The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Steve Yarbrough The Rest of Her Life from Missouri Review

The dog was a mixture of God knows how many breeds, but the vet had told them he had at least some rottweiler blood. You could see it in his shoulders, you could hear it when he barked, which he was doing that night when they pulled up at the gate and Chuckie cut the engine.

“Butch is out,” Dee Ann said. “That’s kind of strange.”

Chuckie didn’t say anything. He’d looked across the yard and seen her momma’s car in the driveway, and he was disappointed. Dee Ann’s momma had told her earlier that she was going to buy some garden supplies at Western Auto and then eat something at the Sonic, and she’d said if she got back home and unloaded her purchases in time, she might run over to Greenville with one of her friends and watch a movie. Dee Ann had relayed the news to Chuckie tonight when he picked her up from work. That had gotten his hopes up.

The last two Saturday nights her momma had gone to Greenville, and they’d made love on the couch. They’d done it before in the car, but Chuckie said it was a lot nicer when you did it in the house. As far as she was concerned, the major difference was that they stood a much greater chance of getting caught. If her momma had walked in on them, she would not have gone crazy and ordered Chuckie away, she would have stayed calm and sat down and warned them not to do something that could hurt them later on. “There’re things y’all can do now,” she would have said, “that can mess y’all’s lives up bad.”

Dee Ann leaned across the seat and kissed Chuckie. “You don’t smell too much like a Budweiser brewery,” she said. “Want to come in with me?”

“Sure.”

Butch was waiting at the gate, whimpering, his front paws up on the railing. Dee Ann released the latch, and they went in and walked across the yard, the dog trotting along behind them.

The front door was locked — a fact that Chuckie corroborated the next day. She knocked, but even though both the living room and the kitchen were lit up, her momma didn’t come. Dee Ann waited a few seconds, then rummaged through her purse and found the key. It didn’t occur to her that somebody might have come home with her momma, that they might be back in the bedroom together, doing what she and Chuckie had done. Her momma still believed that if she could tough it out a few more months, Dee Ann’s daddy would recover his senses and come back. Most of his belongings were still here.

Dee Ann unlocked the door and pushed it open. Crossing the threshold, she looked back over her shoulder at Chuckie. His eyes were shut. They didn’t stay shut for long, he was probably just blinking, but that instant in which she saw them closed was enough to frighten her. She quickly looked into the living room. Everything was as it should be: the black leather couch stood against the far wall, the glass coffee table in front of it, two armchairs pulled up to the table at forty-five degree angles. The paper lay on the mantelpiece, right where her momma always left it.

“Momma?” she called. “It’s me and Chuckie.”

As she waited for a reply, the dog rushed past her. He darted into the kitchen. Again they heard him whimper.

She made an effort to follow the dog, but Chuckie laid his hand on her shoulder. “Wait a minute,” he said. Afterwards he could never explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all his own, why he had restrained her.

Earlier that evening, as she stood behind the checkout counter at the grocery store where she was working that summer, she had seen her daddy. He was standing on the sidewalk, looking in through the thick plate glass window, grinning at her.

It was late, and as always on Saturday evening, downtown Loring was virtually deserted. If people wanted to shop or go someplace to eat, they’d be out on the highway, at the Sonic or the new Pizza Hut. If they had enough money, they’d just head for Greenville. It had been a long time since anything much went on downtown after dark, which made her daddy’s presence here that much more unusual. He waved, then walked over to the door.

The manager was in back, totalling the day’s receipts. Except for him and Dee Ann and one stock boy who was over in the dairy aisle sweeping up, the store was empty.

Her daddy wore a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved pullover with an alligator on the pocket. He had on his funny-looking leather cap that reminded her of the ones policemen wore. He liked to wear that cap when he was out driving the MG.

“Hey, sweets,” he said.

Even with the counter between them, she could smell whiskey on his breath. He had that strange light in his eyes.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“When’d you start working nights?”

“A couple of weeks back.”

“Don’t get in the way of you and Buckie, does it?”

She started to correct him, tell him her boyfriend’s name was Chuckie, but then she thought Why bother? He’d always been the kind of father who couldn’t remember how old she was or what grade she was in. Sometimes he had trouble remembering she existed: years ago he’d brought her to this same grocery store, and after buying some food for his hunting dog, he’d forgotten about her and left her sitting on the floor in front of the magazine rack. The store manager had carried her home.

“Working nights is okay,” she said. “My boyfriend’ll be picking me up in a few minutes.”

“Got a big night planned?”

“We’ll probably just ride around a little bit and then head on home.”

Her daddy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a twenty and handed it to her. “Here,” he said. “You kids do something fun. On me. See a movie or get yourselves a six-pack of Dr. Pepper.”

He laughed, to show her he wasn’t serious about the Dr. Pepper, and then he stepped around the end of the counter and kissed her cheek. “You’re still the greatest little girl in the world,” he said. “Even if you’re not very little anymore.”

He was holding her close. In addition to whiskey, she could smell after-shave and deodorant and something else — a faint trace of perfume. She hadn’t seen the MG on the street, but it was probably parked in the lot outside, and she bet his girlfriend was in it. She was just three years older than Dee Ann, a junior up at Delta State, though people said she wasn’t going to school anymore. She and Dee Ann’s daddy were living together in an apartment near the flower shop he used to own and run. He’d sold the shop last fall, just before he left home.

