2The Parking Lot

She made it to the car and got in and then sat there, because she had driven, and Wes had come with her, and she couldn’t very well leave him.

The Camry was parked where she always parked it, in the second row by the dumpster enclosure. From there she could get out fast after the Kitchen Crew’s post-service meetings, which never needed to go longer than twenty minutes and always did. The windshield had a skin of dust and a single yellow maple leaf stuck under the wiper. She put her hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, like she was taking her driver’s test, and looked at the leaf.

Her heart was going so hard she could see it in her wrists.

Inside, muffled, the piano started up again. Carolyn was playing the offertory, as if the church had decided to pick up where it left off. They would be passing the plates. People would be putting in their envelopes and not looking at each other. In a few minutes Nate would give the benediction, and the doors would open, and they would all come out into the lot, and she would still be sitting here.

She thought about starting the car. She thought about how it would look, Jo Pruitt peeling out of the Cedar Run lot on the Sunday after her son’s funeral with gravel pinging off the Fryes’ Buick. She didn’t start it.

Four or five minutes went by. Then something knocked on the passenger window.

It was Hazel Ormond, with the Buick. She must have left during the offertory, which took some doing. Hazel’s pew was a long way from the door, and the Buick had tennis balls on its back feet that made a sound on the carpet like somebody dragging a sack of flour. Jo had never once seen her leave early. Hazel was bent over the walker with her pocketbook hanging off one handle, peering in through the glass with her mouth set.

Jo unlocked the door.

It took Hazel almost a full minute to get in. There was a procedure. The walker had to be parked and braked. She had to turn and back up to the seat and sit sideways, then lift her legs in one at a time with both hands under the knee, the way you’d load firewood. Jo thought about helping and knew better. When Hazel was finally settled she took off her rain bonnet, though it wasn’t raining, folded it into a square, and put it in her lap.

She didn’t say anything. She looked out the windshield at the dumpster enclosure the way you’d look at a view.

Inside, Carolyn finished the offertory. There was a pause and the low sound of Nate’s voice, too far away to make out.

“They did it to me in sixty-eight,” Hazel said.

Jo turned her head.

“Not that.” Hazel moved one knobbed hand toward the church. “Not exactly that. But it was the same animal.” She smoothed the rain bonnet. “Brother Pettit preached Ruthie’s funeral. He’d been here eleven years and I’d have told you he was a good man, and he was, mostly. He stood up there over my girl in her little white box and said the Lord had needed another flower for His garden. Said it like he’d thought it up himself. Said it like it was a comfort.” Hazel breathed out through her nose. “Every woman in this church came up after and told me what a beautiful thing that was. How it helped them. Helped them.”

Jo couldn’t have answered if she’d tried.

“I sat there,” Hazel said. “I sat right there on that front pew and let him say it about my baby, and I nodded, because Carl was holding my hand and the whole county was watching. Then I went home and I couldn’t pray for a year. I’d open my mouth and nothing.” She looked at Jo for the first time since she’d gotten in. Her eyes were very pale, and the whites had gone yellow at the edges. “Fifty-seven years I’ve been sorry I didn’t walk out. So.” She shrugged, a small hitch of one shoulder under the church coat. “I thought I’d come tell you that you did it right. That’s all. I don’t have anything else. I’m too old to have anything else.”

Jo’s face did something. She felt it happen and couldn’t stop it. She put her forehead down on the steering wheel between her hands and made a sound she had not made at the hospital, or at the funeral home, or at the graveside. It came from somewhere under her ribs and it went on for a long time.

Hazel didn’t touch her. She sat in the passenger seat with her rain bonnet in her lap and looked out at the dumpster enclosure, and she waited, and she didn’t say there, there.

---

The doors opened and people started coming out, and Jo sat up and wiped her face with the heels of her hands and watched them come. They came out in their clusters, blinking in the daylight. She saw them look over, and she saw them look away, and she saw a few of them, Nell Frye, Brenda, start across the gravel and then stop and turn back, because Hazel was in the car. It would be Hazel Ormond’s doing, how the thing that happened next got talked about. Jo hadn’t known she needed that until she saw it working.

She didn’t see the Hollands come out. They must have used the side door by the nursery.

Wes came out last. He came down the steps slow, with his hands in his suit pockets, and walked straight to the car without stopping for anyone. Two men reached for him and he nodded at them and kept going. Hazel saw him coming and started the procedure in reverse. By the time Wes reached the car she had the door open and both feet on the gravel and was reaching for the Buick. He took her elbow without asking and got her up, and she let him.

“Wesley,” she said.

“Miss Hazel.”

“You take her home.” Hazel set the brakes on the walker and looked back into the car at Jo. “Don’t you come back here until you want to. You hear? Not a Sunday before. They’ll tell you different. They’ll bring you pies and tell you different.” She pulled the rain bonnet on over her white hair and tied it under her chin with a firm little yank. “Well. Bring me a pie. I could use a pie.”

Then she went off across the lot toward the Fryes’ Buick, the real one, with the tennis balls scraping on the gravel.

---

Wes drove. Jo sat on the passenger side where Hazel had been. The seat was still warm.

He took the long way, down Cedar Run Road past the Mennonite greenhouse and the fairgrounds, instead of cutting over on Kessler. She knew why. Neither of them said anything about it. They weren’t ever going to drive Kessler Road again if they could help it. She understood that, and she also understood that this was a small town with three roads out of it, and that sooner or later they would have to.

“I didn’t know,” Wes said at the stop sign at Route 9.

“I know you didn’t.”

“He didn’t say a word to me. Not one. I shook his hand Wednesday at the funeral home, and he didn’t say a word.”

“Did Lisa know?”

Wes put his blinker on. Then he took it off again, since there was nobody coming either direction and never was on a Sunday, and just sat there with his foot on the brake.

“She had to,” he said.

Jo’s phone had been buzzing in her purse since the parking lot. She took it out and looked at the lock screen, since she couldn’t help it. She had eleven messages. Three were from Nate, the first one long enough to be cut off in the preview: Jo, I am so sorry. I think I may have misjudged the — Two were from Brenda. One was from Kim Mercer, who taught fourth grade and had been in the choir loft: Praying for you right now!!! 🙏🙏🙏

Four were from Lisa.

Jo I’m so sorry

I didn’t know Nate was going to say all that. I swear to God I didn’t. Caleb just wanted to

He’s been sick all week. He can’t sleep. He wanted to do something

Please call me. Please

Jo read them once. Then she held the side button down until the screen showed the slider, and she slid it, and the phone went black. She put it back in her purse and zipped the purse closed.

“Jo,” Wes said.

“Drive, Wes.”

He drove.

---

The night of October third, Jo had waited up. That was the thing she kept circling back to. It wasn’t the lights or the deputy, not even the room at the hospital. It was the plain, stupid fact that she had waited up, the way she had waited up every Friday of Eli’s senior year, and that she had been annoyed.

Eli’s curfew was eleven-thirty. He had never once made it on time. He had never once been more than fifteen minutes late, either. He had a sort of genius for landing in the narrow space where you couldn’t justify grounding him. He’d come through the door at 11:41 or 11:44 all loose-limbed and apologetic, smelling like woodsmoke or fry grease, saying I know, I know, I know, Mama, and kiss the top of her head on his way to the refrigerator. She would say one of these nights, and he would say one of these nights, and that was a whole conversation they had been having for a year.

He had left at a quarter to seven. He’d been standing at the door in his letterman jacket with Caleb’s car idling in the driveway, the gray Civic with the one mismatched hubcap. He had leaned back into the kitchen and said, “Love you, Mama. Eleven-thirty. I swear.” He said I swear the way people say bless you after a sneeze. She had said, “Wear a coat,” and he had held up his arms to show her the jacket, and she had said, “A real coat,” and he’d laughed and gone.

That was it. She had turned it over so many times since that it had gone smooth, like a creek rock. Love you, Mama. Eleven-thirty. I swear. A real coat. It wasn’t a bad last conversation. She kept telling herself that. People had worse ones. People’s last words were I hate you or you never listen or nothing at all. Hers were about a coat.

At 11:30 she had been on the couch watching a cooking show with the sound down. Wes was asleep in his recliner with the Reds’ season over and the remote on his chest. At 11:35 she texted Eli: Clock’s ticking, buddy. At 11:38 she called him and it went straight to voicemail, which meant his phone was dead again, because he never charged it. She texted him anyway: Your phone is dead isn’t it.

And then —

And then she had waited. That was what she remembered. That was what she let herself remember. She had sat on the couch with her phone in her hand and waited, and been annoyed, and planned what she would say.

At 12:05 she had woken Wes up. At 12:10 they were in the Camry, Wes driving in his socks and sweatpants. He was grumbling that she was going to embarrass the boy, that he was probably sitting in the Petersons’ driveway, that she was going to pull up in her bathrobe and the kid would never live it down. They took Kessler Road, because Kessler was the way home from the Petersons’ place. It was the way everybody went.

She saw the lights before they came around the curve. They were red and blue, and they were strobing off the undersides of the trees, turning the leaves a color leaves weren’t meant to be. Wes said huh in a tone she would hear for the rest of her life. Then they came around the bend by the Yoder place and there was a sheriff’s cruiser across both lanes, and a fire truck, and an ambulance with its back doors open. Past all of it, in the white work lights the fire department had set up, a gray car was wrapped against the trunk of the big white oak like it had been thrown there. It had one mismatched hubcap.

She didn’t remember getting out of the car. She remembered a deputy with his arms out, young, younger than Eli looked, saying ma’am, ma’am, ma’am. She remembered Wes’s voice saying her son’s name to him, and the deputy’s face changing. She remembered the ambulance doors closing, and running, and Wes catching her around the waist. She remembered the ambulance pulling away with its siren going, which meant something, which meant they were still trying. She held on to that the whole twenty-two minutes to Lorimer Regional. They followed it, running the lights, with Wes’s hands so tight on the wheel that the next morning he had bruises across both palms.

A doctor came into the small room at 12:51 and sat down on the coffee table across from them, knee to knee. That was how she knew. Doctors didn’t sit down to tell you good news. Her name was Dr. Anand. She was very young, with a wedding ring and a smear of something on her sleeve, and she said the time was twelve thirty-six. She said we did everything we could and then something Jo would never forget: “He wasn’t alone. There were people with him the whole time.” Jo had thought, even then, even in the middle of it, that’s a good thing to say. I should teach that to the Crew.

There was a chaplain, a heavyset man with a lanyard, who sat with them and didn’t say much. They let them see Eli. She wasn’t going to think about that part.

And there had been Lisa.

Caleb had been brought to Lorimer too, in the second ambulance, the one that hadn’t needed its siren. At one o’clock in the morning, Jo came out of the room where Eli was, into the bright hallway, and there was Lisa Holland in pajama pants and Rob’s work jacket, coming the other way at a half run. Rob was behind her, still in his safety vest from the night shift.

They had stopped ten feet apart.

Twenty years, that friendship. Since they had both been pregnant, due three weeks apart, sitting on the same pew with their feet swollen. Since the two of them had pushed the boys side by side in strollers around the fairgrounds track every morning for a whole summer. There had been the carpools and the ball games, and the church camp in Kentucky where both boys got poison ivy on the same unfortunate part of their bodies. There was the time Jo sat with Lisa all night at this same hospital when Lisa’s dad had his stroke, and the time Lisa drove four hours in a snowstorm to bring Jo home from a conference in Cleveland when the Camry’s transmission went. They had never once had a fight worth the name. They had been the kind of friends who used each other’s bathrooms without asking and knew each other’s Social Security numbers.

Lisa’s face that night. Jo would never be able to describe it to anyone, and she would never try.

Then they had closed the ten feet between them. She didn’t know which of them moved first. They held on to each other in the middle of the hallway at Lorimer Regional, with a janitor waiting to get past them with his cart, and they didn’t say a word. There were no words. Lisa’s son was down the hall in a bed with a broken collarbone and a concussion and a sheriff’s deputy outside his curtain. Jo’s son was behind the door she had just come out of, and he was not going to get up. For that one minute, it didn’t matter whose was whose. They were two women holding each other up in a hallway, and they shook together.

Then Jo had said, “I need the restroom,” and let go, and gone down the hall.

She was in the restroom a long time. She knew that because Wes had come looking for her and knocked. She did not remember what she did in there. She remembered the paper towel dispenser, and the smell of the pink soap, and the fluorescent light buzzing. She remembered sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with her phone in her hands. Then she remembered Wes knocking, and that was all.

There was a shape there. She walked around it.

---

The funeral had been Saturday. The Hollands did not come.

Jo had understood that. Everybody had understood it. People were kind about it at the funeral home, the way people in small towns are kind about the things they all agree not to say. Of course they didn’t come. How could they? That poor boy. That poor family. Lisa must be beside herself. Jo had nodded and nodded. She had thought, without deciding to, that it was right that they stay away. It was the one decent, obvious thing. Some pain was only yours to carry, and the least the Hollands could do was let her carry it without having to look at them.

Then this morning they had walked into her church and sat two rows behind her. Lisa’s boy, who had been driving the car, had gotten up out of that pew and walked past her son’s empty place on the aisle to ask God for a clean slate in front of everyone they knew. And the everyone they knew had clapped.

