The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Kyle Minor A Day Meant to Do Less

From The Gettysburg Review

Reverend Jack Wenderoth carried his mother into the bathroom and sat her on the closed toilet lid, and then he began to undress her. She was wearing her threadbare old housedress, the red one she had worn when he was a child and that had now faded to pink. He had bought her gowns, bathrobes, cotton pajamas, other housedresses, but she would not wear them. She said no by making sounds in the back of her throat. The sounds were terrible, the sounds someone made when she was dying. Which she was.

He knelt at her feet. Her body slumped, and her shoulders tilted to the left, toward the sink and the table that held it and the sharp Formica edgework. He raised himself from his knees and reached up and righted her. Her eyes were alert but not bright. He noticed that he was avoiding them. He noticed that he was noticing himself quite a bit and her not so much. It took effort not to notice her, but it was hard on him to notice her. It required him to acquaint himself with the droop of her face’s left side, the gurgling sound her throat made involuntarily, and worst of all the foul smell of her body. He had noticed the smell a few minutes earlier, and that’s why he was undressing her.

He did not want to undress her. It was the first time he had undressed her. His wife, Julie, usually undressed her. His mother used to say, when they were young and courting, “Jack and Julie, like the song.” It was not a song he knew. He knew “Jack and Jill,” the nursery rhyme she had sung to him when he was a boy, to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” His hands were on her shoulders, righting her, and yet he was touching her with as little of himself as he could. His own body was so far from hers that righting her with his hands made his back and shoulders ache.

He thought he should maybe hold her for a minute. She was watching him with those eyes. He thought maybe she did not want him to hold her. He did not know if she wanted him to wash her. She was not making the noises, and she knew why they were in the bathroom. He had told her. To hold her he would have to straddle her with his legs. He was very aware of the proximity, already, of his parts to hers. When he was small he would lay his head in her lap, and she would stroke his hair, but when he turned twelve he tried to lay his head in her lap so she would stroke his hair and she said there would be no more of that. When he asked her why, she said, “Because you’re too old now.”

So he stood for another moment, righting her but not holding her. He said, “Mother, I’m going to take off your shoes and socks now, all right?”

Her lips moved but not to form a word. He thought what she was giving was permission. He couldn’t be sure, but the smell of her was all over him. He took his hands from her shoulders. She did not topple. He knelt again, and though he did not want to, he wanted to: he put his fingers to his nose and smelled them. They smelled like her body. She was not looking down at him. He did not want her to see that he was smelling his fingers. He was ashamed of the act, and he did not know why. No one had seen except him.

“Your shoes, Mother,” he said. He had never called her mother, not in his whole life. He called her mama, or, later, mom. When he was very young, he called her mommy, but he had not called her that for a long time. His father had called her Francine, and everyone else called her Franny. She was wearing house slippers, fairly new ones he had bought for her. They were rubber-soled and lined with furry cotton. She could not wear them in the winter, because they built up a charge, and she gave and received a shock whenever she was touched.

He took the slippers from her feet. Then he began to pull at the toe of the black sock on her right foot. She made the gurgling sound. No. He let go of the sock.

“Does it hurt, Mother?” he said.

She did not say anything.

“Does it hurt?”

Nothing.

He stood again and looked at her in the eyes. Mother. “Mom,” he said, more kindly. “Does it hurt?”

She winked her right eyelid, twice. Slowly. That was something new.

“I saw that, Mom,” he said. “Can you do it again? I want to be sure.”

She winked the eyelid again, twice, slowly. Then she lost control of it, and it began to twitch.

“Well, that’s something,” he said, but mostly to himself. “Okay,” he said, to himself, but then, louder, for her: “Okay.”

She did it a third time, the eyelid, maybe to affirm her yes, maybe to stop the twitching. “I see it,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I’m going to wash you now. I’m going to do it, but not if you don’t want me to. I’m going to take that sock off by unrolling it from the top, all right?”

A fourth time she blinked twice. A regular conversation.

He knelt again. This time he began at the top of the sock, and unrolled it slowly down her calf. When he touched her there, he could feel the muscle contract a little. Her skin was cold. He unrolled the sock to her heel. Then he put his other hand beneath her foot and lifted it. He was careful around the heel to stretch the fabric, but when he reached the arch of her foot, she made the gurgling sound again, and he stopped. She inhaled sharply. He was hurting his mother.

The sock had to come off. He tried again, this time stretching the fabric as carefully around the arch as he had around the heel. When sock cleared skin, he saw something like a rash, a reddish-purple blemish that covered most of the arch, surrounded by a deep yellowish-purple ring, a deep, deep bruise.

“Mom,” he said, “you’ve got a nasty sore down here. On the arch of your foot. It’s bruised. It’s a bad one.”

He patted her calf to reassure her, but she tensed at his touch, so he stopped. He said, “The other one now, Mom,” and began to work on the other shoe and sock.

Her silence bothered him almost as much as the throat noises had. When he was young her voice was a constant, a drone that must have been the same kind of comfort for her that the television had been for him, in college, when he was lonely and could not sleep without the sound of it. When he was young she chattered, and what mattered to her — he could see it now for the first time — what mattered to her was not the content of her talk, but just its continuation. He remembered something his sister Millie had often said about her, uncharitably: “She just talks to hear the sound of her own voice.” But that wasn’t true, not entirely. Her voice, which had irritated him so often, especially in his adolescence, when he began to think of her as being more and more ignorant the more books he read, was now, in his memory, taking on some kind of a musical quality, a soft companionable drone.

He took off her right shoe, then began to unroll her sock. He thought that if she could talk now, about nothing — no, that was uncharitable — about, say, the shower curtains, how they were starting to yellow, and how that was the problem with translucent shower curtains, the way they yellowed so quickly and needed to be replaced so often, unlike shower curtains patterned in mostly solid colors... if she could talk now, and say things like this, she would be bringing comfort not only to herself, but also to him.

So he said, “Mom, have you noticed the shower curtains?” It felt forced, but he pushed on. “They’re starting to yellow, and that’s the problem, I think, with translucent shower curtains...”

The shoes and the socks were off now, and — this was most remarkable — her breathing had become less labored. Maybe he was imagining it. It was barely discernible, this change in her breathing, but it meant something to him. He heard himself saying, “Julie was thinking of buying some shower curtains to match the hand towels. Maybe something forest green, like the towels, with some purple accents,” and it was automatic, this talk. It was not the talk he talked, not usually, but it was the talk that was coming from his mouth. It was received talk, like telephone hellos and goodbyes, or how are you doings and see you laters passing between half-courteous strangers on the street. He found that it comforted him the way he imagined the same kind of talk had comforted his mother. It made him uneasy even as it comforted him. He kept it up because it seemed to comfort her.

The shoes and socks were off, but that meant he would soon have to take off the housedress. He had been moving so slowly, and he knew this was why. He was about to confront his mother’s nakedness. To be, in a sense, the cause of it. He considered what other tasks he might perform to delay unbuttoning the front of the house-dress and sliding it from her body. He was still talking — “... the Formica is so out of date, and Julie thinks it might be nice to refinish all the countertops in the house with tile, but that kind of work takes so much time, so I was thinking about maybe vinyl laminate...” — but mostly he was thinking of what else he could do, and then — of course! — he remembered the bath water.

Julie had given him instructions before she left to pick up a few things they had forgotten the night before at the house of their friends, the Marinos. She had said maybe two inches of water, like a bath drawn for a baby. Make the water warm, but not lukewarm, but not too hot either. Test it by dipping two fingers in the bath water near the faucet and splashing a little on the tender skin on the inside of the arm, just below the wrist, where the crossing blue veins could be seen beneath the skin.

Or at least beneath his pale skin. He was still talking automatically, at his mother but not necessarily to her, but his mind was on his skin. He straightened and folded the black socks so he could turn his palms toward his face and get a good look at his own arms, how pale they were, how he had always hated their color. It was a color he had inherited from her. He could look beyond his arms and see the pale skin of his mother’s legs. They were the same color, his arms and her legs. He wondered if she had ever hated the color of her skin and almost asked her, then thought better of it.

He was always thinking better of it, had always been thinking better of it his whole life. On Sundays he preached sermons that revealed, say, how love hurt at four o’clock in the morning when Julie was still asleep, her hair piled up on the pillow, and him knowing he had to be off to accompany the out-of-town family of an indigent killed beneath a bridge to identify the body at the morgue, and that he might not be home again until after she had awakened and gone about her day and gone back to sleep again. In those sermons he gave away parts of himself more intimate than those he was willing to share with his mother, except in that public space. He looked at his arms and her legs and wanted to tell her a closely held secret, which was that when he drove the interstates on the way to hospital visits and ministers’ meetings and church softball games, he often as not would play cassette tapes of black singers like Al Green or Marvin Gave or, hell, James Brown. He’d drive down the road and let himself imagine he was himself some famous maestro of soul, be transported to what he imagined must be some rundown bar in Detroit or, who knows. Watts, someplace he had never been and would never go and which for all he knew was nothing like whatever it was he was trying to imagine. But he’d be there, in the car, singing for an audience of twelve or twenty, an appreciative audience to be sure, except maybe a few drunks. And here was the centerpiece of the fantasy. The skin, his skin, would have somehow darkened to a deep brown, a skin tone he imagined would give him access to whole worlds he could never know, and one that would not embarrass him under the lights of that dirty club the way it had always embarrassed him at the beach or on the sandlots or anytime he had to wear shorts to play some ball game or to feign comfort at some overly casual social function.

He was looking at his mother’s legs and talking about kitchen remodeling, and then without even finishing his sentence, he stopped talking and began humming. At first he was not aware of what he was humming, and then he realized that what he was humming was “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye. It was not a song his mother would have approved of his singing or even knowing. At once he was aware of the, oh, three dozen ironies that wrapped themselves around his choice of song to hum, of all things Freudian and Jungian, all those blowhards, that his seemingly subconscious choice of that tune might imply. The oedipal and the — good great hell, what was he doing?

What he was doing was undressing his mother. What he was doing was not undressing his mother; he could see that well enough. So could she probably. He had been in the bathroom for nearly fifteen minutes and had only managed to take off her socks and shoes. He had not even begun to run the bath water.

He finished folding the socks and placed them neatly on top of the shoes and kept humming Marvin Gaye since no other tune came readily to mind and since he knew, really, it didn’t mean anything, and because it was a fine tune, and because, strangely enough, his mother was starting to relax a little. He could see it in her posture, and he could see it in her face.

He turned the hot and the cold knobs and tried to find the right temperature. The phone rang. He let it ring but turned off the water and stopped humming and kicked open the bathroom door with his foot so he could hear the answering machine when it picked up. Technically, he was working. But, technically, he was always working. Always on call, at least. He heard Julie’s voice on the machine — we’ll get back with you as soon as we can, and God bless — that last part, God bless, always irritating him because it was a cliché so well worn that it didn’t mean anything anymore; except it did mean something to Julie, which irritated him, too, but not so much that he would say anything to her about it.

The machine beeped, and he heard Lindsay Marino, a parishioner for whom both he and Julie had some affection. Lindsay and her husband, Tom, too. A fine couple. She was saying, “...Art Miller, room 319, Good Samaritan Hospital...” Art was Lindsay’s husband’s uncle, and a real curmudgeon, the kind of guy who would invite you over to pray for his, say, lack of appetite, then get cranky when you said, “Art, buddy, I’m pretty thirsty. Would you mind if I got a glass of water from your tap?”

Art Miller, Lindsay was saying, had collapsed this morning. Right away they had thought heart attack, but it turned out to be a false alarm, some sort of panic attack that anyway felt like a heart attack, and Art wasn’t himself so convinced that it wasn’t. “He’s asking for you,” Lindsay was saying. “This is rich, really rich. Jack, but he says my prayers aren’t quite enough to get him through the night. He needs the man of God. He keeps saying that. Bring me the man of God!’ I thought you’d get a kick out of that. So, for serious. Jack, can you come over to Good Sam? He’s driving me nuts and I need to get out of here by three so I can take Mike Junior to baseball practice.”