He didn’t work anymore, and Dee Ann’s momma had said she didn’t know how he aimed to live, once the money from his business was gone. The other thing she didn’t know — because nobody had told her — was that folks said his girlfriend sold drugs. Folks said he might be involved in that too.

He pecked her on the cheek once more, told her to have a good time with her boyfriend and to tell her momma he said hello, and then he walked out the door. Just as he left, the manager hit the switch, and the aisle lights went off.

That last detail — the lights going off when he walked out of the store — must have been significant, because the next day, as Dee Ann sat on the couch at her grandmother’s house, knee to knee with the Loring County sheriff, Jim Wheeler, it kept coming up.

“You’re sure about that?” Wheeler said for the third or fourth time. “When your daddy left the Safeway, Mr. Lindsey was just turning out the lights?”

Her grandmother was in bed down the hall. The doctor and two women from the Methodist church were with her. She’d been having chest pains off and on all day.

The dining room table was covered with food people had brought: two hams, a roast, a fried chicken, dish upon dish of potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, two or three pecan pies, a pound cake. By the time the sheriff came, Chuckie had been there twice already — once in the morning with his momma and again in the afternoon with his daddy — and both times he had eaten. While his mother sat on the couch with Dee Ann, sniffling and holding her hand, and his father admired the knickknacks on the mantelpiece, Chuckie had parked himself at the dining room table and begun devouring one slice of pie after another, occasionally glancing through the doorway at Dee Ann. The distance between where he was and where she was could not be measured by any known means. She knew it, and he did, but he apparently believed that if he kept his mouth full, they wouldn’t have to acknowledge it yet.

“Yes sir,” she told the sheriff. “He’d just left when Mr. Lindsey turned off the lights.”

A pocket-sized notebook lay open on Wheeler’s knee. He held a ball-point pen with his stubby fingers. He didn’t know it yet, but he was going to get a lot of criticism for what he did in the next few days. Some people would say it cost him re-election. “And what time does Mr. Lindsey generally turn off the lights on a Saturday night?”

“Right around eight o’clock.”

“And was that when he did it last night?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, that’s what Mr. Lindsey says too,” Wheeler said. He closed the notebook and put it in his shirt pocket. “Course, being as he was in the back of the store, he didn’t actually see you talking with your daddy.”

“No,” she said. “You can’t see the check-out stands from back there.”

Wheeler stood, and she did too. To her surprise, he pulled her close to him. He was a compact man, not much taller than she was.

She felt his warm breath on her cheek. “I sure am sorry about all of this, honey,” he said. “But don’t you worry. I guarantee you I’ll get to the bottom of it. Even if it kills me.”

Even if it kills me.

She remembers that phrase in those rare instances when she sees Jim Wheeler on the street downtown. He’s an old man now, in his early sixties, white-haired and potbellied. For years he’s worked at the catfish plant, though nobody seems to know what he does. Most people can tell you what he doesn’t do. He’s not responsible for security — he doesn’t carry a gun. He’s not front-office. He’s not a foreman or a shift supervisor, and he has nothing to do with the live-haul trucks.

Chuckie works for Delta Electric, and once a month he goes to the plant to service the generators. He says Wheeler is always outside, wandering around, his head down, his feet scarcely rising off the pavement. Sometimes he talks to himself.

“I was out there last week,” Chuckie told her not long ago, “and I’d just gone through the front gates, and there he was. He was off to my right, walking along the fence, carrying this bucket.”

“What kind of bucket?”

“Looked like maybe it had some kind of caulking mix in it — there was this thick white stuff sticking to the sides. Anyway, he was shuffling along there, and he was talking to beat the band.”

“What was he saying?”

They were at the breakfast table when they had this conversation. Their daughter Cynthia was finishing a bowl of cereal and staring into an algebra textbook. Chuckie glanced toward Cynthia, rolled his eyes at Dee Ann, then looked down at the table. He lifted his coffee cup, drained it, and left for work.

But that night, when he crawled into bed beside her and switched off the light, she brought it up again. “I want to know what Jim Wheeler was saying to himself,” she said. “When you saw him last week.”

They weren’t touching — they always left plenty of space between them — but she could tell he’d gone rigid. He did his best to sound groggy. “Nothing much.”

She was rigid now too, lying stiffly on her back, staring up into the dark. “Nothing much is not nothing. Nothing much is still something.”

“Won’t you ever let it go?”

“ You brought his name up. You bring his name up, then you get this reaction from me, and then you’re mad.”

He rolled onto his side. He was looking at her, but she knew he couldn’t make out her features. He wouldn’t lay his palm on her cheek, wouldn’t trace her jawbone like he used to. “Yeah, I brought his name up,” he said. “I bring his name up, if you’ve noticed, about once a year. I bring his name up, and I bring up Lou Pierce’s name, and I’d bring up Barry Lancaster’s name too if he hadn’t had the good fortune to move on to bigger things than being DA in a ten-cent town. I keep hoping I’ll bring one of their names up, and after I say it, it’ll be like I just said John Doe or Cecil Poe or Theodore J. Bilbo. I keep hoping I’ll say it and you’ll just let it go.”

The ceiling fan, which was turned off, had begun to take shape. It looked like a big dark bird, frozen in mid-swoop. Three or four times she had woken up near dawn and seen that shape there, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. One time she stuck her fist in her mouth and bit her knuckle.

“What was he saying?”

“He was talking to a quarterback.”

“What?”

“He was talking to a quarterback. He was saying some kind of crap like ‘Hit Jimmy over the middle.’ He probably walks around all day thinking about when he was playing football in high school, going over games in his mind.”