---

At home, Wes changed out of his suit and went out to the garage and didn’t come back. After a while she heard him on the phone with Dale about the chest freezer. She heard him say yeah and no and I don’t know, Dale in that low voice he used when he was holding something up with his back.

Tessa’s door was shut. There was music behind it, something with a lot of bass. Jo stood outside it with her hand up to knock and then didn’t. She had nothing to offer through a door.

She went down the hall instead and opened Eli’s.

Nobody had touched it. The bed was unmade the way he had left it Friday afternoon, the blue comforter kicked down to the foot. There was a Mountain Dew can on the windowsill that she would have yelled about a week ago. His catcher’s gear was piled in the corner in the shape of a small, collapsed person. There were papers taped to the wall above his desk. One was a printout of the lineman program at the college in Nelsonville, with the tuition circled in red pen and $$$? written next to it in his handwriting. Next to that was a photo of him at the top of the old water tower at the fairgrounds, which he wasn’t supposed to have climbed, grinning down at whoever was taking the picture. He’d always liked high places. When he was four he climbed onto the refrigerator.

The room smelled like him. It smelled like drugstore body spray and dirty socks and the leather oil he used on his mitt. She knew from the Crew, from other families, from other bedrooms like this one, that the smell wouldn’t last. Some mothers put a shirt in a zip-top bag to save it. She had always thought that was a little much. She understood it now.

She lay down on his bed on top of the kicked-down comforter with her church shoes still on. She put her face in his pillow and breathed.

After a while she heard the floor creak in the hallway, the loose board outside the bathroom that Wes had been saying he’d fix for six years. She knew by the weight of it that it was Tessa. She knew Tessa was standing there in the doorway, in Eli’s hoodie, looking at her.

She didn’t turn around. She meant to. She told herself to, and her body didn’t do it. She lay with her face in the pillow and her back to the door and didn’t move, because if she turned around she would have to be somebody’s mother, and right then she didn’t have it in her.

The board creaked again. The footsteps went away down the hall. A door shut, softly.

3Just As I Am

The thing nobody told you about a broken collarbone was that you couldn’t lie down.

Caleb Holland had slept sitting up in his dad’s recliner for nine nights. His left arm was strapped against his chest in a sling with a figure-eight brace under it that pulled his shoulders back like a soldier’s, and if he tried to lie flat, something in there ground like a bad wheel bearing. The ER doctor said six to eight weeks. The orthopedic guy in Lorimer said maybe surgery, maybe not, let’s see how it knits. Caleb didn’t care either way. He’d have let them take the whole arm off. He sat in the recliner in the dark living room every night with the TV off, listening to the refrigerator cycle and his mother not sleeping on the other side of the wall, and he waited for it to be morning. Then he waited for it to be night again.

The concussion made the light hurt. It made words slide around on a page. They said that would go away too.

He didn’t have his phone. A deputy had taken it at the hospital, the morning after, with Caleb still in the bed with the IV in his hand. He was older than the deputies at the crash, with a gray mustache and a very quiet voice. He’d held out a clear plastic bag and a form on a clipboard and said, “Son, I need to ask you for your phone,” and Caleb had said, “Okay.” His mom had said, “Wait, wait, should we —“ and his dad had said, “Lisa,” and she’d stopped. Caleb signed the form with his right hand, which was his good hand, but the signature came out like a little kid’s. The deputy sealed the bag and wrote on it with a marker and took it away. Caleb had not asked for it back. He didn’t want it back. He didn’t want to ever touch a phone again.

---

They didn’t go to the funeral. That was his mom’s decision, and his dad backed her up, and Caleb had argued with them. It was the only time all week he’d said more than three words in a row.

“I was supposed to be a pallbearer,” he said. “We said. We said, freshman year. Whoever went first —“ He stopped, because it was a stupid thing two fourteen-year-olds had said after a horror movie, and because saying it out loud made him want to throw up.

“Baby,” his mom said. She was sitting on the edge of the coffee table in front of him, the way she’d been sitting in front of him all week, like she was guarding a door. “Baby, you can’t. You know you can’t. Think about Jo. Think about Wes. Think about what it would do to them to see you walk in.”

He thought about it. He thought about it until his head hurt worse. She was right, and he hated that she was right, and he stayed home.

They’d watched it on the church’s Facebook livestream, him and his mom and Maddie, on his mom’s iPad propped against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. His dad wouldn’t watch. He said he’d go get the oil changed in the truck, on a Saturday, at eleven in the morning. Nobody pointed out that the truck didn’t need an oil change.

The livestream was one camera, bolted to the back wall of the sanctuary, pointed at the stage, so mostly what they saw was the backs of people’s heads. The Pruitts were a smudge in the third row. The casket was at the front, closed, with a spray of red and white carnations on it that had to be from the baseball team. Caleb watched the team carry it out at the end, Tanner and Josh and Brody and the Wilkes twins and Coach Dunleavy on the back corner in place of him. He watched how Josh stumbled on the step down from the platform and Tanner caught the weight. He didn’t breathe the whole time. Maddie held his good hand under the table so hard her nails left marks.

His mom cried without making any noise. She’d been doing that all week. She’d be scrubbing a pan or folding a towel and tears would just be running down her face, and she’d keep folding.

Afterward, she went out to the garage and came back with the white Pyrex, the one with the blue flowers, the one Caleb had seen on Jo Pruitt’s kitchen table and his own kitchen table so many times he couldn’t remember it being anywhere else. She stood at the stove for an hour making chicken and rice. She put the lid on and wrote a card to go with it and then tore up the card. Then she called Mrs. Tully to come pick it up, because she couldn’t take it herself. She sat in the car in the driveway for a while after Mrs. Tully left.

---

On Wednesday, before all that, his mom had driven him to the church to see Pastor Nate.

It had been her idea. She said she didn’t know what else to do. She said he wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping, and she’d called the doctor and the doctor said it was the concussion and the shock, and to give it time. But Caleb had looked at her across the kitchen and said, “Mom, I don’t think God’s going to let me in,” and his mom had gone white and called the church office that afternoon.

Pastor Nate’s office was in the back of the education wing, past the preschool Sunday school room with its felt board and its cardboard ark. Caleb had been in the office before, for a youth group thing about leadership that he mostly remembered because there’d been donuts. It was different now. Pastor Nate came around the desk and hugged him, carefully, around the sling, and held on longer than Caleb expected. When he pulled back his eyes were wet.

“Sit down, man,” he said. “Sit down. Lisa, do you want to —“ and Caleb’s mom said she’d wait in the car, and went.

They’d talked for an hour. Or, Pastor Nate had talked, and Caleb had sat on the little couch with his arm strapped to his chest and stared at a framed print on the wall of footprints on a beach. Pastor Nate talked about David and Bathsheba, which Caleb didn’t totally follow, because he hadn’t done anything like that. Then he talked about Peter, who denied Jesus three times and then got forgiven on a beach over breakfast. Then he talked about grace. He said grace wasn’t something you earned, it was something you received, and that there was nothing — nothing, Caleb — that could separate him from the love of God. He had the verse up on his phone and read it out loud.

“I can’t breathe,” Caleb said, when he stopped. “Like, all the time. It feels like somebody’s standing on me.”

Pastor Nate nodded like he’d been waiting for that. “That’s the weight of it. That’s real. You’re carrying something enormous, and you weren’t made to carry it.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Can I ask you something? Have you ever actually given your life to Christ? Not as a kid. As a man.”

Caleb had been baptized at nine, at youth camp in Kentucky, in a lake, in the same ten minutes as Eli. They’d gone under one right after the other, and then Eli had come up spitting and yelled that a fish touched him, and the whole camp had lost it. Caleb had meant it, as much as you can mean anything at nine. He’d been kind of coasting since. He went to church because his family went to church. He went to youth group because Eli went, and because Kenzie went. He said grace at dinner. He’d prayed about stuff, like tests and the Wright State scout who came to see Eli but was supposed to watch him too, and his grandpa’s stroke. He hadn’t really thought about any of it. He had assumed there’d be time.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Okay,” Pastor Nate said, gently. “Okay. Well. I think maybe that’s what’s happening here. I think God’s using this, as terrible as it is — and it’s terrible, Caleb, I’m not minimizing it — I think He’s using it to call you. Personally. To Himself.” He waited. “Do you want to pray right now?”

Caleb said yes, because he wanted the weight off. He’d have said yes to anything.

They prayed. Pastor Nate said a sentence and Caleb said it after him. It was about admitting he was a sinner, and believing Jesus died for him, and asking Him to come into his life and take control. Caleb said all of it. He meant it. He meant it so hard his whole body shook. At the end, Pastor Nate said amen and grabbed Caleb’s good hand in both of his and squeezed it, and Caleb waited for the weight to lift.

It shifted a little, maybe. Like when somebody standing on you moves their foot.

“Man,” Pastor Nate said. He was smiling, and he looked like he was going to cry again. “Man. Okay. Listen. I want to throw something out there, and you can totally say no. What would you think about doing this publicly? At the invitation, Sunday? It’s a biblical thing. Confessing with your mouth. It’s not about performing. It’s about your church family getting to stand with you. They want to stand with you, Caleb. I’ve been getting calls all week. People don’t know what to do for you. This would give them something to do.”

Caleb thought about walking down that aisle with everybody looking at him. It made him want to die. He also thought, in a sick, hungry way he didn’t look at very hard, that maybe if everybody saw it, if everybody clapped, then it would be true. Then he’d be allowed to breathe.

“The Pruitts,” he said.

Pastor Nate’s face got serious. “Yeah. I’ve thought about that. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t expect the Pruitts will be in church Sunday. Nobody comes back the Sunday after. And even if they did —“ He stopped, like he was picking his words. “Jo and Wes are strong believers. They’ve been in that church longer than I have. I think, in time, I think they’d want this for you. I really do. I think it could be the beginning of something. For everybody.”

In the car, Caleb’s mom asked how it went. He told her. She was quiet a long time with her hands on the wheel in the church parking lot.

“Jo won’t be there,” she said finally. “She won’t. Nobody goes back the Sunday after. I wouldn’t.” She put the car in reverse. “Okay. If you think it’ll help, baby. Okay.”

---

They’d been wrong.

He knew it the second they came in the side door by the nursery on Sunday morning. His mom stopped so short in front of him that Maddie walked into her back. Through the gap between the Fryes and the end of the pew he could see the Pruitts, third row, left side. Mrs. Pruitt in a navy dress, with her hair up the way she wore it for weddings. Mr. Pruitt in the same gray suit from the livestream. An empty space on the end.

“Oh, God,” his mom whispered. “Oh, God. Caleb. We can go. We can go right now.”

He looked at the empty space.

“No,” he said. He didn’t know why he said it. It came out of him like something with its own legs. “No. I told him I would.”

They sat down in their pew, two behind the Pruitts, because it was their pew and they didn’t know what else to do. Caleb sat on the end, which was the wrong end, the end where his dad usually sat. He could see the back of Mrs. Pruitt’s neck. She had a small brown mole just under her hairline that he’d known about his whole life without ever knowing he knew it. Because she’d been bending over him since he was a baby, tying his shoes and wiping his face and checking the back of his head for ticks after they’d been in the Yoders’ woods.

He didn’t hear the sermon. He heard some of it. It was about not grieving like people with no hope. He thought Mrs. Pruitt might turn around. She didn’t. Mr. Pruitt didn’t either. They sat very straight and very still, and every so often Mr. Pruitt’s hand moved on the pew between them.

Then they stood up and Mrs. Weese started playing the introduction, and Caleb’s legs started shaking so badly he had to grab the pew in front of him with his good hand.

Just as I am, without one plea —

He’d sung that song ten thousand times. He’d never listened to the words. Without one plea. No excuse, no reason, nothing to say for yourself, which was exactly right, because he didn’t have anything to say for himself. He hadn’t said anything to anybody. Not to the deputies at the scene, whose questions he couldn’t remember. Not to the older deputy with the gray mustache. Not to his parents, who kept asking him in careful voices what happened, baby, what happened, and then saying never mind, never mind, not now. He had nothing. He had a curve, and a tree, and a sound he heard every time he closed his eyes. He had the smell of the airbag powder, and Eli’s hand hanging down from the seat, and the radio still playing.

He stepped out into the aisle.

It was a long way. He’d never noticed before. He passed the Pruitts’ pew close enough to touch it. He looked at the carpet, which was dark red and worn pale down the middle. He could feel her there the way you feel a stove is on without touching it. He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t have. He kept his eyes down and walked, and then he was at the front, and Pastor Nate was coming down the steps, and his hand was on the back of Caleb’s neck, warm, and he was saying in his ear, I’m so proud of you, man, I’m so proud of you, just breathe, and Caleb tried to breathe.

The song ended. Pastor Nate turned him around.

He hadn’t known Pastor Nate was going to say all that. He’d thought they’d just pray, maybe, and then he’d sit back down. He’d thought maybe people would come up after and shake his hand. He hadn’t thought about the words in front of all of his church family, or God is already at work, or this church knows how to forgive. By the time he understood what was happening it had already happened. The clapping started way in the back.

Caleb would remember the clapping for the rest of his life. It came at him from everywhere, like rain on a tin roof, and every clap landed on him like a slap. He hadn’t done anything. He’d walked forty feet. He’d walked forty feet, and Eli was in the ground in Ashby Cemetery under a mound of dirt that wasn’t even settled yet, and people were clapping.