The machine beeped again, and he looked at his mother sitting on the toilet lid and could not discern any response coming from her. He wanted to say, Come on, Momma, say something disapproving, but of course he would not. Instead, he said it himself. “Art Miller,” he said. “Now there’s one guy who can wail.”

Still, she did not respond, but he thought maybe it gave her some satisfaction. It gave him some satisfaction. And was his mother any less a member of his congregation than Art Miller? A man who was in the hospital, sure, but who was, in any case, in better health, even on this panic-attack day, than she was on this or any other day. Jack could not be sure how much she was or was not engaged with all that surrounded her. Already her eyes seemed to be less alert than when he brought her into the bathroom, but how can a person tell, anyway, exactly what another person’s eyes reveal? Perhaps she was growing tired, or maybe he was growing tired and looking at her eyes differently.

He turned the hot and cold knobs again and tested the water. When he had regulated the temperature to his liking, he put the stopper in the tub. Then he tested the water again with his hands, adjusted the water some more. Checked the stopper. Measured the depth of the water with his index finger. Tested the temperature again. Made a tiny adjustment to the cold knob. Just a little more cold, so it wouldn’t be too hot. In defiance of the words of God as reported by the crazy, exiled, and starved apostle John in the Book of Revelation, Jack’s least favorite book of the Bible because it so defied anything like rational meaning: “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” No. What he was after was something like lukewarm, just a little warmer than lukewarm and two inches deep.

The water had risen to one inch. He had run out of things to do with his hands. He noticed that his back was turned to her. He knew how intentional it was, his back being turned to her. It was turned, he realized, because he was still trying to avoid looking at her.

He forced himself to turn and look at her. There she was. She was sitting on the toilet seat, half-slumped, or at least not nearly as upright as he had left her, resting her weight against the back of the toilet. She was looking at him.

He looked down at her feet and saw that they were bare. Of course they were bare: he had taken off her shoes and socks. But were they cold? Should he cover them?

Then he knew that he was looking at her feet because she was not her feet. She was her face and eyes. She was not her body — God no — not this body, not his mother. But if she was not this body, what was she? What had she become? And if the mother he had known — the mom, the momma, the mommy — had vacated this body, who was it then who sat before him?

Then he knew that he was letting himself be drawn deeper and deeper into these abstractions because it was another way of not looking at her. It was a way of looking but not looking. Of seeing but letting sight lead him to a place not present.

The tub was filling with water behind him, and he turned to see how high he had let the water get. It was four inches, probably. He turned off the faucets, then reached down and pulled the stopper. It wasn’t the act of pulling the stopper that got him, that made his throat catch in the same way he had seen hundreds of other throats catch in a way so predictable, it had long since ceased to move him. It was the sound of that stopper. The plop and the soft sucking that followed.

He turned again and saw her. She had not moved. His own eyes had not filled with tears, and he knew they would not because he had long since trained himself to do a duty when a duty was called for, and now was the time. The time was now. “Now, Mom,” he said. “After I stop the tub, okay?”

She winked her eye twice.

He plugged the tub, and it was about two inches, just right. Then he moved toward her and smelled her stink and put his face near hers, his eyes at the level of hers. He couldn’t help but think that the only thing like what he was about to do, what he was in fact doing... the only thing that he could recall from his whole experience of life was a certain kind of lovemaking he had once known with Julie, a lovemaking of the most intimate kind, a love-making that all but precludes knowledge of the body in favor of a different kind of lostness. A lovemaking punctuated only by the involuntary blinking that for brief but too-long moments breaks the illusion, the spell, of complete connection, two sets of eyes locking upon one another in near-inviolate attention while bodies perform their lesser task. The pleasure of that deepest kind of intimacy, sure, but the terror, too. The complete giving and undoing of self.

He said, “I’m going to put you in the bath now, Momma,” but what he meant was harder: I’m going to take off your clothes now.

He began to unbutton the big white fake pearl buttons that ran the length of her housedress, starting with the top button, near her neck. He looked into her eyes as he did it. She looked back into his, too. She did not make a sound or wink her eye. She did not do anything but breathe shallowly and watch his eyes.

He worked his way down the front of her, button by button. He was sure to keep a tension on the fabric with his fingers. He did not want to touch the skin on the front of her, only button, fabric, button, fabric. He did not know what he was so afraid of. He had been at so many bedsides, seen so many frail bodies uncovered. He did not know what he was so afraid of.

But then he did know. What he was afraid of was his mother’s body. He reached the button near her waist, and then his arms could go no farther without his body moving down with them. He crouched down and tried to keep his eyes locked upon hers, but of course his eyes were at the level of her wrecked, sagging breasts. He was struck by something his father had told him, once, when they had gone on a fishing trip and talked once, only once, about things they never otherwise discussed. His mother’s family had been poor, themselves the children of day laborers in rural Kentucky, escaped to better lives in Florida, where his father was a well-point foreman. They had taken up with a circle of friends who tried to convince his mother not to nurse because they found the practice disturbing. Instead, they were weaning their children at two months and offering bottles of Karo syrup and cow’s milk. “Your mother didn’t take to that talk,” his father had said. “Two years she got the silent treatment, but she said, ‘No baby of mine.’ ”

Now, eye level with his mother’s breasts, he could not ignore his own speculations about what might have passed between them before he was old enough to know. He continued to unbutton, now the waist, now the lap, now the knees.

The housedress came apart then. The flaps of it flanked his mother on either side. She was sitting with her legs uncrossed. He was almost kneeling now, and his eyes continued to seek hers. The next thing he had to do was lift her and put her in the tub. As he stood he lost her eyes and found himself — for a moment, for less than a moment — staring between her legs. She was almost hairless there, but for some stray white wisps and one large alarming black one.

He did not back away. He reached up, toward her, and pulled her arms free of the sleeves. Then he placed his left arm beneath both her legs. With his right arm he encircled her, lifting carefully so he was holding most of her weight under both her armpits. He lifted her and carried her to the bathtub and lowered her into the bath water and took the washcloth and reached down to touch her body with it. She began to tremble as he moved it toward her, and he said, “Shh, shh.” What word could he say to help her be okay? He said, “Mommy, Mommy. It’s all right, Mommy.”

Then her body began to convulse in the water.

Franny Wenderoth had a secret she kept from everyone: the memory of a tobacco field in summer in Kentucky, she running, and a boy, her cousin, giving chase. It started as a game she called house. They played in the kitchen, her mother’s kitchen in the house on John Claremont Hollow Road, a hundred feet from the tobacco field where her father sometimes worked as a day laborer. She said, “You be the mommy, I’ll be the daddy.”

Her cousin blanched at this. His name was Roy. He said, “I’m not being no mommy.” So it was agreed. He would be the daddy, she the mommy. He was eleven years old, she nine. It did not occur to her that they were too old to be playing such a child’s game, because it did not occur to her that she was anything but a child, or that he was, or that there was anything but a child to be.

They were in the kitchen, and she put wood in the stove and lit it, and he stoked the flames until they were burning. Her mother was somewhere; she couldn’t remember where. Her mother was often enough somewhere. Her mother and her father were gone most of the time, but then so was everyone’s mother and father. Roy’s mother was laid up and was around all the time. His mother made him fetch her things, and more and more Roy did like his seventeen-year-old brother, Donny — a bad seed, that Donny Prather, her father would say — and found someplace else to be.

“Put the eggs on,” she said. He did like she said and cracked the imaginary eggs over the griddle. “Now the bacon,” she said, and he did likewise.

Her father would beat her with a switch, and probably Roy, too, if he knew they were burning the wood after all it took to keep it cut and stacked and get the pile high enough for all they would need for winter. Roy stoked the fire some more, and she got nervous and said, “Bacon’s done. Roy, and eggs are starting to burn.”

It was getting hot in the kitchen. She was starting to panic about the wood. Roy noticed and said, “Good Lord, Franny. I’ll cut you some more wood.”

“You won’t cut it right,” she said. Her father would know. Better to just leave be. She was indignant. She liked the feeling of indignant. This kind of playing house was more real, anyway, than cooking eggs or bacon on the stove. She couldn’t ever remember a time her father and mother worked in the kitchen together. It was her mother, or if her mother was gone, it was her father. But they had argued plenty in the kitchen. Part of her secretly hoped Roy would haul off and knock her upside the head. It was a revolting thought that made her plenty angry, and she took not a little pleasure in the heat in her cheeks and chest. The mommy and the daddy.

“I will,” he said. “I know how to cut wood.”

“Not like my daddy,” she said.

He grabbed her by the wrist. “That dog won’t hunt,” he said. He said it good and nasty, and soft, but deep-voiced, like a grown man. The sound of it was weird. Unsettling, like the dark could sometimes be.

She laughed and tried to push him away. He held on to her wrist, and she couldn’t get loose. “Let me be,” she said. She started slapping at him. “Roy Samuel Prather,” she said, “let me be.”

But he wouldn’t let her be. He dug his dirty fingernails into her wrist and pressed down until she screamed. Then, fast as lightning, he reached down with his free hand and grabbed her by the ankle. He picked her up like that, wrist and ankle. When she tried to kick free, he just let her body hit the ground, hard, without letting go of her wrist and ankle, and he dragged her like that out to the front porch and down the four stairs, her shoulder or back or arms knocking against every step.

When he got her out to the yard, he swung her back, then flung her forward as hard as he could. She landed hard, rolling out as best she could, which wasn’t much.

He took two steps back, bent down and picked a blade of grass, put it between his teeth, and chewed on it. He said, casual as can be, “I give you fifty steps and then I’m gonna come and get you.”

By now she was plenty sure he wasn’t the same Roy Samuel Prather she had known the day before. She got up and ran with all that was in her, which was considerable. She had long legs and could run fast, and not just for a girl. She was barefoot, but her feet were hard and soft at the same time, feet that did not mind stepping on stray stones the way other feet might. In later years she could not remember whether she said it aloud or not, but she did have the distinct memory of urging her feet on, of speaking to them: “Go, feet, go.”

She did not count her steps, but it could well enough have been fifty before she heard Roy give an Indian war whoop and then the sound of his bare feet moving through the grass.

She thought she might lose him in the tobacco field. She did not know what he meant to do, but she had been admiring his new brown belt with its metal buckle the shape of Kentucky, and she thought if they really were going to play house, he might just whip her like a daddy would a mommy, and if he did it with that brown belt, he might forget to take off that metal buckle, and wouldn’t it hurt to get beat about the buttocks and back by Kentucky.

She tried to keep as low to the ground as she could and still run. She was among the rows of tobacco now. The leaves whipped her face and neck, but she did not raise her arms to protect her head because she needed them to pump. Behind her she heard Roy saying, “Run, Mommy, run!” and she did not know, now, if they were still playing the game or if he was mocking her.

But he was not gaining on her. She was running as fast as she could, and she knew she would not tire before he did. It was a good feeling, a safe feeling. She could outrun danger.

She turned a corner at the place where a strip of dirt divided one acre from another, then plunged ahead directly into a row in the new field, five rows removed from where she had emerged. She could hear his feet behind her, hesitating, then choosing a row, choosing the right row, and then the chase was on again, but she had put some more distance between them.

Her plan was to reach the end of the row, then double back toward the house. All that was beyond these fields was mountain, and though she was not afraid of the mountains, she was afraid of getting too far from home, of not making it back in time to cook supper, and getting whipped by her daddy.

She came to the end of the row and made a sharp turn left. She meant to count seven rows, then make her left-hand turn toward home. She was running flat-out, counting — one, two, three, four — and then, BOOM, some large figure, something twice her size maybe, came out from row five and stood still, and she could not slow herself or dodge it in time to avoid collision. Running flat-out, she hit this massive wall, hit the body of a grown man, and just before impact, the man’s body jerked its weight forward, into her, and knocked her backward. She landed hard, like a stone thrown straight at the ground, and bounced like the stone would bounce. It took her a moment to clear her head. She heard the sound of footsteps behind her, Roy’s, and when she looked up she was facing him, and when she turned the other way, she saw that she was facing something ten times more scary.

Roy’s brother Donny. Donny Lynn Prather. The bad seed.

He was chewing on a blade of grass. He chewed it just like Roy. He said, “Well, now, what have we here?”

She did not make a move to get up. She dared a look at Roy, and he was grinning ear to ear.