He rolled away from her then, got as close to the edge of the bed as he could. “He’s just like you,” he said. “He’s stuck back there too.”

She had seen her daddy several times in between that Saturday night — when Chuckie walked into the kitchen murmuring, “Mrs. Williams? Mrs. Williams?” — and the funeral, which was held the following Wednesday morning. He had come to her grandmother’s house Sunday evening, had gone into her grandmother’s room and sat by the bed, holding her hand and sobbing. Dee Ann remained in the living room, and she heard their voices, heard her daddy saying, “Remember how she had those big rings under her eyes after Dee Ann was born? How we all said she looked like a pretty little raccoon?” Her grandmother, whose chest pains had finally stopped, said, “Oh, Allen, I raised her from the cradle, and I know her well. She never would’ve stopped loving you.” Then her daddy started crying again, and her grandmother joined in.

When he came out and walked down the hall to the living room, he had stopped crying, but his eyes were red-rimmed and his face looked puffy. He sat down in the armchair, which was still standing right where the sheriff had left it that afternoon. For a long time he said nothing. Then he rested his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his fists, and said, “Were you the one that found her?”

“Chuckie did.”

“Did you go in there?”

She nodded.

“He’s an asshole for letting you do that.”

She didn’t bother to tell him how she’d torn herself out of Chuckie’s grasp and bolted into the kitchen, or what had happened when she got in there. She was already starting to think what she would later know for certain: in the kitchen she had died. When she saw the pool of blood on the linoleum, saw the streaks that shot like flames up the wall, a thousand-volt jolt hit her heart. She lost her breath, and the room went dark, and when it relit itself she was somebody else.

Her momma’s body lay in a lump on the floor, over by the door that led to the back porch. The shotgun that had killed her, her daddy’s Remington Wingmaster, stood propped against the kitchen counter. Back in what had once been called the game room, the sheriff would find that somebody had pulled down all the guns — six rifles, the other shotgun, both of her daddy’s .38’s — and thrown them on the floor. He’d broken the lock on the metal cabinet that stood nearby and he’d removed the box of shells and loaded the Remington.

It was hard to say what he’d been after, this man who for her was still a dark, faceless form. Her momma’s purse had been ransacked, her wallet was missing, but there couldn’t have been much money in it. She had some jewelry in the bedroom, but he hadn’t messed with that. The most valuable things in the house were probably the guns themselves, but he hadn’t taken them.

He’d come in through the back door — the lock was broken — and he’d left through the back door. Why Butch hadn’t taken his leg off was anybody’s guess. When the sheriff and his deputies showed up, it was all Chuckie could do to keep the dog from attacking.

“She wouldn’t of wanted you to see her like that,” her daddy said. “Nor me either.” He spread his hands and looked at them, turning them over and scrutinizing his palms, as if he intended to read his own fortune. “I reckon I was lucky,” he said, letting his gaze meet hers. “Anything you want to tell me about it?”

She shook her head no. The thought of telling him how she felt seemed somehow unreal. It had been years since she’d told him how she felt about anything that mattered.

“Life’s too damn short,” he said. “Our family’s become one of those statistics you read about in the papers. You read those stories and you think it won’t ever be you. Truth is, there’s no way to insure against it.”

At the time, the thing that struck her as odd was his use of the word family. They hadn’t been a family for a long time, not as far as she was concerned.

She forgot about what he’d said until a few days later. What she remembered about that visit with him on Sunday night was that for the second time in twenty-four hours, he pulled her close and hugged her and gave her twenty dollars.

She saw him again Monday at the funeral home, and the day after that, and then the next day, at the funeral, she sat between him and her grandmother, and he held her hand while the preacher prayed. She had wondered if he would bring his girlfriend, but even he must have realized that would be inappropriate.

He apparently did not think it inappropriate, though, or unwise either, to present himself at the offices of an insurance company in Jackson on Friday morning, bringing with him her mother’s death certificate and a copy of the coroner’s report.

When she thinks of the morning — a Saturday — on which Wheeler came to see her for the second time, she always imagines her own daughter sitting there on the couch at her grandmother’s place instead of her. She sees Cynthia looking at the silver badge on Wheeler’s shirt pocket, sees her glancing at the small notebook that lies open in his lap, at the pen gripped so tightly between his fingers that his knuckles have turned white.

“Now the other night,” she hears Wheeler say, “your boyfriend picked you up at what time?”

“Right around eight o’clock.” Her voice is weak, close to breaking. She just talked to her boyfriend an hour ago, and he was scared. His parents were pissed — pissed at Wheeler, pissed at him, but above all pissed at her. If she hadn’t been dating their son, none of them would have been subjected to the awful experience they’ve just gone through this morning. They’re devout Baptists, they don’t drink or smoke, they’ve never seen the inside of a nightclub, their names have never before been associated with unseemly acts. Now the sheriff has entered their home and questioned their son as if he were a common criminal. It will cost the sheriff their votes come November. She’s already lost their votes. She lost them when her daddy left her momma and started running around with a young girl.

“The reason I’m kind of stuck on this eight o’clock business,”

Wheeler says, “is you say that along about that time’s when your daddy was there to see you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Now your boyfriend claims he didn’t see your daddy leaving the store. Says he didn’t even notice the MG on the street.”

“Daddy’d been gone a few minutes already. Plus, I think he parked around back.”