He lifted his head.

She was looking at him. Everybody was looking at her, and she was looking at him. Her face wasn’t angry. It wasn’t anything. It was like looking at the front of a house after everybody’s moved out.

Then she put her hymnal down, and picked up her purse, and walked out.

He watched her go the whole way. Down the side aisle by the windows, past the Harpers, past the Fryes, past his own mother, who had both hands over her mouth. The clapping ran out around her like water running out of a tub. The big oak door swung shut behind her with a slow, heavy thump that he felt through the floor.

In the silence, Pastor Nate’s hand was still on his shoulder. It had gone very still.

---

They went out the nursery door after the benediction, without talking to anybody. His dad drove. His mom sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, turning her wedding ring around and around. Halfway home she said, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill Nate Albrecht,” in a flat voice. His dad said, “Lisa.” She said, “No. No. He told us. He told us she wouldn’t —“ And then she said, “I told you. I told you she wouldn’t be there. Baby, I’m so sorry. This is my fault,” and turned around in her seat to look at Caleb. Her face was all broken up.

“It’s not your fault,” Caleb said.

It wasn’t. He knew exactly whose fault everything was.

At home he went to his room, which he hadn’t slept in for nine nights. He sat on the edge of the bed, since he couldn’t lie on it, and looked at the wall.

He tried to pray. He’d been trying all week, since the office. He’d say God and then stop, because it was like calling somebody on the phone and hearing it ring in an empty house. He’d thought after this morning it would be different. He’d done the thing. He’d walked the aisle. He’d confessed with his mouth in front of everybody. Wasn’t that supposed to count?

God, he tried. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.

Please what. He didn’t know. Please make it not have happened. Please let me feel forgiven. Please let her —

He didn’t know what he wanted her to do. He’d wanted her to come up there, he realized. He’d wanted it so bad he could taste it. He’d wanted her to come up the aisle and put her arms around him the way she’d done a thousand times, and say it was okay. He’d wanted that, from her, in front of everybody, the Sunday after her son’s funeral.

He put his good hand over his face.

---

Around one in the morning his door opened. It was Maddie, in her pajamas, holding her phone.

“Tessa won’t text me back,” she said. Her voice wobbled. “I’ve texted her like fifty times. Since the — since. She won’t answer. She reads them. It says read. But she won’t answer.” She held the phone out to him like he could fix it. “Is she ever going to talk to me again?”

Caleb looked at the little word under the gray bubbles. Read.

Something went through him, cold, from the top of his head down.

“I don’t know, Mads,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She went. He sat there. After a while he got up, since he couldn’t sit on the bed either, and went back out to the recliner in the dark living room. He sat in it with his arm strapped to his chest and looked at the black TV screen, where he could see a faint shape of himself.

He didn’t think about the cupholder.

Every night since the crash, somewhere between midnight and three, his brain tried to walk him back into the car. The Civic, the heater running, the curve coming. Eli beside him in the passenger seat, messing with the radio because his own phone was dead again. Eli singing along in that voice like a truck with a bad muffler. And then the light down by Caleb’s right knee, the screen coming on in the cupholder —

He didn’t think about it. He got up and went into the kitchen and ran the tap and drank a glass of water standing at the sink. Then he drank another one. Then he stood there with his good hand flat on the counter and counted the tiles on the backsplash, which he had done every night for nine nights. There were a hundred and forty-four, twelve by twelve, and one had a crack in it.

4Office Hours

Sam Whitcomb had given her two weeks. She went back on Monday, day eleven.

“Jo,” he said, when she came through the back door at 7:20 with her lunch in a bag and her reading glasses on her head. He was standing in the break room in his scrubs with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth, and he looked at her the way he looked at an X-ray with something on it he didn’t like. “Jo. No.”

“The recall list is three weeks behind,” she said. “I saw it from home. Brittany doesn’t know how to run the filter for the six-month patients. She’s been calling people who were in in August.”

“I don’t care about the recall list.”

“You will when your hygiene schedule’s got holes in it in December.” She put her lunch in the refrigerator on her shelf, the top one, left side, where it had been for eleven years. “I need to be here, Sam. I need to be somewhere that has a list.”

He looked at her a while longer. Sam was sixty-two and had been fixing Ashby’s teeth since before she moved to town. He had a big, soft face and a bad knee, and he’d hired her off a two-sentence recommendation from Lisa Holland, who used to clean his teeth. He didn’t go to Cedar Run. He went to St. Mary’s in Lorimer when he went anywhere, which his wife said was Christmas, Easter, and funerals. He had been at Eli’s.

“Okay,” he said. “But you go home when you need to. No asking. You just go.”

“I’m not going to need to.”

“Then you won’t,” he said. “Coffee’s fresh.”

---

She fixed the recall list by nine-thirty. She fixed the insurance aging report, which had gotten ugly, and she called Delta Dental about a claim they’d been sitting on since September. She reorganized the supply closet shelf where Brittany had been putting the prophy paste in with the fluoride varnish. She did not look up when the front door chimed, because every time she looked up somebody was looking back at her. By now she knew the look. People came to the window to check in, and they saw her, and their faces went through a small, fast series of adjustments, like somebody hunting for the right key on a ring. Then they said oh, Jo, or I didn’t know you’d be here, or, from the ones who didn’t know her well, nothing at all. Those were the best. She took their co-pays and asked if their address had changed.

At ten-fifteen Paula Greer came up front between patients and stood beside her desk with her mask pulled down around her chin. Paula had been a hygienist in the practice for as long as Jo had been there, and she was the closest thing Jo had to a friend at work who wasn’t also a friend at church. She was Methodist, divorced, a smoker who swore she’d quit, and she was relentlessly nosy.

“Is it true you walked out?” Paula said, low.

Jo kept typing. “Who told you that?”

“My sister-in-law’s in your choir. She called me yesterday at two o’clock. She said you walked straight out, and old Hazel Ormond went out after you, and the pastor looked like somebody’d hit him with a two-by-four.” Paula put one hand flat on the desk. “Good for you.”

“I didn’t do it to be good.”

“I know you didn’t. Good for you anyway.” She went back to her room.

Jo sat and looked at the screen for a while. She had been in the middle of a sentence to an insurance company and couldn’t remember the end of it.

---

At lunch she didn’t eat. She got in the Camry and drove to the church.

She hadn’t planned to. That wasn’t true either. She had planned it since about three o’clock that morning, lying awake on her side of the bed staring at the ceiling fan, composing and recomposing it. In the version she’d settled on, she was calm. She was organized. She had points. She’d written them on a sticky note, and the sticky note was in her pocket. When she parked in the church lot in the same spot as yesterday, by the dumpster enclosure, she took it out and read it again, and then she folded it in half and put it back.

The church office was in the education wing. Doris Kemper, the church secretary, looked up from her desk when Jo came in, and her whole face went soft and horrified. She stood up.

“Is he here?” Jo said.

“Jo, honey — he’s — let me see if he’s —“

“Is he here, Doris.”

Doris looked at the closed door behind her. “He’s here.”

Jo knocked once and opened it.

Nate Albrecht was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. He looked up, and she watched him understand who it was. He stood up so fast his chair rolled back into the bookcase.

“Jo.” His voice cracked on it. “Jo. I’ve been — I called. I texted, I didn’t know if you —“ He came around the desk. For one terrible second she thought he was going to try to hug her, and she took a step back, and he saw it and stopped. He put his hands in his pockets. “Please. Sit down. Can I get you — do you want coffee?”

“No.”

She didn’t sit. After a moment, he didn’t either. They stood on either side of the little coffee table with the box of tissues on it. She was aware of the tissues. She was aware that there were always tissues on that table. People came in here to cry, and she was not going to be one of them.

“I’m so sorry,” Nate said. “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I didn’t — I honestly didn’t expect you’d be there. I thought —“

“You didn’t expect I’d be there,” she repeated.

“Nobody comes the Sunday after. In my experience. I’ve done a lot of funerals, and in my experience the family —“

“So you planned it for a Sunday when I wouldn’t be looking.”

His face changed. “No. No, that’s not —“

“You planned it for a Sunday you thought I’d be home in bed with the blinds down. You thought you’d have the whole thing done and wrapped up. The boy comes forward, the church claps, everybody gets to feel how God’s already at work. And then some Sunday in November I’d come back and it would be finished and I’d just have to get in line behind it.” She heard her own voice. It was steady. That surprised her. “That’s what you planned.”

“Jo, that is not what — Caleb came to me. He came to me, he was in pieces, he told me he didn’t think God would let him in. He’s eighteen years old. He was —“ Nate stopped and made himself slow down. He was a man who’d been to seminars on this. “He was in crisis. Spiritual crisis. And I believed then and I believe now that God met him in this office. I prayed with him. He gave his life to Christ, really gave it, maybe for the first time. And I thought the church needed to see that. I thought he needed the church to see it. People have been calling me all week, Jo, they don’t know how to hold this, they love both of your families, and I thought — I thought it would give them a way to —“

“A way to what?”

He opened his mouth.

“A way to what, Nate? A way to feel better? A way to clap?”

“A way to hope.” He said it with real force. She could see that he believed it. “I thought it was a moment of hope. In the middle of — all of it. I really did.”

“It was my son’s moment,” she said. “It was ten days. It was ten days, and you took the one room in this county where people knew Eli best, and you made it about Caleb Holland’s salvation. You made my son’s death into your altar call.”

That landed. She watched it land. He put a hand on the back of the chair.

Then he did the thing she would remember him for, for a long time, the way you remember the one thing a nurse said wrong. He softened his whole face. He tilted his head. His voice went down low and warm, into what she thought of, God forgive her, as his hospital voice. He said, “Jo. I understand you’re hurting. I can’t imagine what you’re carrying right now. But I want to gently say — I think part of what yesterday was about is that the church is called to forgive. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. And I know that’s not something you’re ready to hear, and that’s okay, but when Peter asked Jesus how many times —“

“Seventy times seven,” Jo said.

He stopped.

“I know the verse. I taught the fourth- and fifth-grade girls in this building for nine years. I’ve got the flannelgraph Peter in a box in my basement.” She took a breath. The sticky note was in her pocket and she hadn’t looked at it once. “Peter asked Jesus how many times. That’s the question. How many. Nobody in that whole book asked Him how soon.”

Nate said nothing.

“You don’t get to tell me when,” she said. “You don’t get to decide what the church is ready for and stand me up in front of it. And you don’t get to take a scared kid who’ll do anything you tell him because he’s drowning, and walk him past my son’s seat, and call that hope.”

She was shaking now. She could feel it in her knees. She was done. She had more on the sticky note, about the livestream and the bulletin and the Kitchen Crew, but none of it mattered now.

“Brenda can run the Crew,” she said. “She’ll do it wrong, but she’ll do it. I’ll send her the spreadsheet.” She turned toward the door.

“Jo,” Nate said behind her. “Jo, please. What can I do?”

She stopped with her hand on the knob. It was an honest question. She could hear that it was honest, underneath all the rest. Somewhere in that man there was a person who genuinely wanted to know. For a moment she was so tired she could have sat down on the floor.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the pastor. You figure it out.”

---

Brenda Tully was coming down the hallway of the education wing with a nine-by-thirteen pan in both hands, covered in foil, when Jo came out of the office. They met by the preschool room, where the cardboard ark was. Brenda’s face lit up and fell apart at the same time.

“Oh, Jo,” she said. “Oh, honey. I was just going to leave this in the kitchen for you, I was going to drive it over tonight, it’s my sausage hash brown thing, the one you like —“

“I have eleven casseroles, Brenda.”

“Well, this one’s a breakfast casserole. That’s different.” Brenda looked down the hall at Nate’s closed door, then back at her. Brenda had been co-chair of the Kitchen Crew for six years. She was a good cook, a fast worker, and completely without an internal editor. She was, as far as Jo could tell, incapable of silence in the presence of pain. She treated a pause like a leak and ran at it with whatever was in her hands. Jo had spent six years quietly routing Brenda toward the families who liked to talk. “Oh, sweetheart. I heard about yesterday. I mean, I was there, of course. I want you to know I understood. I completely understood. I said to Ron in the car, I said, it’s too soon, she wasn’t ready, and that’s okay. God’s timing isn’t our timing. You’ll get there. I just know you’ll get there, because you’re you.” She shifted the pan to one hip and put her free hand on Jo’s arm. “And when you do, it’s going to be such a testimony.”

Jo looked at the hand on her arm.

“The spreadsheet for the Crew is in the shared drive,” she said. “It’s got everything. Families, allergies, who’s got a key to whose house, who returns their pans and who doesn’t. The Kimbroughs don’t. You’ll have to go get them.” She took the pan out of Brenda’s hands. “Thank you for the hash browns.”

---

Dale’s chest freezer showed up that evening in the bed of Dale’s truck. Dale and Wes wrestled it through the garage door without talking. The way they didn’t talk was like two men who’d shared a bedroom for sixteen years and still knew exactly where the other one’s elbows were. Dale hugged her in the driveway afterward, one-armed and awkward, and said, “Anything you need, Jojo,” which he hadn’t called her since her wedding. Then he got in his truck and went home.

She moved the casseroles herself. Wes offered and she said no. She carried them one at a time from the upright freezer to the chest freezer, reading the labels as she went, and she didn’t take any of the labels off.

