VALENTINE
A Novel
Elizabeth Wetmore

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Elizabeth Wetmore 2020

Cover design by Jo Walker

Elizabeth Wetmore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008331924

Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008331948

Version: 2020-02-24

Dedication

For Jorge

Epigraph

Often, I used to say: I am this dust; or, I am this wind.

And young, I would accept that. The truth is, it was never the case.

I have seen enough dust & wind by now to know

I am a little breath that always goes the distance

Longing requires, & to know even this will fail.

LARRY LEVIS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Gloria

Mary Rose

Corrine

Debra Ann

Ginny

Mary Rose

Glory

Suzanne

Corrine

Debra Ann

Mary Rose

Debra Ann

Corrine

Karla

Glory

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Gloria

SUNDAY MORNING BEGINS out here in the oil patch, a few minutes before dawn, with a young roughneck stretched out and sleeping hard in his pickup truck. Shoulders pressed against the driver’s side door, boots propped up on the dashboard, he wears his cowboy hat pulled down far enough that the girl sitting outside on the dusty ground can see only his pale jaw. Freckled and nearly hairless, it is a face that will never need a daily shave, no matter how old he gets, but she is hoping he dies young.

Gloria Ramírez holds herself perfectly still, she is a downed mesquite branch, a half-buried stone, and she imagines him facedown in the dust, lips and cheeks scoured by sand, his thirst relieved only by the blood in his mouth. When he startles and shifts roughly against the truck door, she holds her breath and watches his jaw clench, the muscle working bone against bone. The sight of him is a torment and she wishes again that his death will come soon, that it will be vicious and lonely, with nobody to grieve for him.

The sky turns purple in the east, then blue-black, then old-bucket slate. In a few minutes it will be stained orange and red, and if she looks, Gloria will see the land stretched tight beneath the sky, brown stitched to blue, same as always. It is a sky without end, and the best thing about West Texas, when you can remember to look at it. She will miss it when she goes. Because she can’t stay here, not after this.

She keeps her eyes on the pickup truck and her fingers begin to press themselves lightly against the sand, counting one, two, three, four—they are trying to keep her from making any sudden moves, to keep her quiet, to keep her among the living for another day. Because Gloria Ramírez might not know much on this morning, February 15, 1976, but she knows this: if he hadn’t passed out before he sobered up enough to find his gun or get his hands around her throat, she would already be dead. Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four—she waits and watches, listens as some little animal moves through the mesquite, and the sun, that small, regular mercy, heaves itself over the earth’s edge and hangs burning in the east. And her fingers keep on.

Daylight reveals miles of pumpjacks and oil-field litter, jackrabbits and barbed-wire fences, clumps of mesquite trees and buffalo grass. In piles of caliche and stacks of old pipeline rat snakes and copperheads and rattlers lie entwined, their breath slow and regular, waiting for spring. When morning has come all the way in, she sees a road and behind that, a farmhouse. It may be close enough to walk to, but it’s hard to say. Out here one mile can look like ten, ten could be twenty, and she knows only that this body—yesterday, she would have called it mine—sits in a pile of sand, somewhere in the oil patch, too far from town to see the water tank with her town’s name painted on the side, Odessa, or the bank building, or the cooling towers at the petrochemical plant where her mother works. Soon, Alma will come home from a night spent cleaning offices and break shacks. When she steps into the one-bedroom apartment that still smells of last night’s hominy and pork, and Tío’s cigarettes, when she sees that the sofa bed where Gloria sleeps is still made up from the day before, Alma might feel worried, maybe even a little afraid, but mostly she will be pissed off that her daughter is not home where she belongs, again.

Gloria scans the pumpjacks moving up and down, great steel grasshoppers, always hungry. Did he drive them as far as Penwell? Mentone? Loving County? Because the Permian Basin is eighty thousand square miles of the same old, same old, and she could be anywhere, and the only true things are her thirst and pain, and the roughneck’s occasional sighs, his teeth grinding and body shifting, the click and hum of the pumpjack just a few yards away from where she sits.

When a bobwhite begins to call its own name, the sound gently pries the morning open. Gloria looks again at the farmhouse. A dirt road slices the desert in half, a straight line moving steadily toward a front porch she is already starting to imagine. Maybe it’s close enough to walk to, maybe a woman will answer the door.

He has not moved when her fingers push the last number into the sand, a shaky one thousand. Gloria turns her head slowly back and forth, and understanding that it is her silence as much as anything else that’s keeping her alive, she wordlessly considers the pieces of her body as they appear to her. Arm. Here is an arm, a foot. The foot bone’s connected to the heel bone, she thinks, and the heel bone’s connected to the anklebone. And over there, on the ground next to the wooden drill platform, her heart. She turns her head this way and that, gathering the body, covering it with clothes that lie torn and strewn around the site, as if they are trash, disregarded and cast aside, instead of her favorite black T-shirt, the blue jeans her mother gave her for Christmas, the matching bra and panties she stole from Sears.

She knows she shouldn’t, but when it is time to go Gloria cannot help looking at the roughneck. Thin wisps of blond hair crawl out from under the felt edge of his cowboy hat. Skinny and gristle tough, he is just a few years older than Gloria, who will be fifteen next fall, if she survives this day. Now his chest rises and falls regular, just like anybody else’s, but otherwise he is still. Still asleep, or pretending to be.

Gloria’s mind skitters into this thought like a horse into a hidden skein of barbed wire. Her mouth falls open then jerks itself closed. She is oxygen starved and gasping, a fish torn from a lake. She imagines her own limbs disconnected, fleeing into the desert to be picked clean by the coyotes she heard calling to each other all through the night. She imagines her bones blanched and worn smooth by the wind—a desert filled with them—and this makes her want to shriek, to open her mouth and howl. Instead, she swallows hard and sits back down in the sand, shutting her eyes tight against both the roughneck and the sun brightening, interminable sky.

She must not panic. To panic is the worst possible thing, her uncle would say. When Tío tells a war story—and since he came home last year, every story is a war story—he begins the same way. Know what you call a soldier who panics, Gloria? KIA, that’s what. He ends his stories the same way, too. Listen, an army man never panics. Don’t you ever panic, Gloria. You panic and—he forms his index finger into a pistol, presses it against his heart, and pulls the trigger—bang. And if there is only one thing she knows for sure on this morning, it is that she doesn’t want to die, so she jams two fists hard against her mouth and she tells herself to stand back up. Try not to make a sound. Move.

Then Gloria Ramírez—for years to come, her name will hover like a swarm of yellow jackets over the local girls, a warning about what not to do, what never to do—stands up. She does not go back for her shoes, when she thinks of them, or the rabbit fur jacket she was wearing last night when the young man pulled into the parking lot at the Sonic, his forearm hanging out the open window, sparse freckles and golden hair glistening beneath the drive-in’s fluorescent lights.

Hey there, Valentine. His words took the ugly right out of the drive-in, his soft drawl marking him as not from here, but not that far away either. Gloria’s mouth went dry as a stick of chalk. She was standing next to the lone picnic table, a shaky wooden hub in the midst of a few cars and trucks, doing what she always did on a Saturday night. Hanging around, drinking limeades and begging smokes, waiting for something to happen, which it never did, not in this piss-ant town.

He parked close enough that Gloria could see the oil patch on him, even through the windshield. His cheeks and neck were wind-burned, his fingers stained black. Maps and invoices covered his dashboard, and a hard hat hung on a rack above the seat. Empty beer cans lay crushed and scattered across the truck’s bed, along with crowbars and jugs of water. All of it added up to a pretty good picture of the warnings Gloria had been hearing her whole life. And now he was telling her his name—Dale Strickland—and asking for hers.

None of your damned beeswax, she said.

The words were out before she could think about them, how they would make her seem like a little girl instead of the tough young woman she was trying hard to be. Strickland leaned farther out the open window and looked at her real puppy-dog like, his eyes bloodshot and ringed with shadows. She stared directly into them for a few seconds. The blue turned pale then slate, depending on how the light hit his face. They were the color of a marble you fought to keep, or maybe the Gulf of Mexico. But she wouldn’t know the Pacific Ocean from a buffalo wallow, and this was part of the problem, wasn’t it? She had never been anywhere, never seen anything but this town, these people. He might be the start of something good. If they stayed together, he might drive her down to Corpus Christi or Galveston in a few months, and she could see the ocean for herself. So she gave him her name. Gloria.

He laughed and then turned up the radio to prove the coincidence, Patti Smith singing Gloria’s name on the junior college radio station. And here you are, he said, in the flesh. That’s fate, darlin’.

That’s bullshit, darling, she said. They’ve been playing that album every two hours since last fall.

She had been singing it for months, waiting to hear the album, Horses, on the radio and enjoying her mother’s conniptions every time Gloria sang, Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. When Alma threatened to drag her to mass, Gloria laughed out loud. She hadn’t been to church since she was twelve years old. She made a fist, held it in front of her mouth as if it were a microphone, and sang the line again and again until Alma went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

The Sonic was dead as hell on this Valentine’s night. Nothing and nobody—just the same skinny, jacked-up carhop who came straight from her day job and pretended not to see the same old delinquents pouring Jack Daniel’s into paper cups half full of Dr Pepper; the girl only a couple of grades ahead of Gloria who sat on a barstool behind the counter, flipping switches and repeating orders, her voice blurred by the heavy speakers; and the cook, who occasionally stepped away from the grill and stood outside smoking while he watched cars cruise the drag. And now, a tall, big-shouldered old lady let the bathroom door slam shut behind her, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked briskly toward a truck where an even older man, pole skinny and bald as an egg, sat watching Gloria.

When the woman climbed in beside him, he pointed at the girl, his head bobbing slightly as he spoke. His wife nodded along with him, but when he stuck his head out the window, she grabbed his arm and shook her head. Gloria leaned against the picnic table and snugged her hands in the pocket of her new jacket, glancing back and forth between the couple and the young man, who sat with his arm hanging out the open window, fingers tapping steadily against the side of his truck. Gloria watched the two old buzzards arguing in the truck and when they again looked at her, she pulled one hand from her pocket. Slowly, slowly she uncurled her middle finger and held it in the air. Fuck you, she mouthed, and the horse you rode in on.

She looked again around the Sonic parking lot and shrugged—nothing to lose, everything to gain—and she climbed into the young man’s pickup truck. The cab was warm as a kitchen, with the same faintly ammoniac smell of the industrial cleaners that lingered on her mother’s hands and clothes when she came home from work. Strickland turned up the music and handed her a beer, cracking it open with one large hand while his other curled around the steering wheel. Well, what do you know, he said. Gloria, I think I love you. And she pulled the heavy door closed.