“Parked around back,” the sheriff says.

“Yes sir.”

“In that lot over by the bayou.”

Even more weakly: “Yes sir.”

“Where the delivery trucks come in — ain’t that where they usually park?”

“I believe so. Yes sir.”

Wheeler’s pen pauses. He lays it on his knee. He turns his hands over, studying them as her daddy did a few days before. He’s looking at his hands when he asks the next question. “Any idea why your daddy’d park his car behind the Safeway — where there generally don’t nothing but delivery trucks park — when Main Street was almost deserted and there was a whole row of empty spaces right in front of the store?”

The sheriff knows the answer as well as she does. When you’re with a woman you’re not married to, you don’t park your car on Main Street on a Saturday night. Particularly if it’s a little MG with no top on it, and your daughter’s just a few feet away, with nothing but a pane of glass between her and a girl who’s not much older than she is. That’s how she explains it to herself anyway. At least for today.

“I think maybe he had his girlfriend with him.”

“Well, I don’t aim to hurt your feelings, honey,” Wheeler says, looking at her now, “but there’s not too many people that don’t know about his girlfriend.”

“Yes sir.”

“You reckon he might’ve parked out back for any other reason?” She can’t answer that question, so she doesn’t even try.

“There’s not any chance, is there,” he says, “that your boyfriend could’ve been confused about when he picked you up?”

“No sir.”

“You’re sure about that?”

She knows that Wheeler has asked Chuckie where he was between seven-fifteen, when several people saw her mother eating a burger at the Sonic Drive-in, and eight-thirty, when the two of them found her body. Chuckie has told Wheeler he was at home watching TV between seven-fifteen and a few minutes till eight, when he got in the car and went to pick up Dee Ann. His parents were in Greenville eating supper at that time, so they can’t confirm his story.

“Yes sir,” she says, “I’m sure about it.”

“And you’re certain your daddy was there just a few minutes before eight?”

“Yes sir.”

“Because your daddy,” the sheriff says, “remembers things just a little bit different. The way your daddy remembers it, he came by the Safeway about seven-thirty and hung around there talking with you for half an hour. Course, Mr. Lindsey was in the back, so he can’t say yea or nay, and the stock boy don’t seem to have the sense God give a betsy bug. Your daddy was over at the VFW drinking beer at eight o’clock — stayed there till almost ten, according to any number of people, and his girlfriend wasn’t with him. Fact is, his girlfriend left the country last Thursday morning. Took a flight from New Orleans to Mexico City, and from there it looks like she went on to Argentina.”

Dee Ann, imagining this scene in which her daughter reprises the role she once played, sees Cynthia’s face go slack as the full force of the information strikes her. She’s still sitting there like that — hands useless in her lap, face drained of blood — when Jim Wheeler tells her that six months ago, her daddy took out a life insurance policy on her momma that includes double indemnity in the event of accidental death.

“I hate to be the one telling you this, honey,” he says, “because you’re a girl who’s had enough bad news to last the rest of her life. But your daddy stands to collect half a million dollars because of your momma’s death, and there’s a number of folks — and I reckon I might as well admit I happen to be among them — who are starting to think that ought not to occur.”

Chuckie gets off work at Delta Electric at six o’clock. A year or so ago she became aware that he’d started coming home late. The first time it happened, he told her he’d gone out with his friend Tim to have a beer. She saw Tim the next day buying a case of motor oil at Wal-Mart, and she almost referred to his and Chuckie’s night out just to see if he looked surprised. But if he’d looked surprised, it would have worried her, and if he hadn’t, it would have worried her even more: she would have seen it as a sign that Chuckie had talked to him beforehand. So in the end she nodded at Tim and kept her mouth shut.

It began happening more and more often. Chuckie ran over to Greenville to buy some parts for his truck, he ran down to Yazoo City for a meeting with his regional supervisor. He ran up into the north part of the county because a fellow there had placed an interesting ad in National Rifleman — he was selling a shotgun with fancy scrollwork on the stock.

On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she avoids latching onto Cynthia. She wants her daughter to have her own life, to be independent, even if independence, in a sixteen-year-old girl, manifests itself as distance from her mother. Cynthia is on the phone a lot, talking to her girlfriends, to boyfriends too. Through the bedroom door Dee Ann hears her laughter.

On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she sits on the couch alone, watching TV, reading, or listening to music. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night and Cynthia is out with her friends, Dee Ann goes out herself. She doesn’t go to movies, where her presence might make Cynthia feel crowded if she happened to be in the theater too, and she doesn’t go out and eat at any of the handful of restaurants in town. Instead she takes long walks. Sometimes they last until ten or eleven o’clock.

Every now and then, when she’s on one of these walks, passing one house after another where families sit parked before the TV set, she allows herself to wish she had a dog to keep her company. What she won’t allow herself to do — has never allowed herself to do as an adult — is actually own one.

The arrest of her father is preserved in a newspaper photo.

He has just gotten out of Sheriff Wheeler’s car. The car stands parked in the alleyway between the courthouse and the fire station. Sheriff Wheeler is in the picture too, standing just to the left of her father, and so is one of his deputies. The deputy has his hand on her father’s right forearm, and he is staring straight into the camera, as is Sheriff Wheeler. Her daddy is the only one who appears not to notice that his picture is being taken. He is looking off to the left, in the direction of Loring Street, which you can’t see in the photo, though she knows it’s there.

