“I’ll call the Feds tomorrow,” Quinn said. “We didn’t have a lot of luck with the DA.”

“I wonder why?”

“No kidding.”

“You look a million miles away,” she said. “You doing OK? I’m worried about you.”

“Right here,” Quinn said, reaching for Ophelia’s hand and pulling her back into him close. He wrapped his arm around her stomach and started to kiss the back of her neck, feeling her shudder a bit as he placed a hand up under her T-shirt. Her stomach was flat and hard, Ophelia inhaling a deep breath, closing her eyes, tilting her head back into Quinn. Quinn could taste her skin on his lips and moved his hand over the first button of her Levi’s, and then the second, and then he slid his hand between her legs. Ophelia became a bit unstable on her feet, reaching back with both hands, arching her back, and feeling for Quinn’s hair and face and then turning to him, Quinn kissing her harder now and finding her in his fingertips, the water audibly boiling on the stove, Quinn hoping like hell she didn’t hear it. But a buzzer sounded and she pushed him away, catching her breath, buttoning her jeans with one hand and smoothing down her T-shirt with the other. She picked up the paring knife and pointed it straight at Quinn’s heart.

“Sit,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stay.”

Hondo peered up from the couch, his rabies tags jingling on his collar. Quinn smiled.

“Drink your beer,” she said. “I’ll let you know when supper is ready.”

Quinn took his beer and found a spot on the couch next to Hondo. He picked up the remote and found 3:10 to Yuma just at the scene when Van Heflin agrees to take Glenn Ford back to prison. Seemed like as good a place as any to begin.

I appreciated you helping,” Caddy said early the next morning. “I could’ve gotten Boom when he gets off at the County Barn, but it’ll be nice to get this all distributed before then. It’s supposed to get down to five degrees tonight.”

“Remind me why we live here again?” Diane Tull said, driving her old Ford, loaded down with boxes of warm clothes from The River and twelve radiators the Jericho General Store had donated. “I could sell seed and feed down in Florida.”

“There are times when I think this county is a paradise,” Caddy said, leaning against the passenger-door window, farmland and long stretches of pine zipping by. “But then you see the ugliness of what we’ve done to this place, all the logging, busted-up trailers, and stripping of anything that can make a buck. We didn’t need a tornado to rip this town apart. We just needed a few more good years.”

“God gives us spring to make amends for it,” Diane said. “The wisteria and the daffodils and the trees coming alive again. It makes you remember this is a fertile place. That’s the reason our crazy ancestors staked out this land, thinking their families could thrive here. They could grow their own food, hunt what meat they needed.”

“Our people came here from North Carolina in 1846,” Caddy said. “Before that, they were kicked out of Scotland and Ireland. My momma’s family got some Indian in her, too. Choctaw.”

“I got some Cherokee,” Diane said. “Maybe the reason only this one strand of my hair is white. You think I should dye it?”

“No way,” Caddy said. “That’s your signature. I think it makes you look hot.”

“A hot momma at fifty?” Diane said, driving with two fingers on the wheel, looking for the turnoff on past the Richards place. “Hmm.”

“I don’t mean to get personal,” Caddy said. “But you been dating any?”

“I was seeing this fella from Tupelo last year, nice hair and good teeth, but I found out he was married and had two kids,” she said. “I met him online and he said he was divorced. But things started happening that didn’t add up. He’d take phone calls outside, come over at weird times, and never stay the night. I finally saw on his cell phone where he’d been texting his wife that he was at a tool convention in Atlanta. When he came back and started to love on me, I told him the convention was closed and he needed to hit the road. And take his goddamn tool with him. He started crying like a little boy, saying he’d been having personal issues, his wife was cold and all that. But, Caddy, I just don’t have time for that shit.”

Caddy was silent. She stared out the window, passing more clear-cut acres and ugly logging roads twisting into the hills. Seemed like everything of worth in Tibbehah was cut down, loaded on a truck, and taken out of the state. This place must’ve been a garden back during the Choctaws’ time, before a backhoe and bulldozer could rip the guts out of a place.

“I’m through with dating and men and all that mess,” Caddy said. “I miss Jamey Dixon every waking second. But to think about ever being with anyone else makes me want to just throw up.”

“Hadn’t been long, Caddy,” Diane said, slowing, taking a left turn down the county road to Fate. They would drop off the heaters at the Primitive Baptist Church and stop off at ten houses who’d requested cold-weather clothes. Caddy had the names of the families listed in a spiral notebook in her hand.

“Men are good for two things and two things only,” Caddy said. “Both starting with the letter F. Since I got myself clean, I’ve learned to fix plenty on my own.”

Diane pulled into the dirt lot in front of the little Primitive Baptist Church, a white clapboard building with a small hand-painted sign at the roadside. There were already twenty people outside, waiting in the cold, for them to arrive with the heaters. The preacher, a wiry old man named Shelton Graves, met Caddy and they went through the list together about which families were in luck, which ones would need more sweaters and blankets for the next few days. Mississippi wasn’t a place that prepped much for cold weather—the bad nights, the freezing nights, people treated like some kind of strange, cruel event. Back during the ice storm of ’94, the worst winter weather most people in the state had ever seen, some houses way out in the county didn’t have power for nearly two months.

Pastor Graves and Diane Tull pulled the radiator boxes off the truck and passed them into the hands of a thick-bodied bald man in a flannel shirt and Dale Jr. cap who stacked them neatly. Caddy had jumped up into the back of the truck, sorting through the boxes, looking for the baby clothes to hand over to one of the women who was waiting. Two more boxes, clearly marked in Magic Marker, were dropped off, and then Diane and Caddy were circling out of the lot, with a wave to the pastor and his people.

“What would people do around here without churches?” Caddy said.

“Starve,” Diane said.

“I don’t know if the South is as religious as it is practical.”

“Southerners have never been good at practical,” Diane said. “We’re stubborn, clannish people who don’t like being told what to do. And that makes us easy targets for the greedy.”

“I still believe there’s a lot of good,” Caddy said, smiling. “That took me some while to find out. But if you look for it, believe in it, you’ll find it. You look for the darkness and that shit will swallow you whole.”

Diane put both hands on the wheel, making a tricky sharp turn, the truck a little hard to handle, as it never had power steering, rolling like a leaden tank down the busted dirt road. “I just like to keep an eye out,” she said. “Surprises have never been much fun.”