The sun is lingering just above the truck’s wheels when she finally walks away from him. She does not look behind her. If he’s going to wake up and shoot her, she does not want to see it coming. Let the bastard shoot her in the back. Let him also be known as a coward. As for Gloria, she will never again call herself by the name she was given, the name he said again and again, those long hours while she lay there with her face in the dirt. He spoke her name and it flew through the night air, a poison dart that pierced and tore. Gloria. Mocking, mean as a viper. But not anymore. From now on, she will call herself Glory. A small difference, but right now it feels like the world.

Glory makes her way across the oil patch, walking, stumbling, and falling past pumpjacks and mesquite scrub. When she crawls through a hole in the barbed-wire fence and walks into an abandoned drilling site, an awkwardly written sign gazes flat-faced down upon her, warning of poisonous gases and the consequence for trespassing. YOU WILL BE SHOT! When a stray piece of glass or a cactus spine pierces her foot, she watches her blood gather on the tough, impermeable ground and wishes it were water. When a coyote howls and a second answers, she looks around for a weapon and, seeing nothing, grabs hold of a mesquite branch and tears it from the tree. She is surprised by her strength, surprised she is still moving, surprised by the aching dryness in her mouth and throat, and a new pain that began as a small pricking in her rib cage when she first stood up. Now it has moved down to her belly, turned hot and sharp, a steel pipe set too close to a furnace.

When she comes to a set of railroad tracks, she follows them. When she loses her balance, she grabs onto a barbed-wire fence and falls hard into a pile of caliche rocks laid out in a long line. She studies the gravel lodged in the palms of her hands. His skin and blood are under her fingernails, a reminder that she fought hard. Not hard enough, she thinks, as she picks up a small stone and places it under her tongue, like Uncle Victor might, if he were thirsty and wandering through a desert, wondering how far away home was. At one end of the rock pile, a small marker with the words Common Grave is mounted on a steel cross. A second grave lies a few yards away, small and unmarked, the grave of a child or, perhaps, a dog.

Glory stands up and looks behind her. She is closer to the farmhouse than the truck. The wind riffles the air, a finger drawn through the grass, and she notices for the first time how still the morning has been. As if even the buffalo and blue grama grasses, thin and pliant as they are, have been holding their breath. It’s a small wind, scarcely noticeable in a place where the wind is always blowing, and surely too light to carry her voice back to him. If she speaks, he will not hear. Glory Ramírez turns and looks toward the place where she has been. For the first time in hours, she means to say something out loud. She struggles to find some words, but the best she can manage is a small cry. The sound comes forth briefly and pierces the quiet and disappears.

Mary Rose

I USED TO believe a person could teach herself to be merciful if she tried hard enough to walk in somebody else’s shoes, if she was willing to do the hard work of imagining the heart and mind of a thief, say, or a murderer, or a man who drove a fourteen-year-old girl out into the oil patch and spent the night raping her. I tried to imagine how it might have been for Dale Strickland:

The sun was already crawling toward high sky when he woke up, dick sore and dying of thirst, his jaw locked in a familiar amphetamine clench. His mouth tasted like he had been sucking on the nozzle of a gas can, and there was a bruise the size of a fist on his left thigh, maybe from hours pressed against the gearshift. Hard to say, but he knew one thing for sure. He felt like shit. Like somebody had beaten both sides of his head with a boot. There was blood on his face and shirt and boot. He pressed his fingers against his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Turned his hands over and over looking for cuts, then pressed them against the sides of his head. Maybe he unzipped and examined himself. There was some blood, but he couldn’t find any obvious wounds. Maybe he unfolded himself from the front seat of his pickup truck and stood outside for a minute, letting the harmless winter sun warm his skin. Maybe he marveled at the day’s unseasonable warmth, its unusual stillness, just as I had earlier that morning when I stepped onto my front porch and turned my face to the sun and watched a half dozen turkey buzzards gather in large, slow circles. The work of mercy means seeing him rooting around in the bed of his truck for a jug of water and then standing out there in the oil field, turning 360 degrees, slow as he could manage it, while he tried to account for his last fourteen hours. Maybe he didn’t even remember the girl until he saw her sneakers tumbled against the truck’s tire, or her jacket lying in a heap next to the drilling platform, a rabbit skin that fell just below her waist, her name written on the inside label in blue pen. G. Ramírez. I want him to think, What have I done? I want him to remember. It might have taken him a little longer to understand that he had to find her, to make sure she was okay, or maybe to make sure they were clear about what had happened out there. Maybe he sat on the tailgate, drinking musty water from his canteen and wishing he could remember the details of her face. He scuffed a boot against the ground and tried to bring the previous night into focus, looking again at the girl’s shoes and jacket then lifting his gaze to the oil derricks, the ranch road and railroad tracks, the scarce Sunday traffic on the interstate and behind that, if you looked real hard, a farmhouse. My house. Maybe he thought the house looked too far to walk to. But you never know. These local girls were tough as nails, and one who was mad? Hell, she might be able to walk barefoot through hell’s fires, if she made up her mind to do it. He pushed himself off the tailgate and squinted into the jug. There was just enough water to clean up a little. He bent down in front of the driver’s mirror and ran his fingers through his hair, made a plan. He would take a piss, if he could manage it, and then drive over to that farmhouse and have a little look-see. Maybe he’d get lucky and the place would be abandoned, and he’d find his new girlfriend sitting out there on a rotting front porch, thirsty as a peach tree in August and happy as hell to see him again. Maybe, but mercy is hard in a place like this. I wished him dead before I ever saw his face.

When the time comes and I am called to take the stand, I will testify that I was the first person to see Gloria Ramírez alive. That poor girl, I will tell them. I don’t know how a child comes back from something like this. The trial will not be until August, but I’ll tell those men in the courtroom the same thing I will tell my daughter when I think she’s old enough to hear it.

That it had been a bad winter for our family, even before that morning in February. The price of cattle was falling by the minute, and there had been no rain for six months. We had to supplement with feed corn, and some of the cows foraged for licorice root to help them abort their calves. If not for the oil leases, we might have had to sell some of our land.

That most days, my husband drove around the ranch with the only two men who hadn’t left us for more money in the oil patch. The men threw silage off the back of the truck and fought screwworms. They pulled out half-dead cows that got tangled in barbed wire—they are stupid animals, don’t let anybody tell you different—and if an animal couldn’t be saved, they shot it between the eyes and let the buzzards do the rest.

I will tell them that Robert worked all day, every day, even Sundays, because a cow can die just as easily on the Sabbath as any other. Other than the fifteen minutes it took him to choke down a plateful of pot roast—you spend half the day cooking it, and they eat it in less than five minutes—I hardly ever saw my husband. What we need is a tougher brand of cow, he’d say as he stacked his fork and knife on his plate and hand it to me on his way out the door. We need some Polled Herefords or Red Brangus. How do you think we’re going to afford that, he’d say. What are we going to do?

When I think back on that day and finding Gloria Ramírez on my front porch, my memories are stitched together like pieces of a scrap quilt, each a different shape and color, all bound together by a thin black ribbon, and I expect it will always be this way. Come August, I will testify that I did the best I could, under the circumstances, but I will not tell them how I failed her.

I was twenty-six years old, seven months pregnant with my second baby, and heavy as a Buick. With the second one, you always get bigger faster—so say the women in my family—and I had been feeling lonely enough that I occasionally let Aimee stay home from school with some invented malady, just to have a little company. Two days earlier, we had called the school secretary, Miss Eunice Lee.

As soon as I hung up the phone, Aimee Jo started mimicking Miss Lee’s crabby old face. Some people say she’s a direct descendent, and I don’t believe it for a minute, but I will tell you this: if it is true, she sure didn’t inherit the general’s good looks. Bless her heart. My daughter scrunched up her face and pretended to hold the school’s phone next to her ear. Well, thank you for calling, Mrs. Whitehead, but I do not care to know the details of Miss Aimee Jo’s BMs. I hope she feels better real soon. Y’all have a happy Valentine’s Day. Bye-bye! Aimee wiggled her fingers in the air, and the two of us just fell out laughing. Then we started a batch of yeast rolls to eat with butter and sugar.

It was a small thing, me and Aimee standing together in the kitchen while we waited for the dough to rise, the whole day stretched out in front of us like an old housecat, the two of us laughing so hard at her impression of Miss Lee that we nearly peed ourselves. But I sometimes think that when I am on my deathbed, that Friday morning with my daughter will be one of my happiest memories.

On Sunday morning, we were playing gin rummy and listening to church services on the radio. Aimee was losing, and I was trying to figure out how to throw the game without her catching on. While I waited for her to draw the four of hearts, I passed cards and dropped hints. Won’t you be my valentine? Won’t you be my heart? I said. Oh, my heart! I can hear it beating—one, two, three, four times, Aimee Jo. Back then, I did not believe it was good for a child to lose at cards too often, especially a little girl. Now I think differently.

We listened to Pastor Rob finish a sermon about the evils of desegregation, which he likened to locking a cow, a mountain lion, and a possum in the same barn together, then being surprised when somebody gets eaten.

What’s that mean? my daughter asked me. She pulled a card from the deck, looked at it for a few seconds and laid her cards on the table. I win, she said.

Nothing you need to know about, little girl, I told her. You have to say gin. My daughter was nine years old, just a few years younger than the stranger I was about to find standing at my door, waiting for me to pull open that heavy door, to help.

It was eleven o’clock. I am sure of this because one of the deacons—one of those Hard Shell types that doesn’t believe in having any fun—gave the sending prayer. I don’t suppose any serious Baptist would think too kindly about us playing cards while we listened to church services on the radio, but that’s how it was. After eleven, it’s the oil reports, then the cattle markets. That month, you listened to rig counts and new leases if you wanted to hear good news. If you wanted to sit down in your recliner and have yourself a good cry, you listened to the cattle markets.

The girl knocked on the front door, two short and sturdy raps that were loud enough to startle us. When she knocked a third time, the door trembled. It was brand-new, made of oak but stained to look like mahogany. Two weeks earlier, Robert had it shipped down from Lubbock after we had our same old argument about whether we ought to move to town. It was a familiar argument. He thought we were too far away from town, especially with another baby coming and the oil boom getting under way. It’s busy out here now, he argued, drilling crews driving all over our land. No place for women, or little girls. But this fight got ugly and we said some things. Threats, I guess you could say.

Of course, I was tired of watching flatbed trucks tear up our road, tired of the stink, a cross between rotten eggs and gasoline, tired of worrying that some roughneck would forget to close the gate behind him and one of our bulls would end up on the highway, or Texaco would dump wastewater in the unlined pit they built too close to our well. But I love our house, which Robert’s grandfather built fifty years earlier with limestone he hauled in little by little, in the back of his truck, from the Hill Country. I love the birds that stop over every fall on their way to Mexico or South America, and again in the spring on their way back north. If we moved into town, I would miss the pair of mourning doves that nest under our porch and the kestrels that hover just a few feet above the pale earth, their wings beating madly in the seconds before they swoop down and fetch up a snake, and the sky going mad with color twice a day. I would miss the quiet, a night sky uninterrupted by anything except the occasional glow of red or blue when casinghead gases are being flared off.