When she takes the photo out and examines it, something she does with increasing frequency these days, she wonders why her daddy is not looking at the camera. A reasonable conclusion, she knows, would be that since he’s about to be arraigned on murder charges, he doesn’t want his face in the paper. But she wonders if there isn’t more to it. He doesn’t look particularly worried. He’s not exactly smiling, but there aren’t a lot of lines around his mouth, like there would be if he felt especially tense. Were he not wearing handcuffs, were he not flanked on either side by officers of the law, you would probably have to say he looks relaxed.

Then there’s the question of what he’s looking at. Lou Pierce’s office is on Loring Street, and Loring Street is what’s off the page, out of the picture. Even if the photographer had wanted to capture it in this photo, he couldn’t have, not as long as he was intent on capturing the images of these three men. By choosing to photograph them, he chose not to photograph something else, and sometimes what’s outside the frame may be more important than what’s actually in it.

After all, Loring Street is south of the alley. And so is Argentina.

“You think he’d do that?” Chuckie said. “You think he’d actually kill your momma?”

They were sitting in his pickup when he asked her that question. The pickup was parked on a turnrow in somebody’s cotton patch on a Saturday afternoon in August. By then her daddy had been in jail for the better part of two weeks. The judge had denied him bail, apparently believing that he aimed to leave the country. The judge couldn’t have known that her daddy had no intention of leaving the country without the insurance money, which had been placed in an escrow account and wouldn’t be released until he’d been cleared of the murder charges.

The cotton patch they were parked in was way up close to Cleveland. Chuckie’s parents had forbidden him to go out with Dee Ann again, so she’d hiked out to the highway, and he’d picked her up on the side of the road. In later years she’ll often wonder whether or not she and Chuckie would have stayed together and gotten married if his parents hadn’t placed her off-limits.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He sure did lie about coming to see me. And then there’s Butch. If somebody broke in, he’d tear them to pieces. But he wouldn’t hurt Daddy.”

“I don’t believe it,” Chuckie said. A can of Bud stood clamped between his thighs. He lifted it and took a swig. “Your daddy may have acted a little wacky, running off like he did and taking up with that girl, but to shoot your momma and then come in the grocery store and grin at you and hug you? You really think anybody could do a thing like that?”

What Dee Ann was beginning to think was that almost everybody could do a thing like that. She didn’t know why this was so, but she believed it had something to do with being an adult and having ties. Having ties meant you were bound to certain things — certain people, certain places, certain ways of living. Breaking a tie was a violent act — even if all you did was walk out door number one and enter door number two — and one act of violence could lead to another. You didn’t have to spill blood to take a life. But after taking a life, you still might spill blood, if spilling blood would get you something else you wanted.

“I don’t know what he might have done,” she said.

“Every time I was ever around him,” Chuckie said, “he was in a nice mood. I remember going in the flower shop with Momma when I was a kid. Your daddy was always polite and friendly. Used to give me free lollipops.”

“Yeah, well, he never gave me any lollipops. And besides, your momma used to be real pretty.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything. I’m just stating a fact.”

“You saying she’s not pretty now?”

His innocence startled her. If she handled him right, Dee Ann realized, she could make him do almost anything she wanted. For an instant she was tempted to put her hand inside his shirt, stroke his chest a couple of times, and tell him to climb out of the truck and stand on his head. She wouldn’t always have such leverage, but she had it now, and a voice in her head urged her to exploit it.

“I’m not saying she’s not pretty anymore,” Dee Ann said. “I’m just saying that of course Daddy was nice to her. He was always nice to nice-looking women.”

“Your momma was a nice-looking lady too.”

“Yeah, but my momma was his wife.”

Chuckie turned away and gazed out at the cotton patch for several seconds. When he looked back at her, he said, “You know what, Dee Ann? You’re not making much sense.” He took another sip of beer, then pitched the can out the window. “But with all you’ve been through,” he said, starting the engine, “I don’t wonder at it.”

He laid his hand on her knee. It stayed there until twenty minutes later, when he let her out on the highway right where he’d picked her up.

Sometimes in her mind she has trouble separating all the men. It’s as if they’re revolving around her, her daddy and Chuckie and Jim Wheeler and Lou Pierce and Barry Lancaster, as if she’s sitting motionless in a hard chair, in a small room, and they’re orbiting her so fast that their faces blur into a single image which seems suspended just inches away. She smells them too: smells after-shave and cologne, male sweat and whiskey.

Lou Pierce was a man she’d been seeing around town for as long as she could remember. He had red hair and always wore a striped long-sleeved shirt and a wide tie that was usually loud-colored. You would see him crossing Loring Street, a coffee cup in one hand, his briefcase in the other. His office was directly across the street from the courthouse, where he spent much of his life — either visiting his clients in the jail, which was on the top floor, or defending those same clients downstairs in the courtroom itself.

Many years after he represented her father, Lou Pierce would find himself up on the top floor again, on the other side of the bars this time, accused of exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl. After the story made the paper, several other women, most in their twenties or early thirties, would contact the local police and allege that he had also shown himself to them.

He showed himself to Dee Ann too, though not the same part of himself he showed to the twelve-year-old girl. He came to see her at her grandmother’s on a weekday evening sometime after the beginning of the fall semester — she knows school was in session because she remembers that the morning after Lou Pierce visited her, she had to sit beside his son Raymond in senior English.

Lou sat in the same armchair that Jim Wheeler had pulled up near the coffee table. He didn’t have his briefcase with him, but he was wearing another of those wide ties. This one, if she remembers correctly, had a pink background, with white fleurs-de-lys.

