It was the spring great-aunt Lady was caught without her Coca-Colas.   That's how she remembered things, in terms of events that were importantly disastrous to her and only her.   One morning in late April the whole town woke up to two inches of ice and, inconveniently, it was great-aunt Lady's grocery day.   She stocked up on her weekly supply of Coca-Colas every Wednesday.   Within forty-eight hours everyone in town was referring to it as the spring Lady got caught without her Coca-Colas because the power might have gone out but the telephone lines were blessedly spared.   Reverend Joe finally got his car out and took her to the grocery store.   That's when great-aunt Lady decided being a Yankee, even a single one, wasn't such a sin and maybe he did have a right to be in the pulpit.

That spring was also the one-year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts to cancer.   But that wasn't disaster enough for great-aunt Lady.   She said, "Your Mama's alive and well and there's nothing disastrous about that."

The ice storm passed and May that year was divine and warm.   Mom started wearing summer dresses again.   Her counselor had told her she would go through a mourning period, missing her breasts.   And she quietly did.

The spring that great-aunt Lady was caught without her Coca-Colas, the one year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts, was also when Reverend Joe finally brought his wife down from Connecticut.

Her name was Fala and she had beautiful dark hair that wasn't quite brown, but not quite red either.   And it was always so shiny.   The light through the stained glass made it look like she had glitter in her hair.   I liked to watch her.   She sat alone on the very first pew every Sunday.

I think she was afraid of us.   She asked us to repeat ourselves like we were speaking a new language she was trying to learn.   I think she tried to be a good preacher's wife, but great-aunt Lady complained that the parsonage's telephone line was always busy because Fala called her family every seven minutes.   I thought that was extraordinary.   I'd never known anyone who called somebody every seven minutes.   My babysitter talked for at least a half an hour before calling someone else when she watched me on the evenings Mom had to work.   At the homecoming picnic the first Sunday in July, I decided to ask Fala about it.

She looked a little confused when I asked her, so I repeated myself, more slowly this time.

"I understood you," she said.   She had walked away from the picnic to smoke under the hickory tree near the road and I had followed her.   "I talk to my family a lot, but not every seven minutes."   She flicked the ashes off her cigarette with an agitated movement.   She smiled at me, a little thinly.   "I think your great-aunt was just trying to make a point."

"Oh," I said.   She finished her cigarette but made no move to return to the picnic.   Instead, she fished out another and lit it.   I leaned against the trunk of the tree figuring she would tell me to leave if she didn't want me there.   "How do you get your hair to do that?" I said after a stretch of silence.   "It's so shiny."

Her hand went to her hair and she stroked it as if comforting herself.   "Cream rinse.   My sister sends me down a supply of it every couple of months.   It's from a salon we used to go to in Hartford."

"My hair won't do anything but braid," I said.

Fala reached over and touched my hair.   "It's dry," she said.   "You need some cream rinse.   I'll bring you a bottle of mine next week.   You can tell me how it works."   Then, out of the blue, she asked me, "Your mother had breast cancer, didn't she?"

I nodded.

"My grandmother had breast cancer, too."   No one in town ever said that word breast , at least not twice during the same conversation.   As far as the town was concerned, my mother had an affliction.   But it seemed to me that whether or not it was an affliction didn't matter because it was still in her breasts.   But here Fala was saying it out loud like she was saying cabbage or antelope .   She took another drag off the cigarette and looked out across the field.   "I was named after my grandmother.   Fala means 'crow.'"

She said that as if it really pleased her and I thought if my name meant crow, I wouldn't be too happy about it.   Neither would great-aunt Lady.   She didn't like crows.   She was always shooing them out of her yard, running out her back door, waving her arms and fussing.   We lived next door to her so the crows would fly over to us until she went back inside and then they flew back.

"I'll come by.   How about tomorrow?   When will your mom be home?"

"Usually about five-thirty except on Thursday and then she works at night."

"I'll come after dinner," she said with a nod.   She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it.

"We should get back.   Some of the church ladies are giving me that look."

Fala came by at seven-thirty the next evening and gave me a yellow bottle of cream rinse which I promptly used.   It stung my eyes.   She was still in the kitchen, talking to my mom, when I went to bed.