Well, this is my home, I told him. I’m not leaving.

At some point, I punched Robert in the chest, a thing I had never done before. He couldn’t hit me back because I was pregnant, but he sure could throw a fist into our front door three, four times. Now I had this pretty new door, and because she had lain in bed listening to us scream at each other in the kitchen, Aimee Jo got a new bicycle, a little Huffy with pink streamers and a small white basket.

We heard the three loud raps and Aimee said, Who’s that? When I thought about it later, when I saw how badly Gloria had been beaten, I was surprised she was able to muster it, to make that thick oak tremble beneath her fist. I hauled myself out of the recliner. We were not expecting company. Nobody comes out this far without calling first, not even the Witnesses or Adventists, and I hadn’t heard a truck or car coming up our road. I bent down and picked up the Louisville Slugger that Aimee had left on the floor next to my chair. You stay put, I said. I’ll be right back.

I opened the door just as a little capful of wind picked up, disturbing a cluster of flies that had settled in her hair, on her face, in the wounds on her hands and feet, and my gorge rose. Christ Almighty, I thought and looked up the dirt lane leading from our house to the ranch road. All quiet, aside from a noisy flock of sand hill cranes wintering next to our stock tank.

Gloria Ramírez stood on my front porch tottering like a skinny drunk, looking for all the world as if she had just crawled down from the screen of a horror movie. Both eyes were blackened, one swollen nearly shut. Her cheeks, forehead, and elbows were scraped raw, and vicious scrapes covered her legs and feet. I snugged my fingers around the baseball bat and yelled at my daughter. Aimee Jo Whitehead, run to my bedroom and get Old Lady out of the closet, and bring it here right now. Carry it the right way.

I could hear her moving through the house, and I yelled that she was not to run with my rifle in her hands. When she walked up behind me, I kept my body between her and the stranger on the porch. I reached behind me to take my dear old Winchester from my daughter’s small hand. Old Lady, I’d named that rifle, after the grandma who gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday.

What is it, Mama, rattlesnake? Coyote?

Hush up, I said. Run to the kitchen and call the sheriff’s office. Tell them to bring an ambulance. And Aimee, I said without taking my eyes off the child in front of me, you stay away from those windows or I will beat you to within an inch of your life.

Not once have I beaten my daughter, not once. I got whipped when I was a little girl, and I swore up and down I’d never do it to my own kids. But on this morning, I meant what I said and Aimee believed me, I guess. Without a word of argument, she turned and ran to the kitchen.

I looked again at the child faltering on my porch then glanced away for long enough to scan the horizon. It’s flat enough out here that nobody can sneak up on you, flat enough you can see your husband’s pickup truck parked next to a water tank and know he’s still too far away to hear you shouting for him. You can drive for miles out here without the road turning or lifting, not even a little bit. I stepped farther onto the porch. I couldn’t see anybody who might want to hurt us, but I couldn’t see anybody who might want to help us either.

And now, for the first time since we moved to Robert’s family land, I wished to be elsewhere. For ten years I had been keeping an eye out for snakes and sandstorms and twisters. When a coyote killed one of my chickens and drug it through the yard, I shot him. When I went to draw a bath for Aimee and found a scorpion in the tub, I stepped on it. When a rattlesnake curled up underneath the clothesline or next to Aimee’s little bicycle, I took a hoe to it. Daily, it seemed, I was shooting something or chopping it to pieces or dumping poison down its burrow. I was always disposing of bodies.

Imagine me standing on my porch with one hand on my belly, the other using Old Lady as a crutch while I try to remember what I had for breakfast—cup of Folgers, piece of cold bacon, the cigarette I sneaked when I went out to the barn to gather eggs. Imagine my stomach turning itself inside out when I bend down to face the stranger on my porch, when I swallow hard and push the salt from my mouth, when I say, Where are you from, honey? Odessa?

Imagine that hearing the name of her hometown breaks whatever fearsome spell the girl is under. She rubs at her eye and winces. When she begins to speak the words come rough, like grains of sand blown through a screen door.

Can I have a glass of water? My mother is Alma Ramírez. She works nights, but she will be home by now.

What is your name?

Glory. Can I have some ice water?

Imagine the girl might be asking after my okra patch, calm as she seems, remote, and it is this horror hiding behind indifference that finally causes something to tear loose, to break apart from the rest of me. In a few years, when I think she’s old enough to hear it, I will tell my daughter that my lower belly cramped and went cold as a block of ice. A steady hum started in my ears, faint but growing louder, and I remembered a few lines of a rhyme I had read back in high school, the winter before I left school and married Robert—I heard a fly buzz—when I died—and for a few cramping, cold and miserable seconds, until I felt the unmistakable kick, I thought I was losing the baby. My vision dimmed and I remembered another verse, stray and unconnected to anything. How strange it was to be thinking of poems now, when I had not given them so much as a passing thought all these years since I had become a grown woman, a wife and mother, but now I recalled: This is the Hour of Lead—Remembered, if outlived.

I stood up straight and shook my head gently, as if doing so might help me clear away all that was happening right in front of me, as if I could clear away the terrible fact of this child and whatever hell she had endured, as if I could step back into my living room and tell my daughter, It’s just the wind, honey. Don’t pay any attention, it’s not calling our name today. How about another game of gin? You want to learn how to play Hold’em?

Instead, I leaned heavily on the rifle and rested my other hand on my belly. I am going to get you a glass of ice water, I said to her, and then we’ll call your mama.

The girl gently shifted from side to side, a halo of sand and dirt rising up around her face and hair. For a few seconds, she was a dust cloud, a sandstorm asking for help, the wind begging for a little mercy. My hand reached out to her, as the other stretched behind me to lean the rifle against the doorframe. She leaned hard to one side, a reed in the wind, and when I turned back to grab her—to keep her from falling off the porch or maybe just trying to keep myself upright, I will never be able to say for sure—she ducked her head slightly. Dust filled the sky behind her.

A pickup truck had turned off the ranch road and was starting toward our house. When it passed our mailbox, the driver swerved suddenly, as if briefly distracted by a quail darting across the dirt road. The vehicle skidded toward our stock tank, then straightened out and kept on. The driver was still at least a mile off, rumbling steadily up our road, kicking up dirt and ruddying the air. Whoever he was, he drove like he knew exactly where he was going, and he was in no real hurry to get there.

These were my mistakes: When I saw the truck coming up the road, I did not allow the child to look behind her so I couldn’t ask, Have you ever seen that truck before? Is that him?

Instead, I scooted her inside and handed her a glass of ice water. Drink it slow, I told her, or you’ll throw up. Aimee Jo stepped into the kitchen, her eyes growing big as silver dollars when the girl began quietly to say over and over, I want my mom, I want my mom, I want my mom.

I chewed a couple of saltine crackers and drank a glass of water, then bent over the kitchen sink and splashed my face for long enough that the pump switched on and the odor of sulfur filled the basin. Y’all stay right here, I told them. I’ve got to take care of something outside. When I come back, we’ll call your mama.

My stomach hurts, the girl cried. I want my mom. And my anger was sudden, filled with bile that burned my throat and, later, made me feel ashamed of myself. Shut up, I yelled at her. I sat both girls down at the kitchen table and told them not to move. But I never asked my daughter if she had called the sheriff. My second mistake. And when I stepped outside and picked up my rifle, when I carried it to the edge of the porch and readied myself to meet whoever was coming up our road, I did not check to make sure it was loaded. My third mistake.

Now. Come and stand with me at the edge of my porch. Watch him drive slowly into my yard and park not even twenty feet from my house. Watch him slide out from behind the steering wheel and look around our dirt lot with a long, low whistle. The truck’s door slams closed behind him and he leans against the hood, looking around as if he might like to buy the place. The sun and air pluck gently at him, lighting the freckles on his arms, riffling his hay-colored hair. Late-morning sunshine turns him gold as a topaz, but even from where I am standing I can see the bruises on his hands and face, the red borders around his pale blue eyes. When a gust of wind passes through the yard, he crosses his arms and shrugs, looking around with an easy smile, like the day has just become too good to believe. He is barely past being a boy.

Morning—he glances at his watch—or I guess it’s afternoon, just about.

I stand there clutching the rifle stock like it is the hand of my dearest old friend. I do not know him, but I understand right away that he is too young to be one of the surveyors who sometimes drives out to make sure we’re keeping the access road open and clear, or a wildcatter who has stopped by to shoot the shit and see if we might be interested in selling our land. He looks too young to be a deputy volunteer either, and that’s when it occurs to me that I did not ask Aimee if she called the sheriff’s office.

What can I do for you? I say.

You must be Mrs. Whitehead. This is a real pretty place y’all have out here.

It’s all right. Dusty, same as always. I keep my voice steady, but I am wondering how he knows my name.

He chuckles gently, a stupid, arrogant sound. I guess so, he says. Good for my line of work, though. It’s easier to work a rig when Mother Nature keeps things nice and dry.

He stands up straight and takes one step forward, his palms facing up. His smile is steady, a needle on a cracked kitchen scale.

Listen, ma’am, I’ve had a little trouble this morning. I wonder if you will help me?

He steps toward the porch, and I watch his feet move closer. I look up, and he’s holding his hands high above his head. When the baby kicks me hard in the ribs, I rest a hand on my belly and wish I could sit down. Two days ago I fired my gun at a coyote trotting through the yard with his eyes on the chicken coop. At the last second, I took my eye off the bead sight at the end of my muzzle and missed him, and then Aimee started hollering about a scorpion, so I set the gun down and grabbed my shovel. And now I cannot recall whether I replaced the cartridge. Old Lady is a Winchester 1873, which my grandma believed to be the finest gun ever made. Now I smooth my thumb across the worn-smooth wooden stock as if she might tell me herself: yes or no.

Son, what do you want? I say to the boy who is barely a man.

He looks fine standing out there in the sunlight, but his eyes narrow. Well, I’m real thirsty and I’d like to use your telephone to call—

He takes another step toward the house but stops abruptly when he sees Old Lady. He can’t possibly know, I tell myself, that it might not be loaded. I tap the barrel gently against the pecan planking, one, two, three times, and he cocks his head, listening.

Mrs. Whitehead, is your husband at home?

Yes he is, of course he is, but he’s sleeping right now.

His smile gets a little wider, a little friendlier. A cattleman asleep at noon?

It’s 11:30. I laugh, and the sound is bitter as juniper berries. How stupid it sounds! How alone it makes me seem.

He giggles a little, real high-pitched, and my stomach roils at the sound. His laughter is a false cut.

