“You ever heard Diane sing?” Ophelia said, wrapping her arms around her body. It was a warm night for January, but it was still January. Quinn sat down next to her and put an arm around her. “She’s got a gift.”

The trees were leafless and skeletal, skies turning a reddish copper with long wisps of clouds. “Yep,” Quinn said. “There’s something about her that reminds me a bit of June Carter Cash.”

“Most people say Jessi Colter,” Caddy said, piping up, pulling a cigarette out of the pack and giving Quinn a Don’t you dare lecture me, you cigar-smoking bastard stare.

“Just because you smoke Cubans doesn’t make ’em any less dangerous.”

“Dominicans,” Quinn said. “Cubans are illegal.”

Jason waved away the smoke with his little hand and jumped off the picnic bench, pointing up into the tree. “There’s two of ’em. Look, Uncle Quinn. Pow. Pow. Pow. I can get both.”

“And Boom?” Ophelia asked. “He’s doing OK?”

“Hadn’t drank in a long while,” Quinn said. “Says he’s fine with that.”

“I couldn’t get by without him at The River,” Caddy said. “He comes by every day after work. Helps out on Saturday and after church, too.”

“You do the true Lord’s work.” Ophelia plucked the cigarette from Caddy’s hand and took a puff. “Y’all feed the poor and the sick and give people a place to stay when they have nowhere to go. You don’t need to be a man or go to Bible school for that.”

She handed Caddy back her cigarette.

Little Jason now talked about hunting deer and wild turkey and maybe he could buy that bowie knife at the Farm & Ranch. “Like the one in the book you read,” Jason said. “About the king and that knife in the rock?”

Jean stepped out onto the porch and called them to supper. Quinn caught just a glimpse of his mother in the fading light, blue jeans and an old gray sweatshirt. Dressing up was a rare thing for her, only church, weddings, and funerals. His father had been gone nearly twenty years, and despite some men coming and leaving, she preferred to keep to herself. She was a tallish redhead, a little heavier, a few more wrinkles in her face over the years, but men still turned and looked at Jean Colson. She yelled again and stepped back inside.

Jason didn’t seem excited about supper but walked on ahead with Caddy, Hondo trying to scoot into the kitchen door but someone pushing him back. Hondo, a coat of gray and black patches, ran up to Quinn and nuzzled his leg, flashing the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

“Hondo’s been banished from supper,” Quinn said. “Jason was feeding him under the table.”

“You always let him clean your plates.”

“Yeah, but Jason was giving him too much,” Quinn said. “That dog is getting fat.”

Ophelia rubbed Hondo’s ears and told Quinn not to talk that way. Quinn didn’t say anything, just leaned in and kissed her hard on that tight red mouth. Glad to be alone with her again.

“How’d the meeting with Mr. Stevens go?” she asked.

“He said me and Lillie got nothing to worry about.”

“You believe that?”

“Hell no,” Quinn said, standing. “But, c’mon, let’s eat. I hear the meat loaf tastes like shit.”

•   •   •

When Diane Tull got home at midnight, his bright green Plymouth Road Runner was parked out front, him waiting on her and wanting to talk again. She’d told him to please call first, that he couldn’t just come on over when he was lonely or bored and wanted to break out the Jim Beam and cigarettes and discuss his troubles. She told him last time she wasn’t goddamn Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Phil, she was just a working woman trying to have a little fun in the middle years and that bringing up the past wasn’t part of the grand plan. But there he was again, slumped behind the wheel, probably drunk but trying to hide it with the breath mints and chewing gum, trying to walk straight, be focused, and have them talk about Lori. Again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, starting off the conversation like that. Who does that? I’m sorry. Really?

“I’m not in the mood, Hank,” she said. “Can we let it alone for the night?”

“I started on it again,” he said. “My daughter came to me in a dream.”

“She did to me, too,” Diane said. “For a long time. But I finally got brave enough to ask her to leave. And you know what? She did. Lori hasn’t come back since.”

“May I come in?”

“It’s late,” she said. “I got work in the morning.”

“You sure are all dolled up.”

“I sang tonight,” she said. “At the Southern Star. I told you about it last week. You said you might come and listen. I was looking for you. Might’ve been able to talk there.”

“I’m real sorry,” he said. “I’ve been a mess. I bet you sure were something. I saw you and that preacher sing last year, that one who had that church in a barn and got himself shot?”

“Jamey Dixon.”

“Yeah, Dixon,” Stillwell said. “Y’all sounded pitch-perfect on those old hymns.”

Diane leaned into the doorway of her 1920s bungalow, complete with rose trellis and porch swing, and just looked at him. He had a haphazard way of dressing, new blue jeans, an old Marshall Tucker Band tee, and a mackinaw coat that stunk of cigarettes. He had longish red hair and a red beard, both showing some gray. “Come on in,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

“I just wanted to see how things went,” he said. “With the sheriff. Did he know about what happened? He had to have known about it. Had to bother him, thinking this was all left unsettled in the county.”

“It happened three years before he was even born, Mr. Stillwell,” she said. “Sit down in the kitchen and I’ll get you something to drink. You hungry?”

“Water is fine.”

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get you a Coors.”

“OK.” Stillwell licked his lips. “Appreciate it.”

He took a seat at the small kitchen table, slumped at the shoulders, hands laced before him. A hanging silver lamp in the center of the room shining over him. She opened up the refrigerator and grabbed a couple bottles, popped the tops, and placed one in front of him.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he said, seeming embarrassed to take a drink. “You can ask me whatever you want. Me and you, we’re almost family.”

“We’re not family,” she said. “We just have a pretty ugly connection. That’s worse than being kin.”

“That we do.”

“Why do you keep coming to me?” she said. “Why bring all this up inside me? You do realize I left this shithole town for twenty years because I was tired of heading to the store for bread and milk and getting eyes of fucking pity. You know how many times people started laying hands on me in the damn cereal aisle, wanting to pray, when all I wanted was a goddamn box of Frosted Flakes?”

Stillwell licked his lips more and then drank a few swallows of the Coors. “I don’t rightly know,” he said. “I think it had something to do with the storm.”

“The storm?” she said. “How’s that?”

He coughed and gave a loose, weak smile. She drank some beer while she waited for him to think on things, mull over what he wanted to say. A beer always helped her come down from the high of singing, this group of them getting it right, finding a nice feel for some Haggard, that old bottle letting everyone down, feeling no pain at closing time. And finishing things off, closing out the last set with a bluegrass version of “Mama Tried.” She and J.T. harmonizing on the chorus, J.T. setting down his bass for a mandolin, making each note sound like the turning of pins in a kid’s music box.

“I lost everything in that storm,” he said. “I knew then there might be no more time to make sense of it. I got to make sense of it before I’m gone. You remember how we used to always light candles for Lori every year on the Fourth. And then people just stopped showing up.”

He looked down at the table, took a breath, and he started to cry. After a while, he wiped his eyes and his face and drank some more beer.