When I was six years old and hid from my parents in the hollow of a log because I'd been bad, my father coaxed me out with promises of cake and hugs.

After that I didn't venture far, but I would stand under the clothesline with our neighbor and watch Momma stick clothespins over the top of Daddy's shorts and listen to her brag about me. "Penny's going to be a senator just like her Uncle Barry. She's going to be someone people listen to." She'd clasp me in the safety of her arms and give me hugs and wet kisses.

Momma would drag my awkward tracings of Mickey Mouse out of her apron and make Julia look at them while I hid my face. "When I think of all the talent my little Penny has, it makes me glad to think she's had a wonderful life. She was given to this happy family and we're going to protect and love and nurture her forever."

All that summer and for many years after, I'd steal out of the house, lie on the grass, and stare up at the clouds, trying to remember what had happened that night that I'd run away. I'd been wearing the new red dress sprinkled with white stars and tied with a wide blue sash.

Uncle Ed's broad face had broken into a smile when he'd seen me and his granite eyes had locked on mine and would not let me go. "You look just like Old Glory, Pen." He wore his best blue suit and tie to baby sit while Momma and Daddy went to see the fireworks. I wouldn't go because the noise and their light streaking across the sky made me shiver and cry.

"Uncle Ed will stay with you. Isn't that nice?" Daddy said, patting me on the head and walking out the door with a bottle of beer in his hand.

Uncle Ed wore what Momma called his "celebrating face." It looked purple as the plums on Aunt Ida's pie and his breath smelled so strong I could barely stand to be near him. But he'd stayed away from me, drinking from a bottle of brown liquid and listening to the radio, taking off his jacket and tie and rolling up his sleeves. Bottle almost empty, he began to sing in a hoarse voice to the music.

He grabbed me and set my patent-leathered feet atop his shiny black shoes. We dipped and glided across the floor, bumped into the dining room table and upset the picture of me in diapers sitting on a baby blanket that occupied the piano top for as long as I could remember. Our moves displaced giggles long-hidden in my lungs and sent them echoing across the room. The crash of my Momma's Dutch doll figurine from the credenza ended our dance and he pulled me toward the couch. More giggles punctuated my halting breath as he put his arm around me and lowered me onto his lap.

His hands come up around my chest and felt around, moving down, down. The yeasty funk of his breath terrified me.

The next thing I remembered was feeling pain between my legs, and running into the woods, tears streaming my face, heart beating in a terrified patter. Branches slapped my legs and spider webs filmed across my eyes. I ducked inside a hollow log grown furry from moss, and hid there for hours. Insects buzzed around me, their cool legs and antennae tickling across my skin. Knives of water dripped down from above and ran across my arms.

"Penny, come out of there. We know something bad happened, but it's all right now. Come on out now, Pen. It's time for bed." Momma's voice wove a terrible feeling of guilt over me and I crept farther back in that log, my feet rattling beneath me.

Daddy reached in and I felt strong arms pulling me out. I collapsed against his chest and sobbed. He patted my hair and pushed cobwebs out of my eyes. "Poor baby. Don't be afraid. I'll protect you." He carried me back home to our little stilt house on Lake Seminole while the lights blazed next door in Grandma's house like they do after a prison breakout.

After Daddy put me in bed, I lay awake and listened to my parents. First came the hushed, frightened tones, then the words about Grandma. "Why does she care what we do?" That was Mommy's voice.

"Because she's the one who takes care of the family. She makes sure everybody's okay."

"You do that."

"Not as good as she does or Uncle Barry does. That's their job."

Uncle Barry was a lawyer, too. He lived far away in a place called Tallahassee. I didn't know exactly what he did, but everyone in town knew him. Uncle Barry had something my Momma called political power. He was infested with it, she said and that made me wonder if he had to be dewormed like my cocker spaniel.

The next day Grandma came over for dinner. While my step sister, Leila, slept and Mommy did the dishes, Grandma took me out on the porch and we sat on the swing. Her gray head nodded and her wrinkled face looked down at me. She had sharp little teeth that glinted in the sunset.

"Don't disgrace the family, Penny," she told me. "Your mother married beneath her the first time. Good thing he was killed in Vietnam and she found your father. He's a state attorney, someone people respect. We're a tightly knit family and we stick together no matter what and we don't tell strangers our business."

She looked at me with something deep in her eyes that told me I'd better obey even if I didn't understand why. After Grandma left, I lay in bed and stared out the window at the Big Dipper, praying I would never disgrace my family.

The next morning, I played with my favorite doll, a yellow yarn hair stuffed creation Momma had made me for Christmas from a pattern she wrote for from Stella's Craft Shop that she'd heard about on the TV. While Momma made chocolate chip cookies and ate half the batter, I asked her what Grandma meant. "Just do what Grandmother says and you'll be fine," was all Momma would say.

"Tell me what happened when I crawled in the log. What did I do that was so bad?"

A strange look came over Momma's face and she dumped the bowl of cookie makings into the sink with a violent effort. "Nothing dreadful happened. It's all in your mind, Penny. Try to think of pleasant things and the big piece of chocolate cake you're going to have for dessert."