Donny said, “It’s a fine morning, ain’t it, darling?”

Roy whistled a tune: Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, for I belong to somebody.

Donny took a step toward her. He said, “Now, who do you belong to, honey?”

“Somebody,” Roy said, “is me. I’m the daddy.”

“Is that right?” Donny said. He bit off the end of the blade of grass and spit it out. She did not like the way he was smiling at her. His smile wasn’t the same as Roy’s. For the rest of her life, she would remember that smile. It was the smile of a buzzard in the face of the newly coyote-eaten body of a deer, rotting but not quite dead. “What if I said I’m the daddy.”

She looked at Roy. All of a sudden he looked very small. He puffed out his chest and said, “I’m the daddy, I give the whooping. Like you said.”

She cheered a little at his words. Her own daddy could give a whipping like you couldn’t believe, and she knew how to take it. A whipping wasn’t nothing to her. One, two. No matter. She would close her eyes and take it. But then Roy was taking off his belt, and she looked again at that metal belt buckle shaped like Kentucky, and she knew it wasn’t Roy was going to get to whip her with it, but Donny. And what damage could somebody like Donny do with a weapon like that?

Roy was on one side, and Donny was on the other, behind her. She could outrun Roy, she had already proven that today, but there wasn’t one way she could think of to get loose of Donny. So she turned around. She intended to tell Donny that, sure enough, Roy was the daddy, and she would take her whipping from him. That was the rules of the game.

But when she turned around, she saw that Donny had already taken his bell off. Behind her, Roy was getting steamed. “It’s my whipping, goddamn it,” he said. “I’m the daddy.”

Franny took two steps back, and neither Roy nor Donny did anything to stop her. Donny stepped right past her and yanked the belt from Roy’s hand. He had his own belt in the other hand, and then fast as anything, he swung first his then Roy’s at Roy’s back and legs, first one then the other, again and again. The sound of them hitting was terrible, the whip crack of Roy’s belt followed by the dull thud of the belt buckle.

It didn’t seem right for him to beat on Roy like that. Franny took a running start. She jumped on Donny’s back, and when she did, he threw the belts into a row of tobacco and picked her off his back with one hand and threw her down.

She had lost her wind. Her whole body hurt from being thrown down so hard, especially her left side, where she had hit. She breathed in hard, trying to suck down as much air as she could as fast as she could.

She could see Roy. He was on the ground, behind Donny, on his butt, shuffling backward. Donny didn’t pay him any mind. He looked down at Franny. He said, “Ain’t you a lovely thing, Franny Mae.”

Then he undid the front of his trousers and took out his worm — she knew what one was but had never seen one before — and it was long and flesh colored and purple at the end.

“You ever seen one of these before?” Donny said.

It made her ashamed. Roy was still sprawled out there on the ground, looking at them with a big dumb face. Donny took the worm between his fingers and pointed it at her, and a hot stream of clear piss came shooting out at her. She screamed, and he laughed and shook it up and down so it covered her up and down, and some of it got on her face. She raised her hands to her face and tried to get up, but he came closer, pissing all the way, and when she was almost up, he pushed her down again.

When he had stopped pissing, he said, “Open up that pretty little mouth, Mommy.”

She shook her head no and clenched her teeth and held her lips tight together. She wanted to tell Roy to do something, come help her like she had tried to help him, but she did not want to open her mouth.

Donny reached down and gripped both of her cheeks with one hand and squeezed so hard she thought her teeth would be pushed loose from her gums. He pried her jaws open, and then he put that disgusting part of his body right up to her lips and started pissing again. She tried to shut her mouth, but he was still holding it so she could not. It started to get hard and push against her mouth. The piss was hot in her throat, and it gagged her, and she could taste it most in her nose, where the scent of it rose from the back of her throat like the dust from a field newly plowed.

Then he lost his aim somehow, and his grip on her face, and the piss splashed all over her face. It was Roy. Finally — finally! — he had jumped on Donny’s back from behind. When Donny turned around, Roy reared back and punched him square in the nose.

Blood began to squirt from Donny’s face. He put his hands to his nose and when he pulled them away they were covered in red, and she could see that his nose was bent a little, to the side. He reached up and grabbed his own nose and yanked it back into place, and when he did he made a sound so terrible that it threw Franny into a panic, and she got up again and started to run, but Donny saw it, and reached out his foot to trip her.

She fell hard on her face and knocked free one of her front teeth, a new adult one that couldn’t be replaced, and right away she could feel the warmth in her own mouth, the taste of iron overtaking the ammonia musk. As she dug in the dirt, looking for the tooth, she could hear Donny and Roy scuffling, Donny cursing and Roy yelling at him to stop.

She found the tooth and put it in her pocket. She put her tongue to the gum from which it had been knocked to try and stop the bleeding. When she looked up, Roy was on his back, and Donny was sitting with his knees on Roy’s chest, his thing still hanging out the front of his pants. He had pinned Roy’s arms beneath his legs, and Roy’s legs were kicking at the air with no chance of getting the rest of him free. Donny was slapping him in the face — “How’s that, you little shit? Does that feel fine?” — pulling his right hand back, then bringing it down full force on Roy’s right cheek, then again with the left, then the right again.

She did not want to leave Roy like that, at the mercy of his older brother. She had to think quick. What occurred to her in later years was that, like it or not. Roy had set her up, and because of what he had done, she had lost a tooth and wasn’t going to be able to get it back, and that she certainly must have feared losing worse than a tooth. That’s how she rationalized it when she was older and needed some way to find peace with herself at having left him to fend for himself against an older brother twice his size, an older brother whose self could not be controlled.

But in that moment, all she knew was the great animal fear that made the deer freeze and the bobcat run. She did not look back. She ran into the rows of tobacco, through one acre and then the next, and then on to her own house, and past it, and down the country road, to the house of her mother’s cousin, Miss Lucy. The whole time, running, she could not know whether or not Donny was behind her, giving chase, could not have heard the sound of his running if she had tried, not above the din of her own exertions, the labor of her breathing, and the pounding of her heart. She ran as though he was chasing her, did not even look back when, after banging on Miss Lucy’s door with her fists, she ran through the open door, right past Miss Lucy, and into the bathroom, and shut the door and locked it and would not come out, not for hours and hours. Not until her mother came by in the early evening and got her out, first coaxing, then threatening, then promising no harm would come to her by way of her father.

By the time she left that bathroom, Franny had washed her face clean. She did not, would not, speak, and it was not until two days later that her mother discovered that her front tooth was gone. By then they had found Roy’s body up in the mountains. By then some dogs had got it, and it was mangled so badly they were hard-pressed to know what the dogs had done and what Donny had done. Everybody knew it was Donny, but nobody could prove it, and when the time came, Donny produced a girlfriend, a truly unreliable witness named Thelma Jane, from up in the hills, from a family well known to let their children run wild, and whose men were all locked up in jails most of the time, most of them on repeated small-time stints in Rowan County Jail, and some doing longer, harder time in state and federal penitentiaries.

For her part, Franny didn’t say anything. Not one word. Wouldn’t even admit to being there, and even though her parents were sure enough she had been with Roy that day, they did not want any part of the proceedings against Donny. He was family, and it was a family matter, and it was meant to be settled among family. In the end, he was let go for want of evidence. Before his own daddy could get at him to settle it in the family way, he was off and gone, some said to California, others to New Mexico, others to Mexico, out of the country and far away, maybe even as far as Guatemala or El Salvador, or past the equator to Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil.

But Franny couldn’t see it that way. She thought about it often as she grew older, Donny and Roy and that awful day, and she wondered what would have happened if Roy had just run off like he could have. Would it have been her they found up that mountain, eaten away by dogs?

It troubled her, and then one day, when she was thirteen years old, she thought of something that troubled her even more, which was that Donny was not the brightest wick in the lamp, and how on God’s green earth could anyone be made to believe that he, of all people, could possibly teach himself to know Spanish?

He couldn’t be in South America, then. Not there, or Guatemala, or Mexico, or anywhere. And how would he pay his way to New Mexico or California? And what would he do for work once he got there? All he knew was hills, and he knew them the way ants knew their dirt tunnels, could probably find his way through every twist and turn in every creek, knew when and where the waters changed their paths after a rainstorm, knew which caves were empty and which bedded brown bears or bobcats or coyotes.

The truth that became apparent to her, then, and which no one else ever seemed to know, was that Donny Lynn Prather, the bad seed, the murderer, was living in the hills that surrounded her. One evening not long before her fourteenth birthday, she was lying in bed in the middle of the night, not sleeping as always, or barely sleeping, sleeping the light sleep that is less like sleep than like worry, when she heard a tapping at her window. Just a slight tapping. Just a little tap. Just a tap-tap-tap. Three taps, a sound like knuckles rapping against a door.

She looked up, and what she saw was nothing. Or nothing she could be sure about. But when she looked down again at her own covers in the dim, half-moon light coming through her window, she thought she saw — it was not even an impression so much as an impression of an impression, a shadow’s shadow’s shadow — the figure of a man hovering there. When she looked up again, he was gone. When she looked down again, she thought she saw the movement. She looked up again, and there was nothing there, and then she was afraid to not look anymore.

So she stared out the window. She lay rigid, alert. Staring. She stayed that way the rest of the night, in that nervous state. It was exhausting to spend the night that way, and when morning came, she was so relieved at the sight of the sun that she directly fell asleep. Her mother came in and tried to stir her when she did not show in the kitchen to help with breakfast, but there was no rousing her. She had only the faint memory of opening her eyes and seeing her mother hovering over like a ghost, her face white against a bedroom that had taken on a strange shade of blue.

After that she thought she saw him everywhere. Saw him without actually seeing. He was the squirrel peeking out from behind the trees, so she stopped going off into the woods. He was the whistle of the wind through the exposed roots of the old cherry tree by the creek, so she refused to cross it to go to the well and fetch water. He was hiding behind the wood stove where she and Roy had cooked the bacon and eggs with the wood they had stolen from her father’s pile, so she refused to go anymore into the kitchen.

Her world grew smaller and smaller and smaller — her room, the parlor, Sunday church — and then she was old enough to flee. John Wenderoth, a boy at the Free Will Independent Baptist Church, asked her to marry him, and she said she would on the condition they move away — “Anywhere, as long as it’s away,” she said, when he asked — and as soon as he had saved some money working as a well-digger’s apprentice, he spirited her off to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he knew able-bodied men were needed for the construction boom, and then they were gone.

The children came quickly. Eleanor first, and then Millie, and then, after enough years had gone by that they thought they wouldn’t have any more, along came John Junior, who they called John Junior until he was old enough to declare himself Jack. The world grew larger again. John came home after work smelling like sweat and dirt, smelling sweet to her taste, like a man should, and she fed him, and together they bathed the children, something other families did not do all together. They prayed at the dinner table, too, and broke bread with great reverence. Life was rich and full.

Eleanor went off to the state university, the first in the family. She did not finish, but then neither John nor Franny had finished high school, and they were proud of their eldest all the same for even going. They bought Florida Gators T-shirts and hung an orange and blue flag from the front porch, parallel to their red, white, and blue American flag.

Then Millie went away, too, to Stetson University, a private Baptist school in the north part of the stale, on the east coast. When she told them, Franny thought John would burst a vessel in his brain for worry, but then she said she thought she could get a scholarship, and she did, and the people at the church were so proud that they pitched in for board and books.

Millie finished, too, with a degree in accountancy. John said, “Can you believe it, darling? We don’t never have to pay anyone to do our taxes ever again.”

Franny beamed. Things were so good. She couldn’t believe things could ever get so good.

But then they got better. First, Eleanor married a man from a wealthy family, a dentist named Carl. John said, “Can you believe it, sweet girl? We can get our teeth fixed right.” And sure enough they did. Carl pulled all John’s bad teeth and fitted him with the most beautiful set of porcelain teeth anybody ever saw. They went to church that Sunday, and people were making over him like nothing he’d ever seen. Franny could not believe that porcelain teeth could bring anyone so much happiness.