Wes came out and stood in the side door and watched her.

“I’m going to go talk to him,” he said. “Nate. Man to man. Tomorrow.”

“Don’t you dare make it nice.”

“I wasn’t going to make it nice.” He rubbed his thumb along the door frame. “I’m going to ask him what he was thinking. And then I’m going to listen, and then I’m going to tell him what I think.”

“And what do you think?”

Wes took a while. He always took a while. She used to find it maddening, in the early years, when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-five and she wanted him to say things. Then somewhere along the way she’d understood that he was taking a while because he meant to say it right, and she had started waiting.

“I think he meant well and did a terrible thing,” Wes said. “I think that’s most of the terrible things.”

She put the Frye family’s tetrazzini in the chest freezer and closed the lid.

“The boy looked like death,” Wes said.

“Good,” Jo said.

She heard it come out of her mouth. It sounded like someone else. It hung there in the garage, under the fluorescent shop light, next to the lawn mower and the recycling bins and Eli’s blue Silverado, which was sitting in the second bay with a skin of dust on the hood where it had sat since Friday the third.

Wes didn’t say anything. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the truck. Then he went back in the house.

She stood by the freezer with her hand flat on the lid and waited to feel sorry. She waited a long time. What she mostly felt was cold, from the freezer, and a tightness under her breastbone, like she’d been holding her breath since the night of the third and didn’t know how to let it out.

---

Her phone rang at nine-thirty while she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub in her robe, doing nothing. The screen said Lisa. Under the name was the picture Jo had assigned to that contact years ago. It was the two of them at the county fair, sunburned and laughing, with a funnel cake between them the size of a hubcap.

It rang four times and went to voicemail. A minute later it buzzed with the voicemail notification. She didn’t listen to it.

It buzzed once more, a text this time, from a number she didn’t have saved. Mrs. Pruitt, this is Sgt. Harlan Voss with the county sheriff’s office. I’m very sorry for your loss. Our crash reconstruction is complete and I would like to sit down with you and Mr. Pruitt to go over it, along with Renee Castillo from the prosecutor’s victim services office. Would Thursday work? Please call me at your convenience.

Jo read it twice.

Crash reconstruction. She knew, roughly, what that meant. There had been a man at the scene with a camera and a measuring wheel. She’d seen him through the work lights while the deputy held her arm. Sometime in the last ten days, someone had been out on Kessler Road measuring skid marks and gouges in the bark of the white oak and doing math. Someone knew, in numbers, exactly how it happened.

She sat on the edge of the tub and felt something move under the surface of her mind, big and slow, like a fish under dark water. She didn’t look at it. She typed back, Thursday is fine. Wes and I will both be there, and then she turned off the phone and sat in the dark bathroom until the water heater clicked off.

5Reconstruction

The prosecutor’s office was on the second floor of the county annex in Lorimer, across the street from the courthouse. The annex was a flat brick building from the seventies that looked like an elementary school somebody had given up on. They parked in a lot behind it, next to a row of sheriff’s cruisers, and Wes sat with his hands on the wheel after he turned the engine off.

“You don’t have to go in,” Jo said.

“Neither do you.”

“I’m going in.”

“Then I’m going in.” He didn’t move. “I just need a minute.”

She gave him a minute. She watched a man in a Carhartt jacket come out the back door of the annex, light a cigarette, look at it, and throw it away without smoking it.

---

Renee Castillo met them at the top of the stairs. She was fifty or so, small and brisk, in a cardigan with a lanyard around her neck. She had very kind, very tired eyes, and a firm handshake that held on a half second longer than it needed to. She had called Jo twice already, the week of the funeral, and Jo had let both calls go to voicemail. On the voicemails she had said her name and her title, victim advocate, and that she was there whenever they were ready. She’d sounded like she meant it.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I know this is — there’s no good way to do this. We’ll go at whatever pace you need. You can stop anytime. You can walk out anytime. Nobody will think a thing about it.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of walking out,” Jo said.

Renee didn’t smile, exactly, but something in her face acknowledged it.

The conference room had a long fake-wood table, a whiteboard with a ghost of old marker on it, and a box of tissues. There were always tissues. At the far end of the table a man stood up. He had a gray mustache and a very quiet voice, and when he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Pruitt, I’m Harlan Voss,” she recognized him. He had been at the hospital that night, in the hallway. He’d been standing by the curtain where Caleb was.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said. He didn’t reach out to shake hands. He waited to see if they would, and when they didn’t, he nodded and sat back down. There was a thick binder in front of him and a laptop, closed.

“I’ve been doing crash reconstruction for the county for nineteen years,” he said, when they were all sitting. “I’m going to walk you through what we found. I’m going to try to be plain about it. If there’s anything you don’t want to hear, you tell me and I’ll skip it. There are photographs in this binder and I’m not going to show you any of them unless you ask.” He waited. “Is that all right?”

“Yes,” said Wes.

Sergeant Voss opened the laptop and turned it toward them. It was a diagram. Clean black lines on white, like something from a geometry test: two parallel lines curving to the right, a little rectangle for a car, a row of dots, a circle for the tree. There were numbers next to the dots. Jo looked at it and thought, that’s Kessler Road. She’d driven that curve five thousand times. She had never once thought of it as a shape.

“The posted speed limit on Kessler Road is fifty-five,” Sergeant Voss said. “Coming into the curve by the Yoder property there’s a yellow advisory sign for forty. That’s advisory. It’s not a legal limit. It’s the speed the county engineer’s office recommends for that curve in good conditions.” He touched the screen. “Mr. Holland’s vehicle has an airbag control module, what people call a black box. It records the last several seconds before a crash event. It shows the vehicle entering the curve at fifty-eight miles per hour.”

Fifty-eight. Jo turned the number over. It didn’t sound like much. She did sixty on Route 9 every morning.

“The road was dry,” Voss said. “Visibility was good. No other vehicles involved. No sign of mechanical failure. Tires were in fair condition.” He paused. “At fifty-eight, that curve is drivable. Kids do it. People do it. It’s not comfortable, but if you’re paying attention, you make it.” He touched the screen again, and the little rectangle slid along the curve and then drifted, gently, toward the outside line. “The data shows the vehicle holding a steady speed and a steady steering angle, drifting toward the right edge of the roadway for approximately two and a half seconds. Then a sharp steering input to the left. Overcorrection. The rear of the vehicle came around.” He didn’t show that part. He left the rectangle where it was. “The vehicle left the roadway on the left side and struck the tree on the passenger side.”

Wes had put his hand on the table. Jo looked at it. His knuckles had gone white.

“Brakes?” Wes said.

“Brake application about half a second before impact.”

“Half a second.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jo made herself breathe. “Two and a half seconds,” she said. “Drifting. Why.”

Sergeant Voss looked at Renee. It was a small look, very quick. Renee gave a small nod.

“We executed a search warrant on Mr. Holland’s phone,” Voss said. “The phone’s data shows it was unlocked and in use in the seconds prior to the crash. A text message was opened on the device at eleven forty-one and fifty-two seconds. The black box records the steering correction at eleven forty-one and fifty-five.”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere down the hall a copier was running.

“He was texting,” Wes said.

“He was reading a text message, sir. There’s no indication he was typing a reply.”

“Reading.” Wes shook his head slowly. “Who from? Do you know who —“

“It doesn’t matter who,” Jo said.

It came out of her fast and loud, louder than she meant. Wes turned and looked at her. So did Renee. Sergeant Voss didn’t look at her at all. He was looking at the laptop.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said again, lower. Her hands were in her lap. She pressed them together. “Some girl. Some friend. What difference does it make? It could have been the President. He picked it up. He looked at it. He was driving my son home, and he took his eyes off the road for — how long?”

“Two to three seconds,” Voss said quietly.

“For two to three seconds, to read a text message. From anybody. That’s what matters.” She was aware that her voice was shaking. “That’s the only thing that matters.”

Nobody said anything. Renee reached across the table and nudged the tissue box an inch toward her, not all the way. Jo didn’t take one.

Sergeant Voss closed the laptop.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

---

Later she would remember that silence. She would take it apart and look at it from every side, the way you study a photograph after you’ve learned something about the people in it. She would remember that Voss said yes, ma’am and closed the laptop. She’d remember that he said it the way you say it to someone when you’ve decided not to argue. She would remember that Renee looked down at her legal pad and wrote nothing.

But that was later. In the room, it only felt like the end of something. She felt a hard, clean relief, like setting down a bag of groceries you’ve been carrying too long.

---

Daniel Firth came in at the half hour. He was the assistant prosecutor assigned to the case. He was younger than she’d expected, maybe thirty-five, tall and hollow-cheeked, in a suit that didn’t quite fit in the shoulders. He sat down next to Renee and folded his hands on the table. He explained things the way an engineer might, in order, without hurrying, and without any padding.

The charging decision was his office’s, he said. It was not the family’s. He wanted them to understand that clearly, because families often felt that the choice was theirs, and then felt responsible for it, and that wasn’t fair to them. He would listen to them. Their views mattered. But the decision would be made on the evidence and the law.

“There are essentially two roads here,” he said. “One is a charge based on negligence. That means he failed to use the care a reasonable person would use. Under our statute, when negligence causes a death, it’s a misdemeanor of the first degree, with up to six months in jail. The other is a charge based on recklessness, which is a higher standard. That’s a felony. To prove recklessness, we have to show he knew of the risk and disregarded it, and it’s a harder case to make. Speed was over the advisory but within the posted limit. No alcohol. No drugs. His blood work was clean. No prior record, not so much as a speeding ticket. He wasn’t racing anyone, wasn’t showing off.” He paused. “The phone is the heart of it. Phone use can support recklessness in some cases. Whether it does here is what I’m working through.”

“How long,” Jo said.

“To decide? A few weeks. I want to talk to the reconstruction expert again, and I’m looking at some case law.” He met her eyes. “I’ll call you before anything is filed. You won’t read about it in the paper.”

“I want the felony,” Jo said.

Wes shifted beside her.

Firth nodded, and didn’t write anything down. “I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do.” She leaned forward. “He wasn’t some stranger. He’s been in and out of my house since he was in diapers. I taught him to ride a bike. That boy knew the rules. He knew about phones and driving. They showed those videos at school every year. I told him. I stood in my kitchen and told both of them. He knew exactly what could happen, and he did it anyway, with my son in the seat next to him. If that isn’t what reckless means, I don’t know what it means.”

“I hear you,” Firth said. He still didn’t write anything down. “I want to be honest with you, Mrs. Pruitt, because I think you’d rather have that than the alternative. I don’t know yet whether I can prove it. If I charge a felony I can’t prove, I risk a jury acquitting him of everything. Then there’s no conviction at all. I’m not willing to take that risk on a guess. I’ll take it if the evidence supports it.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll charge what I can prove, and I’ll prove it.”

Jo sat back.

Renee spoke up then, gently, and explained the rest. They had a right to be notified at every stage. They had a right to be present at every hearing. They would have a right, at sentencing, to make a statement to the court, in writing or out loud or both, about Eli and about what his death had done to them. The judge would take it into account. Renee would help them with all of it. She handed them a folder with their names typed on a label on the front, and a card with her cell phone number on the back in pen. “Anytime,” she said. “I mean that. I’ve had people call me at two in the morning.”

Jo took the folder. She put it in her lap on top of her purse.

“He drove like a grandma,” she said.

They all looked at her.

“Caleb. Eli used to complain about it. Said riding with Caleb was like riding with Mr. Frye. Hands at ten and two. Always used his blinker, even pulling out of our driveway. Eli would razz him about it.” She heard her own voice crack. “That’s the thing. That’s the part I can’t — he was the careful one. He was the one I didn’t worry about.”

---

In the parking lot, Wes stood beside the Camry with the keys in his hand and didn’t unlock it.

“Jo,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just going to say one thing.”

“Wes.”

“You didn’t want to know who he was texting.”

“He wasn’t texting. He was reading.” She heard how that sounded, like she was correcting a patient’s insurance ID number. “It doesn’t matter who.”

“You said that.”

“Because it doesn’t.” She held out her hand for the keys. “Let me drive. I need to drive.”

He studied her, the way he’d looked at her in the garage. Then he put the keys in her hand.

She drove home on Route 9, not Kessler, with the radio off. Wes looked out the passenger window at the cornfields, which were stubble now, gray and flattened. Neither of them said anything for twenty minutes. When they pulled into the driveway, the porch light was on even though it was the middle of the afternoon. Tessa had been doing that, leaving lights on in the daytime. Jo hadn’t said anything about it.

---

That night she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and read.

She didn’t know she was going to until she was doing it. She’d meant to pay the electric bill. Instead she typed texting and driving deaths into the search bar. Then she read everything. She read government statistics that said more than three thousand people died every year in crashes involving a distracted driver. She read that the actual number was probably higher, because distraction was hard to prove and underreported. She read that reading a text at fifty-five miles an hour for five seconds was like driving the length of a football field blind. She read a blog by a mother in Texas whose daughter had been killed by a driver who was texting. She read the comments under it, hundreds of them, from other mothers, and fathers, and siblings, and a man in Oregon who had been the driver in one of these, and who wrote that he had not had a single night of sleep without pills in eleven years.