"Why do I feel so funny about Uncle Ed?"

Momma shook her head and wheatish shocks of her shoulder length hair swished in the breeze from the floor fan. " Don't talk about such things. It'll only make you feel bad and we want you to feel good. Let's talk about all the new clothes we're going to buy you for school."

I decided to do what Momma said, even though a strange everlasting fear lingered between my legs and a horrid ball of slime took over in my soul. Because I didn't know what else to do, I went about my business, going to school and getting the best grades I could. Maybe they would make up for the secret rock that must have fallen through my heart leaving it forever empty and ugly. I joined the church choir and debate team, learned to play the flute, and even won a state scholarship in my senior year of high school.

"Look how smart she is," Momma told everyone and Grandma half-smiled at me, the most pleasure I'd ever seen the old woman show.

Several young men of various shades and amounts of handsomeness at the state university asked me out on dates, but I turned them all down. It wasn't that they weren't nice, it was that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't fit to go out with them. What if I did go and they found out I was fatally flawed, unacceptable, the worse person in the world, as I had finally realized sometime during the last years? I didn't want that to happen, so I just smiled and treated them politely, as Momma had taught me to do.

Leila went away to college and never came back. The rest of the family never spoke her name and when I mentioned her, they ignored it, much as they did "that dreadful night," as they referred to the evening I'd climbed into the hollow tree and refused to come out until Daddy worked his magic. I graduated magna cum laude and took a job as a women's dress buyer for a local department store where I ordered ankle length and neck high gowns and overlooked strapless and backless creations.

I got the phone call one night when I was closing up and getting ready to go home. Momma's voice sounded like it had the night Daddy had rescued me from my hiding place in the log. "Uncle Ed is in the hospital. They say he has to have heart surgery. Come right away."

"That's too bad, Momma, but I have to work late tonight. We're doing inventory and you know how much work that is."

Uncle Ed came through surgery and Leila called me. "I'm coming to stay with you, if that's all right." Leila was never one to pretend about things. Maybe that's why she and the rest of the family never got along but the two of us spent hours telling each other exactly what we thought.

A heaviness lifted from my chest and some of the slime slid off my soul. "Of course that's all right. I've missed you."

I gave Leila a long hug when she arrived, silk dress rustling and body whisking fragrant pulsations of Chanel No. 5 perfume at me when I led her in the door of my apartment. "I'm so glad you want to stay with me. I thought you'd want to stay with Momma and Daddy."

Leila gave me a dark look like she used to when she told me spooky Halloween stories that made me shriek with fear. She started to unpack her suitcase of New York City clothes, her long artistic violin-playing fingers moving carefully, precisely. "I refuse to stay in that house with them."

The thought made me both nervous and excited. I wished I could be like Leila, but something sad and futile inside me told her I could never be that way. I sat down on the bed next to Leila, eager to find out more. "Why don't you want to stay in their house?" A rabbit-who's-been-caught-in-a-trap wounded look entered her eyes. "You're kidding. After what happened to you, I'm surprised you even talk to them."

"Think about what?" My mind jumbled with confusing ideas. Something about that night tugged at my brain, but I couldn't grab hold of it.

"You know it was all Uncle Barry's fault, don't you?"

"What was?" I felt as if I was in a dream, watching someone else talk to Leila.

"The cover-up."

"What cover-up?"

"You don't have to play dumb with me, Penny. You know how the family sticks together."

"I know all about that."

A fire of resentment built in Leila's eyes and she flung her arms up, fingers chopping through the air. "It's because of Uncle Barry that all this has been bottled up so long. I'm so mad at him."

"What did he do?" I remembered how he'd bought me peppermint candy and hot-dogs at the county fair and how he'd taken me on the Ferris wheel where I'd peed in my pants out of fear.

"Maybe it's more what Grandma did. When I first went to her about Uncle Ed she was angry, not at Uncle Ed, like she should have been, but at me. Can you imagine? I was hurt and bleeding and all she said was not to cause problems, not to talk about it because people would think bad about the family and it would hurt Uncle Barry's reelection chances."

Blood pounded in my ears. "He hurt you, too?"

"Yes, he sexually abused me, just like he sexually abused you."

Something inside my chest made a fist. It banged and bloodied my ribs and forced all the air out of my lungs. Someone had finally put a name on what had happened. I fell back on the bed, then sat up again. "How could they think Uncle Barry's reelection was more important than us being abused?"

Leila's eyes opened even wider and she looked up at me through the prison of her eyelash long bangs. "The whole family has had to suffer so Uncle Barry can be a politician. It's not right."

Hands shaking with newfound news, I unfolded one of Leila's blouses and hung it on a hanger. Images of that night careened in my brain and I wanted to run away screaming like girls in B movies do when they've seen the slasher enter their room. Out of my dry mouth came three words, "I don't understand."

"What happened between Uncle Ed and us shouldn't be allowed to happen. He's a sick, twisted man."

"I know he's sick. His heart was very bad."

Leila grabbed the blouse out of my hand. "Not that kind of sick. Sick in his mind!"