But then Carl went to work on her mouth. She had been wearing a prosthetic tooth all these years that John had bought for her when they first moved to West Palm Beach, a belated wedding gift so beautiful she demanded he drive her straight home, and when they arrived she led him to the kitchen table. She told him to sit down, situated him just the way she wanted. Then she took off his shoes and his socks and rubbed and kissed his toes and his feet, pulled off his belt and unzipped his trousers and pulled them off, too. Then she rubbed and kissed his legs, just as slow as she liked him to rub and kiss her. Then she did something she had been refusing to do those early months of their union, had been refusing because of Roy and Donny Prather and what Donny had done to her that day in the dirt behind the tobacco field. She put her face right in his lap and took him in her mouth, and the act was to her every bit as cleansing as she imagined the day of her baptism might have been if she had been old enough to know and understand just what sins — past, present, future — were being washed away. When he was finished, she rinsed her mouth in the sink, and then she hiked up her good dress, and — she could hardly believe it — he was ready already, and she climbed up onto the table, onto him, and when they saw that it would not hold their weight for long, they made their way into the bedroom.

That’s the way Eleanor was made, and now this dentist husband of hers, this Carl, was offering to make a new tooth for Franny, not a prosthetic, but an actual tooth that he would implant in her gum. By now her prosthetic tooth had taken on a blackish-blue cast, a navy blue almost, that stood in ugly contrast against the yellow-brown color of her other teeth. Carl made this new tooth white, and colored the yellow teeth to match it, and when he was done and her mouth had healed from the procedure, she looked in the mirror, John standing behind her. “You look beautiful,” he said. He had been saying it for many years, but this time, this once, she believed him, thought herself beautiful. She was almost forty-five years old now, and for the first time beautiful.

Then the hard times came back with a vengeance. The year John Junior turned thirteen, Millie married another accountant, a man she met at work, and for two years she all but disappeared. This man, this accountant, had been rude to Franny and especially to John at the wedding, and made some mean-spirited comments about John’s blue suit, which the man considered out of fashion, and on which John had spent two hundred dollars the week before the ceremony. That was the second sign of trouble. The first had been his forgetting to ask John for Millie’s hand in marriage, but Franny said that it must have been an oversight, that times had changed and it wasn’t Kentucky, and weren’t they glad for that. But then Millie all but disappeared, and when Franny did see her, usually in passing at the grocery store, she looked haggard. She had taken to wearing dark sunglasses, even indoors, and to speaking in whispers.

After the third time Franny saw her this way — produce aisle, iceberg lettuce display — she told John she suspected Millie was what they called a battered wife. John could hardly bear it. He did not go to work the next day. She saw him in the backyard, pacing. She let him pace but thought a vegetable drink might make him feel better. His brother Larry back in Kentucky had got his cancer, melanoma of the skin, and beat it after buying a juicer and making three times daily drinks out of lettuce, cabbage, apples, carrots, and lemon juice. John thought it was a good idea, and whether or not the juicer had the power to ward off cancer, he sure did look and feel better, though his skin had lately taken on an orangish cast that Eleanor’s husband Carl said had something to do with the beta carotene in the carrots.

She watched him while she juiced. He looked up and waved a hand to let her know he saw her, and made his way to the door. She met him there, the orange-brown juice in hand. He took a long sip and said, “I’m gonna have to go over there.”

She said, “You might make it worse.” But she wanted him to go whether it did or not. She wanted to go herself.

He took another, longer sip, and drained the whole thing. She didn’t know how he could do it, but it must’ve given him time to think what he was going to say next. He swallowed, then he met her eyes with a gaze more direct than she was used to seeing from him. It was a little cold, and she remembered what power he was capable of projecting, and what kind of good man he must be to rein it in at home. He said, “If it’s gonna get worse, I’m gonna get her out of there myself. And if she’s not going to go, I’m gonna get him out. One way or the other.”

What happened next it took her some time to piece together. John didn’t say much to her, but he did confide in Carl, and Carl confided in Eleanor, and after a while Eleanor let it slip in fragments, a detail here and one there, until finally Franny was satisfied that she knew. Horrified, too. What happened was it was dark by the time John arrived. There was a light on in the house, and the ugly green curtains were drawn, and he could see Millie and her husband — his name was Erik, the Viking name mismatched with his scrawny body — he could see them in silhouette. He saw Erik’s arm reach out and make contact with Millie’s head, and Millie pushing back. Erik must have been off balance, and he fell, and when his shadow rose again, it reached out for the curtains and ripped them from the wall. When they came down, he could see that Millie was crying. She was standing there, naked from the waist up except for a frilly brassiere, one of her eyes swollen shut. By this time, John was out of the car and racing for the front door. Inside he heard a lot of yelling. The door was unlocked, which was a good thing, because in that state no doubt he would have kicked it down. When he got in the house, he found his daughter backed into a corner by skinny Erik, who was saying vile things. He turned and saw John, and Erik said, rapid-fire, “This is private; this is none of your concern; you don’t know what’s going on here, what she’s done,” and by the time he got to who she’d fucked, John was across the room. He grabbed Erik by the wrist and yanked so hard, he jerked the skinny Viking’s arm from its socket. Right away, Millie tried to intervene. She put herself between her husband and her father and said, “Stop it. Dad. Stop it right now. He’s my husband!” To John, hearing her saying it like that was like taking a whipping. He took two steps back, looked at his daughter, looked at her husband. All the fight went out of him then, and he looked at Erik and said, “You don’t have a daughter. You don’t know how it is.” Erik didn’t say anything. He went into the bedroom and pulled a suit from the closet, walked out the front door, his arm dangling from his shoulder at a grotesque angle, and drove away. Millie was still standing in the corner. John saw her there, and it must have killed him to see her like that, wearing that lacy brassiere above her bare midriff, her eye swollen shut. He went into the bedroom and took the orange velour blanket from beneath the comforter and brought it out into the living room. She had sat down on the couch, and he sat beside her and wrapped the velour blanket around her shoulders so it covered her and made her warm. His arm came to rest on her shoulder, and he let it rest there, lightly, and she didn’t resist any. They sat there in silence for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m ashamed, but it’s not you I’m ashamed of.”

After that, Millie moved in with Eleanor and Carl for a while. Erik made some overtures toward patching things up, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. Franny didn’t want Millie to even talk to him again except through lawyers, but she knew well enough to keep quiet, and she told John to do the same.

It ended badly, at least as far as Franny was concerned. The dentist who employed Eleanor’s husband Carl was nearing retirement age, and his practice was housed on land he owned, land that sat on one of the last mostly undeveloped major intersections in downtown West Palm Beach. The land was maybe twenty or thirty times more valuable than the dental practice, and the old man decided to sell. He offered Carl his client list in exchange for a continuing (and quite large) participation in the business’s future income, and Carl gave it some thought, but it would have been difficult to find land to buy or lease in the same part of the city that was affordable enough to ensure the kind of profitability he hoped he might achieve in return for the hassle and risk of taking over the practice. He would have to move the practice to the suburbs, maybe out west of town to Royal Palm Beach or Wellington, where the young families were moving. But then if he was going to move anyway, and no doubt lose most of the clients, who wouldn’t want to make the half-hour commute to the dentist’s office twice a year, why give a cut to his old employer?

Carl and Eleanor mapped out their reasons for rejecting the offer over a supper of Franny’s famous Hungarian goulash, a recipe she had learned from the Cuban woman next door, and John nodded, and inside, Franny was cheering all over again for this man Carl, this dentist who had made Eleanor’s life so good, and who even now was making such well-reasoned decisions for himself and her daughter. But then Eleanor said, “Carl’s parents say they’ll cosign the bank loan for a new practice in Lake Mary. It’s only fifteen minutes from where they live, and it’s growing so fast. That’s the direction Orlando’s growing, to the north...”

It was like a blow to the chest. Franny and John both lied and told them it was wonderful news. “Best thing me and Franny ever did was move away from Kentucky,” John said — gamely, Franny thought — but after they went home, John said, “Do you think they’re gonna take Millie with them?”

The thought had not occurred to Franny. She took to calling Carl and Eleanor’s house at odd hours, hoping to catch Millie when they weren’t home. But one or the other of them always seemed to be home when she called. When she heard their voices, she hung up the phone, and after the eighth or ninth hang-up, she got a call from Eleanor. “Mom, have you been trying to call here?” she said.

“No,” Franny said, too fast.

“Mom, I know you have. We had to get the phone company to put a trace on the call. It cost fifteen dollars. Do you know what a trace is, Mom?”

She could figure it out well enough.

“I don’t understand, Mom. You call because you want to talk to me, and then you hang up?”

Franny didn’t know what to say, so she hung up.

She leaned on the handset for a while where it rested in the cradle and looked at it. Then she lifted it from the cradle and called back. Before Eleanor could even say hello, Franny was off and running. “You’re-ruining-my-life-by-leaving-and-you’re-taking-my-Millie-too,” and “How-could-you-do-this-to-your-father?” Then she hung up again.

Then she made a list, a catalog of all the things she and John had done for Eleanor and Millie, on a ruled yellow legal pad, starting with eighteen combined months of pregnancy and moving on through all the work of infant mothering (item #12: “nursing, no Karo syrup”) and getting toddlers ready for school (item #37: “i learned to read better so i could teach it right to both of you”) and roller skates and Barbie dolls and braces and even flashy teenage miniskirts (“and i even hid it from your daddy even though it wasn’t right to do it”) and on and on, filling seven long yellow pages and writing a paragraph on the eighth to the effect that this effort, this “hasty couple pages,” was very much an abridgment.

It was Millie who called first. She had been seeing an expensive psychologist, a friend of Carl’s, and her mouth was full of three-dollar words. She told Franny what she thought Franny didn’t know about boundaries. She said what was being forced on her and Eleanor was nothing less than an extension of the guilt complex Franny had been building in them their whole lives. She said Franny’s main goal in life was her own comfort, and that’s what all the walking around the house humming and talking about nothing had been about all those years.

“What humming?” Franny said. “What talking to myself? I was singing songs to bring happy to the house. I was talking to you, to cheer you up. It was a habit, a good good good habit.”

“It was an unconscious habit,” Millie said. “You did it to meet some unmet need in yourself from your marriage or your childhood you haven’t found a way to come to terms with.” She told her about something called Johari’s window, something her psychologist told her, some way of looking into the soul, where there was all different things about you, and some of them were known to you and everybody else, and some you knew about yourself but kept close so nobody else could know, and some were secrets about you, but open secrets that you didn’t yourself know but everybody else knew about you.

Or claimed to know, Franny thought, as she listened to Millie go on and on in this high-minded way. Because how could any one person know what was happening inside the mind of another person? What their thoughts were, their intentions, their motivations? Her intentions were pure, she knew that well enough. And her secrets were her own.

Franny said, “Don’t throw big words around to try and show me. I’m no dummy. I know what those big words mean. And let me tell you another one I know: cultivate. I cultivated every one of those habits. For you. So don’t try and tell me, just because you’re getting too big for your britches. I raised you. I knew you from when you were not but a speck in your daddy’s eye. I knew you before you knowed yourself.”

Still, it was the first she’d heard of this talk, and she knew after hearing Millie say it that it must have been said many times before. She thought about that Johari’s window and the things she must not know other people thought they knew about her, had been thinking about her all along. She knew, then, that her children were ripping her up behind her back after she spent her whole life trying to make theirs good. There wasn’t a child on earth loved her parents as much as her parents loved her, Franny knew that well enough, but what about respect? What about where the Bible said honor thy father and thy mother? That was in the Ten Commandments. It was given to Moses from God, and those girls knew it, too. She had showed it to them in the blue Bible storybook probably a hundred times or more when they were little.

It wasn’t long after that she started to get bogged down in thinking about secrets and the way they were kept. Long after Carl moved away and took Eleanor and Millie with him to Lake Mary and his new dental paradise, nearer his own wealthy parents, she played and replayed that conversation with Millie again and again in her mind. John did not say much about it, but she noticed that he had been taking care of even more things around the house than he usually did, which forced him to be around more. He was taking John Junior — Jack, he wanted to be called Jack now — to the high school every morning so Franny could sleep in, and picking him up after baseball practice in the afternoons, too, juggling his own work schedule and saying no to good overtime so he could do it. He was making most of the meals, and he was bringing into the house flowers fresh cut from the backyard, putting them in vases, and changing the water as long as they stayed nice. It was his way; it was what he had always done when he thought she was sad, and kept on doing until her sadness had passed.