“How you making it, honey?” he said. “You been holding up all right?”

She shrugged. “Yes sir. I guess so.”

“Your daddy’s awful worried about you.” He picked up the cup of coffee her grandmother had brought him before leaving them alone. “I don’t know if you knew that or not,” he said, taking a sip of the coffee. He set the cup back down. “He mentioned you haven’t been to see him.”

He was gazing directly at her.

“No sir,” she said, “I haven’t gotten by there.”

“You know what that makes folks think, don’t you?”

She dropped her head. “No sir.”

“Makes ’em think you believe your daddy did it.”

That was the last thing he said for two or three minutes. He sat there sipping his coffee, looking around the room, almost as if he were a real estate agent sizing up the house. Just as she decided he’d said all he intended to, his voice came back at her.

“Daddies fail,” he told her. “Lordy, hoto we fail. You could ask Raymond. I doubt he’d tell the truth, though, because sons tend to be protective of their daddies, just like a good daughter protects her momma. But the truth, if you wanted to dig into it, is that I’ve failed that boy nearly every day he’s been alive. You notice he’s in the band? Hell, he can’t kick a football or hit a baseball, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine. I remember when he was this tall—” He held his hand, palm down, three feet from the floor. “—he came to me dragging this little plastic bat and said, ‘Daddy, teach me to hit a baseball.’ And you know what I told him? I told him, ‘Son, I’m defending a man that’s facing life in prison, and I got to go before the judge tomorrow morning and plead his case. You can take that bat and you can hitch a kite to it and see if the contraption won’t fly.’”

He reached across the table then and laid his hand on her knee. She tried to remember who else had done that recently, but for the moment she couldn’t recall.

When he spoke again, he kept his voice low, as if he were afraid he’d be overheard. “Dee Ann, what I’m telling you,” he said, “is I know there are a lot of things about your daddy that make you feel conflicted. There’s a lot of things he’s done that he shouldn’t have, and there’s things he should have done that he didn’t. There’s a bunch of shoulds and shouldn’ts bumping around in your head, so it’s no surprise to me that you’d get confused on this question of time.”

She’d heard people say that if they were ever guilty of a crime, they wanted Lou Pierce to defend them. Now she knew why.

But she wasn’t guilty of a crime, and she said so: “I’m not confused about time. He came when I said he did.”

As if she were a sworn witness, Lou Pierce began, gently, regretfully, to ask her a series of questions. Did she really think her daddy was stupid enough to take out a life insurance policy on her mother and then kill her? If he aimed to leave the country with his girlfriend, would he send the girl first and then kill Dee Ann’s momma and try to claim the money? Did she know that her daddy intended to put the money in a savings account for her?

Did she know that her daddy and his girlfriend had broken up, that the girl had left the country chasing some young South American who, her daddy had admitted, probably sold her drugs?

When he saw that she wasn’t going to answer any of the questions, Lou Pierce looked down at the floor. “Honey,” he said softly, “did you ever ask yourself why your daddy left you and your momma?”

That was one question she was willing and able to answer. “He did it because he didn’t love us.”

When he looked at her again, his eyes were wet — and she hadn’t learned yet that wet eyes tell the most effective lies. “He loved y’all,” Lou Pierce said. “But your momma, who was a wonderful lady — angel, she wouldn’t give your daddy a physical life. I guarantee you he wishes to God he hadn’t needed one, but a man’s not made that way… and even though it embarrasses me, I guess I ought to add that I’m speaking from personal experience.”

At the age of thirty-eight, Dee Ann has acquired a wealth of experience, but the phrase personal experience is one she almost never uses. She’s noticed men are a lot quicker to employ it than women are. Maybe it’s because men think their experiences are somehow more personal than everybody else’s. Or maybe it’s because they take everything personally.

“My own personal experience,” Chuckie told Cynthia the other day at the dinner table, after she’d finished ninth in the voting for one of eight positions on the cheerleading squad, “has been that getting elected cheerleader’s nothing more than a popularity contest, and I wouldn’t let not getting elected worry me for two seconds.”

Dee Ann couldn’t help it. “When in the world,” she said, “did you have a personal experience with a cheerleader election?”

He laid his fork down. They stared at one another across a bowl of spaghetti. Cynthia, who can detect a developing storm front as well as any meteorologist, wiped her mouth on her napkin, stood up, and said, “Excuse me.”

Chuckie kept his mouth shut until she’d left the room. “I voted in cheerleader elections.”

“What was personal about that experience?”

“It was my own personal vote.”

“Did you have any emotional investment in that vote?”

“You ran once. I voted for you. I was emotional about you then.” She didn’t even question him about his use of the word then — she knew perfectly well why he used it. “And when I didn’t win,” she said, “you took it personally?”

“I felt bad for you.”

“But not nearly as bad as you felt for yourself?”

“Why in the hell would I feel bad for myself?”

“Having a girlfriend who couldn’t win a popularity contest — wasn’t that hard on you? Didn’t you take it personally?”

He didn’t answer. He just sat there looking at her over the bowl of spaghetti, his eyes hard as sandstone and every bit as dry.

Cynthia walks home from school, and several times in the last couple of years, Dee Ann, driving through town on her way back from a shopping trip or a visit to the library, has come across her daughter. Cynthia hunches over as she walks, her canvas backpack slung over her right shoulder, her eyes studying the sidewalk as if she’s trying to figure out the pavement’s composition. She may be thinking about her boyfriend or some piece of idle gossip she heard that day at school, or she may be trying to remember if the fourth president was James Madison or James Monroe, but her posture and the concentrated way she gazes down suggest that she’s a girl who believes she has a problem.