She read about laws. She read that some states had banned handheld phones in cars entirely, and some only banned texting, and that enforcement was spotty everywhere. She read about a campaign in some state she didn’t remember with yellow wristbands. She read about a foundation somebody had started in their dead son’s name. The foundation had a logo and a website and had been on the Today show.

At some point she got a legal pad out of the junk drawer and started writing things down.

Tessa came into the kitchen at eleven for a glass of water, in Eli’s hoodie. She stood at the sink and drank it with her back to Jo.

“Are we ever going back to church?” she said, to the window.

Jo looked up. It took her a moment to come back from wherever she had been.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Good,” said Tessa. She put the glass in the sink and went back down the hall.

Jo sat and looked at the doorway where she’d gone. She thought, I should go after her. She thought, I will. In a minute. She looked down at the legal pad, where she had written, in the middle of the page, in capital letters, going over them again and again with the pen until they were thick and dark and the paper had started to tear:

HE WAS READING A TEXT.

And under it, smaller, in her normal handwriting, as if she were labeling a dish:

some girl.

6Signs

The email from the band director came on a Tuesday. The subject line was Tessa. Jo opened it at her desk at work between a crown prep and a cleaning.

Mrs. Pruitt — I want to start by saying how sorry I am about Eli. He used to come to every home game early to heckle the drumline, and they loved him for it. I don’t want to intrude, and please don’t feel you need to respond. I just wanted to let you know that Tessa turned in her uniform and her clarinet on Monday and told me she’s done with band. I told her the door’s always open. She’s a gifted kid, and she’s been working so hard this fall. I understand if she needs time. I just wanted to make sure you knew. — Mr. Reyes

Jo read it twice. Then she sat with her hands on the keyboard and tried to remember when she had last asked Tessa about band.

She couldn’t. Some time in September, probably. Before. She had a memory of Tessa at the kitchen table practicing fingerings with no reed in her clarinet, over and over, the keys clicking like a small animal. Eli had come through on his way to the refrigerator and played a drumroll on the top of her head. Tessa had screamed at him, and Jo had yelled at both of them from the laundry room. It must have been September. Everything was either September or after.

Tessa had played at the game that night. Friday the third. Jo knew that, the way she knew her own address. The band had played the away game at Logan, and Tessa had come home on the bus at ten-fifteen and gone to bed, and at twelve-oh-five, when Jo woke Wes, Tessa had been asleep. Jo hadn’t woken her. She had left a note on the counter, Went to get your brother, back soon. When they came home at four-thirty in the morning, Tessa was sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas, holding the note.

Jo had not thought about that note since. She thought about it now, at her desk, with the Delta Dental hold music playing in her ear. She thought about her fourteen-year-old daughter alone in the house for four hours, holding back soon.

---

When she got home Tessa was on the couch with her phone. That was all Tessa did now. She went to school. She came home. She lay on the couch in Eli’s hoodie with her knees pulled up and scrolled, and she didn’t answer questions with more than one word. Jo had thought that was grief, and it was. She had also thought it was fourteen, which it also was, and she had let the two of them blur together into something she could leave alone.

“Mr. Reyes emailed me,” she said.

Tessa didn’t look up. “Cool.”

“You quit band.”

“Yep.”

“Tess.” Jo sat down on the arm of the couch. “Honey. You love band. You’ve been working all fall on the —“

“I played at the game.”

Jo stopped.

“I played at the game,” Tessa said to her phone. “We did the halftime show. We did the fight song after the touchdown. I was playing the fight song and he was at a bonfire, and then he was —“ Her voice didn’t break. It went flat, like somebody had pressed a hand down on it. “I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not putting on that uniform. I’m not playing that song. You can’t make me.”

“I’m not going to make you.”

“Okay. Then we’re done.” Tessa turned her phone over on her chest, then turned it back and held it out, suddenly, at arm’s length. “Did you see this?”

It was Instagram. Jo didn’t have Instagram. She’d never seen the point. She took the phone and looked.

It was a photograph of Eli at youth camp the summer before last, on the dock at the lake in Kentucky, soaking wet, mid-jump, with his arms flung out and his mouth open in a yell. Jo had never seen it. Somebody had edited it so the colors were warm and golden, and across the bottom, in white text over the water:

NONE OF US ARE PROMISED TOMORROW.

Underneath, the caption. The account was cedarrunyouth.

Last week our youth family lost one of our own. Eli Pruitt was a leader, a light, and a friend to everyone. Eli’s story is a wake-up call for all of us. If you died tonight, do you KNOW where you’d spend eternity? Eli did. Do YOU? 🙏 Join us Wednesday night at 7 for a special service of remembrance and response. Bring a friend who needs to hear this. #EliStrong #NotPromisedTomorrow #ReadyOrNot

It had four hundred and twelve likes. Jo scrolled down through the comments. So powerful 🙏. Praying for everyone. This gave me chills. Going to bring my cousin. RIP Eli, see you on the other side bro.

“It’s been up for four days,” Tessa said. “Everybody at school’s seen it. Kaylee Brandt shared it. She didn’t even know him.” Her voice was rising now, finally, cracking open. “They’re using him, Mom. They’re using him like a — like a poster. Like his whole thing was just so people would get scared and come to youth group. He’s not a wake-up call. He’s my brother.”

Jo looked at the photograph. At Eli, flying.

She felt the anger come up through her body like heat through the floor of a car. It felt clean and bright and good, and for the first time in three weeks it was pointing somewhere other than inward.

“Give me Tyler’s number,” she said.

Tessa stared at her.

“You have it. You’re in the youth group chat. Give it to me.”

---

Tyler Beck was twenty-six and had been Cedar Run’s youth pastor for eighteen months. He had a beard he was still growing into and a wife who taught kindergarten, and he wore his baseball cap backward during youth group and forward during church. As far as Jo could tell, he believed every single thing he said. He picked up on the second ring, sounding cheerful.

“Tyler, this is Jo Pruitt.”

The cheer went away. “Mrs. Pruitt. Oh, man. Hey. I’ve been praying for you guys all —“

“Take down the picture of my son.”

A pause. “The — on Instagram?”

“Take it down.”

“Mrs. Pruitt, I — can I just explain where my heart was on that? Because I promise you it came from a good place. Eli was so passionate about his faith. He was one of my best guys. He’d want people to — if his story can reach even one kid who’s —“

“You don’t know what Eli would want.”

“I — respectfully, I think I kind of do? We talked a lot. He —“

“You don’t know what he’d want, Tyler, because he’s dead, and nobody gets to know anymore.” She was standing in the middle of the living room now, and Tessa was sitting up on the couch, watching her with her mouth open. “What I know is that you took a picture of my son that I’ve never seen, and you put words on it, and you put it up for four hundred people. And you never once picked up the phone and asked his mother. You didn’t ask his sister. She has to walk down the hallway at school past kids who’ve been looking at her dead brother on their phones under a hashtag.”

There was a silence on the line.

“I didn’t think about Tessa,” Tyler said. His voice was different. Smaller.

“No. You didn’t.”

“I — okay. Okay. I’ll take it down right now. I’m — Mrs. Pruitt, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t —“ He stopped. She heard him breathe. “I should have asked. You’re right. I should have asked.”

“Yes,” she said, “you should have,” and hung up.

She stood there holding Tessa’s phone. After a minute it buzzed in her hand. She looked down and the page had refreshed, and the picture was gone. Where it had been, there was a grid of other pictures: pizza night, the youth car wash, a lock-in with kids asleep on the fellowship hall floor in sleeping bags.

Tessa was looking at her.

“You made him take it down,” Tessa said.

“He took it down.”

“You made him.” Something happened in Tessa’s face. It was the first thing that had happened in her face in three weeks that wasn’t blankness or fury. Jo could not have named it. It was small and it went away almost as fast as it came. It looked, maybe, like being surprised that somebody had noticed.

“Thanks,” Tessa said. She took her phone back and lay down on the couch again and turned toward the cushions.

Jo stood there a moment longer. She thought about sitting down. She thought about putting her hand on Tessa’s back, the way she used to rub her back when she was small and couldn’t sleep, in slow circles, until she went heavy. She had her hand half out.

Tessa’s phone buzzed. Tessa looked at it and made a sound through her nose and started typing.

Jo put her hand in her pocket and went to start supper.

---

That night after supper, which was the Harpers’ ziti and which nobody ate much of, she sat down at the kitchen table with her legal pad and her laptop and started building something.

She didn’t call it that. She didn’t call it anything at first. She made a list. On the list were things like yard signs? and school assembly — talk to Mr. Hartley and state rep — who is it and Facebook page. She looked up the state’s distracted driving laws and wrote them down in a column. She looked up the county’s crash data, which was harder to find, and wrote that down too. She found a print shop in Lorimer that did yard signs, corrugated plastic with wire stakes, in bulk. She sat and looked at the order form until the screen dimmed.

The words came to her in the shower the next morning, with the water going cold. PUT IT DOWN. Three words. Something you could say to a kid, something you could say to yourself. Something you could fit on a sign.

She designed it on the print shop’s website, in the little online template. Black letters on yellow, like a road sign. PUT IT DOWN. Under it, smaller: For Eli. She thought about putting his picture on it and decided no. She thought about Tyler’s post. She didn’t want Eli’s face stuck in yards all over the county, getting rained on, getting run over by lawn mowers. His name was enough.

She ordered two hundred. It cost four hundred and eighty dollars, and she put it on the Visa without asking Wes.

---

Wes found out about it the way he found out about most things she’d decided, which was by coming home and seeing it. On the first of November he pulled into the driveway at five-thirty in his work truck and there was a yellow sign in the front yard by the mailbox. He sat in the truck with the engine running and looked at it. Then he turned the truck off, and came up the walk, and stood on the porch, and looked at it some more.

Jo was in the kitchen, watching him through the window over the sink.

He came in. He took his boots off by the door the way he always did, left heel, right heel, and put them on the mat. He came and stood at the kitchen island.

“There’s a sign in the yard,” he said.

“There’s two hundred signs,” Jo said. “The rest are in the garage. The Dunleavys want ten for the ballfield. The Dairy Barn’s going to put it on their marquee. Mr. Hartley at the high school wants to talk about an assembly in the spring, before prom. I made a Facebook page last night, and it’s got four hundred people already.”

He didn’t say anything. He looked at her.

“It’s for Eli,” she said.

“I know who it’s for.”

“Then what?”

He took a long time. She dried a pot that was already dry.

“I went and saw Nate,” he said.

She put the pot down. “When?”

“Tuesday. On my lunch.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I told you I was going to.”

“You didn’t tell me you went.”

“I’m telling you now.” He looked at the counter. “He listened. I’ll give him that. He listened, and he didn’t argue, and when I got done he cried, and he said he’d been wrong. Said he got ahead of God. That’s what he said. I got ahead of God, Wes. I told him I thought he’d got ahead of a whole lot more than that.” Wes shrugged, a small, tired movement. “He said he wants to make it right. I told him that wasn’t up to me.”

Jo waited.

“He asked about you,” Wes said.

“And?”

“And I told him you were putting signs in yards.”

She turned back to the sink. There was nothing in it. She ran the water anyway.

“Say it, Wes.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“You’ve got something to say. You’ve had something to say since the day we sat in that room with Sergeant Voss. You’ve been walking around this house with it for two weeks. Just say it.”

Behind her, he was quiet. She heard him pull out one of the stools at the island and sit down on it. It creaked. He was a big man, and those stools had never been meant for him. She had been meaning to replace them for years.

“I think it’s a good sign,” he said finally. “I think it’s a good thing to say. I think if one kid sees it and puts their phone in the glove box, then that’s one kid.” He paused. “I just think you want to be careful what it’s for.”

She turned off the water.

“It’s for Eli.”

“Is it?”

She turned around. He was sitting on the stool with his big hands flat on the counter, looking at her, not angry, not anything, just looking. He had looked at her this way the night she told him she was pregnant with Eli, when they had eleven hundred dollars in the bank and a car with no reverse gear.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Wes said. “I’m asking.”

She looked at him. He looked at her. On the counter between them sat Brenda’s breakfast casserole, thawing for tomorrow, with its label: “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”

“I’ve got signs to deliver,” she said, and got her keys.

---

She drove until dark with the back seat full of yellow signs. She dropped ten at the Dunleavys’. She dropped five at the Dairy Barn, where the manager, a big, soft-spoken kid named Rudy who’d worked with Eli for two summers, came out to the car and took them from her and then stood there holding them with his eyes filling up. She dropped some at the church, in the foyer, with a note: Take one. She didn’t go into the sanctuary. She dropped some at the Fryes’ and at the Mercers’ and at a half dozen houses where people had messaged the Facebook page that day saying they wanted one.

On the way home, in the last gray light, she drove through the subdivision off Pine Street where the Hollands lived.

She didn’t need to. It wasn’t on the way to anything. She told herself she was checking on a delivery. The Kellers on Pine had asked for two.

The Hollands’ house was the blue split-level at the end of the cul-de-sac. She’d been in it a thousand times. She knew where the key was hidden, in the fake rock by the downspout, and which step on the back deck was soft. She knew there was a crack in the kitchen backsplash, one tile, from when Rob dropped a cast-iron skillet. She knew Lisa’s good dishes were in the hutch behind the dining room door.

