A jade hand and a promise

Adam sleeps in snatches now and needs help with buttons and shoelaces. He wakes from a dream to tell Lee, calmly and in tears, that his father was a thief who stole from the Grand Army — and Lee, refusing to believe it, turns it over privately: the most rigidly honest man alive living on stolen money, and Aron's purity funded out of a whorehouse. Abra arrives red-nosed from the wind, and Lee blurts out that he wishes she were his daughter; she says she wishes he were her father, because she loves him. He gives her an ebony box holding a small green jade button carved as a resting hand — his mother's only ornament — and she kisses him, which has never happened to him before. She tells him she burned Aron's letters and never felt good enough for him, and Lee suggests that now she need not be perfect she can be good. Walking her home, Cal makes a date for the wild azaleas. Then he tells the constable he burned fifteen thousand dollars and is disbelieved.

A chapter of small mercies, set against Adam's decline and playing lightly on purpose. Lee's private arithmetic — honest man, stolen money; pure boy, brothel money — is a joke about balance rather than an argument, the nearest the book comes to consoling itself. The jade hand at rest is his one possession, and the first time he has called anyone darling.