Lord, Mrs. Whitehead, did your husband tie one on last night too?

No.

He sick? Too much Valentine’s candy?

He is not sick—I press one hand against my belly, thinking, slow down, little baby, quiet—can I help you with something?

I told you, I’ve had some trouble. My sweetheart and I drove out here last night for a little celebration. You know how it is—

I see, I tell him, and smooth my hand back and forth across my stomach.

—and we drank too much, had a little dustup. Maybe she didn’t like the heart-shaped box of chocolates I bought for her, and I might have passed out—

Did you.

—guess you could say I lost my valentine. Shame on me, huh?

I watch him talk, and I am holding on to my old rifle for dear life, but my throat feels like somebody just wrapped his hand around it and started to squeeze real slow. Behind him, and barely visible on the horizon, I catch a glimpse of a cherry-red car racing down the highway. It is more than a mile away, and from this distance, the car looks as if it is flying across the desert. Come and visit me please, I think as it approaches the turnoff to our ranch, and my throat aches a little. The car hesitates, a small wobble on the horizon, and then speeds away.

The young man keeps telling his little story, still smiling, blond hair glowing in the sun. He is standing less than ten feet from me now. If there’s a bullet in the chamber, I won’t miss him.

When I woke up this morning, he tells me, she had already hightailed it out of there. I’m afraid she might be walking around in the oil patch and that ain’t no place for a girl, as I’m sure you know.

I don’t say a word. Listening is what I do now. I listen, but I don’t hear anything except him, talking.

I hate to think of her getting into some trouble out there, he says, stepping on a diamondback or running into the wrong kind of person. Have you seen my Gloria? He lifts his right hand and holds it out to his side, palm down. Little Mexican gal? About yay high?

My throat slams shut, but I swallow hard and try to look him right in the eye. No sir, we haven’t seen her. Maybe she hitched a ride back to town.

Can I come in and use your phone?

I shake my head real slow, back and forth. No.

He pretends to look genuinely surprised. Well, why not?

Because I don’t know you. I try to speak this lie as if I mean it. Because now, I do know him—who he is and what he’s done.

Listen, Mrs. Whitehead—

How do you know my name? I am nearly shouting now, pushing one hand against the baby’s foot, which hammers against my rib cage.

The young man looks surprised. Well, it’s right there on your mailbox, ma’am. Listen, he says, I feel bad about what happened out there, and I’m real worried about her. She’s a little crazy, you know how these Mexican gals can be. He stares at me intently, his blue eyes just a shade darker than the sky. If you’ve seen her, you should tell me.

He stops talking and gazes past me toward the house for a few seconds, a broad grin spreading across his face. I imagine my daughter peeking out the window at him. Then I imagine the other girl looking through the glass, her blackened eyes and torn lips, and I do not know whether to keep my eyes locked on him or turn my head to see what he sees, know what he knows. So I stand there, me and my maybe loaded gun, and I try to listen.

I want you to step back, I tell him after a thousand years of silence have passed. Go stand next to the tailgate of your truck.

He doesn’t move. And I told you that I want a drink of water.

No.

He looks up at the sky and lays his hands on the back of his neck, fingers threaded. He whistles a few bars of music and though the song is familiar, I can’t name it. When he speaks, he is a man, not a boy.

I want you to give her to me. Okay?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you go on back to town?

You step inside the house now, Mrs. Whitehead, and get my girlfriend. Try not to wake your husband, who is sleeping upstairs, except he’s not, is he.

It is not a question, and suddenly, Robert’s face rises wraithlike before me. You did all this for a stranger, Mary Rose? You risked our daughter’s life, our baby’s life, yourself, for a stranger. What the hell is wrong with you?

And he’d be right. Because who is this child to me, anyway? Maybe she got into his truck willingly. I might have done the same ten years earlier, especially for a man this pretty.

Lady, I don’t know you, he says. You don’t know me. You don’t know Gloria. Now I want you to be a good girl, and set down that gun and go inside that house, and you bring her out here.

I feel the tears on my cheeks before I’m aware that I have begun to weep. There I stand, with my rifle, that useless piece of beautifully carved wood, and why should I not do as he asks? Who is she to me? She is not my child. Aimee and this child whose feet and fists kick and flail, they are somebody to me. They are mine. This girl, Gloria, she is not mine.

When he speaks next, the young man is no longer interested in asking questions, or talking. Bitch, he says, you listen here—

I try to listen for something other than his voice—a phone ringing in the house, a truck coming up the road, even the wind would be a welcome noise, but everything on this particular piece of flat and lonely earth has gone silent. His is the only voice I can hear, and it roars. Do you hear me, you stupid bitch. You hear me?

Gently, I shake my head. No, I don’t hear you. Then I pick up the rifle and snug it against my shoulder, a right and familiar sensation, but now it feels like somebody has poured lead into the barrel. I am as weak as an old woman. Maybe it is loaded, I don’t know, but still I point it at his pretty, golden face—because he doesn’t know either.

I don’t have one word left in me, so I flick my thumb across the safety and sight him through the aperture, my vision blurred by tears and the sorrow of knowing what I will say if he asks even one more time. Well, come on then, mister. I will take you to the ground myself, or die trying, if it means standing between you and my daughter, but Gloria? Her you can have.

We hear the sirens at the same time. He is already turning around when I lift my gaze from the bead sight. We stand there and watch the sheriff’s car coming fast up the road. An ambulance is right behind him, kicking up enough dust to choke a herd of cows. Just this side of our mailbox, the driver overcorrects and slides off the road. The vehicle bounces off the barbed-wire fence and skids into the flock of sand hill cranes, who rise up shrieking. They take flight, all noise and thin legs and thwapping disorder, a hue and cry.

For a few seconds, the young man holds himself still as a frightened jackrabbit. Then his shoulders slump forward and he rubs his fingers against his closed eyes. Well, shit, he says. My daddy’s going to kill me.

A lot of years will pass before I think my daughter is old enough to hear it, but when I do, I will tell her the last thing I remember seeing before I leaned back against the doorframe and passed out cold on the front porch. Two little girls, faces pressed against the kitchen window, mouths agape and eyes wide open, only one of them mine.

Corrine

WELL, IT’S A murderous little shit, the skinny yellow stray with lime-colored eyes and balls the size of silver dollars. Somebody dumped it in the dirt lot behind the Shepards’ house at the end of December—a Christmas present that wore thin quick, a bad idea from the get-go, Corrine told Potter at the time—and no creature has been safe since. Songbirds have perished by the dozens. Finches, a family of cactus wrens nesting under the storage shed, too many sparrows and bats to count, even a large mockingbird. In four months, the stray has doubled in size. His pale fur glows like a chrysanthemum.

Corrine is kneeling in front of the toilet when she hears the panicked cry of another small animal in the backyard. The birds shriek and beat their wings against the ground, and the garter snakes and brown racers die quietly, their light bodies barely disturbing the hard-packed dirt in her empty flowerbeds. This is the sound made by a mouse or squirrel, maybe even a young prairie dog. Critters, she thinks, that’s what Potter used to call them. And her throat closes up.

Holding her thin brown hair with one hand, she finishes bringing up the contents of her stomach, then sits with her cheek pressed against the bathroom’s cool wall. The animal cries out again and in the silence that follows, she tries to piece together the details of last night. Did she have five drinks or six? What did she say, and to whom?

The ceiling fan rattles overhead. The meaty stink of salted peanuts and Scotch drifts toward the open window, and Corrine’s eyes are wet from the force of her sick. All this, and that bald spot on the crown of her head getting bigger by the day. Not that this particular detail has anything to do with how drunk she got last night, but still—it is part of the inventory. As is the small square of toilet paper dangling from her chin. She flicks it into the toilet bowl, closes the lid, and lays her forehead against the porcelain while she listens to the tank fill back up.

Sloppy as a bag of fishing worms left out in the sun, Potter would tell Corrine if he were here. Then he’d fix her a Bloody Mary, heavy on the Trappy’s hot sauce, and fry up some bacon and eggs. He’d hand her a piece of toast to sop up the bacon grease. Back in business, he’d say. Pace yourself next time, sweetheart. Six weeks since Potter died—went out in a blaze of glory!—and this morning she can hear her husband’s voice so plainly he might as well be standing in the doorway. Same old goofy smile, same old hopeful self.

When the phone in the kitchen rings, the sound tears a hole in the quiet. There’s not one person in the world Corrine cares to talk to. Alice lives in Prudhoe Bay and only calls on Sunday nights when long distance rates are low. Even then, Corrine, who hasn’t forgiven her daughter for the blizzard that shut down the airport in Anchorage and kept her from Potter’s funeral, always keeps the conversations short, talking just long enough to reassure her daughter that she is fine. I am just fine, she tells Alice. Staying busy with the garden, going to church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, going through your daddy’s things so the Salvation Army can pick them up.

Every word of it is bullshit. She hasn’t boxed up so much as a T-shirt of that old man’s. Out back, the garden is nothing but packed dirt and bird carcasses, and after forty years of letting Potter drag her to church, she isn’t about to give those sanctimonious bitches another minute, or another nickel. In the bathroom, his leather shaving kit still sits open on the vanity. His earplugs are on his nightstand, alongside an Elmer Kelton book and his pain medicine. The jigsaw puzzle he was working on when he died is still spread out on the kitchen table, and his new cane leans against the wall behind it. A stack of life insurance forms, along with six banker’s envelopes from the credit union, mostly fifties, a few hundred-dollar bills, lies on a gold plastic lazy Susan in the center of the table. Sometimes Corrine thinks about setting the envelopes on fire, one by one, with the money still inside.

The phone rings again, and Corrine presses her eyes against the palms of her hands. A week earlier, she broke off the volume dial in a fit of pique. Now, with the ringer stuck on high, the god-awful off-key chime pierces every nook and cranny of the house and yard, screaming when it could have asked. The voice on the other end is equally unpleasant when Corrine finally snatches up the phone, when she says testily, Shepard residence.

Because of you, a woman shouts, I got fired last night.

Who? Corrine says, and the woman sobs and slams the phone so hard that Corrine’s ear rings.

The stray cat is standing outside the sliding-glass door with a dead mouse in his mouth when the phone rings again. Corrine snatches it up and yells into the receiver, Go to hell. The cat drops his victim and bolts across the backyard, scaling her pecan tree and launching his large, ugly body over the cinder-block fence and into the alley.

They were making plans for their retirement when Potter’s headaches started the previous spring. He was fully vested in his pension, and Corrine had been collecting hers since the school board forced her out a few years earlier, in the wake of some ill-advised comments she made in the teacher’s lounge. Maybe we can drive up to Alaska, Potter said, stop in California and see that redwood tree that’s big enough to drive a truck through.