But what she was feeling was not sadness. All Millie’s talk about secrets and comfort and what is known and to whom... all of that had put her in mind again of the Prather boys, her cousins Donny and Roy, and that day Roy had chased her through the tobacco field, toward Donny, who he had to know was waiting there for her, waiting to do bad things to her, even though Roy probably didn’t know how bad. The day playing house had gone wrong, and her childhood had ended, and Roy had died.

It was a secret, the secret, in fact, of her whole life. She had never told John the story, although he knew well enough about the dog-eaten boy that was found up in the mountain, knew, too, that Roy was her cousin, and that the boy, the brother, who had most likely done it had run off and was never heard from again. But what seemed so remarkable to her, now, forty years after she stopped being nine years old forever, was that her husband John had never once brought it up. Never once asked. Didn’t act one bit curious. Wasn’t that strange?

Jack came home early that afternoon, saying baseball practice had been cut short by rain, and he had caught a ride home with a girl named Julie. That took Franny by surprise. She looked him over as he walked down the hall toward his bedroom and shut the door. Only fifteen, but from behind he looked just like his daddy did when Franny had first met him, except for Jack’s long hair. Same broad shoulders, same thick legs, walked the same way. Good Lord, he was almost the same age John had been then.

She walked back to his bedroom and knocked on the door, and when he said, “Come in,” she did. He was lying on the bed, propped up on his elbows over a pad of graph paper full of algebra equations. Franny said, “Who is this Julie?”

“Just a girl, Mom,” he said, but from the way he said it, she could tell it wasn’t just a girl.

“How old is she?” Franny said. “She’s older? She drives a car?”

“She just turned sixteen, Mom,” Jack said. “She’s in the same grade as me.”

Franny frowned. She had been so caught up in the lives of her girls, she hadn’t been paying enough attention to Jack, not for a long time. He was so quiet, moved through the house like he wasn’t even there. You could almost forget he was there at all.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

He turned his attention back to the algebra. She said, “Did you call your daddy and tell him you was coming home early?”

He acknowledged as much with a wave, not disrespectful but not mindful, either, of her. He had been growing less and less mindful of her. It had been going on for a long time, but she only now noticed it as a pattern.

She went through the motions of making dinner, peas and carrots and potatoes and cubed steak, but she did not find any joy in it. Turning on the burner on the electric stove, she noticed that she was humming. A hymn. Oh, precious is the flow that makes me white as snow... For just a moment it had made her feel better, and she remembered what Millie had said, and then it made her feel worse, her humming to keep herself company and not even knowing it, like everyone apparently knew she did.

When John came home, he went directly to tend to the backyard without saying so much as hello. She thought he was mad at her at first — the whole world was, it seemed like — but after a while she looked out at him through the window and saw how he was hacking away at the hedgerows that lined the back of their property with his hedge clippers, but he wasn’t doing it right, wasn’t doing it slow and careful like was his way. He was going fast, clip-clip-clipping. It looked like he was trying to hurt the bushes. She could see his biceps working where they poked out from his shirtsleeves.

She went outside. He did not hear her approaching. He kept on moving, herky-jerky. She called out his name. She said, “John, honey, John...”

He turned and looked at her. He had a strange look on his face like he didn’t recognize her.

She said, “John, what’s wrong? What did I do wrong?”

He softened at this, let the arm, his right arm, holding the hedge clippers drop to his side. He was standing there at a half-crooked angle, those hedge clippers dangling from his right side and his body all slumped to the right like it was following the hedge clippers. He said, “Oh, shit, Franny.”

It was maybe four times she had ever heard him say a curse word. She could count on one hand with the thumb finger left over.

“Them girls is gonna move away,” he said. He said it like they were dead.

She thought on it a while. He seemed to be looking at her for an answer.

Then she said, “Just like we did.”

At that he just nodded his head, slow. Like he was resigning himself to it. He could say a hundred things and more to her without even saying one single word.

Then she said — she could hardly believe she was saying it — “Do you know why we ran away?”

She said it like that — ran away. Not went away.

He picked up on it right off, and said, “We didn’t run nowhere at all. We decided. We chose. We made a choice, a real good choice, and packed our things, and left in a orderly fashion. We left because you said we ought to, and that was good enough for me, and I stand by it. I’m not ashamed of it.”

He must have been trying to make her feel better, she decided. And that’s what he would think was called for. That’s what he always thought was called for, making her feel better. Good Lord, that was what he lived for. She knew it and had always known it but only realized that she knew she knew it just now. Millie and her Johari window. It was gonna haunt her, and she did not like it one bit.

She said, “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking real things here. I’m talking about why we left. Why I told you I wanted to leave. You never did ask. We just packed our things and went.”

“And that was good enough for me,” he said. “Your word is good enough for me any day of the week.”

“No, no, no,” she said. Her voice was rising. “I asked you a fair question, and you must have an answer. You, John Wenderoth, are a smart man who thinks of things. And this once I want to know what it is you think. So you tell me. Why did we leave Kentucky?”

He looked down at the ground for a long moment, one that felt like ten or twenty. Then, lifting his head but not connecting his eyes with hers, he said, “Well,” and then another long pause, and then he said, “I suppose we left because of your daddy.”

He did look in her eyes, then, probably, she thought, to gauge how it was she would respond before he went on. She did not want to give herself away, afraid he wouldn’t if she did.

He said, “Your daddy was a mean man, God love him. I know he was. I seen him being rough with people more than once. And you was so quiet. You didn’t hardly come out for anything. I saw you there, sitting in the pew at church, and I knew. I knew how it was. He must’ve been...”

Here his voice trailed away, and she knew what he was saying was that all these years her husband John thought her daddy, her sweet daddy, had been beating on her, or worse, the way daddies sometimes did to their daughters in those hills, in those times, the thing that passed among the women in whispers you had to overhear to be privy to, and that was what he meant to rescue her from. She didn’t hardly know what to say to it.

He was still looking at her, like it hurt him to almost say it. He said, “It’s okay, Francine. He didn’t probably mean anything by it. It wasn’t your fault. Maybe not even his. It was a hard life back there. People didn’t know how to be.”

She stood there and looked at him, her secret between them, and all those years, too. One way of looking at it, what she had to tell him was so much worse than the thing he had been thinking all along. But, the other way, it wasn’t worse at all. One way it was her cousin did it to her before he murdered his brother, and the other way it was her own daddy did it to her, and murdered her a different way, a way so bad she would have had to keep on living with it. But then she was living with the other thing well on past when it happened, and it hadn’t killed her, but then in a way it had, and she had had to resurrect herself, or at least teach herself how to be again.

Around and around she went with herself. Not much time passed, but in the way the mind does when under great pressure, the time inside her grew very slow to her own reckoning even as it must have been very fast when compared to the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall.

Then she decided. She hung her head. She didn’t say a thing.

John walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her, and he said, “It don’t matter one way or the other. Francine. You’re the whole world and you always was.”

She leaned into him in the way he liked because she liked it and told him so. Roy was dead and buried, and if Donny had found a way to live, he was an old man now, and not Donny anymore. Those girls could move away if they wanted, and soon Jack would be gone, too, but what was past was past. She sealed it off inside herself, and there wasn’t anyone could touch her heart in the worst way again. It was a cold feeling.

She didn’t have her John for long after that. One afternoon he was working on a construction site in Port St. Lucie, where some developer was building a new baseball park, a spring training facility for the New York Mets where their minor league team would also play during the summer. John was excited about it, working on a baseball park. It meant something to him that office buildings and suburban neighborhoods did not. One afternoon he heard some Mets executives and a few ballplayers would be flying down to survey the progress, and he told Jack to take the day off school and come to work with him, meet the players.

Franny watched them drive away that morning. She watched the way they touched each other when they were walking down the sidewalk to the carport. The good-natured arm punching and the horseplay. They had something between them she thought she had once with Eleanor, and then Millie.

They got into the car and drove away, and that’s the last time she saw John alive. On the interstate, on the way to the construction site, John clutched his hand to his chest. Jack later said he thought, for a moment, his father would lose control of the car, but just as Jack was reaching for the wheel, John rallied, inhaled with great effort — “He was white as a sheet,” Jack recalled — and straightened his shoulders and gripped the wheel and steered the car onto the shoulder and then the grass strip beyond. Then, the car safely at a stop, he slumped over the steering wheel. Jack jumped out of the car and waved his arms frantically at the approaching traffic. A middle-aged woman in a beige Datsun compact stopped, and together she and Jack wrestled John from the car. By then he had lost consciousness, and by the time they reached the hospital, he had stopped breathing. By 8:22 that morning, he had been declared dead. Jack called and told Franny what had happened and asked her to conic to the hospital, and she said, “He’s dead?” and Jack said — he was crying — “Yes, Mom, he is,” and Franny said, “Then there’s nothing I can do,” and she got him off the phone as quick as she could. Then she went into the bathroom and vomited until she was too weak to get up. She lay on the bathmat and let herself drift into something not sleep but like dreaming. She rested there until she marshaled the strength to get up. Then she got up and went to the kitchen and made some tea. Her hands were shaking. She drank the tea and ate some peanut butter cheese crackers. Then she went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and scrubbed the toilet until there was no sign of her illness.

By the time Jack arrived home, Franny had prepared grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. It was ready for him on the table. He came in through the back door by the kitchen, took one look at the food, then hung his head, went into his bedroom, and did not come out until the next day.

Jack never said anything about it, but she always wondered whether he thought her somehow defective as a mother for not going to the hospital to comfort him. He had been sixteen then, and his pain must have been enormous, but what about hers? Who had she had her entire life except for John? Eleanor? Millie? For the duration of their childhoods, maybe, but they were gone now, moved away, off to follow that dentist Carl — no better than a kidnapper, that Carl — to Lake Mary, which may as well have been the red planet Mars. What could Jack know about what she had lost, losing John? What could any child know about what a whole life spent with someone means? Especially a whole life that didn’t rightly begin until that someone came along and gave it a reason to keep being after years and years of having no reason at all.

The distance between Franny and Jack widened after that. They shared the space of the house, but they did not have things to say to each other. They were not enemies; there was nothing bitter between them. They were more like strangers. And something else, too. As he grew toward manhood, he continued to have some of his father’s features, but as he grew into his face, characteristics from her own family began to assert themselves in ways she could not have expected. His nose and ears grew longer, more like her father’s and less like John’s. He had been seeing the older girl, Julie — that’s how Franny thought of her, even though she and Jack were still in the same grade — and as they grew more serious, there was some glint in his eye that was not of John, some expression of desire she caught a glimpse of now and then when Jack was walking behind Julie and did not know she was watching him. When her son would look at his girlfriend’s legs or backside. A directness. Nothing sidelong. An expression of desire that was different in kind from the way she had seen John look at her in the unguarded moments they had shared.

She tried to put it aside, but she could not. She did not remember ever seeing her father in a moment so unguarded, yet she somehow knew it was of her family. She knew in a very general way but would not say to her own self, not even in the privacy of her own mind, that the quality she saw in her son’s gaze was in some way reminiscent of something she remembered about her cousin Donny Lynn Prather.

Just once, and only to put it to rest, she put it into words, but not aloud. Only in her head. Just once, just to put it to rest. Because it was not, she knew, any sign of any deficiency in her son. It was just something in the blood, something, in fact, that came from her, that something inside her shared with Donny only because they shared a grandfather. It was not what caused Donny to be what he had been. It was just a speck in her son Jack’s eye.

She suspected Jack and Julie were sleeping together but could not put her finger on why. When they went out at night, he always came home at an acceptable hour. He was busy, and stayed busy, with baseball. He had been going to the church more, the Cherry Road Baptist Church the family had been attending ever since they had moved to West Palm Beach, way back when it wasn’t even a proper church but instead what they called a mission. John used to stand in the back as an usher one Sunday a month and greet visitors and tell them that he was “a charter member of our church.”

