Guy was her father too; Amos was nowhere in the picture. Guy was tall and dark and exciting, his lean face so much like Gray’s that, no matter what, she couldn’t hate him. He had always been kind to her, to all Renee’s kids, but he had sometimes gone out of his way to speak to Faith and had once or twice bought her a small treat. It was probably because she looked like Renee, Faith thought. If Guy had been her father, then Gray would be her brother, and she would be able to worship him up close, live in the same house with him. Those daydreams had always made her feel guilty about Pa, and then she would try to be extra nice to him to make up for it. Lately, however, she was fiercely glad that Guy wasn’t her father, because now she didn’t want Gray to be her brother.

She wanted to marry him.

This most private of her daydreams was so shocking that sometimes it startled her, that she would dare to even dream so high. A Rouillard, marry a Devlin? A Devlin set foot in that hundred-year-old mansion? All the Rouillard ancestors would rise up from their graves to drive out the intruder. The parish would be aghast.

But still she dreamed. She dreamed of being dressed in white, of walking down the wide aisle of the church with Gray waiting for her at the altar, turning to watch her with those heavy-lidded dark eyes, the expression in them hot and wanting, and just for her. She dreamed of him sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her over the threshold – not at Rouillard House, she couldn’t imagine that, but somewhere else that was theirs alone, maybe a honeymoon cottage – to a big bed that awaited them. She imagined lying under him, her legs around him as she had seen Lindsey’s, imagined him moving, heard his seductive voice whispering French love words in her ear. She knew what men and women did together, knew where he would put his thing, even though she couldn’t imagine how it would feel. Jodie said that it felt wonderful, the best thing in the world…

Scottie gave a sharp cry, jerking Faith from her daydream. She dropped the potato she had been dicing and jumped to her feet, because Scottie didn’t cry unless he was hurt. He was still standing at the screen, holding his finger. Faith picked him up and carried him to the table, where she sat down with him on her lap and examined his hand. There was a small, deep scratch on the tip of his index finger; probably he had raked his hand across a hole in the screen, and the torn wire had dug into his skin. A single drop of blood had welled in the tiny wound.

"There, there, it’s all right," she soothed, hugging him and wiping away his tears. "I’ll put a Band-Aid on it and it’ll get well. You like Band-Aids."

He did. Whenever he had a scrape that needed bandaging, she ended up plastering the things over his arms and legs, because he would keep nudging her until all the Band-Aids in the box had been used. She had learned to take most of the bandage strips out of the box and hide them, so that only two or three were there for him to see.

She washed his finger and got the box down from the top shelf, where it was kept to keep him out of it. His round little face was glowing with delight and anticipation as he held out his stubby finger. Making a big production out of it, Faith applied the bandage to the wound.

He leaned forward and peered into the open box, then grunted as he held out his other hand.

"Is that one hurt, too? Poor hand!" She kissed the grubby little paw and applied a bandage to the back of it.

He leaned over and looked into the box again, and grinned as he held up his right leg.

"My goodness! You’re hurt all over!" she exclaimed, and bandaged his knee.

He checked the box again, but it was now empty. Satisfied, he trotted back to the door, and Faith returned to fixing supper.

With the long summer days, it was just twilight at eight-thirty, but by eight that evening Scottie was already tired and nodding off. Faith gave him a bath and put him to bed, her heart squeezing painfully as she stroked his hair. He was such a sweet little boy, oblivious to the health problems that would keep him from living to adulthood.

At nine-thirty she heard Amos driving up, his old truck clanking and backfiring. She went to unlatch the screen and let him in. The stink of whiskey came in with him, a purulent, greenish yellow stench.

He stumbled over the threshold, and righted himself.

"Where’s your ma?" he growled, in the ugly mean tone he always used when he was drinking, which was most of the time.

"She went out a couple of hours ago."

He lurched toward the table, the uneven floor making his steps that much more perilous. "Damn bitch," he muttered. "Ain’t never here. Always out shakin’ her ass at her fancy rich boyfriend. Ain’t never here to fix my supper. How’s a man supposed to eat?" he suddenly roared, hitting the table with his fist.

"Supper’s ready, Pa," Faith said quietly, hoping the uproar didn’t wake Scottie. "I’ll fix you a plate."

"Don’t want anything to eat," he said, as she had expected. When he was drinking, he never wanted food, just more booze.