But Corrine had her doubts. You can’t even get the sun up there for half the year, she told him, and what the hell is in Alaska? Moose?

Alice, said Potter. Alice is up there.

Corrine rolled her eyes, a habit she’d picked up from thirty years of working with teenagers. Right, she said, shacking up with whatshisname, the draft dodger.

Two days after they put down a deposit on a brand-new Winnebago thirty feet long and with its own shower, Potter had his first seizure. He was mowing the front yard when he fell to the ground, teeth clattering, arms and legs jerking madly. The lawn mower rolled slowly toward the street and came to a stop with its back wheels still on the sidewalk. Ginny Pierce’s kid was riding her bike in circles on the Shepards’ driveway, and Corrine heard her hollering all the way from the bedroom, where she’d been reading a book with the swamp cooler turned up high.

They drove five hundred miles to Houston and rode an elevator for fifteen stories to sit in two narrow chairs with vinyl cushions and listen while the oncologist spelled it out for them. Corrine sat hunched over a spiral notebook, her pen bearing down on the paper like she was trying to kill it. Glioblastoma multiforme, he said, GBM, for short. For short? Corrine looked up at him. It was so rare, the oncologist said, they might as well have found a trilobite lodged in Potter’s brain. If they started radiation therapy right away, they might buy him six months, maybe a year.

Six months? Corrine gazed at the doctor with her mouth hanging open, thinking, Oh no, no, no. You are mistaken, sir. She watched Potter stand up and walk over to the window where he looks out at Houston’s soupy brown air. His shoulders began to move gently up and down, but Corrine didn’t go to him. She was stuck to that chair as surely as if someone had driven a nail through one of her thighs.

It was too hot to drive home, so they went over to the Westwood Mall, where they sat on a bench near the food court, both of them clutching bottles of cold Dr Pepper as if they were hand grenades. At dusk, they walked to the parking lot. They drove with the windows down, the wind blowing hot against their faces and hands. By midnight the truck stank of them—the remnants of a cup of coffee Corrine had spilled on the seat the day before, her cigarettes and Chanel No. 5, Potter’s snuff and aftershave, their mutual sweat and fear. He drove. She turned the radio on and off, on and off, and on, pulled her hair into a clip, let it back down, and turned off the radio, turned it back on. After a while, Potter asked her to please stop.

City traffic made Corrine nervous, so Potter took the loop around San Antonio. I’m sorry, she told him, for adding time to our drive. He smiled wanly and reached across the seat for her hand. Woman, he said, are you apologizing to me? Well. I guess I really am dying. Corrine turned her face toward the passenger window, and cried so hard her nose clogged up and her eyes swelled nearly shut.

Not even nine o’clock, and it is already ninety degrees outside when Corrine looks out the living-room window and sees Potter’s truck parked on the front lawn. It was his pride and joy, a Chevy Stepside V8, with a scarlet leather interior. It has been a dry winter and the Bermuda grass is a pale brown scarf. When the breeze picks up, a few blades of grass that weren’t flattened beneath the truck’s wheel tremble under the sunlight. Every day for the past two weeks, the wind picks up in the late morning and blows steadily until dusk. Back when Corrine gave a shit, that would have meant dusting the house before she went to bed.

On Larkspur Lane, the neighbors stand in their front yards, water hoses in hand, staving off the drought. A large U-Haul turns the corner and stops in front of the Shepards’ house, then backs slowly into the driveway across the street. If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.

No one will ask, but they will sure talk if she doesn’t move Potter’s truck off the lawn, so Corrine swallows an aspirin and puts on a skirt suit from her teaching days, an olive-green number with brass buttons shaped like anchors. She puts on pantyhose, perfume, lipstick, and sunglasses then creeps outside wearing her house slippers, as if she has just returned from church and is settling in for a busy day at home, doing something.

The day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky. Across the street and down the block, Suzanne Ledbetter is watering her St. Augustine. When she sees Corrine, she switches off her hand sprayer and waves, but Corrine acts as if she doesn’t see. She also pretends not to see any of the neighbor kids who have spilled out of houses and across lawns like pecans from an overturned basket, and she barely registers the crew of men who have climbed out of the moving truck and are standing around the yard across the street.

When she opens the door to Potter’s truck and spots a cigarette lying on the bench seat, broken but repairable, Corrine gasps with gratitude. Quick, quick, she shifts the truck into reverse and pulls it squarely onto the driveway, then fetches up the cigarette and makes for the front door, pausing for just long enough to turn on the faucet. A water hose is stretched across the lawn like a dead snake, the rusty nozzle lying facedown in the dirt beneath the Chinese elm she and Potter planted twenty-six years earlier, the spring after they bought the house. Ugly and awkward, the elm reminds Corrine of dirty hair, but it has survived droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes. When it grew three feet in a single summer, Potter, who had a nickname for everything and everyone, started calling it Stretch. When Alice fell out of it and broke her right wrist, he started calling her Lefty. Every other damn thing in the backyard is dead, and Corrine couldn’t care less, but she can’t bear to let this tree die.

And even if she wanted to, Corrine knows, if she lets the tree go, or she makes a habit of parking Potter’s truck on the grass, or people see her in the front yard wearing the same clothes she wore to the Country Club last night, they might start feeling sorry for her. Pity. It makes her want to kick the shit out of someone—namely Potter, if he weren’t already dead. She thumps his funeral wreath and slams the front door behind her. In the kitchen, the phone rings and rings, but she is not picking up. No way, no how.

At three o’clock in the morning, they stopped to gas up at the Kerrville truck stop and wandered into the restaurant for coffee and an ice cream cone. After they ordered, he told her that radiation therapy was just a bunch of poison they pumped into your veins. It burned you from the inside out, made you even sicker, and what kind of months would those be?

I won’t do it, Corrine. I’m not having my wife wipe my ass, or run my steak through a blender.

Corrine sat across from her husband with her mouth hanging open. You always told Alice that getting hurt was no excuse to quit playing a game—her voice rose and fell like a kite in strong wind—and now you’re going to die on me? A couple sitting in the adjacent booth glanced their way then stared down at their table. Otherwise, the restaurant was empty. Why on earth had Potter chosen to sit here? Corrine wondered. Why must she share her grief with total strangers?

This is different, Potter said. He studied his ice cream for a few seconds. When he looked out the window, Corrine looked too. Between the diesel stations and eighteen-wheelers and a neon sign advertising hot showers, it was bright as high noon out there. A trucker pulled away from the diesel pump, honking twice as he merged onto the frontage road. A cowboy leaned against his tailgate and gulped down a hamburger, his belt buckle sparkling in the light. Two cars filled with teenage girls rolled slowly through the parking lot.

Potter and Corrine leaned back in their booth and looked at the ceiling. The plaster tiles directly above their heads were covered with piss-colored water spots and a smattering of holes about the size of No. 8 buckshot, as if some jackass had thought it might be funny to discharge his weapon while people were trying to eat their supper. When there was nothing left to look at, they looked at each other. His eyes filled with tears. Corrie, this is terminal.

What in the hell are you talking about? Corrine knocked her fist on the table, and coffee sloshed out of their mugs. Get up and fight! like you always said to Alice, and me too, on occasion.

Well, it didn’t do me no good, telling y’all that. Speaking low and fast, Potter leaned toward his wife. Alice still ran off to Alaska with that boy. You still walked away from teaching, the minute things got hard. All that work, Corrine—when we met, you were the only person I had ever known who went to college—and you gave it up to stay home and read your poetry books.

Her face was crimson with fear and rage. I think I told you a dozen times that I was sick to death of it all.

Baby, I don’t think you understand how serious this is. He reached across the table, but Corrine snatched her hand back and folded her arms across her breasts. Don’t you dare call me baby, Potter Shepard, or I will kill you myself.

I’m already dying, honey.

Screw you, Potter. You are not. Never let me hear you say that again. And they sat in stupefied silence while the coffee went bone-cold and the ice cream turned soupy.

When they pulled into the garage the next morning, they were greeted by the same musty smell of cardboard boxes and Potter’s old army tent, the same click and whir when the motor on the deep freeze switched on, the same old tools gathering dust on Potter’s tool bench. Nothing was different in any way, except they hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and Corrine looked like she had aged ten years, and Potter was dying.

While she made a skillet of corn bread and warmed up some pinto beans, he set a jar of chow-chow and a plate of sliced tomatoes on the kitchen table. He pointed at the heat shimmers on the other side of the sliding-glass door. The heat in August, she said, it’s a special kind of hell. It’s a wonder any of us survive it. He laughed gently, and the two of them fell silent.

After breakfast, they set the dishes in the sink and went into the bedroom, where he turned the swamp cooler on high and she pulled the draperies closed. They crawled into bed, Corrine on her side, Potter on his, and in that strange midday dusk they lay next to each other, fingers twined and minds numb with terror. They waited for whatever was coming next.

Thinking it might help with her hangover, she tries to make herself a fried egg sandwich, but she sees the yolk wobbling in her cast iron skillet, a watery yellow eyeball, and her stomach roils. Instead, she holds her hair back, lights her cigarette on the stove burner, and leans against the icebox while she waits for the nicotine to help bring the previous night into focus.

It had been a slow night at the Country Club and by midnight, everyone had gone home except Corrine and the bartender, Karla, along with a few diehards, men with nowhere to be and no one waiting for them once they got there. She’d be damned if she was going to make small talk with any of these fools, so she watched Karla polish glassware while the men talked football and oil prices—1976 looked like it was going to be a damned good year for both—and discussed Carter and Ford—hated them both, one was a dipshit and the other was a pussy. Nixon had been their man, and now, with Watergate in the rearview mirror, the men were beginning to understand that they’d not only lost their leader, they’d lost their war against chaos and degeneracy. Black Panthers and Mexicans, Communists and cult leaders, people who fucked right in the middle of a street in downtown Los Angeles, for chrissakes.

Talking shit, Corrine mused, same as any other group of men anywhere else on the planet. She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker. After a few minutes, it was all just low, male murmuring.

Karla! Corrine thinks now as she stubs her cigarette out in the kitchen sink. It was Karla who called earlier, or maybe Ginny’s kid, who calls almost every morning to see what Corrine is doing, and whether she might not like some company.

On the last day of 1975, they stood on the back patio after supper and watched the stray carry a white-throated sparrow across the backyard. It was a female, rarely seen this far south, and they had been listening to its sweet, singular song—Old Sam Peabody, Peabody—since early November, just a few days after they brought Potter home from the hospital. For the last time, he said when they were still sitting in the hospital parking lot. Corrine hadn’t even got her key in the ignition when he leaned over and tried to pat her knee. I gave it a shot, for you, he said, but this is the last time. No more treatments, no more doctors.