Whether or not this is so Dee Ann doesn’t know, because if her daughter is worried about something she’s never mentioned it. What Dee Ann does know is that whenever she’s out driving and she sees Cynthia walking home, she always stops the car, rolls her window down, and says, “Want a ride?” Cynthia always looks up and smiles, not the least bit startled, and she always says yes. She’s never once said no, like Dee Ann did to three different people that day twenty years ago, when, instead of going to her grandmother’s after school, she walked all the way from the highway to the courthouse and climbed the front steps and stood staring at the heavy oak door for several seconds before she pushed it open.

Her daddy has gained weight. His cheeks have grown round, the backs of his hands are plump. He’s not getting any exercise to speak of. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, he tells her, the prisoners who want to keep in shape are let out of their cells, one at a time, and allowed to jog up and down three flights of stairs for ten minutes each. He says an officer sits in a straight-backed chair down in the courthouse lobby with a rifle across his lap to make sure that the prisoners don’t jog any farther.

Her daddy is sitting on the edge of his cot. He’s wearing blue denim pants and a shirt to match, and a patch on the pocket of the shirt says Loring County Jail. The shoes he has on aren’t really shoes. They look like bedroom slippers.

Downstairs, when she checked in with the jailer, Jim Wheeler heard her voice and came out of his office. While she waited for the jailer to get the right key, the sheriff asked her how she was doing.

“All right, I guess.”

“You may think I’m lying, honey,” he said, “but the day’ll come when you’ll look back on this time in your life and it won’t seem like nothing but a real bad dream.”

Sitting in a hard plastic chair, looking at her father, she already feels like she’s in a bad dream. He’s smiling at her, waiting for her to say something, but her tongue feels like it’s fused to the roof of her mouth.

The jail is air conditioned, but it’s hot in the cell, and the place smells bad. The toilet over in the corner has no lid on it. She wonders how in the name of God a person can eat in a place like this. And what kind of person could actually eat enough to gain weight?

As if he knows what she’s thinking, her father says, “You’re probably wondering how I can stand it.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I can stand it,” he says, “because I know I deserved to be locked up.”

He sits there a moment longer, then gets up off the cot and shuffles over to the window, which has three bars across it. He stands there looking out. “All my life,” he finally says, “I’ve been going in and out of all those buildings down there and I never once asked myself what they looked like from above. Now I know. There’s garbage on those roofs and bird shit. One day I saw a man sitting up there, drinking from a paper bag. Right on top of the jewelry store.”

He turns around then and walks over and lays his hand on her shoulder.

“When I was down there,” he says, “scurrying around like a chicken with its head cut off, I never gave myself enough time to think. That’s one thing I’ve had plenty of in here. And I can tell you, I’ve seen some things I was too blind to see then.”

He keeps his hand on her shoulder the whole time he’s talking. “In the last few weeks,” he says, “I asked myself how you must have felt when I told you I was too busy to play with you, how you probably felt every time you had to go to the theater by yourself and you saw all those other little girls waiting in line with their daddies and holding their hands.” He says he’s seen all the ways in which he failed them both, her and her mother, and he knows they both saw them a long time ago. He just wishes to God he had.

He takes his hand off her shoulder, goes back over to the cot, and sits down. She watches, captivated, as his eyes begin to glisten. She realizes that she’s in the presence of a man capable of anything, and for the first time she knows the answer to a question that has always baffled her: why would her momma put up with so much for so long?

The answer is that her daddy is a natural performer, and her momma was his natural audience. Her momma lived for these routines, she watched till Watching killed her.

With watery eyes, Dee Ann’s daddy looks at her, here in a stinking room in the county courthouse. “Sweetheart,” he whispers, “you don’t think I killed her, do you?”

When she speaks, her voice will be steady, it won’t crack and break. She will display no more emotion than if she were responding to a question posed by her history teacher.

“No sir,” she tells her daddy. “I don’t think you killed her. I know you did.”

In that instant the weight of his life begins to crush her.

Ten-thirty on a Saturday night in 1997. She’s standing alone in an alleyway outside the Loring County Courthouse. It’s the same alley where her father and Jim Wheeler and the deputy had their pictures taken all those years ago. Loring is the same town it was then, except now there are gangs, and gunfire is something you hear all week long, not just on Saturday night. Now people kill folks they don’t know.

Chuckie is supposedly at a deer camp with some men she’s never met. He told her he knows them from a sporting goods store in Greenville. They all started talking about deer hunting, and one of the men told Chuckie he owned a cabin over behind the levee and suggested Chuckie go hunting with them this year.

Cynthia is out with her friends — she may be at a movie or she may be in somebody’s back seat. Wherever she is, Dee Ann prays she’s having fun. She prays that Cynthia’s completely caught up in whatever she’s doing and that she won’t come along and find her momma here, standing alone in the alley beside the courthouse, gazing up through the darkness as though she hopes to read the stars.

The room reminds her of a Sunday school classroom.

It’s on the second floor of the courthouse, overlooking the alley. There’s a long wooden table in the middle of the room, and she’s sitting at one end of it in a straight-backed chair. Along both sides, in similar chairs, sit fifteen men and women who make up the grand jury. She knows several faces, three or four names. It looks as if every one of them is drinking coffee. They’ve all got styrofoam cups.