"Is there anythin’ in this damn house to drink?" He staggered to his feet and began opening cabinet doors, slamming them when they didn’t reveal what he wanted.

Faith moved quickly. "There’s a bottle in the boys’ bedroom. I’ll get it." She didn’t want Amos stumbling around in there, cussing and probably puking, and waking Scottie. She darted into the dark little room and blindly searched under Nick’s cot until her hand brushed against cool glass. Dragging the bottle out, she carried it back into the kitchen. It was only about one quarter full, but anything would pacify Pa. She twisted the cap off and handed the bottle to Amos.

"Here, Pa."

"Good girl," he said, brightening as he tipped the bottle to his mouth. "You’re a good girl, Faith, not a whore like your ma and sister."

"Don’t talk like that about them," she protested, unable to listen. Knowing it was one thing, but talking about it was another. It wasn’t as if Pa had any room to throw stones.

"I’ll say what I damn well please!" Amos flared. "Don’t sass me, girl, or I’ll belt you one."

"I wasn’t sassing you, Pa." She kept her voice calm, but prudently moved out of reach. If he couldn’t reach her, he couldn’t hit her. He was likely to throw something, but she was quick and his missiles seldom struck her.

"Fine kids she gave me," he sneered. "Russ and Nick are the only two I can stomach. Jodie’s a whore like her ma, you’re a prissy smart-ass, and the last one’s a goddamn idiot."

Keeping her head turned away so he couldn’t see the tears that burned her eyes, Faith sat down on the ragged, sagging couch and began folding the laundry she’d done that day. It would never do to let Amos see that he’d hurt her. If he ever scented blood, he moved in for the kill, and the drunker he was, the more vicious he became. The best thing to do was ignore him. Like all drunks, he was easily distracted, and she figured he’d soon be passed out anyway.

She didn’t know why it hurt. She had long since ceased to have any feelings for Amos, not even fear. There was certainly nothing there to love, the man he had been long since destroyed in countless bottles of whiskey. If he had ever shown any promise, it had been gone by the time she’d been born, but somehow she thought he had always been pretty much as he was now. He was simply the type of person who always blamed others for his problems rather than doing something to correct them.

Sometimes, when he was sober, Faith thought she could see why Renee had once been attracted to him. Amos was a little over average height, with a wiry body that had never gone to fat. His hair was still dark, if thinning on top, and he could even be called a good-looking man – when he was sober. Drunk, as he was now, unshaven and with his hair mussed and hanging in dirty strings, his eyes red and rheumy with alcohol, his face bloated, there was nothing the least attractive about him. His clothes were dirty and stained, and he stank to high heaven. Judging by the sourness of his smell, he had already puked at least once, and the stains on the front of his pants meant that he hadn’t been as careful as he should have been when he’d peed.

He finished off the bottle in silence, then belched loudly. "Gotta piss," he announced, staggering to his feet and heading toward the front door.

Faith’s movements were measured, her hands never faltering as she listened to the stream of urine spattering in front of the step, for everyone else who came in that night to tramp into the house. She would mop the floor first thing In the morning.

Amos weaved back into the house. He hadn’t zipped his pants, she noticed, but at least his sex wasn’t exposed.

"Goin’ to bed," he said, making his way toward the back room. Faith watched him stumble and right himself by bracing his hand on the doorframe. He didn’t undress, but fell across the bed as he was. When Renee came home and found Amos lying across the bed in his filthy clothes, she would raise hell and wake everyone in the house.

Within minutes, Amos’s heavy snoring was echoing through the cramped shack.

Faith immediately got up and went into the lean-to that had been built onto the back of the shack, which she shared with Jodie. Only Amos and Renee had an honest-to-goodness bed; all the rest of them had cots. She turned on the light, the single bare bulb glaring, and quickly changed into her nightgown. Then she pulled her book out from under the mattress. Now that Scottie was in bed and Amos passed out drunk, she would likely have a couple of peaceful hours before anyone else came home. Amos was always the first one home, but then he always got started first.

She had learned not to hesitate when an opportunity for enjoyment presented itself, but to seize each moment. There were too few of them in her life for her to allow any to pass untasted. She loved books, and read anything that came to hand. There was something magical in the way words could be strung together and a whole new world fashioned by the arrangement. While reading she could leave this crowded shack far behind, and go to worlds filled with excitement and beauty and love. When she was reading, she was someone else in her mind, someone worthwhile, rather than one of the trashy Devlins.