He didn’t feel up to driving to church for the New Year’s party, and she had never wanted to go in the first place, and by four o’clock, they’d eaten supper and put on their sweatpants. While Corrine enjoyed her cigarette, Potter leaned heavily on his new cane. The cat sat atop their cinder-block fence like he owned the place, his fur turning gold in the last bit of daylight. Potter said that he couldn’t help admiring him. Most strays didn’t last a week before they were run over on Eighth Street, or some little boy shot them with his .22. The black stripes across the cat’s face made him look a bit like an ocelot, he observed. He’d probably be good company, Potter said, if you got him fixed.

We ought to poison the little bastard before he kills every living creature on the block, Corrine said. She handed her cigarette to Potter, who held it stiffly between his thumb and index finger. He had quit twenty years earlier, and they’d been fighting about her habit since. But all his griping hadn’t mattered a bit, she thought sadly as she walked over to sweep up the bird carcass. She was going to outlive him after all.

While Karla polished glassware and cut limes, Corrine smoked one cigarette after the other. She ran her thumb across the names and phone numbers carved into the mahogany bar. On one side of the room, large plate-glass windows overlooked the golf course. The wildcatters who bankrolled the project in the late sixties had originally planned on eighteen holes, but construction ceased abruptly amid a sudden glut in the oil markets. While a bulldozer and irrigation pipes sat rusting on what would have been the tenth, club members made do with nine holes. And now, seven years later, with the price of oil ticking up, they might finally get those other nine.

When Corrine folded her beverage napkin and slid her glass to the edge of the bar, Karla brought another Scotch and Coke. Was it her fifth, sixth? Enough that she hooked her toes around the bar rail when she reached for her drink, enough that Karla set a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the bar in front of her.

One man said, just as plain as day, What we have here are two competing stories, a textbook case of he said, she said.

A second sipped his beer and set it down hard against the bar. I saw that little Mexican gal’s picture in the newspaper, he said, and she didn’t look fourteen.

Corrine paused on the number she had been tracing with her finger. They were talking about Gloria Ramírez, the girl she and Potter had seen at the Sonic. We watched her climb into that truck, Potter said, and we sat there like somebody had sewn our pants to the seat.

You okay, Mrs. Shepard? Karla was watching her from the other end of the bar, dishrag in one hand, empty mug in the other.

Yes ma’am. Corrine tried to sit up a little straighter, but her toes lost their grip and her elbow slipped off the edge of the bar.

The men looked at her briefly and then decided to ignore her. It was the best thing about being an old lady with thinning hair and boobs saggy enough to prop up on the bar. Finally, she could sit down on a barstool and drink herself blind without some jackass hassling her.

That’s how they are, a third man said, they mature faster than other girls. The men laughed. Yes, sir! A lot faster, said another.

Corrine felt the heat climbing up her neck and spreading across her face. Potter must have talked about Gloria a dozen times, usually late at night when the pain was so bad he got out of bed and went into the bathroom and she could hear him moaning. All the things he wished he’d done. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, she had told him. That’s all we needed, you picking a fight with a man half your age.

But Potter insisted that he had known right away something wasn’t right. He’d worked alongside young men like that for twenty-five years, and he knew. But they sat there and watched the girl climb into that truck, and then he and Corrine drove home. Two days later, when they saw the man’s mug shot in the American, Potter said that he was a coward and a sinner. A day after that, when the newspaper published Gloria Ramírez’s school picture, he sat in his recliner for a long time looking at her straight black hair and tilted chin, the gaze she directed at the camera, the little smile that might have been a smirk. Corrine said there ought to be a law against putting that girl’s name and picture in the local paper—a minor, for God’s sake. Potter said she looked like a girl who feared nothing and nobody, and that was probably all gone now.

While Karla eyed the tip jar, Corrine downed her drink in several long, throat-searing gulps. She signaled for another. Karla Sibley was barely seventeen, and she had a new baby at home with her mama. She was still trying to decide whether to cut Corrine off when the old woman pushed her barstool away from the bar, wobbled mightily and tugged at her shirt until it hung straight against her large chest and hips.

Never mind, Karla, she said. I’ve had enough. She turned to the men. That girl is fourteen years old, you sons of bitches. You gentlemen have a thing for children?

She drove herself home, keeping her eyes on the centerline and Potter’s truck ten miles under the speed limit, and it was after three when she finally lay down on the sofa. She pulled an afghan over her legs—she still couldn’t sleep in their bed, not without Potter—and though she would struggle to piece it together, at least until the first rush of nicotine hit her bloodstream the next morning, she had fallen asleep replaying what she said to the regulars and the last words she heard before she slammed the heavy door behind her, Karla whining at the men, It’s not my fault, I didn’t bring it up. You can’t tell that old lady anything.

Fourteen years old. As if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white. She carries her ashtray to the kitchen table and sits down at the table, where she fiddles with a loose puzzle piece and glares at the envelopes filled with money. Potter had worked on the puzzle for hours, his left hand sometimes shaking so hard he had to prop his elbow on the table and form a brace with his right. All those hours, all that effort, and still he had completed only the border and a couple of brown and gold cats.

When the stray wanders across the patio and sits outside the sliding-glass door, staring at her, Corrine picks up Potter’s cane and shakes it at him. She might give the little son of a bitch a pretty good knock on the head, if he doesn’t quit coming into her backyard and killing everything.

In late February, the cat caught a large male grackle and tore it to pieces, and Corrine nearly slipped on the shiny blue-black head when she took out the trash. The next morning they found a warbler—its head a tidy tuft of gray and black, the bright yellow breast a shock of color against the concrete. Potter paused and watched its feathers tremble in the wind. By then, he had begun to stammer sometimes. Cor—, Cor—, Cor—, he would say, and Corrine wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shout, No, no, no, this is a mistake. But it had been a good morning, no seizures, no falls, and when Potter spoke it was the same voice she had been hearing for thirty years.

Well, he said, if you got him fixed and set some food out, he might stop killing things. He might be pretty good company.

Hell, no, Corrine said. I need something else to take care of like Jesus needed another nail.

Wish you wouldn’t blaspheme like that, Potter said. But he laughed anyway and they looked out across the yard where the cat was lying under the pecan tree. His weird green eyes were fixed on a small lizard that was running along the cinder-block fence.

It was midmorning and sunlight had turned the fence the color of ash. A small wind ruffled the cat’s gold fur. On the other side of the dirt lot behind their house, an ambulance wailed down Eighth Street. Corrine and Potter listened as the sound moved downtown toward the hospital. What in the world are you going to do without me? Potter asked, and when Corrine told him, with no small amount of sorrow, that it had never occurred to her, not once in their marriage, that she would outlive him, Potter nodded gently. It don’t seem fair, he said.

Corrine started to correct her husband’s grammar—it doesn’t seem fair—same as she always did, but then she thought about his occasional mistakes, his tuneless whistling, his habit of giving a nickname to every goddamn creature that crossed his path, and she sighed deeply. She would miss the sound of his voice. Not fair, indeed! She nodded at him and turned away before he could see her starting to cry.

Potter touched her arm and hobbled over to the shovel that leaned against the house. You might surprise yourself, he said, after I’m gone.

I doubt that very seriously, she said.

In recent weeks, he had started to bury some of the animals they found in the backyard, when he felt up to it. This time, it took him nearly ten minutes to break through the hard-packed dirt and caliche. Corrine asked if he wanted a hand and he said no, no, he could do it. He dug a foot-deep hole next to the back fence, set the warbler in it, and covered it up. Buried it, Corrine still mutters when she thinks about that bird, like the damned thing mattered. Toward the end, her husband had become more sentimental than usual. Right up until the minute he wasn’t, the bastard.

A week later, Potter woke up early and rolled over to face Corrine. He felt good, he said. Like the tumor never happened, almost. He left his cane in the kitchen and went outside to sweep the back patio. He fetched his shears from the garage and trimmed the hedges next to the front porch. After he gathered up the skinny limbs and carried them to the dumpster, he admired his work and Corrine yelled at him for walking around without his cane. If she had been paying attention, she wouldn’t have allowed it for a minute. But Potter grabbed her around the waist and nuzzled her neck, saying, baby you smell so good, and she let him pull her into the bedroom for an hour or two.

After, Potter said he wanted a T-bone for supper. He would grill and they could have a couple of baked potatoes with all the fixins—and butter, not that margarine she had been pushing on him for the last decade. If they took a pecan pie out of the freezer now, he said, it would defrost in time for dessert. After supper, he put on a Ritchie Valens album and danced her around the living room, and so what if it had been years since they had thought to dance with each other? They could do it now, he said. Later, it would occur to Corrine that she should have known, right then and there, what he was up to.

On the table next to his chair in the living room, the newspaper from February 27, the day he died, is folded to the crossword. A single word is penciled in. Four letters, to walk or drive across a shallow place. Ford. On the table next to her chair sits a book of poetry that she has not touched in months, preferring instead to read articles on cancer and healthy eating, even one about a doctor down in Acapulco, an idea that Potter had immediately vetoed. She wanders back into the front hallway and lets her fingers drift across the walnut case of his AM/FM radio, twisting the knobs back and forth. On pretty nights, when the wind was blowing from the north, they would carry it out to the front porch and listen to the country station out of Lubbock. To the day he died, only Corrine, Potter, and the doctors knew about his illness. Any day, they kept promising each other, they would tell Alice and a few people from church, but then Potter went and jumped the gun. Goddamn him.

The doorbell is mounted on the wall directly above the radio, and when it rings, Corrine nearly comes out of her skin. She stands frozen in place, heart pounding, her right hand still on the radio’s dial. The bell rings again and then she hears Debra Ann Pierce’s peculiar knock, three evenly spaced raps in the center of the door, three staccato knocks on the left side, three on the right, then the child calling, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, as she does at least once every day.

Corrine opens the door, wedging her large body between the doorjamb and door. She squeezes her thighs together, as if given half a chance the child might try to dart between her legs, like a small dog.

Are you the one who’s been calling me all morning, Debra Ann Pierce? Corrine’s voice is a rasp and her tongue feels like someone put a coat of paint on it. She turns her head toward her shoulder and coughs.

No, ma’am. Debra Ann is wearing a hot pink T-shirt that says Superstar and a pair of orange terrycloth shorts that barely cover the tops of her thighs. In one hand she holds a horny toad, which she rubs between the eyes with her index finger. Its eyes are closed, and Corrine wonders if this child has been carrying a dead animal around the neighborhood, but then the little creature starts squirming in the girl’s hand.

You should let that poor thing go, Corrine says. It’s not a pet. Little girl, I had a late night and I’m tired, and my phone has been ringing off the wall this morning.

Where did you go?

That’s none of your business. D. A. Pierce, why are you calling my house?

It wasn’t me, I swear.

Do not swear, Corrine says and regrets it immediately. What the hell does she care what this child does, as long as she gets off the front porch and leaves Corrine be?