Franny wasn’t going much anymore. It was too hard to go without John. Worse, it made her think thoughts that ended up in bad places. Like, if God is good and loves those who accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, then why does He allow so many terrible things to happen in the world? And she wasn’t thinking about it in the abstract. The beef with God she was trying to avoid was quite personal. As in: If God is good and loves those who accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, then why is John dead? And why did Millie’s husband beat her? And why did she and Eleanor move away? And why was Donny Lynn Prather allowed to kill his little brother Roy on a day he meant to do less?

Sunday mornings, Jack would rise early, shower, dress, and leave to pick up Julie, and Franny would lie in her bed and pretend to be sleeping.

She went on sleeping in, and not just on Sundays anymore, but also on Mondays and Tuesdays. Wednesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays. Fridays she did force herself to wake, by the alarm clock neither she nor John had needed their whole lives, being children raised in the natural cycles of the sun’s rising and setting. Fridays she was in the car by 8:30, and off to Claudia’s Beauty Salon in the Cross-County shopping center on Okeechobee Road, where she got her hair done and listened (without participating) to the neighborhood gossip, this ungrateful child and that one, mostly, and wondered at her own restraint, for she by now had as much to say on the subject as anyone.

Jack graduated from high school and went on to college at Stetson University, same as Millie, and he, too, planned to be an accountant. Julie followed him there, and by sophomore year they were married. At the rehearsal dinner the night before the ceremony, Jack sprung on Franny the news that he had changed his major from accounting to something called Bible and Religion, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming in protest: “And how will you feed your family?” Already he was up to his eyeballs in college loans; six months later he told her he was thinking of attending the Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas upon graduation, which he said would now take five years on account of his changing his major so late in the game.

Three years passed. Jack and Julie moved to Texas. Eleanor sent a card every year for Christmas. Millie remarried, a partner in Carl’s dental practice named (and this was funny) Dennis, but didn’t send Franny an invitation. The backyard ceremony grew nearer and nearer — Franny heard all about it from Sally Cunningham down the street, whose daughter was Millie’s lifelong best friend — and finally, when Franny couldn’t take it anymore, she called Millie on the phone and said, “Your old mother can’t come to your wedding?”

“I sent you an invitation. Mother,” Millie said. She said it cold like that. Mother. What kind of way was that to talk?

“I never saw no invitation,” Franny said.

“Well, I sent it,” Millie said. “And, anyway, you’re invited. I’m inviting you now.”

But the invitation never came by mail, and to Franny that was message enough. She did not want to go anyplace she wasn’t wanted. If John were around he would’ve smoothed it over, called Millie, calmed Franny, arranged for an invitation to be sent. But John was not around. John was dead and gone and everything good with him. Franny did not go to the wedding, and after that she and Millie did not speak at all.

Franny went out less and less. She stopped getting her hair done once a week. It was a vanity she did not need to indulge, and anyway she was tired of hearing about everyone else’s children, what they had accomplished. Now she got her hair done once every three weeks at Mary’s Beauty Salon on Military Trail, but the talk there was almost more unbearable, everyone prattling on about their grandchildren and passing along pictures.

What did it say about her that her children, all married, had not produced any grandchildren? Sure, Eleanor and Carl had the good excuse that they weren’t able, a problem of Carl’s, not Eleanor’s. But was this not the age of science, like they said all the time now, and technology? Surely, with the kind of money a Lake Mary dentist must be pulling in, they could afford some of that in vitro fertilization. Shelby Crockett’s son-in-law had been shooting blanks all along, but all he did was get his brother to go in a cup, and then they implanted his seed in her daughter, and it was as though the baby was all theirs, instead of three-quarters.

But Millie, well, Millie said she wanted no part of any child rearing. And Jack and Julie had been married going on four years now, and still no news. That saying, no news is good news? Well, it’s not so. No news is not good news. Good news is good news. Franny waited and waited, but the good news never came.

Then one morning Jack called, and he said, “Mom, I have some good news.” This was it. She was sure of it. She was so excited she began to squeal and jump up and down. She said, “Oh, oh, I’m so happy, I’m so happy for you. For us.”

Jack said, “Well, wait a minute, Mom. I haven’t told you yet.”

And she said, “I’m sorry, it’s just I get so excitable these days.” She dabbed at her moist eyes with a handkerchief. She sat down in the chair by the kitchen phone and waited to hear it. She wanted to savor every second. In that brief moment she felt forty-five years old and beautiful. She wished John were here to share it with her. She bounced up and down in her seal like a schoolgirl.

“It’s me and Julie,” Jack said. “We have a big change that’s going to happen in our life. We’re moving. Back to West Palm Beach. I’ve been called to be the pastor at the Cherry Road Baptist Church.”

She put her hand over the receiver and began to sob, silently as she could. She was shaking at the shoulders.

“There’s a few formalities,” Jack was saying. “I have to come down and preach. There has to be a vote. But, I mean, they know me and I know them, and I don’t think there will be any sort of problems.”

She regained her composure. He was waiting for her to say something. He would want her to tell him how wonderful it was, and how happy and proud she was, and, really, it was true, the part about it being wonderful. It was wonderful that one of her children would be moving home. She could be happy about it. It was something to be happy about.

She said, “Jack, I’m happy and I’m proud. The news you are saying is wonderful.”

He said, “I want you to come see me preach, Mom. I want you to be there.”

She said, “I’ll be there, all right. You just watch. I’ll be there on the front row, saying amen. Me and Julie, and, who knows, little John Wenderoth the Third maybe...”

She went on at some length about what it would be like to be a grandmother. John, for his part, did not say much about it. When he said he had to get off the phone, had to go attend to something for Julie, she still had more things to say, so she called Eleanor on the phone. Carl answered and tried to exchange some pleasantries, but she said if he didn’t mind would he get Eleanor on the phone, because she had some important and exciting news to share.

As soon as she heard Eleanor’s voice, Franny told her tale, first the news from Jack that he and Julie would be hearing God’s call on their lives to come on down to the Cherry Road Baptist Church — that part she told real fast — and then a whole lot of speculation about what it would be like to sit on that front row, in a seal of honor, right there alongside Julie and little John the Third, and, who knows, maybe some little girl, maybe named Francine Mae, after her.

Eleanor interrupted. “What’s this about John the Third and Francine Mae, Mother?” she said. Mother. That again.

Franny began to lecture. “That’s what people do when they meet and marry and settle down,” she said. “That’s the normal, healthful, God-ordained way of things.”

“Well, what does that say about me and Carl?” Eleanor said. “We don’t have any children.”

“Well,” Franny said. It was her way of saying that she understood the rebuke and did not accept it. Eleanor had crossed a line she should not have crossed. She was the daughter, after all.

Eleanor’s voice softened. “Look, Mom,” she said. “I don’t think you should be saving things like that to Jack and Julie.”

“And why is that your business?” Franny said.

“I don’t suppose it is,” Eleanor said, keeping an even tone. That was even more infuriating than if she had been yelling. It was a point of pride, Franny supposed. Refinement. Class. All those things people think they acquire so they can be better than other people. “But I’ll tell you anyway, because I don’t think it’s fair for you to assume that Jack and Julie are going to move down there and make their choices just to please you.”

“They are not going to have any children?” Franny said. “You know this? They told you it?”

“They’re busy with their careers,” Eleanor said. “The same as a lot of people. Jack just did his internship at First Baptist of Dallas and he was working eighty, ninety hours a week. And Julie’s doing the crisis pregnancy counseling. That takes time. You get these poor black girls who don’t have anyplace else to go and the man who got them that way sees he can pay a couple hundred dollars for an abortion or spend the next eighteen years paying child support or more likely running from it. You know how they are. That’s a lot of pressure she has to try and combat. And they’re all confused about love, like any girl that age knows the first thing about it. It takes a lot of time to avert a crisis like that. It’s life and death, Mom. She’s out there on the front lines of it, and sometimes it keeps her away all hours.”

“You’re lecturing me,” Franny said.

“I’m not lecturing you, Mom,” Eleanor said. “I’m telling it to you straight.”

And right away, thoughts began to consume her that she could hardly bear. What kind of mother raises three children who themselves think so little of children that they do not want to have any of their own? What kind of trauma do they think they survived? What do they know the first thing about survival anyway? They had it so easy, these children. John working a good job, and Franny staying home and tending to everything. So easy, and the warmth of family all around them, and now every single one of them acting like family itself was some kind of poison they needed to void from their systems.

Franny went to see Jack preach his tryout, but she sat in the back row, not up front with Julie. It was her way of protesting, but no one seemed to notice. Jack acknowledged her from the pulpit, asked her to stand, said, “That’s the woman who raised me, who I owe my very self to. I want to say it publicly. I love you, Mom.” Then everyone applauded, but it wasn’t for anything she had done. It was because that’s what they were supposed to do. It was a dog and pony show.

When it was over they voted him in 204 to 16, with 4 abstentions. That was as close to unanimity as the Cherry Road Baptist Church had ever seen. Franny herself abstained, which would have brought the total abstentions to 5, except her vote was invalidated on account of the last time she set foot in the church was seven and a half years ago for the Easter cantata. She was still a member, a charter member at that, but not in good standing. But the act of attending made her eligible to vote again for at least the next five years, and for the rest of the years she lived in her own house, the one she had shared with John, she never missed another vote. She registered strongly her support for air-conditioning improvements and her opposition to hiring a music minister who did not also want to work with the youth, often enough heading up a stubborn bloc of old-timers against Jack. She did it for the same reason she had abstained the day he was voted in. It wouldn’t be right to cast a favorable vote just because the pastor was her son. That would be nepotism, and it just wouldn’t be right.

Still, there were advantages to being the pastor’s mother. Jack was well liked. Women she had known her whole adult life would come up to her and compliment her on her raising him so well. “He’s grown into quite the gentleman,” they might say, or, those so inclined: “He’s grown into quite the mighty man of God.”

She began to attend the Wednesday morning women’s prayer meetings, which she found were quite useful for catching up on everyone’s business. Everyone talked bad about gossip, even while they were doing it. Marjorie Phillips would say things like, “I want to offer a request for intercessory prayer for Mary Jo Abdo. I was at the beauty shop last week and I heard her spreading all sorts of gossip about the women of the church. I want to pray for Mary Jo, in the spirit of love, that she might turn away from idle chatter and toward more edifying kinds of words.”

It was delicious. Franny joined in, too. She resumed her weekly hair appointments so she would have more prayer requests to share. Often she was the first to know about illness, divorce, and all kinds of other miseries, which she offered up for prayer. Mary Jo Abdo began coming to prayer meetings and before long told Franny that she considered her to be an A-1 All-American prayer warrior, and something of a mother to her in the faith.

Tuesday evenings she went over to jack and Julies house for dinner, and they made over her. Sometimes Julie grilled steaks on the back porch, really nice tenderloin cuts Franny and John never would have bought, and sometimes Jack made some kind of Mexican food, or Japanese food, always something new he was learning from someone he went to visit. He said it made people feel more comfortable if they had something to do with their hands, and it made him more comfortable, too, so when he went to visit people, if they weren’t too ill, he would ask them to teach him how to make their favorite meal in the kitchen. He would even offer to buy the ingredients, though almost everyone refused to let him.

One Tuesday evening Julie was out back grilling. Franny and Jack were sitting in the comfortable chairs in the living room, and she was telling him about how Mary Jo Abdo had met a gentleman in his fifties — “A younger man,” she said, eyes bright: “The scandal!” — when Jack interrupted her and said he wanted to check on Julie, that he’d be right back.

He was gone a little too long, and she began to worry. If life had taught her one thing, it was that the good times don’t ever last, that the bad times come and take them away right when you least expect it. She waited another minute and then she got up and walked toward the back door. Just then, the door opened, and Jack and Julie walked in pushing a brand-new bicycle, a beautiful old-fashioned kind, with high sloping handlebars and a basket and a red horn. “For you, Mom,” Julie said, and that was almost better than the bicycle, her calling Franny mom. It was the first time she had ever said it.

She began to ride the bicycle in the early afternoon. It felt good to move around some every day. She was sore at first, but then her body adjusted, and then she began to ride in the mornings. Once a week she undertook a long ride to the airport and back, growing fond of passing landmarks like the old Army barracks, the bomb shelter, even the strip clubs and their pink facades.