The gray Civic wasn’t in the driveway. Of course it wasn’t. It was in an impound lot somewhere, or a salvage yard, crumpled into the shape of a tree. Rob’s pickup was gone too. Night shift. Lisa’s Equinox was there, and the kitchen light was on, and upstairs, on the left, the light in Caleb’s bedroom window.

Across the street, in the Kellers’ front yard, facing the Hollands’ front door, somebody had already stuck one of her yellow signs.

PUT IT DOWN. For Eli.

Jo slowed the Camry to a crawl. She sat in the middle of the cul-de-sac with her foot on the brake and looked at the sign, and then at the lit window above it. She felt something in her chest she didn’t have a name for. It was hard and bright, like a coin. It was a kind of satisfaction.

A shadow crossed the upstairs window. Somebody standing up, or sitting down.

She took her foot off the brake and drove around the circle and out of the subdivision. She didn’t look in the rearview mirror. She didn’t drop off the Kellers’ second sign. It was still on the back seat, face up, when she pulled into her own driveway, next to her own sign, under her own porch light, which Tessa had left burning since morning.

8Psalm 88

Hazel had asked for a pie. It took Jo five weeks to bring her one, and when she did, it was from Kroger.

She stood in the bakery section of the Kroger in Lorimer on the Saturday before Thanksgiving with a sweet potato pie in a plastic clamshell. She was aware, as she stood there, that in twenty-one years of marriage and fourteen years of running the Kitchen Crew, she had never once in her life bought a pie. She had made pies for funerals and for weddings and for the Fourth of July and for the church auction, where her bourbon pecan had gone for sixty dollars two years running. She had judged the pie contest at the county fair. She had opinions about lard.

She hadn’t cooked anything since the third of October. The casseroles had fed them. When the casseroles ran thin, Wes brought home Wendy’s or they ate cereal. Tessa had started making herself ramen at eleven at night, and Jo heard her in the kitchen and didn’t get up.

She put the clamshell in the cart. Nobody said anything. The girl at the register was maybe seventeen and didn’t know her, and scanned it without looking up. In the car Jo sat with the pie on the passenger seat. She looked at it for a while, the orange filling with a little brown ring where it had pulled away from the crust. Then she laughed, once, out loud, alone in the parking lot. It came out of her like a hiccup and startled her.

---

Hazel lived on Walnut Street in a small white house with green shutters and a ramp that the men’s group had built up to the front door five years ago, after her second fall. It was the kind of house that had been kept exactly as it was on some particular day and then left there. The porch had two metal chairs painted red, and a glider, and a pot of mums that had frozen and gone brown. In the yard by the front walk, between a birdbath and a concrete goose in a yellow rain slicker, stood one of Jo’s signs.

PUT IT DOWN. For Eli.

Jo stood at the bottom of the ramp and looked at it.

“Somebody stuck that there,” Hazel said through the storm door. “I didn’t ask for it.”

“Do you want me to take it out?”

“Can’t bend down to pull it out myself anyway, so I guess it’s staying.” Hazel pushed the storm door open with the front of the Buick. “Well. Come in. You’re letting my heat out.”

---

The living room had a green davenport with doilies on the arms and a big old console television that Jo could tell didn’t work, because a smaller flat-screen sat on top of it. There was a rocking chair with a cushion tied to it. Every flat surface held photographs. Hazel and Carl on their wedding day, him in an Army uniform, her in a suit with a corsage the size of a cabbage. Carl older, holding up a bass. Hazel with a hairnet and a big spoon at the high school cafeteria, surrounded by laughing kids with seventies haircuts. And over and over, in black and white and then in faded color, a little girl. Brown bangs. A gap in her teeth. On a pony. In a church dress. At a birthday party with a paper hat. Asleep on Carl’s chest.

Jo didn’t look at those long. It felt like reading someone’s mail.

Hazel took the pie into the kitchen and peeled the clamshell open and looked at it.

“You bought this,” she said.

“I bought it.”

“Hm.” Hazel got two saucers down out of a cabinet and two forks out of a drawer. “Well, good for you. I used to make everything from scratch. Every blessed thing. Carl’s mother came to supper every Sunday for thirty years, and if she saw a can in my kitchen she’d act like I’d served her dog food.” She cut two slices, thick ones. “After Ruthie, I bought a pie. First time in my life. Mrs. Lowery at the IGA looked at me like I’d shoplifted it. I stood out in that parking lot and ate the whole thing with my fingers. Didn’t even take it home.”

Jo sat down at the kitchen table. It was yellow Formica with chrome legs. There was a Bible on it, a big old King James with a cracked black cover, and a pair of reading glasses, and a magnifying glass on a cord.

“Sit,” Hazel said, although Jo was already sitting. She put a saucer in front of her and lowered herself into the other chair, which took a while. “Eat.”

Jo ate. It was too sweet, and the crust was mealy. It was the best thing she had put in her mouth in seven weeks.

---

“She was six,” Hazel said.

She said it without being asked. She said it looking out the kitchen window, at the backyard, where there was a clothesline and a birdfeeder and a rusted swing-set frame with no swings on it.

“Leukemia. They found it the Christmas she was four. Bruises on her legs we thought were from the neighbor boy’s tree fort. In 1966 they didn’t have much. They had some things. We tried all of them. Columbus, twice a month, Carl driving, Ruthie in the back with a bucket in her lap. Her hair came out in the bathtub. She thought it was funny. She wanted to see if she could get it all out in one piece, like a wig.” Hazel took a small bite of pie. “Fourteen months. She died on a Tuesday in March. The crocuses were coming up.”

Jo kept quiet. She had learned that much, in fourteen years of kitchens. You didn’t say anything.

“And then Brother Pettit stood up and told the whole county God wanted a flower for His garden.” Hazel set down her fork. “I told you that.”

“You told me.”

“What I didn’t tell you is, I believed him. For a while. I thought, well, if that’s what God’s like, then God’s a thief. That’s what I thought. He looked down at all the little girls in Ohio and picked out mine because she was the prettiest, like picking a tomato at the grocery. I thought if that’s who He is, I don’t want anything to do with Him.” She shook her head slowly. “I couldn’t pray. I told you that. I’d get down on my knees by the bed where I’d said my prayers every night since I was four years old, and nothing. My mouth would open and nothing would come.”

“What did you do?” Jo said.

Hazel reached over and pulled the big King James across the table. It fell open by itself about two-thirds of the way through, to a page that had been opened so many times the edges had gone soft and gray as flannel. She put on her reading glasses, then took them off, then held up the magnifying glass.

“My eyes are shot,” she said. “I know it by heart anyhow. Psalm eighty-eight.” She put her finger on the page, not reading, just touching it. “You know it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Most people don’t. The preachers don’t preach it. It’s not a very useful psalm, if you’re a preacher.” She turned the Bible around and pushed it across the table. “Read the end. Last verse. Out loud.”

Jo looked down. The page was dense with small type, two columns, and somebody, Hazel, had underlined half of it in ballpoint pen so many times that the ink had gone through to the other side. She found the last verse. Eighteen.

“Lover and friend hast thou put far from me,” she read, “and mine acquaintance into darkness.”

She waited for the next verse. There wasn’t one. The next line was the heading of Psalm 89.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.” Hazel took the Bible back and closed it with her hand flat on the cover. “That’s the only one in the whole book that doesn’t turn around. All the other sad ones, you go through the whole thing with the fella crying and carrying on. His bones are dried up, his enemies are laughing, God’s hid His face. Then you get to the last couple of verses and he says, But I will trust in thee. Yet will I praise him. He turns around. He comes out the other side. Not this one.” She tapped the cover. “This one just stops. In the dark. The fella’s talking to God the whole way through, all eighteen verses, never stops talking to Him. And at the end God still hasn’t said anything back, and it’s still dark, and that’s where it ends.”

She sat back in her chair.

“I read that every night for a year,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what I figured out. Somebody put that in the Bible on purpose. Some old scribe or some king or whoever put the book together, they could have left it out. It doesn’t make anybody look good. It doesn’t teach you anything. But they put it in. They put it right in there with all the ones that come out the other side, like it belonged.” She looked at Jo. “I figured it was for people like me. For when you can’t turn around yet. God put a place in His book for people who can’t turn around yet. That’s how I started praying again. I didn’t have any words of my own. So I prayed that one.”

Jo sat very still.

“I’m not telling you that to make you feel better,” Hazel said. “I’m just telling you.”

---

“I can’t pray,” Jo said.

It came out without her deciding. She was looking at her plate, at the little triangle of crust she’d left.

“I haven’t prayed since — I haven’t. Not really. I say things. I say God, please in the car. I say grace when Wes says it. But I haven’t — I can’t get there.” She pressed her fork into the crust until it broke. “I’ve been a Christian since I was eleven years old, Hazel. I’ve never gone a day. Not when my mother died, not when we lost the second baby, not ever. I’ve prayed with two hundred families in their kitchens. I’ve held hands with people in the ICU. I know how.”

“I know you do.”

“So why can’t I —“

“Because you’re mad at Him,” Hazel said.

Jo looked up.

Hazel was looking back at her, pale-eyed, perfectly calm.

“You’re mad at Him,” she said again. “And you’re a good Baptist girl, and good Baptist girls don’t get mad at God, so you’re sitting on it. And you can’t pray around it, because it’s too big. It’s like trying to talk to somebody with a refrigerator between you.” She picked up her fork and pointed it at Jo. “So quit trying to get around it. Say it to Him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You think He doesn’t know?” Hazel snorted. “Honey, He knows. He knew before you did. You’re not going to surprise Him. You’re not going to hurt His feelings. He’s heard worse. He heard worse from His own Son, on a Friday.” She put the fork down. “Go on.”

“Here?”

“Well, I’m not going to leave. I just sat down.”

Jo looked at the yellow Formica. She looked at the King James with its soft gray edges. She looked out the window at the swing-set frame with no swings on it.

She put her hands flat on the table.

“God,” she said.

That was as far as she’d ever gotten. She stopped there. The refrigerator.

“Go on,” Hazel said, quietly.

“He was coming home,” Jo said. Her voice came out rough. “He was five minutes from home. He was on Kessler Road. He’s been on Kessler Road ten thousand times. You were there. You were in that car. If you’re everywhere, you were in that car, and you watched that boy pick up that phone and you watched it happen and you let it happen. You could have made him look up. One second. You could have given him one second. You part seas. You raised people. All you had to do was make a kid look up from his phone, and you didn’t.”

She was crying now. She hadn’t noticed it start.

“And then you let them clap. In your house. You let that man stand up there and say you were already at work. Already. Ten days. Like it was a good trade. Like Eli was the price, and Caleb Holland’s soul was what you got for him, and everybody should be happy about the deal.” She hit the table with the flat of her hand, and the saucers jumped. “Well, I’m not happy. I don’t want the deal. I want my son. You hear me? I want my son back and I don’t care about anybody’s soul, and if that makes me a bad Christian then I’m a bad Christian, and you can —“

She stopped. She had run out.

The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, somebody’s dog was barking, a long way off.

Hazel let the kitchen be quiet a while. Then she reached across the table and put her old, knobbed hand over Jo’s, just for a second, the first time she’d touched her. It was dry and light, like paper.

“There,” she said. “Now you’re praying.”

---

They sat there. Jo wiped her face with a paper napkin from the holder on the table, a ceramic one shaped like a rooster, and then another one. Hazel ate the rest of her pie.

“It didn’t help,” Jo said finally.

“No. It doesn’t, the first time.” Hazel scraped her fork around the saucer. “It’s not supposed to help. It’s supposed to be true. Helping comes later. Sometimes a lot later.” She considered. “Some things, I’m still waiting on.”

“Like what?”

Hazel didn’t answer right away. She got up. It took a while. She carried her saucer to the sink and ran water over it and stood there with her back to Jo, looking out the window.

“There’s a woman I haven’t forgiven since 1968,” she said. “She’s been dead since 2009. Doesn’t slow me down any.”

Jo waited, but Hazel didn’t say anything else. She turned off the water and dried her hands on a dish towel with a rooster on it that matched the napkin holder.

“Ephesians says be ye angry and sin not,” Hazel said. “Says don’t let the sun go down on your wrath.” She hung the towel on the oven door. “I figure the sun’s gone down on mine about twenty-one thousand times. So I’m not the one to tell you how to do it.” She turned around. “That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. That’s all. Don’t listen to me too much. I’m a bitter old woman. Everybody at that church knows it. They’re scared to death of me. It’s the only fun I have.”

Jo laughed. It hurt. It was the second time that day.

---

At the door Hazel stopped her.

“Somebody from the Ledger called me,” she said. “Asking about you. Asking about your signs. Wanted to know if I was one of the church ladies who’d rallied around.” She said rallied around like she was holding it with tongs. “I told her I don’t rally. I’m eighty-one.”

“She called me too,” Jo said. “Monica something. She wants to do a story.”

“Are you going to let her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It would get the word out. It would get more signs out.” She put on her coat. “It’s a good message, Hazel. It’s a true thing. Put your phone down when you drive. If it saves one kid —“

“Oh, it’s a good message.” Hazel leaned on the Buick in the doorway, looking out at her little yard with its birdbath and its concrete goose in a rain slicker and its yellow sign. “It’s a real good message. I’ve got it right there in my yard where I can look at it every morning.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Just be careful it doesn’t turn into a way to keep from praying,” she said. “That’s all. You can do an awful lot of good works standing in front of a door you don’t want to walk through. I did forty years of ’em. I’ve got a plaque.”