Yes, ma’am. Debra Ann reaches around and pulls her shorts out of her butt crack. She looks across the street and frowns. Are those Mexicans moving here?

Maybe, says Corrine. That, also, is none of your business.

Some people ain’t going to like that one bit—Mr. Davis, Mrs. Ledbetter, old Mr. Jeffries—

Corrine holds up her hand. You stop that. Those men have as much right to be here as you and me.

They do not, the girl says. This is our street.

What do you think Mr. Shepard would think if he heard you talking like that?

The girl looks down at her bare feet and flexes both big toes a few times. She adored Potter, the only adult who never corrected her grammar or undercut her plans, who listened attentively to her tall tales about her imaginary friends Peter and Lily, who flew in from London and regaled D. A. with stories about the London Bridge and the Queen of England. Not once had Potter suggested that she was too old for make-believe friends, never did he tease.

Corrine pats the several pockets of her suit jacket and discovers a box with one cigarette. Well, hot damn. She pulls it out of the box and lights up, blowing the smoke just above the girl’s head. Where’s your daddy today?

Working in Ozona—Debra Ann pushes out her bottom lip and blows upward so hard her bangs tremble—or Big Lake. The girl turns the horny toad around and holds it close to her face. I’m gonna take you home with me, she whispers ominously and grabs hold of her eyebrow. She yanks several hairs out and flicks them into the hedge next to the porch. There are small bald patches in each brow, Corrine sees now. In the days after Debra Ann’s mother left town, Corrine carried food over to Jim while Potter and D. A. sat on the couch and watched cartoons. At Potter’s funeral, the girl had leaned over the casket and peered into Potter’s face for so long that Corrine wanted to knock her in the head with the flat of her hand and say what the hell do you think you’re looking at, little girl?

Debra Ann tries to see if the toad will fit in the pocket of her shorts, but it starts clawing at her hands. I thought you might like some company, she tells Corrine. We could finish Mr. Shepard’s puzzle.

I do not care for any company, thank you.

The girl gazes at her, and after a few seconds Corrine sighs. Well, I’m out of cigarettes. Do you want to ride your bike up to 7-Eleven and buy me a pack?

D. A. nods and smiles. She is missing two baby teeth, one canine up top, one canine on the bottom, and the gaps are red and inflamed. The remaining teeth are yellow and dingy, and there are pieces of food, bread maybe, along her gum line. Her black hair is jagged and matted at the ends, as if she started to comb it out and got bored, and Corrine could swear she sees a few nits. Wait here, Corrine says and goes inside to fetch her purse. When she hands the girl a dollar bill, D. A.’s eyes widen with pleasure.

Here’s fifty cents for a pack of Benson & Hedges, she says, and fifty cents for your time. Make sure you get the right brand—Ultra Lights.

D. A. shoves the bill into her shorts pocket and asks if Corrine has a shoebox so she can leave the horny toad on the porch. Corrine tells her no, there is a stray running around killing anything it can catch, and the child takes off running across the lawn, the toad clasped in her left hand. When Corrine yells at her not to talk to strangers, D. A. lifts the animal above her head and waggles it in the old woman’s direction. Even from a distance, Corrine can see thin streams of blood leaking from both the creature’s eyes, its last and most desperate line of defense.

Potter had written his letter on a yellow legal pad he found in Corrine’s desk. He had tried hard not to nickel-and-dime the Almighty, he wrote. He had prayed for help only a handful of times that he could remember—when his B-29 lost an engine over Osaka, when Corrine had some trouble with the morphine in the moments after Alice was delivered, when they all had pneumonia in the winter of 1953. In 1968, he prayed for the price of oil to go back up, and he might have prayed to catch a bigger catfish once or twice when they were fishing Lake Spence, but he was mostly joking. And now, Potter wrote, he was counting on the Almighty not to nickel-and-dime him—because he was not willing to ride this train to the end of the line.

He wrote that he would miss their long drives and their camping trips, and the way Corrine moved her feet up and down against his calves at night after they had crawled into the tent because she was always cold and he was always warm. He would miss all the little critters they listened to, as they lay in the tent with their sleeping bags zipped together.

There were some things he regretted. He wished he had gone to college when he came home from the war, even if it had meant accepting help from the government. He wished they had gone to Alaska to see Alice, and he had sent their daughter a letter saying as much. But most of all, he wished he’d done things differently on Valentine’s night. All this, from a man who had hardly written so much as a grocery list since he came back from flying bombers over Japan.

He left the letter on the kitchen table, along with several envelopes that contained ten thousand dollars in cash. He had been worrying for weeks that the life insurance company would find some way to cheat Corrine out of the policy, and she correctly guessed this was emergency money he had stashed somewhere. At the bottom of the note, a sentence had been added, scrawled quickly with a red pen. Make sure Dr. Bauman writes hunting accident on the death certificate.

Twenty minutes later, when the sheriff’s deputy came to the front door, and before Corrine even had a chance to ask where they had found him, the deputy told her there had been an accident, a terrible accident, the kind of accident you never saw coming. It happens more often than you would think, he said.

When Debra Ann returns fifteen minutes later, her mouth is ringed with chocolate and she is no longer carrying the horny toad. She clutches Corrine’s cigarettes in one grubby hand while she explains that her daddy won’t be home until eight o’clock, and she thinks there might be some leftover goulash at home, but she isn’t sure. Maybe Lily and Peter ate it all. Debra Ann leans toward Corrine and cranes her neck as she tries to see down the hallway, the smell of mildew rising from her hair and clothes. Stomach lurching, Corrine holds out her hand for the cigarettes. She knocks the box against her palm, nods gently while Debra Ann jabbers on about the horny toad, how the clerk at the 7-Eleven made her let him go before she could come into the store, and although she told the animal to stay put in her bicycle basket, of course he was gone when she came back.

They are wild animals that will give you warts, Corrine told her. Get a better pet next time.

I saw Mr. Shepard’s cat out there in the alley behind your house.

That is not Mr. Shepard’s cat.

Well, he used to feed it.

Oh, he did not.

I know for a fact that Mr. Shepard used to let it sleep in the garage sometimes when it was cold outside.

Oh, bullshit, says Corrine. We didn’t even have so much as a sleet storm last winter.

It still got cold, says Debra Ann. He might be good company.

Corrine tells the child that she does not want to feed anything, or water it, or clean up its shit or pull ticks off its ears, or vacuum fleas out of her draperies when it gets into the house. I’ll tell you what, D. A., she says, if you can catch that cat, you can take it home with you.

I wish I had a cat that wanted to come live with me, Debra Ann says, but my daddy only wants pets that will live in a box. I wish we had something to eat other than goulash. I wish—but Corrine interrupts and asks if D. A. remembers what Corrine’s old daddy himself used to say.

Wish in one hand and poop in the other, see which one gets full faster? she says glumly.

Yes, ma’am, Corrine says as she steps backward into the house and gently pushes the door closed in the child’s face.

While the phone rings a dozen times, Corrine fixes herself an iced tea with a smidge of bourbon. When she’s sure Debra Ann isn’t hanging around the yard, she heads back outside for a porch-sit and a smoke. She will stay low, sitting on the concrete step next to the hedges, where she can see what’s going on without anyone noticing her.

At least once a week since Potter died, Suzanne Ledbetter shows up at Corrine’s door with a casserole and an invitation to participate in some damned crochet circle or one of those god-awful recipe swaps where each woman makes the recipe and writes down her observations on a 3x5 notecard before passing it along to the next woman, who also makes the recipe and adds her notes to the card. And so it goes. In this way, the women are able to make a good recipe even better, says Suzanne Ledbetter.

Corrine has learned over the years to say no thank you to get-togethers and recipe swaps. Still, by the time she sits down on her front porch with a drink in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, she has a freezer full of casseroles. And a head full of bullshit too, she thinks as she lowers her bottom onto the concrete step and scoots over to peer through her scraggly hawthorns. Across the street, two young men are carrying a large television console into a rust-colored brick ranch that is a mirror image of Corrine and Potter’s—nine hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one full bath plus a powder room off the dining room. The kitchen window faces the backyard, same as Corrine’s, and the same sliding-glass door leads to a back patio, she imagines, though she never knew the previous tenants, three young men who kept a large mutt chained to a dead pecan tree in the front yard and who, mercifully, took the dog with them when they moved out in the middle of the night.

A white sedan pulls up, and a young girl and her mother start taking several small boxes from the back seat. The woman is heavily pregnant, swollen as a deer carcass on a hot road, and there is no sign of a mister. When the car is empty, the woman stands in the front yard while the child hops around the dead tree. She is the spitting image of her mama—white-haired and round-faced—and from time to time she walks over and hangs on the woman’s maternity smock as if one or the other of them might lift off the ground and drift across the sky, should she let go.

The woman—she looks too young to have a girl that big—rubs her daughter’s back while they watch three young men carry furniture and boxes up the driveway, through the open garage, and into the house. They are still boys, Corrine sees now, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, with sneakers, crew cuts, and cowboy hats in varied shades of brown perched on their heads. Two middle-aged men, wearing the same brown steel-toed boots that Potter used to lace up before he headed out to the plant in the mornings, stand by the front door measuring and re-measuring the doorframe against a massive mahogany door that is leaning against the house like a drunk. Corrine swirls her pinkie in her drink and looks at the pregnant woman with amusement. The front door that’s already there wasn’t good enough for her? Well! She sucks the liquor off her finger.

One of the men holds up his hands in the shape of a door, showing how wide, how tall, and the woman shakes her head. One hand moves to her forehead, the other to her belly, and then, as the man points again at the doorframe, her upper body drifts toward the door, a boat listing ever so slightly, then sinking fast as she folds in half. A cry rises up from the men. Corrine sets down her drink and smacks her lips. By the time she has hauled herself to her feet and pulled on her slippers, the woman is on her hands and knees in the front yard, her belly skimming the dirt. The child hovers anxiously around her mother’s head. Words in both Spanish and English fly around the yard like sparrows. A man runs into the kitchen and returns with a plastic cup filled with water.

Corrine introduces herself and points at her house across the street while the girl, Aimee, plucks at her mother’s maternity blouse. She is a jowly child with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they are nearly invisible. The mother, Mary Rose, gasps as her blouse rises and falls with a contraction, and Corrine thinks she might have seen her back at the high school, just another girl who dropped out and got married. It’s impossible to remember them all.

Corrine tries and fails to remember a single useful detail from the hazy twilight sleep of her labor with Alice, some thirty years ago. Can I drive you to the hospital?

No, thank you. I can drive myself. Mary Rose presses both hands against her belly while she looks up at Corrine. I saw the wreath on your front door. I’m sorry for your loss.