I stared at the teddy bear sitting on my desk and the satin pillow with the words that Grandma had embroidered on it for my seventh birthday: God is good. Pictures of my family cluttered the top of my walnut dresser. I pulled my eyes away from my things and looked at Leila. "What do you mean?"

"He's probably done it to others. He ruined my life for twenty years, but I'm not going to allow him to ruin it anymore." Two tears rolled down Leila's face, making a ridge in her makeup and flouring black marks of mascara under her eyes.

"What did he do to you?"

"The same thing he did to you."

Tears welled up in my eyes, slid over the side and made tiny streams down my cheeks. "That's just it. I can't remember what he did."

Leila's arms came around my shoulders. "You poor thing. It's bad enough to remember, but how terrible it must have been for you all these years not to know."

More tears spurted out of my eyes. "Tell me what happened."

Leila snatched another blouse out of her suitcase and thrust it onto a hanger. "I went to Momma with it and she was angry at Uncle Ed. I think if she would have known how to fire Daddy's shotgun she would have killed him. She went to the police and told them Uncle Ed had been touching me. I even had to show them on a doll where he touched me and with what parts of his body. It was awful, but Momma told me I had to do it, so I did. I wish I'd known then how it would all turn out."

I sat on the edge of the bed, legs shaking so hard I almost slid off the down coverlet and fell onto the floor. "I don't want to talk about this any more."

Leila hugged me so tight I could feel her heart ricochet. "I know it's hard, but you can't just wrap it up inside and pretend it didn't happen."

I sniffed my tears away. "You're right. Tell me what happened."

"Nothing. That's just it. The State Attorney's Office decided not to press changes. It wasn't until last month that I found out why."

"Why?"

"Uncle Barry. He has power and influence. He took care of it so his pristine reputation wouldn't be tainted."

"When did all this happen?"

"You were four and I was six. Don't you remember all the arguing between Momma and Daddy and how Grandma finally came over and stopped it?"

I searched through the clutter of my mind, finding only a foggy half-memory. "What happened to Uncle Ed?"

Leila grunted and dumped two pair of pumps on the floor of the closet. "Nothing. Grandma wouldn't even allow Momma and Daddy to take me to a doctor to see if I was all right. They never took you either. Grandma saw to that. She held something over them. I don't know what, maybe their inheritance or the mortgage on this house. After Daddy lost his job when he was in that car accident, Grandma helped them out. She never let them forget it."

"They wouldn't talk to me about the night Uncle Ed hurt me, either."

"What did I tell you? Now do you believe me?"

I felt an outflow of warm hot fudge love for my half-sister. "Of course I believe you."

"Will you help me?"

"How?"

"I'm bringing charges against all of them. They should have done something to protect us, but they didn't. The whole thing is going to come out."

My insides shook like a blast from an earthquake. Everything I'd believed in and come to trust gave way and crumbled inside me like rock giving way to a natural disaster. If Uncle Ed was mentally sick, maybe I was too, and Leila. Maybe the whole thing was in our minds. I pulled my lips back until they hurt, smiled woodenly at my half-sister and agreed to help.

Much later that night when the apartment grew dark and Leila had shoved the rest of her clothes into the closet and snored from her bed, I lay awake, my mind going over what we had discussed, trying my hardest to remember that night, but I couldn't. I sighed and turned over. Maybe it was better to forget all about it, just like Momma and Daddy said. I had done something wrong and I was being punished. The punishment would go on forever because I deserved it. Nothing, not even Divine intervention, could prevent that. Tomorrow I would tell Leila I couldn't help with her legal battles, that her only way to survive was to stay part of a tightly knit family. That would be best for everyone. I sighed, then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

In the gray hours of the morning, a tall dark stranger visited me in my dreams. I couldn't see the man's face, but he carried my unborn little girl in his arms and a blinding light encircled him. "This cannot happen to any more innocents," the man said. "The sins of the fathers must not be visited on the children."

I barely remembered the stranger when I woke. The sun came through the trees in shafts of piercing golden light, and only a small fragment of the dream remained in my mind. That small something made me wake up happy, humming. Guilt peeled off my shoulders and ran out my fingertips in an irrevocable flow of relief. I was myself: light, pure, whole, perfect, beyond the reach of the tight stitches that had knitted me down. Now I would find the strength. Now I would do what had waited so long to be done. Now I would complete the trajectory to Grandma's house. I placed my feet squarely on the floor, stood up and went off to accomplish my plan.

Grandma met me at the door with a sneer and a glass of lemonade. "Don't go getting any uppity ideas or let Leila push you into doing something that would hurt our family."

My breath caught in my throat. "I have to talk to you, Grandma."

She took me by the arm and sat me down at the kitchen table next to the white Bible she'd underlined with red ink. "Of course you have to talk to me, I'm your Grandma." She handed me a plate of cookies. "What is it? You can tell me."

Her voice sounded nice, too nice, like one of those ladies in the commercials that you know is lying to you. Sweat trickled down my back. "It's about me and Leila."

Grandma picked up the Bible and held it in her hands. "Leila. Now there's a problem already. She's crazy you know. Had to send her to the state hospital to get her mind unscrewed."