She was over at our house a lot the next few weeks.   Then Reverend Joe, larger than life and as big as our doorway, started showing up.

It was hard to eavesdrop because the kitchen opened into the dining room and there was no place to hide close enough to hear.   Sometimes I would sit outside on the back porch steps in the evening and throw rocks from the driveway into the yard to try to quiet the cicadas so I could catch words coming from the kitchen.   Reverend Joe and Fala talked a lot.   When Mom talked, she talked very low like she knew I was trying to listen.   I had to stop eavesdropping after Robert Junior, who mowed our grass in the summer, complained about the rocks in our yard flying up and hitting him in the head.

I finally asked my mom about these sessions when we were at the grocery store.   I tried to slide into the conversation by remarking over the cantaloupes, "Reverend Joe and Fala are over at our house a lot."

"Friends talk."   She put some oranges in the cart and walked ahead of me.

"But why you?   I mean, there are lots of other people in this town."

"Would you share all your secrets with your great-aunt Lady?" she asked over her shoulder.

She had a point.   "No way.   What do they talk about, Reverend Joe and Fala?"

"Fala's grandmother always wanted her to marry a preacher," Mom said, putting a package of bacon into our cart, which she told me I couldn't push if I ran into her heels one more time.

"The grandmother she was named after?"

"Uh-huh," Mom said, looking at the ground beef.

"She had breast cancer, right?"

Mom looked up at me.   "How did you know that?"

"Fala told me."

"Oh.   Yes, her grandmother had cancer.   And her grandmother wanted her to marry a preacher so Fala promised her.   That's why she's here."

"Was Reverend Joe the only preacher she could marry?"

Mom laughed at that and I was glad because I loved her laugh.   It caused these little lines around her eyes as if she was so happy she had to squint.   She was so beautiful.   She had started wearing make-up like she used to and by this time she had stopped remarking every time she passed a mirror that she was as flat as a boy.   "No, honey.   Reverend Joe is originally from Hartford and he went up there to visit some family last year.   It was right after Fala's grandmother died.   Reverend Joe and Fala knew each other in school and they renewed their acquaintance.   He proposed and she accepted."   Mom had this way of explaining things that always made them make sense.   I missed that when she wasn't around.

"They're over at our house a lot," I managed to work in again.   "Great-aunt Lady says visitation means visiting lots of people, not just one."

"Aunt Lady's being persnickety, honey."   We moved to the cereal aisle and I darted off.   "Don't tell her I said that!" Mom called after me.

The sessions with Fala and Reverend Joe lasted through the summer, sometimes stopping for a few weeks, sometimes happening every other day.   The last session was on the day before Halloween, and it was with Fala.   I remember because Fala brought the costumes she was making for some of the Sunday school kids and Mom helped her sew.   A few weeks later Reverend Joe and Fala went up to Hartford to spend Thanksgiving with their families.   Only Reverend Joe came back.

Reverend Joe and Fala divorced in the spring of the next year and the ladies at church clucked with sympathy.   Two months later Reverend Joe started seeing my mom.   I remember the night he took up half the couch as he sat waiting for my mom to get ready for their first date.   He told me my mother was the most serene and compassionate person he had ever known.   I told my mom this the next day but she just smiled as she did the dishes.   It was the two-year anniversary of my mom losing her breasts, the spring great-aunt Lady ran over her iris bed with her lawn mover.

I asked great-aunt Lady what she thought about the divorce.   It was pretty big news.   It was even in the newspaper.   Fala had floated into our lives, left conditioner at several people's houses, made some people envious, some mad, left cigarette butts in the church courtyard, and only ever talked to my mother.   I thought she was fun and mysterious, like someone on summer break from school who had come down to visit with us like the Jessup twins from Illinois.

Great-aunt Lady sat in her iris bed wearing her big straw visiting hat.   "Fala's much better off than my poor irises," she said to me, poking the ground with a trowel.   "Everyone is alive and well and, in all probability, happy."   She looked at me, shaking her head as if I should understand this by now.   "There's nothing disastrous about that."