Down at the far end of the table, with a big manila folder open in front of him, sits Barry Lancaster, the district attorney, a man whose name she’s going to be seeing in newspaper articles a lot in the next twenty years. He’s just turned thirty, and though it’s still warm out, he’s wearing a black suit, with a sparkling white shirt and a glossy black tie.

Barry Lancaster has the reputation of being tough on crime, and he’s going to ride that reputation all the way to the Mississippi attorney general’s office and then to a federal judgeship. When he came to see her a few days ago, it was his reputation that concerned him. After using a lot of phrases like “true bill” and “no bill” without bothering to explain precisely what they meant, he said, “My reputation’s at stake here, Dee Ann. There’s a whole lot riding on you.”

She knows how much is riding on her, and it’s a lot more than his reputation. She feels the great mass bearing down on her shoulders. Her neck is stiff and her legs are heavy. She didn’t sleep last night. She never really sleeps anymore.

“Now Dee Ann,” Barry Lancaster says, “we all know you’ve gone through a lot recently, but I need to ask you some questions today so that these ladies and gentlemen can hear your answers. Will that be okay?”

She wants to say that it’s not okay, that it will never again be okay for anyone to ask her anything, but she just nods.

He asks her how old she is.

“Eighteen.”

What grade she’s in.

“I’m a senior.”

Whether or not she has a boyfriend named Chuckie Nelms.

“Yes sir.”

Whether or not, on Saturday evening, August 2nd, she saw her boyfriend.

“Yes sir.”

Barry Lancaster looks up from the stack of papers and smiles at her. “If I was your boyfriend,” he says, “I’d want to see you every night.”

A few of the men on the grand jury grin, but the women keep straight faces. One of them, a small red-haired woman with lots of freckles, whose name she doesn’t know and never will know, is going to wait on her in a convenience store over in Indianola many years later. After giving her change, the woman will touch Dee Ann’s hand and say, “I hope the rest of your life’s been easier, honey. It must have been awful, what you went through.”

Barry Lancaster takes her through that Saturday evening, from the time Chuckie picked her up until the moment when she walked into the kitchen. Then he asks her, in a solemn voice, what she found there.

She keeps her eyes trained on his tie pin, a small amethyst, as she describes the scene in as much detail as she can muster. In a roundabout way, word will reach her that people on the grand jury were shocked, and even appalled, at her lack of emotion. Chuckie will try to downplay their reaction, telling her that they’re probably just saying that because of what happened later on. “It’s probably not you they’re reacting to,” he’ll say. “It’s probably just them having hindsight.”

Hindsight is something she lacks, as she sits here in a hard chair, in a small room, her hands lying before her on a badly scarred table. She can’t make a bit of sense out of what’s already happened. She knows what her daddy was and she knows what he wasn’t, knows what he did and didn’t do. What she doesn’t know is the whys and wherefores.

On the other hand, she can see into the future, she knows what’s going to happen, and she also knows why. She knows, for instance, what question is coming, and she knows how she’s going to answer it and why. She knows that shortly after she’s given that answer, Barry Lancaster will excuse her, and she knows, because Lou Pierce has told her, that after she’s been excused, Barry Lancaster will address the members of the grand jury.

He will tell them what they have and haven’t heard. “Now she’s a young girl,” he’ll say, “and she’s been through a lot, and in the end this case has to rest on what she can tell us. And the truth, ladies and gentlemen, much as I might want it to be otherwise, is that the kid’s gone shaky on us. She told the sheriff one version of what happened at the grocery store that Saturday night when her daddy came to see her, and she’s sat here today and told y’all a different version. She’s gotten all confused on this question of time. You can’t blame her for that, she’s young and her mind’s troubled, but in all honesty a good defense attorney’s apt to rip my case apart. Because when you lose this witness’s testimony, all you’ve got left is that dog, and that dog, ladies and gentlemen, can’t testify.”

Even as she sits here, waiting for Barry Lancaster to bring up that night in the grocery store — that night which, for her, will always be the present — she knows the statement about the dog will be used to sentence Jim Wheeler to November defeat. The voters of this county will drape that sentence around the sheriffs neck. If Jim Wheeler had done his job and found some real evidence, they will say, that man would be on his way to Parchman.

They will tell one another, the voters of this county, how someone saw her daddy at the Jackson airport, as he boarded a plane that would take him to Dallas, where he would board yet another plane for a destination farther south. They will say that her daddy was actually carrying a briefcase filled with money, with lots of crisp green hundreds, one of which he extracted to pay for a beer.

They will say that her daddy must have paid her to lie, that she didn’t give a damn about her mother. They will wonder if Chuckie has a brain in his head, to go and marry somebody like her, and they will ask themselves how she can ever bear the shame of what she’s done. They will not believe, not even for a moment, that she’s performed some careful calculations in her mind. All that shame, she’s decided, will still weigh a lot less than her daddy’s life. It will be a while before she and Chuckie and a girl who isn’t born yet learn how much her faulty math has cost.

Barry Lancaster makes a show of rifling through his papers. He pulls a sheet out and studies it, lets his face wrinkle up as if he’s seeing something on the page that he never saw before. Then he lays the sheet back down. He closes the manila folder, pushes his chair away from the table a few inches, and leans forward. She’s glad he’s too far away to lay his hand on her knee.

“Now,” he says, “let’s go backwards in time.”