For lunch, Nelda asked to share a grilled cheese with the baby. Ali, still full from breakfast, ordered nothing but coffee. As Edie pocketed her order pad, she gave Liam an affectionate pat on the head. “This kid is cute as a button,” she said. “I’ll bet he takes after his daddy.” As Edie walked away, she didn’t glimpse the dismay that flashed across Nelda’s face at the well-meaning remark. Ali did and knew that her mother had stepped in it. So that’s it, she thought. Something to do with the father. Some kid knocked Haley up and then declined to do the right thing.

Since Edie had already broached the subject, Ali went ahead and followed up. “I suppose this is the same old story,” she said. “The boy gets off scot-free, and the girl is left holding the bag and the B-A-B-Y.” Ali didn’t know exactly how old Liam was or how much he’d be able to understand. Spelling some of the critical words seemed like a good thing.

For a moment, rather than replying, Nelda busied herself with doling out a few of the oyster crackers to Liam. “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said at last. “It was actually a lot worse. Do you remember what I asked you about this morning?”

“You mean about good and evil?”

Nelda nodded. “I think most people believe that good comes from good and evil comes from evil, but that’s not necessarily true. My husband, Liam, was one of the nicest people who ever lived. And I consider myself a good person, too, but our daughter, Patsy, was pure evil. Still is pure evil. And yet Haley is her daughter. And Liam here is her grandson.”

Liam took that as a cue to toss a handful of crackers over his head. And when his grandmother-his great-grandmother, Ali realized-chided him about it, he gave her a grin punctuated by tiny white teeth. Shaking her head, Nelda gathered up the crackers and gave him the menu and the Crayolas.

Ali sensed that this was the reason Nelda Harris had driven here-to tell Haley’s story, whatever it might be. Now, though, with Nelda seeming to have second thoughts, Ali realized that it must be worse than a teenage affair gone bad. It must be a case of rape, Ali theorized. She knew from her years in the news business how difficult it could be for rape victims and their families to discuss such things.

“What happened?” Ali asked gently.

Nelda bit her lip. “She was a problem from the day she was born,” she said at last. “We tried to love her, but it wasn’t easy. She was a colicky, cranky baby who never slept. And once she got to school, she was a biter and a fighter. By the time Patsy was a teenager, she was completely out of control.”

When Nelda first started speaking, Ali had thought she was referring to Haley. It wasn’t until that last sentence that Ali understood Nelda was talking about her own daughter rather than Haley, her granddaughter.

“Patsy dropped out of high school her sophomore year,” Nelda continued. “Nothing we said made any difference. As far as she was concerned, she had learned everything there was to learn. Besides, she had taken up with an older guy-a married older guy, a long-haul truck driver named Wally Marsh. Patsy had two abortions before she was twenty. By then Wally had divorced his wife. He and Patsy got married, and the next thing we knew, Haley arrived on the scene.”

There was a short pause in the narrative while Edie delivered Nelda’s grilled cheese and poured more coffee. Nelda cut half the sandwich into pieces and then passed those to Liam, who stopped coloring long enough to mow through them.

“I knew before Patsy ever delivered that she’d be a terrible mother, and she was. She had this strange idea that as soon as she had the baby, Wally was going to straighten up and fly right. He didn’t.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “As my father likes to say, once a cheat, always a cheat.”

“And now Patsy was stuck at home with a baby while Wally was right back to doing his cheating with someone else. So Patsy came up with this harebrained idea of going to school and becoming a truck driver, too. I’m sure she figured that once she was out on the road with Wally, it would be that much easier to keep an eye on him. She came to me and asked me if I’d look after Haley so she could get her license.

“Liam and I talked it over. We knew what kind of a person she was-mean and vindictive. Liam said that if she ever got mad at us, she’d take Haley away and we’d never see her again. We told Patsy that the only way we’d look after Haley was if she made it official-if she and Wally signed over their parental rights to us. We told her they could have visitation privileges, but they needed to make us Haley’s official guardians. And that’s what happened. They both signed the paperwork, and then off they went while we set about raising Haley.”

“From what I see, you did a good job of it,” Ali said.

Nelda nodded. “We still had the farm then. Patsy always hated living there, but Haley loved it. She worshipped her grandpa-followed him everywhere, rode on the tractor with him. And when he got sick, she sat with him for hours on end. Just sat with him, telling him stories that she made up on the spot.” A tear appeared in the corner of Nelda’s eye. She brushed it away with the back of her hand.

Liam peered at her with a look of concern. “Owee?” he asked.

“No, honey,” she said. “Grandma’s fine. Just eat your sandwich.” As he returned his attention to the food, Nelda returned to her story. “At first Patsy and Wally came to visit every month or so, but then their visits started getting farther and farther apart. By the fourth year, they came for Haley’s birthday and for Christmas, and that was it. But it didn’t matter, not really. By the time she was five, she barely knew them. Liam and I were her parents, the only ones who mattered.

“But we started hearing rumors about Patsy and Wally-that things were going haywire with them. Tuttle’s a small town. Wally’s first wife still lived there with his two sons. First we heard that Patsy and Wally were having marital difficulties of some kind. The next thing we knew, Wally was shot dead at a truck stop near Dallas. It turned out that they had been doing land-office business, hauling drugs along with their other cargo. Wally had been ready to settle down and buy a farm somewhere. He bought the farm all right. Patsy and her new boyfriend, Roger Sims, saw to it. All the ugly drug dealing came to light during the trial, and Patsy and Roger both got sent up twenty-years to life for second-degree murder.

“The whole thing nearly killed poor Grandpa,” Nelda continued after a pause. “He wanted to pull up stakes, sell out, and move somewhere else, somewhere far away. We came here looking for a place to move. We went to Prescott for the Fourth of July rodeo and even up to Jerome because he wanted to see a ghost town. But he loved Cottonwood. We both did, and we were thinking about coming here to live when he got sick. Lung cancer. I knew as soon as we got the diagnosis that moving away wasn’t an option. Besides, as I told him at the time, what Patsy did or didn’t do was no reflection on us, and the people who thought it was weren’t worth bothering with anyway.”

Ali was struggling to keep track of this long, convoluted story while wondering how any of it could have contributed to Haley’s turning down the scholarship.

“So for a long time, we just tried to keep going. Liam was getting sicker and sicker. It was all I could do to take care of him and Haley and look after the farm, too. Unlike her mother, Haley was good as gold-sweet and loving-and a huge help. When we lost Liam, she was only twelve, but she took care of me more than I took care of her. I don’t know how I would have made it if she hadn’t been there.” Nelda sighed. “I don’t know how other people deal with having a child in prison. The way I did it was I pretty much put Patsy out of my mind. I guess I sort of thought they put people in prison to be punished and learn their lessons so they won’t make the same kinds of mistakes again. When they come out, they’re supposed to be rehabilitated, right? And then two years after Liam died, the year Haley turned fourteen, who should turn up on my doorstep but Patsy. They had let her out on good behavior. And because she was so needy and because she was my child and because I’m a good person, I let her come home.”