My husband died in February. I just haven’t taken it down. Corrine narrows her eyes and looks at the men and boys who stand quietly in a row, shifting back and forth on their feet, eyeing the rancher’s wife who has gone into labor in the middle of their weekend job, whose husband is well known to them and theirs.

It was a hunting accident, Corrine says. She might as well have swallowed a shovelful of scorpions, the way those words tear at her throat, poisonous, claws out.

A hunting accident. Mary Rose rolls over and sits up, and Corrine is surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. I am so sorry. Listen, we’re still waiting for them to turn on the electricity and I don’t want my daughter sitting around the waiting room by herself. Would you mind if she came to your house for a few hours, just until my husband returns from a livestock auction in Big Springs?

No, ma’am, Corrine says without hesitation. I cannot have anybody in my house right now, sorry. Can I call your mother, or maybe a sister?

No, thank you, Mary Rose says. They’ve got their hands full already.

I want to stay with you, the child whines at her mother. I don’t even know her.

I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and wait with—Corrine pauses while the child glares at her and clutches her mother’s smock—Aimee.

I don’t want her in a waiting room with a bunch of strange men, Mary Rose says.

The women look at each other for a few seconds, the younger woman’s lips a tight seam. She pulls herself to her feet and tells her daughter to run and fetch her car keys, and the little ditty bag she has set in the hall closet. After Aimee scampers into the house through the open garage, Mary Rose asks the foreman to lock up behind them when they have emptied the moving van, and when Corrine starts back toward her own front porch, already longing for the rest of that bourbon and iced tea, hoping that cat didn’t stick its nose in her glass and lick the ice, Mary Rose yells at her, too. Thanks for nothing, she says, but Corrine pretends not to hear. She keeps walking and when she is safely across the street, she dumps her drink in the hedge and goes inside to fix herself a fresh one.

It’s not quite dark outside when the phone rings again. Corrine, who is well into that bottle of bourbon, rushes to the kitchen and grabs the phone with both hands. Every goddamn thing in this house buzzes, rattles, or rings. She wraps the cord around the phone’s base and props open the door between the kitchen and garage with her foot. The loose skin on her arms wobbles madly when she lifts the phone over her head. The phone soars into the garage, strikes the concrete and rings twice when it lands next to the Lincoln Continental that she has forsaken in the forty days since Potter chose to remove himself from what he had once described as his situation. It was our situation, goddamn you.

The kitchen is quiet now, save for the ticking of the wall clock next to the kitchen table. Corrine narrows her eyes at it, considering. Empty liquor bottles lie atop the full trash can, along with a stack of unopened doctor’s bills. She picks up a full ashtray and slowly dumps it on the envelopes in the center of the table. Cigarette butts roll slowly across the pile and fall onto the puzzle pieces. The icemaker dumps a batch of ice cubes. Outside the sliding-glass door, the western sky is the color of an old bruise. A mockingbird perches on the back fence, its voice persistent and sad.

Fetching up the trash can and stepping outside, Corrine jerks the sliding door closed with such force that Potter’s cane clatters to the linoleum and rolls in front of it. The thin sole of her house slipper gives way when it presses against a soft body and she cries out, jumping backward and looking down to see a small brown mouse. She closes her eyes and sees Potter standing by the back fence, sees him struggling with the shovel while he digs the hole, sees him set the animal gently inside.

She wishes she could do that, bury a little creature, act as if it matters. But the ground is hard and her arms are flabby, and she has to stop and catch her wind when she carries groceries in from the truck. She isn’t nearly as good as Potter, never has been. She grabs a shovel out of the garage anyway and slips the blade under the soft, small body. Nearly choking with rage, she carries the mouse into the alley and flings it into the open dumpster. They could have talked about it, how and when he would die. Potter said he wouldn’t have her taking care of him, and she had promised she wouldn’t ask him to hang on until he was unrecognizable to himself, or her. But in the end, he had chosen to go it alone.

The plant whistle blows, the longer, more plaintive wail that signals an accident, and she stands for a few seconds with her hand on the steel dumpster. She has spent a lifetime listening to that whistle and wondering what happened. But these particular fears, that her husband might be lying facedown in a puddle of benzene, that he was working in the area where the explosion occurred, that he didn’t move quickly enough, these worries are now the province of Suzanne Ledbetter and a thousand other women in town. Not Corrine’s. In the field behind her house, the cat stays low, its green eyes steady and vacant, as it watches a yellow rat snake race down the dry flood canal where D. A. Pierce and the other little girls on the street used to ride their bikes, ditching them to sunbathe on the steep concrete slopes, before the city got wise and put up a chain-link fence.

Beyond the canal, the 7-Eleven and A&W Root Beer share a parking lot with the bookmobile, a thirty-foot trailer with perilously unstable metal bookcases and shag carpeting that smells like mildew. Six months earlier, an industrial-sized Quonset hut was built on the lot, a windowless steel building called the Bunny Club—a strip club sharing a parking lot with the mobile library—and it is a damned miracle, Corrine thinks, that any girl in Odessa makes it out alive. For twenty years she watched these local girls at the high school, most of them aspiring to little more than graduating before some boy knocked them up. On any given Monday morning, she might walk into her classroom and listen to sad, vicious rumors about the hospital or jail, or the unwed mothers’ home in Lubbock. She attended more shotgun weddings than she could shake a stick at, and she still runs into those same young women at the grocery store, older now, but still clutching pale and round babies to their chests, still shifting them from one skinny, freckled arm to another while they scream at older kids who dart up and down the aisles like manic squirrels.

Corrine is still standing in the alley when a truck speeds up the main drag and turns into the lot. Its wheels spin and squeal as the driver turns doughnuts in the parking lot. Several men are standing in the truck’s bed, shouting and roughhousing and hanging on for dear life. One of the men throws a bottle at the flood canal, and the glass shatters when it strikes the concrete. When another of them falls from the back of the truck and hits the pavement with a cry, the others laugh and holler. He stumbles after the truck, hands outstretched, and when he draws close to his friends, the truck stops abruptly. He has his hands on the tailgate when somebody tosses two bags onto the pavement and the driver hits the accelerator.

The truck circles around a third time as a man leans over the side of the truck bed with a piece of steel pipe in his hand. The truck speeds up and he leans out a little farther, one hand holding on to the truck’s roll bar, the other waving the pipe back and forth. Corrine opens her mouth to yell Stop, just as the man who stands in the lot lifts his hands over his head as if to say, I give up. The pipe catches him square in the back, and he falls to the pavement like an egg knocked from its nest.

Lord, have mercy, Corrine yells and runs for the house. She is moving fast, praying there will be a dial tone when she plugs the phone back into the wall when her foot catches on Potter’s cane and she pitches forward, landing facedown on the kitchen table. Puzzle pieces fly through the air like brown bats rising from an old water tank, and as Corrine settles onto the kitchen floor, she is aware of the clock ticking on the wall. She is also aware of her face and hands, her knees and shoulders, all shot through with a pain so sudden and big that it might as well be everything in the world.

When they were younger, Potter used to joke that Corrine would go out with a bang. There would be a holdup while she was standing in line at the bank and she would refuse to hand over her purse. Or she would flip the bird at some good old boy who was having a worse day than her, or maybe blow a tire while she was driving too fast on the loop. Maybe her seniors would beat her to death with their copies of Beowulf, or they would sneak out during a pep rally and cut her brake lines after a particularly brutal pop quiz. But nope. Here she is, sprawled out on the kitchen floor like an old heifer, boobs and belly in the kitchen, feet and ass still on the patio.

If things had worked the way they ought to have, Potter would have buried her. He would grieve, of course he would, but he also would have gone on living—playing cards down at the VFW, driving out to the plant to say hello, puttering around the garage or the backyard. He would have put together his goddamned puzzles and listened to Debra Ann talk about childish things—the imaginary friends she was too old for, how many bottle caps she found in the alley, missing her mama and wondering when she was coming home. He would never tire of listening to that child, and even if he did, he wouldn’t say so. If Potter were here, D. A. Pierce and the little girl from across the street, Aimee, would be sitting at the kitchen table with two bowls of Blue Bell ice cream, and that damned cat would dine nightly in the garage, probably on cans of tuna fish. But here Corrine is, and what the hell she will do next, she cannot even begin to imagine.

Tomorrow morning, she will survey the damage—a small cut above her left eyebrow and a goose egg on her right temple, a bruise the size of a grapefruit on her forearm. Her hip will be out of whack for weeks, and she will use Potter’s cane to get around, but only in the house or the backyard, where no one can see her. In the front yard when she waters the tree, and in the grocery store where she picks up a few items for Mary Rose and delivers them, along with one of Suzanne Ledbetter’s casseroles that she digs out of the deep freezer in the garage, Corrine will stand up straight and grit her teeth and act as if nothing hurts. When the phone rings, she will answer, and when she hears Karla’s voice on the line, she’ll ask how she can help.

And what of Potter’s puzzle pieces that flew across the linoleum, several of them skittering so far beneath the icebox and stove that there will be no retrieving them? In a few weeks, when Corrine starts packing up his things for the Salvation Army, she will scribble a note for whoever might get the puzzle next, a little warning that some of the pieces might be missing. Because as Potter has told her a hundred times, there is nothing in this world worse than working that hard, for that long, only to discover that you never had all the pieces to begin with.

Tonight, she rises up from the kitchen floor and plugs the phone in. She calls the police station downtown and tells them that she didn’t see a license plate or notice the color of the truck, and she can’t really describe the men, other than to say that they were drunk, and white, and sounded like they were still boys.

The man is long gone when she returns to the alley. Everything hurts. But it’s a pretty night with lots of stars and Mars glowing in the southern sky. There’s a light wind blowing from the north. If she carries the radio out to the front porch and sets it on the windowsill, she might get the radio station in Lubbock. They’ve been playing a lot of Bob Wills since he died, and it will be good company.

She is still sitting out there when a truck pulls into the driveway across the street and a man who must be Mary Rose’s husband steps out. He hurries around to the passenger side, where he picks up his sleeping child. And now Corrine is struggling to her feet, moving as fast as her bruised old body can carry her. She has a knot on her forehead the size of a silver dollar, and there’s not enough Chanel No. 5 in the world to cover up the stink of cigarettes and booze, but she hurries toward the man who shifts his daughter from one hip to the other and grabs a flashlight off the dashboard before starting toward the house, its uncovered windows gazing emptily across the front yard and street, still waiting for somebody to turn on the lights.

Wait, she shouts. Wait! The little girl’s hair glows white under the streetlight and Corrine crooks a finger around her bare foot as it swings next to her daddy’s knee. When the young man tries to step around her, Corrine gently touches his arm. Is the baby all right? How’s Mary Rose? She is breathing hard and holding the stitch in her side. Listen, she gasps, tell your wife if she needs anything, anything at all, she can count on me. All she has to do is ask, and I will be right there.

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