She had learned not to read in front of Pa or the boys, though. The least they did was make fun of her. Any one of them, in one of their meaner moods, was likely to snatch the book from her and throw it in the fire, or into the toilet, and laugh uproariously as if her frantic efforts to save it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Renee would grumble about her wasting her time reading instead of doing her chores, but she wouldn’t do anything to the book. Jodie made fun of her sometimes, but in a careless, impatient way. She couldn’t understand for the life of her why Faith would rather stick her nose in a book than go out to have some fun.

These precious moments alone, when she could read in peace, were the highlight of Faith’s day, unless she had happened to see Gray. Sometimes she thought that if she couldn’t read, just for a few minutes, she would go crazy and start screaming, and not be able to stop. But no matter what Pa did, no matter what she overheard someone say about her family, no matter what Russ and Nicky had been up to or how weak Scottie seemed, if she could open a book, she would lose herself in the pages.

Tonight she had more than a few minutes free for reading, for losing herself in the pages of Rebecca. She settled on her cot and pulled out the candle that she kept under her bed. She lit the candle, positioned it just so, balanced on a crate to the right of the cot, and scooted so that her back was braced against the wall. The light from the candle, small as it was, was enough to offset the back glare of the light bulb and allow her to read without straining her eyes too much. One of these days, she promised herself, she would get a lamp. She imagined it, a real reading lamp that gave off soft, bright light. And she would have one of those wedge-shaped pillows to lean against.

One of these days.

It was almost midnight when she gave up the battle against her heavy eyelids. She hated to stop reading, not wanting to waste any of this time to herself, but she was so sleepy, she couldn’t make sense of the words any longer, and wasting the words seemed a lot worse than wasting the time. Sighing, she got up and returned the book to its hiding place, then turned out the light. She crawled between the threadbare sheets, the frame of the cot squeaking under her weight, and blew out the candle.

Perversely, in the sudden darkness, sleep wouldn’t come. She shifted restlessly on the thin cot, drifting in a half daydream, half doze, reliving the strained, shadowed romance in the book she’d been reading. She knew instantly when Russ and Nicky drove up, close to one o’clock. They staggered into the house, making no effort to be quiet, laughing uproariously at something their drinking buddies had done that night. Both of them were still underage, but a little thing like a law had never gotten in the way whenever a Devlin wanted to do something. The boys couldn’t go to roadhouses, but there were plenty of other ways they could get booze, and they knew them all. Sometimes they stole it, sometimes they paid other people to buy it for them, in which case they had stolen the money. Neither of them had a job, part-time or otherwise, because no one would hire them. It was well known the Devlin boys would steal you blind.

"OF Poss," Nicky was giggling. "Boooooom!"

It was enough to send Russ into drunken whoops. From the incoherent fragments she heard, evidently "Or Poss," whoever that was, had been scared by something that had made a loud booming noise. The boys seemed to think it was hilarious, but they probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

They woke Scottie, and she heard him grunting, but he didn’t cry, so she remained in bed. She wouldn’t have liked traipsing into the boys’ bedroom in her nightgown – in fact, she would have gone cold with dread – but she would have done it if they’d scared Scottie and made him cry. But Nicky said, "Shaddup and go back to sleep," and Scottie was quiet again. After a few minutes, they were all asleep, the chorus of snores rising and falling in the darkness.

Half an hour later, Jodie came home. She was quiet, or at least tried to be, tiptoeing through the shack with her shoes in hand. The stench of beer and sex came with her, all yellow and red and brown in a noxious swirl. She didn’t bother to undress but flopped down on her cot and heaved a deep sigh, almost like a purr.

"You awake, Faithie?" she asked after a moment, her voice slurred.

"Yeah."

"Thought you were. You should’ve come with me. Had fun, lots of fun." The last sentence was deep with sensuality. "You don’t know what you’re missin’, Faithie."

"Then I don’t miss it, do I?" Faith whispered, and Jodie giggled.

Faith dozed lightly, listening for Renee’s car so she would know everyone was safely home. Twice she came awake with a start, wondering if Renee had managed to come in without waking her, and got up to look out the window to see if her car was there. It wasn’t.

Renee didn’t come home at all that night.