July 4, 1996, the church gathered at Okeeheelee State Park for an Independence Day celebration. They started early. The men played softball and later basketball, even though it was hotter than blue blazes by 9:30. There was a potluck lunch followed by a potluck dinner. Bill Miller brought his famous banana pudding. There were lawn darts and horseshoes, tetherball and badminton. The older women served the food and rested between meals in plastic lawn chairs beneath the shade of the palm trees. At nightfall the children traced their names in the air with sparklers. At nine o’clock the fire department brought a skiff out onto the lake where the water skiers practiced and shot off fireworks. Oh, what a sight. Red, white, and blue. And then the grand finale, explosion after explosion. Franny covered her ears and dropped her jaw the way the men who got back from the war said people did in London during the air raids. Then, just when the music had stopped and the last lights burned out in the sky, the music started up again, a massive chord played on maybe ten pianos at once, and dozens of fireworks, one last round, went up into the sky and burst into color simultaneously. The pattern they made was the American flag.

When it was over, everyone sat in stunned silence for a long, long time. Then someone put their hands together and began to cheer. That’s all it took was one person, and everyone was cheering, up on their feet applauding and whooping like there was no tomorrow, or, better yet, like tomorrow was going to be even better than today, which was saying a lot, because today was as good as it gets.

That was the night she slept in her own bed for the last time. In the morning she woke up feeling fine. She made a cup of coffee, put sugar on her grapefruit, and dug the flesh from the rind with her spoon. Then she got on her bicycle and set off for the airport.

She saw them up ahead, at the corner of Seminole and Cherry. Two Guatemalans — pickers, no doubt; day laborers, like her father had been; but not like her father at all; dirty and unruly — trading blows. The bigger man had the smaller one in a headlock and, was punching away at the top of his head with his free fist. The body of the one in the headlock was flailing all around, kicking his legs in the air, trying to spin out of the hold or get the bigger man on the ground, and he was delivering short blows to the kidneys with both hands.

She slowed down, wanting to see what would happen. Her money was on the one in the headlock, the little guy. He had fight; it was plain to see. It was all she could do to not shout her encouragement.

And just then, the smaller man got his legs hooked around the larger man’s legs and swept them out from under him, and they went down together on the sidewalk. The smaller man’s head hit the concrete first, and right away split open, ran red on the sidewalk. Then the larger man came down on top of the smaller man.

It was horrible, sure, but it was beautiful, all that blood, and the sickening crack of the smaller man’s skull as the larger man came down upon it. She was reminded of something she had all but forgotten from when she was very small, a story her father told. There had been a terrible passenger train accident, a section of track just west of Rowan County that had not been mended. Her father happened to be nearby. He was young, maybe fifteen; she couldn’t remember. He was hunting deer with his father. They both saw it happen. The train derailed, and forty people died, “But I could see the faces, all them people looking out at me and my daddy through them windows like they never had seen two men holding hunting guns before. Like we was the most beautiful people that ever lived on the planet earth. I don’t reckon I’ll ever know that feeling again.”

And that’s how it was for Franny. That Guatemalan picker hit the sidewalk and busted open his head, and then, just briefly, his eyes met hers, and he must have thought he dreamed it, an old lady on an old-fashioned bicycle.

She thought that the man might die, so she held on to his gaze as long as she could. She held on to it, and the act of holding on to it made her forget to keep her eyes on the road ahead. The bicycle rolled slowly into the intersection at Seminole and Cherry. There was the sound of squealing brakes. She looked up and saw a green pickup truck as it clipped her front tire. She lost control of the bike and fell, and the last thing she remembered was a dull cracking sound not unlike the one the picker’s head had just made, but coming from the direction of her right hip. Then a searing pain in that hip as it went stationary while her shoulders and head continued their fall. Then for some reason the smell of bay leaves and cinnamon. Then blackness.

She woke to a strange parade of strangers, vagrants in white coats, faces from her past — neighbors, relatives, schoolteachers, themselves but not. She found herself in great pain, the worst of it in her hip and running up and down her leg. She was haunted by the long dead. They spoke to her, and she was confused because their faces did not match their voices, and they had not aged in the years since she had known them in her youth. Time had ceased its orderly way forward. She could not walk, and men came to kidnap her, and when she tried to scream, they strapped her to a gurney and injected her with something that caused her to lose consciousness, but not entirely.

It happened again and again. She could hear them speaking though she could not move. Once she heard them say that she was suffering from some sort of stroke-related dementia and near paralysis. But she knew that it was the world that was changing and not her. She had clarity. Once, opening her eyes, she saw that the youngest of the doctors — how could this be possible? — was Bruce Macholtz from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, one of the doctors who had tended to her when she had the chicken pox at age six. Dr. Macholtz, but younger now than he was then.

And where was her John? It was time for him to come rescue her. She called out for him, or tried to, but her lips would not properly move. She was saying (but not saying), Let’s do it again, John. Take me away from here. Take me anywhere. We can start over again.

She remembered a magazine picture of a beachfront town near Georgetown. South Carolina. Debourdieu. Oh, it was so beautiful. Beach houses on wooden pilings two hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. John appeared to her once, calling her momma, and she knew it must be a dream. Debourdieu; she had seen it in Better Homes and Gardens. Why would John call her momma? Sweet girl, she wanted to say, to John. Tell me I am your sweet girl.

In Debourdieu the alligators occasionally approached from the brackish swamp water just north. Mary Jo had told Franny about Debourdieu, had shown her the pictures in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine, but the alligator talk she heard from her friend Arlene, who had vacationed in Georgetown. Alligators, walking the streets and beaches of Debourdieu. They had to get the Negroes and Chinamen who worked the rice paddies to come wrangle them away. Oh, for some Indian alligator wranglers. Old-fashioned cowboys and Comanches, John Wayne in a white hat, Tonto. Shirley Temple, remember her? She was a sexpot, a five-year-old tramp in saddle shoes, and no one was allowed to say it. The old men drove to Lexington to see her shake on the silver screen. It was her eyes, Shirley Temple. They spoke lewd things to the old men, those eyes. Oh, in Debourdieu, there, no Shirley Temple would tap her jig. They would feed her to the alligators, and then the Negroes and the Chinamen would hustle it all away.

She and John, there in Debourdieu, growing old, away from their horrid daughters with their dentist husbands, their rejections. But first she would have to find a way to escape. She woke as from a dream and saw the white flecked with black in the ceiling tile squares. White fluorescent lights ran the length of the ceiling. The terrible new Negro music blared from the television. The talking over the boom-boom-boom. Two of them in the room, talking, so not watching. First about men and their bodies. Delicious men, hard men who could be soft as cotton candy. Men worth their runnings around, but just barely. Then praying together. One said, “Take my hand. Sister Charlene,” and then: “Oh sweet Jesus, we come to you now with heavy hearts. We lift up our Sister Charlene in her time of trouble...”

The television still running. That dialect she could not bear, and the music, or what passed for it. She tried to cry out, to scream. Oh, sweet Lord, what if I have been taken from your bosom because of my secret. Because I have lied to John. Where is the fire and the brimstone? The heat and the sulfurous smell that lays wailing for the unrighteous?

The days and the nights intermingled. The woman came and said, “It’s me, Mom. It’s me, Julie.” Called her mom. Took her away, but not to Debourdieu. To a house that seemed familiar, which was a comfort, but which she did not recognize. Often in her life she had recognized places she had never been. There was a word for it, in the French. She couldn’t remember.

On New Year’s Eves she had often longed for confetti, at Christmas for snow to fall in Florida, every other day of the year for Christ to come back on his white horse, the sky to turn red, to be bodily raptured and be with her Father and all the saints in heaven. In this new place, she slowly realized that she could not any more control her body than a small infant could. She’d once heard a preacher say that from dust to dust there is a fall to match every rise. I know I am not dead by my pain. I know where the branch creek meets the larger creek that flows into the river at the bottom of the mountain and I am walking with my father. I am a good girl and have not known a whipping for more than a week. He has not said go choose a switch from the tree.

She knew the tree. She knew it was better to pick a stiff switch, one without any give. But not too stiff, because then it would break against her backside, and, “Franny Mae, you’re in for a world of hurt now.”

She was wearing her red housedress, and this woman Julie was taking it off and then bathing her. The water was not cold and not too hot. She remembered “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” and isn’t it nice to have something that is just right. And isn’t it nice to feel the warm washcloth against your skin, and the water, and to be lifted bodily from the water and feel the towel around your shoulders, and the hands of the young woman drying you.

The pain was worst in the middle of the night when she was alone and tried to call out and no sound came, so no one came. Then one night the worst of all, the thing she thought she had laid to rest.

Donny Lynn Prather, looking in her window.

He mocked her by standing still, watching and not watching. She could not lift her head to see the window, but she could feel him there, staring, not moving.

One evening he found a way to speak to her so she knew he was not moving his lips but was just speaking from his mind to hers. A violation he had achieved how? He was not using words but instead a liquid fear. She could feel him seeping it into her through her skin and skull. She worried it would melt her.

He was sending her a message and sending. A message he was sending but she could not know the words and what they stood for.

Sending and sending.

And then, all at once, she knew, and it was worse than the melting of her skin from her face, though that was part of what he was promising. The words she could not know because they were spoken in Spanish, so he had gone to Mexico after all. He was saying. “You thought I was a dummy, little girl, but I got something for you.” He was saying it in Spanish, but she was hearing it in English. He had been taken by devils for sure. She remembered the preacher when Eleanor was a baby who came one Sunday night to the Cherry Road Baptist Church and said that these devils were all around us, standing on our shoulders, wanting to poke at us but for the blood of Jesus, and it was not that they had got to Donny Lynn Prather just now or even when he was on the run in Mexico. It was that they had got to his momma before he was even born and taken residence in his soul.

Every night he came to her window but did not show her his face by coming in the room. Just let her know he was there so she could not sleep.

She could feel a growing tightness in her chest. She spent most of her days wrung out and half-alive, slumped sideways in a La-Z-Boy chair until the woman Julie brought some couch pillows to prop her up. Like she was a rag doll with sagging flesh, discarded victim of love like the Velveteen Rabbit. Perhaps a dog would come and take her in his jaws and drag her away.

Then one night Donny Lynn came to the window with a new message. “Do you wonder where your John is?” he said but did not say. “Yes, I do,” she said. They were talking this way often. They were bound up together now in such a way that neither had need of voice. “You have him, don’t you,” she said. “You have taken him.”

There was a long silence. Then Donny Lynn Prather went away. He did not say anything. The absence of him was worse than his presence, because he was gone and he had John.

Ten days passed, or ten years. She could not be sure when Donny had found a way to reorder time. A day with the Lord, the preachers would say, is like a thousand years. But what about a day with Donny?

She could see him whipping that little boy, Roy, his little brother, in that field, curse that field, with both belts, knocking that bell buckle the shape of Kentucky into his head, and Franny was standing to one side, no, sitting, in that woman Julie’s La-Z-Boy chair, slumped to one side, watching Roy’s head cave in slowly, while all around her she could hear string music that sounded like heaven, and Julie saying, “Mom, it’s Vivaldi, it’s so beautiful, isn’t it, have you heard it before?” and Roy crying out to Donny, pleading for his life, singing for it “Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, for I belong to somebody” — and then Roy looking at her, saying I’m not being no mommy.

Then, a time of amazing quiet. She fell asleep one evening and woke the next morning. That evening she fell asleep again, and did not wake until the morning. Mornings she sometimes woke soiled by her own urine, sometimes even her own excrement. No matter. The woman Julie would come and tend to her. Bathe her, dry her, brush her hair.

She came to think of herself as a child, and Julie her mother. It was not true — she was not a child, and her mother was long gone — but then, in its own way, it was true. In her heart she was growing to love Julie.

One afternoon Julie left her in the care of another woman. She said she had to go to the store to pick up a few things. When she returned, she was holding a metal cage, and inside the cage was a green parakeet. She held it up so Franny could see it. The parakeet jumped from its perch to ring a bell near the top of the cage. “His wings have been clipped,” Julie said, “but he’s not any less lovely, is he, Mom?”