She went in and shut the storm door, and Jo walked down the ramp to her car. The sign stood in the brown grass beside the walk. The wind had knocked it crooked on its wire stakes. It leaned toward the house like it was trying to hear something through the window.

9Tuesday Group

Ridgeline Hospice was in a converted farmhouse off the bypass outside Lorimer. It had a gravel lot, a wraparound porch, and a sign out front with a dove on it that Jo thought was a little much. The bereavement group met Tuesday nights at six-thirty in what used to be the parlor.

Renee Castillo had given her the flyer at the meeting in October, tucked into the folder with their names on it. Grief Support Group — Open to Anyone Who Has Lost a Loved One — No Cost — No Registration — Just Come. Jo had put it on the refrigerator under a magnet from Eli’s Little League team, and it had stayed there for six weeks. She looked at it every morning while she made coffee. Every Tuesday evening at six she thought about it and didn’t go.

“I’m not a talker,” Wes had said, the one time she’d mentioned it.

“Neither am I.”

He’d looked at her over his cereal bowl. “Jo. You’re the biggest talker I know.”

“Not about this.”

“No,” he said. “Not about this.”

She went on the first Tuesday in December, alone, because the recall list was done and the supply closet was organized and the insurance aging report was clean. There were no more lists at the office to fix. The house was dark and quiet, Wes on a late furnace call and Tessa at her door with her music on, and Jo had been standing in the kitchen at six-oh-five with her car keys in her hand without knowing why she’d picked them up.

---

The parlor had a gas fireplace, a fish tank, and a circle of ten padded chairs that didn’t match. There was a table along one wall with a coffee urn, a stack of Styrofoam cups, a plate of grocery-store cookies, and a box of tissues. There were three more boxes of tissues set at intervals around the circle, on the floor by the chair legs, like somebody was salting a field.

Jo stood in the doorway and almost left.

“You made it,” a man said. He’d been bending over the coffee urn, and he straightened up and came across the room. He was tall and heavy through the shoulders, maybe fifty-five, with close-cropped gray hair, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and a cardigan that had been through the wash too many times. He didn’t hold out his hand. He just stopped a comfortable distance away and smiled at her like she was expected. “I’m Marcus. Marcus Oyelaran. I run this. Come on in, or don’t, whichever. There’s coffee. It’s bad. The cookies are worse.”

“Jo,” she said. “Pruitt.”

Something moved in his face, very slightly. He knew the name. Everybody in the county knew the name by now, between the Facebook page and the signs. But he didn’t say anything about it. He said, “Sit anywhere, Jo. There’s no assigned seats. Although Gary will fight you for the recliner.”

---

There were seven of them that night. Marcus had them go around and say their name and who they’d lost. He said that was all anyone had to say. You could pass. Most people didn’t pass, but you could.

Gary Szabo was in the recliner. He was a big, bald man somewhere past sixty, in a flannel shirt and a Lorimer Fire Department ballcap. He chewed on a toothpick the whole time and kept his arms folded over his stomach. Carol, he said. My wife. ALS. June. That was it.

A young woman named Brianna had lost her grandmother, who’d raised her. An older couple, the Mitchells, had lost a daughter to breast cancer at forty-four. They held hands the whole hour and never let go. A thin, quiet man named Phil had lost his brother and passed on saying anything else.

The woman next to Jo was fifty or so, heavy, with dyed red hair and a sweatshirt that said CEDAR POINT. She had a rosary wrapped around one wrist like a bracelet, and her hands never stopped moving.

“Denise,” she said. “My son. Jordan. He was thirty-one. It was an overdose. August.” She said the word overdose with a little push behind it, like she’d practiced saying it out loud and meant to keep saying it until it stopped sticking.

Then it was Jo.

She’d been thinking about what to say since she sat down. She’d rehearsed it, the way she rehearsed phone calls to insurance companies. Jo Pruitt. My son, Eli. Eighteen. October. A car accident. Short. Clean. The facts.

“Jo,” she said. “My son. Eli.”

Her throat closed.

She sat there with her mouth open. Nobody moved. The fish tank bubbled. She could feel her face getting hot and she hated it, hated being the new person who couldn’t get her own name out. She had sat in a hundred kitchens with people who couldn’t get the words out. She’d put her hand on their arms and waited. She had been so good at waiting.

“Take your time,” Marcus said.

“Eighteen,” she managed. “October. He was —“ She could not say car accident. It wasn’t an accident. She wasn’t going to call it an accident. She could not say killed. “He was a passenger,” she said finally. “Somebody else was driving.”

Across the circle Gary Szabo took his toothpick out of his mouth, looked at it, and put it back.

“Thank you, Jo,” Marcus said.

---

She didn’t talk the rest of the hour. She hadn’t planned to. She’d come to listen, she told herself, to see what it was like, whether it would be any good to recommend to Crew families. She sat with her purse on her lap and her ankles crossed and listened like a visitor.

What surprised her was how much of it was about the dumb stuff.

Brianna talked about her grandmother’s cat, which nobody would take and which kept sitting in her grandmother’s chair. The Mitchells talked about their daughter’s Facebook page. They didn’t know how to take it down, and they didn’t want to, and people kept posting on it, happy birthday in heaven, and every time it made Mrs. Mitchell sick to her stomach. Phil didn’t talk at all. Gary talked about Carol’s car. It was a 2014 Buick LaCrosse with eleven thousand miles on it, and he couldn’t sell it and couldn’t drive it. He went out to the garage and sat in it sometimes. Once he’d fallen asleep in there and woken up at two in the morning with a crick in his neck.

“That’s normal,” Marcus said.

“It’s stupid,” Gary said.

“It can be both.”

Jo thought of Wes, starting Eli’s truck in the garage every Saturday morning at eight. He’d been doing it since the first Saturday after the funeral. She heard it turn over from the kitchen, and heard it idle for exactly ten minutes, and then heard it shut off. He said it was to keep the battery from dying. He never said anything else about it, and she never asked.

Then Denise talked about church.

She went to St. Mary’s in Lorimer. Her whole family had, forever. After Jordan died the church had been wonderful, she said. They’d brought food and sent cards and said a Mass for him, and Father Tom had come to the house. She didn’t have a bad word to say about any of them.

“It’s just,” she said, and her hands twisted the rosary around her wrist, “it’s just that everybody was so quick to say he was with Jesus. So quick. Like they had to get it settled. The first day. At the wake. He’s at peace now, Denise. He’s with the Lord now. He’s not struggling anymore. Over and over. And I believe that. I want to believe it. I pray for it every single night. But it was like —“ She stopped. “It was like they needed him to be in heaven right away so they didn’t have to think about how he got there. So nobody had to say the word. So they didn’t have to sit there with me in the part where my son died on a bathroom floor in a Speedway in Columbus with a needle in his arm. They skipped right over that part to the good part.”

The room was very quiet.

“I didn’t want to skip it,” Denise said. Her voice cracked. “It was his. That part was his, too. The whole ten years of it was his. And everybody was in such a hurry to get him out of it and up to heaven where he’d be nice and clean. I felt like they were taking him away from me. Like they were fixing him up for the viewing.”

Jo sat with her hands locked together in her lap and her ankles crossed. She was not a visitor anymore.

She thought of Tyler’s Instagram post. Eli’s story is a wake-up call. She thought of Brenda. It’s going to be such a testimony. She thought of the applause going up like a wave behind her in the sanctuary, and Nate’s shining face, already at work, and she thought: they were in a hurry too. They were all in such a hurry to get to the good part.

“Yes,” she heard herself say, out loud.

Denise turned and looked at her. Jo hadn’t meant to speak. Her face got hot again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just. Yes.”

Denise looked at her a long moment. Then she reached over, without saying anything, and squeezed Jo’s wrist, hard, once, and let go.

---

Near the end Marcus asked if anyone had something they’d done that week, one thing, that had helped even a little. People said things. Brianna had taken the cat to the vet, and the vet had been kind. Mr. Mitchell had gone fishing. Gary had driven Carol’s Buick around the block, once, and then put it back.

“Jo?” Marcus said. “You can pass.”

She didn’t know why she didn’t pass. Maybe it was Denise’s hand on her wrist. Maybe it was that she’d been silent for fifty minutes and it was driving her crazy.

“I’ve been doing a campaign,” she said. “About distracted driving. My son — the driver was on his phone.” She kept her voice steady. It was easier to talk about this. This had edges. “So I started a thing. Put It Down for Eli. Yard signs. A Facebook page. We have four thousand followers. The Ledger wants to do a story. The high school is talking about having me speak at an assembly before prom.” She realized she was sitting up straighter. “It’s going well. People are responding. People want to do something.”

“That’s a lot of work,” Marcus said.

“I’m good at work.”

“I can tell.” He smiled a little.

“Who’s it for?” Gary said.

Everybody looked at him. He was still in the recliner with his arms folded, the toothpick moving from one corner of his mouth to the other.

“Excuse me?” said Jo.

“The signs.” Gary shrugged, not unkindly. “Who’re they for?”

“They’re for — they’re for kids. So they don’t pick up their phones. So nobody else has to —“

“Uh-huh.” Gary nodded slowly. “And the driver? He see ’em?”

Jo stared at him.

“Local kid?” Gary said. “Lives in town?”

“That’s —“ She felt heat rise up her neck. “That’s not what it’s about.”

“Didn’t say it was.” Gary held up one hand, palm out. “Just asking. Occupational habit. Twenty-eight years on the job, you learn to ask who a thing’s for.” He put his hand back on his stomach. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

He had meant something by it. Everyone in the room knew he’d meant something by it. Jo sat with her face burning and her hands locked in her lap. She thought of the Kellers’ yard, and the sign facing the Hollands’ front door, and the light in the upstairs window. And she felt something she had not felt in a very long time, possibly since she was a girl. It was a hot, prickling, full-body shame, like being caught in a lie by a teacher.

“Grief likes to have a job,” Marcus said, into the silence, mildly. “That’s not a bad thing. Sometimes a job is the only thing that gets people out of bed. Sometimes the job does a lot of good.” He looked around the circle, not at Jo in particular. “It’s just worth knowing, sometimes, which parts of what we’re doing are the grieving, and which parts are the job. Because the job can end. It’s got a finish line. The grieving mostly doesn’t.” He glanced at the clock over the fireplace. “And that’s time. Thank you, all of you. Same time next week, if you want it.”

---

In the gravel lot, in the dark, Jo fumbled her keys and dropped them. By the time she’d found them in the gravel with her phone flashlight, Gary Szabo was standing by the pickup next to hers, with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Didn’t mean to jump you,” he said.

“You did, though.”

“Yeah.” He looked at his truck. “I did. Carol used to kick me under the table for that. Forty-one years. I got bruises on my shins like a soccer player.” He chewed the toothpick. “Sorry.”

Jo unlocked her car. She didn’t get in.

“You go to church?” she said. She didn’t know why she asked.

“Nope.” He considered. “Carol did. Presbyterian, in Lorimer. I go once a month now. Sit in her spot. She’d like it.” He shrugged. “I don’t believe a word of it. I’m not trying to be smart. I just don’t. Never did. She knew. She prayed for me for forty-one years anyway. Last thing she said to me, pretty near, with that machine breathing for her, was she’d see me later. Like I’d just gone out for milk.” He looked away across the dark lot. “I’d like her to be right. I’ll tell you that. I’d like to be wrong about that one.”

Jo had no answer for that.

“I pulled a lot of kids out of a lot of cars,” Gary said. He said it quietly, to the dark. “Twenty-eight years. Route 33, the bypass, all the back roads. A lot of ’em didn’t make it. Some of ’em did.” He took the toothpick out and looked at it. “The drivers. The ones who lived. I’d see ’em sometimes, after, at the hospital. Or at court, when I had to testify. Or in the grocery store, years later. You’d know ’em. There’s a look.” He put the toothpick back. “I never saw one who didn’t wish it had been him instead. Not one. Not in twenty-eight years.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Jo said.

“I know you don’t.” He nodded. “I’m just saying it. You don’t have to do anything with it.” He opened his truck door. The dome light came on and lit up the inside of the cab, which was clean and bare except for a woman’s pink cardigan folded on the passenger seat. “See you next week, Jo. Or not. Whichever.”

He got in and drove away.

She stood in the gravel lot in the cold with her keys in her hand. The farmhouse windows glowed yellow behind her. Through one of them she could see Marcus moving around the parlor, stacking the chairs against the wall and pouring the last of the coffee down a sink. After a while she got in the Camry and sat there with the engine running and the heat on high. She didn’t back out. She sat there until Marcus came out on the porch and turned off the light and locked the door, and waved at her, uncertainly, through the dark. Then she went home.

10Route 9

The sling came off the second week of December. The orthopedic guy in Lorimer looked at the X-ray on his screen and said, “Well, look at that. It knitted,” like it had done something clever on its own. He told Caleb he could start physical therapy and use the arm for light stuff. No lifting over twenty pounds and no contact sports. No bicycles, either, till after New Year’s, because if he fell on it now he’d be right back where he started.

“He’s not going to be riding a bike,” his mom said.