That evening she went to sleep and woke the next morning reeking of drying urine. She waited for Julie to come and get her, but Julie did not come. She waited for a long time. She could hear the parakeet stirring in his covered cage. The daylight from her bedroom had reached him through the white pillowcase meant to comfort him and keep him quiet through the night.

She began to worry about Julie. The Florida sun burned through the window, the heat rising enough she could notice it every few minutes. She worried the parakeet would overheat and die. Tiny birds are fragile. Little green birds.

The door opened. She heard it open, and the relief settled into her. Julie’s being there.

Then a voice. But not Julie’s. A man’s voice, saying Julie’s words. “Let’s get you cleaned up, Mom.”

She had been conscious, sometimes, of the presence of a man in the house. It was not her business. Julie, kind as she was, could do what she wanted. Any comfort there is in the world... how could any of it be bad when all we are doing is waiting to get old and die? She wanted to help that parakeet grow its wings and give it the run of the house. You couldn’t set a thing like that free, because some cat would get to it, or some bigger bird.

The man leaned over her, and she did not right away recognize who he was. He was so familiar she should have known, but what in the world is easy to know when it is so hot in the room?

He reached his arms under her and picked her up. He was not gentle enough. His way of lifting her hurt her. Hurt her legs and hurt more under her armpits where he was carrying too much of her weight. Who was he? And why was he, and not Julie, moving her?

He carried her into the bathroom and sat her roughly on the toilet, then knelt at her feet. She could not hold up her weight, and she slumped to the side. She had the terrible pain in her hip. He reached up and grabbed her by the shoulders. As he leaned back she caught her first glimpse of his eyes.

It was the eyes. Something about the directness of his gaze. Even for just a moment, so direct. So familiar. It was then that she knew who it was who had come for her, after all these years.

It was Donny Lynn Prather. He had come and took John, and then he had come all those nights to scare her at her window. If he was here, what had come of John? What was he planning for her?

Donny said, “Mother, I’m going to take off your shoes and socks now, all right?” And it was not his way of talking. It was the way the younger people talked in this part of the country.

It was a matter of pride had led her to this. She had all those years thought Spanish was beyond him, but he had learned it. Now he had learned to talk like the people all around. He was like one of those lizards that could change color.

And he was calling her mother. She remembered the words so burned in her memory: Open up that pretty little mouth, Mommy. What job had he come to finish?

With the greatest force of her will, she tried to scream in protest, but no words would come. His hands were on her shoulders. His hands were so close to her throat. Then he knelt again and was strangely silent. She could hear only the small sounds of his moving.

“Your shoes, Mother,” he said, and she felt him take the slippers from her feet. She wondered why if he was going to kill her did he not kill her, and then she knew he had made up a ritual to make her afraid.

She was afraid.

Then he did something to her foot. He hurt her so bad she lost her air. Her throat closed up like it sometimes did without her wanting it to.

He said, “Does it hurt, Mother?”

She tried to still herself. Her chest was burning.

He said, “Docs it hurt?” What did he want from her? How could she keep from him the pleasure of letting him know her pain?

He stood, and again those fearsome eyes locked onto hers. “Mom,” he said — in his mouth, the word was a curse — “does it hurt?”

Some signal, any, to make him stop. She tried to blink her eyes. She could only feel the right one, could only see out of it. She blinked twice.

“I saw that, Mom,” he said. “Can you do it again? I want to be sure.”

In hostage situations, give the captor what he wants. That’s what they said on the evening news. She did it again, but her muscles got angry, and her eye fluttered, and she thought it might pop out at him. Any other man would feel horror, but he might find satisfaction. She did not want him to be satisfied.

He began to taunt her again. He was cruel. He said, “Well, that’s something.” He must have thought it was funny to see her like that, not able to move her body like she wanted. “Okay,” then louder, to intimidate her, the monster: “Okay.”

So she tried to blink again and was relieved that it at least stopped the fluttering. “I see it,” he said. Oh, he was cruel.

Then he began his lies. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. Had he said it to John, too? “I’m going to wash you now. I’m going to do it, but not if you don’t want me to. I’m going to take that sock off by unrolling it from the top, all right?”

Rape. She had been avoiding the word all her life, and now it popped up from the place he had planted it. Her body offered nothing for him. What pleasure was left in her old body? This was only violence. Only cruelty. Only the pleasures children find on their way to evil, as when they string a cat from a tree, flay it open, strip its skin, and let it die of exposure. Like they say Donny did when he was a small boy. They say, “Why, we knew then he was a bad seed.” They say it, they said it, but here stands Donny, and all them dead, and still he only a little older than he was then, to judge by his talk and his eyes. He found a way in Mexico. Must have. Here he is. Here, standing over her.

He was waiting for something. She blinked one more lime, to pacify him. That seemed to be what he wanted. He lowered himself again. She felt him touch her on the calf. His skin on hers. He was taking off her sock, like he said. If this was the end of her, he was going to drag it out. She was like that cat, but not kicking. Her body betrayed her.

“Mom,” Donny said, “you’ve got a nasty sore down here. On the arch of your foot. It’s bruised. It’s a bad one.” Then he struck her three times, just enough to hurt, on the calf. “The other one now,” he said, “Mom.”

Mom. Mother. He kept using the words. He was taking off her shoes and her socks now. Sometimes in the years after he had run off into the mountains and far away, she had suffered from terrible dreams — she in a canoe with Roy, paddling downstream, and suddenly the water filling with snakes, and both of them trying to beat them away with the paddles, but there were too many, snakes filling the canoe, snakes wrapping themselves around paddles, snakes wrapping themselves around limbs and chests and necks, snakes hissing, snakes opening their mouths, snakes showing their fangs, their forked tongues — and there would come a time when she realized she was asleep and dreaming, but that did nothing to make the snakes any less real. She would try to wake from those dreams. She would fight as though trying to escape from her own skin. She would fight and fight, a feeling not unlike trying to get above water to avoid drowning, and the fighting would exhaust her. She would wake alone and wet, her muscles tense, her blood rushing like whitewater rapids.

Her body, now, was not unlike her young girl’s body had been in those long moments of not waking. But now she could not wake. Her body had become divorced from her. It functioned to the extent that it functioned and no more. She could not will it to do much more.

She tried to resist the urge, then, to swim upward through herself and try to escape through whatever surface it was that separated her self from her body. Like a swimmer underwater, she could see through the surface well enough to know it was there, to see the light play upon it.

He kept up his patter. “The other one now, Mom,” he said.

She began to pray: Lord, if it is Your will take me now. I’ve seen enough of this life. I don’t want to suffer anymore. Not at his hands. She did not believe her prayer would be answered. She had been told that faith the size of a mustard seed was enough to make heaven move. Her experience of life said that was not so.

He said, “Mom, have you noticed the shower curtains?” What did he want with the shower curtains? “They’re starting to yellow, and that’s the problem, I think, with translucent shower curtains, the way they yellow with time. Julie was thinking of buying some shower curtains to match the hand towels...” And at this she thought she might vomit. What was he threatening? Take me, take me, what life do I have left for living? Julie, she is so kind, so kind...

Now she could not hear the words he was saying, so loud was the sound of the screaming in her own head. The screams got trapped inside when she could not give them voice, and inside they reverberated as in an echo chamber, and multiplied, grew louder and louder until all that was in her seemed to be screaming, crying out as the rocks might but in anguish, not in praise.

She waited to hear the sound of water running, knew he was capable of drowning her, knew how little it would take if he lay her face-down in the water. In Rowan County she had known of at least three children drowned in less than three inches of water in nearby creeks. She had known of cats wrapped in burlap sacks and weighted down, dropped in only a bucket of water and killed that way. Donny himself had at age twelve buried a wounded dog up to his neck in sand and brought over chickens to peck at his eyes and deeper, killed him that way. There was no one way to kill a feeble creature.

Donny began to hum. The song he was humming was carnal. She could feel it in her bones. Could tell from the way he was humming it, the sharpnesses and roundnesses of notes, the way they refused to flatten out, the kind of music that was the opposite of hymns, that carried with it the mark of the silvery tongue.

She heard it, knew she was getting bound up, worried that she was giving him what he wanted. Right then she tried her best to think of things outside herself and long ago. The moment John Junior took his first steps at Connie and Millicent Pomeroy’s house. They had brand-new white carpeting, made to look marbled on purpose, and Eleanor was so excited at the baby’s steps, she ran into the living room carrying her cup of grape juice and spilled it on that carpet, and John said, “I’ll buy you new carpet. I’ll install it myself!” And he would have, gladly, but Connie said he had extra, would he just patch it, and John did, with Connie’s help. She could see them, those two men, cutting a careful square of that white carpet and matching the extra just right, matching one end of the marbling pattern to the other so you couldn’t tell unless you put your nose right up to (hat patch, and then standing back, taking such satisfaction in what they had done, with their hands, with their heads.

The memory calmed her. She could feel it, and hoped Donny could see it, hoped it sped him on his way to whatever it was he intended to do to her, then sped him ever quicker to hell. Surely someone would find her body and go looking for him. Justice was harder to escape than it used to be. They had more than dogs. They had helicopters and computers and television programs. She had watched them every Sunday night, hoping to catch a killer.

She heard the sound of the faucet turning and the water beginning to run. He was still talking, but she was refusing to listen to the words he was saving. She had survived him once before, and she would not be afraid of him now.

The phone rang. She heard him turn off the water, wondered if he would leave her to get up and answer it. Fleetingly, she heard Julie’s voice, which alarmed her, because what if she was in the house? But it was the answering machine, because she heard the beep, and then some sort of wrong number, a woman talking the way one woman talks to another, but saying in the course of her yammering. “Bring me the man of God!”

Then Donny said, “Art Miller. Now there’s one guy who can wait.”

He had turned on the water again. He was looking at her. And then she knew. He meant to kill not just her, but others, too. She tried to pull herself together, but the fear was beginning to rise in her again. She thought of the little green parakeet, and that affected her somehow more than Art Miller. Like people used to say, “Somebody else’s baby dies, you wear black to the funeral. Your dog dies, you wear black for a whole year.”

That wasn’t right, she’d always thought. Now she knew it didn’t matter if it was right or not. Like a lot of things. It was so. It was what it was, and there was no changing the ways of people. The way of a man is righteous in his own eyes, like the preachers say. Oh, to save that little green bird.

He turned off the water. She was aware that he was staring at her with those cold eyes. She could not see those eyes, but she knew. It was just like those long nights when he waited at the windows, or those long-ago afternoons when he stalked her tree to tree. She could not hear his voice anymore and knew he was keeping it from her to prolong the silence and create an empty space in it for her fears.

Finally he spoke. “Now, Mom,” he said. “After I stop the tub, okay?” As though he were asking for her consent. The sincerity of the venomous snake, its bright colored markings covered in mud. And he put his body near hers, his face near hers, so close they were almost touching, so close they were breathing in one another’s air. Close like lovers, his eyes probing hers, his eyes winding their way inside her.

He said, “I’m going to give you a bath now, Momma,” and surely this was her end. There was a strange light in his eyes, something stranger than the familiarity. A sadness, almost. Judas kissing Jesus, compelled by some force stronger than his own love. She could see in that moment something of love in Donny’s eyes, and the sight of it, the sight of love, was more frightening than anything she had seen in her life. To know that the very face of evil was love. To know that every boundary separating every one thing from another could be wiped away in the last moments of life, which she knew these would be. The true nature of the world letting itself be known in this last hour.

Then he began to undress her. He worked his way down the front of her, button by button. He was pulling against the house-dress as he went. She could feel the pull of the fabric against her back. He crouched down, and the dress went open, and his eyes, now, would be gazing upon the breasts of which she had become first ashamed then indifferent. He continued to unbutton, the waist, the lap, the knees, and then the housedress came undone and fell to her sides. He was seeing for the first time the hidden parts of her. She wondered what it meant to him and knew it must thrill him now even more than it would have when she was very young and he meant to ruin her and did.

Then he picked her up again, and she felt a burning in her chest, a great pain. He lifted her, and as he lowered her to the water, he said, “Shh, shh,” and then, “Mommy, Mommy. It’s all right, Mommy.”

Then she began to shake. Then she felt a great pain in her chest. She had always feared she might die alone, but she was not alone.