“Good,” said the doctor. “What’s he doing for getting around? He’s not driving, I assume.”

Nobody answered. The doctor looked at the chart, and something in his face shifted, and he said, “Right. Okay,” and wrote something down.

---

Lou Burkhart had hired him the week before Thanksgiving.

Caleb hadn’t asked. His grandpa had bought tires from Lou for thirty years, and one Saturday Lou showed up on the Hollands’ front porch in his coveralls. He had a face like a catcher’s mitt and hands with black in the creases that would never come out. He told Caleb’s dad he needed somebody to sweep, answer the phone, and learn the tire machine. He said he’d heard Caleb had a few months with nothing to do.

“He’s got a court case,” Caleb’s dad said.

“I heard that too,” said Lou. “Does he know how to push a broom?”

“He’s got a broken collarbone.”

“Well, he can push a broom with one arm. I’ve seen guys do it with no arms. Held it in their teeth.” Lou looked past Caleb’s dad into the living room, where Caleb was sitting in the recliner with his sling on, pretending not to listen. “Six-thirty to three. Twelve an hour. I don’t care what you did, son. I care if you show up. You show up, you’ve got a job. You don’t show up, you don’t. That’s the whole deal.”

Caleb had shown up every day since.

The shop was a cinder-block building on Route 9, painted blue a long time ago, with two service bays and a sign on a pole that said BURKHART TIRE & AUTO — SINCE 1971. It smelled like rubber and cold concrete and the burnt coffee Lou kept on a hot plate all day. There was a radio on a shelf over the workbench that only got one station, a country station out of Portsmouth. Every morning at seven it played the same commercial for a funeral home. Caleb had learned to go into the stockroom when he heard it start.

He swept. He answered the phone and wrote down names and numbers on a pad with a pencil on a string, since he still didn’t have a cell phone, and he didn’t want one. He learned the sizes. P215/65R16. P235/75R15. He learned to read the date codes on the sidewalls and what it meant when a tread was cupped. Once the sling came off, Lou started teaching him the tire machine one-handed, then with both hands. Lou didn’t talk much. When he did talk it was mostly about tires. Twice, when a customer recognized Caleb and got a look on their face, Lou just stepped in front of him and started talking about alignment until the customer forgot what they’d been going to say.

It was the only place in the world where Caleb could breathe for eight hours at a time.

---

The problem was getting there.

It was four and a half miles from the house on Pine Street to Burkhart’s. His mom had been driving him. The shop opened at six-thirty, and she had to be at Ashby Elementary by six-fifty for breakfast duty, which was in the other direction. So she was late every single day, and the principal had started saying things. His dad got off the night shift in Lorimer at seven. Kenzie had a car, but Kenzie had first period at seven-forty and lived in the other direction too. Anyway, things with Kenzie were weird now. She held his hand and kissed him and said all the right things. But she looked at him sometimes like she was trying to see something through a window with the blinds down.

“I’ll walk,” he said.

“You will not,” said his mom.

“It’s four miles.”

“It’s four and a half miles on Route 9 in the dark in December with no sidewalk and coal trucks. No.”

“Mom.” He looked at her. “You’re going to get fired.”

She opened her mouth and shut it. It wasn’t true. Mrs. Dillon wasn’t going to fire her. But it wasn’t all the way not true either, and they both knew his parents couldn’t afford it. Not now, not with his dad’s 401(k) sitting in Grant Mahler’s bank account.

“I’ll wear a vest,” he said. “Dad’s got one from work. The yellow one.”

---

He left the house at ten after five. It was full dark, the kind of dark you only got out past the edge of town in December. It was cold enough that his breath came out white and hung there, and the first mile, down Pine and out past the water plant, wasn’t bad. He had his dad’s reflective safety vest on over his hoodie and his hands shoved in the front pocket. His shoulder ached, a deep ache like a bruise on the bone. He walked fast to keep warm.

Then he turned onto Route 9 and it started to sleet.

It was the kind of sleet that isn’t quite rain and isn’t quite snow, that comes in sideways and finds every gap in your clothes. In five minutes his hood was soaked through. In ten minutes the front of his jeans was plastered to his legs. There wasn’t a shoulder on that stretch of 9, just a white line and a strip of gravel and then a ditch. So he walked on the gravel with his head down. Every time a truck came up behind him he felt it before he heard it, a pressure in the air at his back. Then the roar, and then the wall of wet wind and slush that hit him like a wave and shoved him sideways toward the ditch.

Coal trucks. Milk trucks. Guys in pickups on their way to the plant in Lorimer, doing sixty-five, one hand on the wheel, and some of them —

He knew what they were doing. He could see it when they came toward him on the other side. He’d see the headlights, and in the cab above them, the faint blue glow of a screen held low on the steering wheel, lighting up a face from underneath.

He started counting them. It was a thing to do. By the time he passed the Marathon station at Route 9 and Old Furnace Road, he’d counted eleven. Eleven faces lit up blue from underneath, going sixty-five in the sleet, in the dark, past him, a kid walking on the gravel in a yellow vest. Eleven people who could have looked up and seen him and not been able to stop.

He started shaking. It wasn’t the cold, or it wasn’t only the cold.

That was me, he thought. That was me. That was me.

---

He was about a mile past the Marathon when a set of headlights came up behind him and didn’t pass.

He felt them slow. The white light spread out on the wet road around him and held there, pacing him, and his whole body went tight. You heard stories. Guys yelling stuff out of trucks. Somebody throwing a beer can. Last week somebody had honked at him in the Burkhart’s lot and yelled KILLER out the window and peeled out before Lou could get to the door. He kept walking. He didn’t look back. The headlights stayed behind him.

Then the truck pulled up alongside, slow, and he saw the side of it in the glow of the dash lights. It was a white work truck with a ladder rack. On the door, in blue letters: MILLER HEATING & COOLING — ASHBY, OHIO — “WE’LL KEEP YOU COMFORTABLE.”

Caleb stopped walking.

The truck stopped too. It sat there in the lane with its wipers going and its engine running and its hazards on, blinking orange across the wet asphalt. The passenger window came down. Heat rolled out of it into the sleet. So did the sound of a radio, very low, a man’s voice reading numbers.

Mr. Pruitt was sitting behind the wheel in a canvas work coat and a stocking cap. He wasn’t looking at Caleb. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield at the road, with both hands on the wheel. His face was lit green from underneath by the dash lights.

Caleb stood on the gravel in the sleet and couldn’t move.

“Get in the truck,” Mr. Pruitt said.

He said it to the windshield. His voice was very quiet and very flat. It was the voice Caleb remembered from Little League, from when Mr. Pruitt was assistant coach. He’d almost never yelled. When a kid was about to do something stupid he’d say hey in exactly that voice, and the kid would stop.

Caleb didn’t move.

A coal truck came roaring up in the other lane, its headlights sweeping across both of them. Its wake slapped against the side of the Miller truck and rocked it on its springs. Slush hit the back of Caleb’s legs.

“Get in the truck, son,” Mr. Pruitt said.

Caleb got in the truck.

---

It was warm. That was the first thing. It was so warm it hurt. The heater was going full blast and it hit his wet face and hands like something solid. He sat with his hands between his knees and dripped on the floor mat and shook.

The cab smelled like coffee and the inside of a furnace, dust and hot metal. There was a clipboard on the dash with a stack of work orders on it, and a thermos in the cupholder. The cupholder. He looked at it and looked away. There was a small wooden cross hanging from the rearview mirror on a leather string. He was pretty sure Eli had made it at camp when they were eleven. He was pretty sure he had one just like it, somewhere in a drawer.

Mr. Pruitt turned off the hazards and pulled back into the lane and drove.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t look over. He drove with both hands on the wheel at a steady fifty. The wipers went back and forth and the radio kept going low. It was the farm report out of Columbus: corn futures, soybeans, feeder cattle, barrows and gilts. The man read the numbers in a voice like somebody reading the Bible in church, slow and even, as if they mattered to God.

Caleb sat there. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He didn’t know what to do with his face. His whole body was screaming at him to say something. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s my fault. I’m sorry. The words were right there, piled up behind his teeth, and he couldn’t get any of them out, because he knew with a total certainty that if he said even one of them Mr. Pruitt would pull over and let him out. Or worse, wouldn’t. So he sat there with his mouth shut. The only sound was the heater and the wipers and the man on the radio saying hogs were steady to a dollar lower.

They passed the high school. They passed the Dollar General. They passed the turnoff for Kessler Road. Mr. Pruitt didn’t slow down or look at it. Caleb didn’t either. He felt it go by on his right like a cold spot.

“Where you headed,” Mr. Pruitt said. Still to the windshield.

“Burkhart’s,” Caleb said. His voice came out cracked. He cleared his throat. “Burkhart Tire. On —“

“I know where it is.”

A mile later, the blue cinder-block building came up on the right with its sign lit on the pole. Lou’s truck was already in the lot and the light was on in the office. Mr. Pruitt pulled in and stopped beside the bay doors. He left the engine running. He sat there with his hands on the wheel.

Caleb put his hand on the door handle.

“Mr. Pruitt,” he said. “I —“

“Don’t,” Mr. Pruitt said.

He said it quietly. He didn’t turn his head. He was looking at the bay door, which had a dent in it at about bumper height where somebody had backed into it in 1980-something, and a rust stain running down from the dent like a tear. His jaw was working. Caleb could see it, a muscle jumping under the stubble along the bone. His hands were very tight on the wheel.

“Don’t,” he said again. “Not yet. I can’t —“ He stopped. He breathed out through his nose. “Just don’t.”

“Okay,” Caleb whispered.

He opened the door. The cold came in. He got out and stood on the concrete in the sleet in his dad’s soaking wet yellow vest. He started to close the door.

“What time you get off,” Mr. Pruitt said.

Caleb stopped with his hand on the door.

“Three,” he said.

Mr. Pruitt nodded, slowly, at the windshield. He didn’t say anything else. Caleb waited, but nothing else came, so he shut the door. The truck backed out and pulled onto Route 9 and went on toward Lorimer. He watched its taillights until they went over the hill by the grain elevator.

Lou was standing in the office doorway with a cup of coffee, looking at him.

“Was that Wes Pruitt?” Lou said.

Caleb nodded.

Lou looked at the road where the truck had gone. He looked at Caleb, soaking wet, shaking, standing in the lot. He kept looking. Then he went back in the office, and when Caleb came in, there was a second cup of coffee poured on the workbench and a dry Burkhart Tire sweatshirt folded next to it. Lou didn’t say a word about any of it, then or ever.

---

At three o’clock his mom picked him up, late, apologizing. He didn’t tell her. He didn’t know how to tell her. He didn’t know what had happened. He wasn’t sure anything had. Maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe Mr. Pruitt had seen some kid walking in the sleet on Route 9 and stopped, the way you’d stop for anybody, and then seen who it was and been stuck with it.

He lay awake that night. He’d started sleeping in his bed again once the sling came off. Or he lay in it, anyway. He thought about the green dash lights on Mr. Pruitt’s face, and his hands on the wheel, and the muscle in his jaw. Don’t. Not yet.

Not yet. Like there’d be a later.

---

The next morning he left at ten after five. It wasn’t sleeting. It was just cold, clear and black, with stars. He walked down Pine, past the water plant, and turned onto Route 9. He walked past the Marathon at Old Furnace Road and counted the screens, and he kept walking.

He was about a quarter mile past the Marathon when the headlights came up behind him and slowed.

He didn’t turn around. He stopped walking, and stood on the gravel, and waited. The white truck pulled up beside him, and the passenger window came down, and the heat and the farm report rolled out.

Mr. Pruitt was looking at the windshield.

“Marathon,” he said. “Ten till six. I’m not waiting.”

Caleb got in the truck.

11Maddie

Tessa had a six-month cleaning scheduled for December sixteenth at 3:40. Jo had booked it in June, back when there was a June. She had forgotten about it until it popped up on the hygiene schedule on her own screen at work that morning. PRUITT, TESSA — PERIO MAINT/PROPHY — PAULA. She sat looking at her daughter’s name in the same font as everyone else’s, and felt it land on her like a small, specific failure.

She texted Tessa at lunch: You have a cleaning at 3:40. I’ll pick you up from school at 3:15, front loop.

Tessa texted back twenty minutes later: cant im at aubreys after school for a project. can we reschedule

Jo looked at that for a while. Aubrey Vance lived on Sycamore, three blocks from the middle school. Tessa had been going to Aubrey’s after school a lot lately. Two or three times a week, Jo thought, although she couldn’t have said for sure. Lisa used to handle the after-school driving on Tuesdays and Thursdays when both girls had band, and since October nobody had handled anything. Tessa had just started getting herself places. She walked, or got rides from people, and texted Jo where she was, and came home before dark. Jo had been grateful for it. She could admit that. She had been grateful not to have to think about it.

I’ll come get you at Aubrey’s at 3:20, she typed. You’re not skipping a cleaning. Paula is holding the slot.

No reply. The little word came up under her message: Read.

---

Aubrey’s mother came to the door in a Christmas sweater with a dish towel over her shoulder. She looked surprised to see Jo, and then her face did the thing everybody’s face did now. Then she looked more surprised.

“Oh — Tessa’s not here,” she said. “Aubrey’s at piano on Tuesdays. Was she supposed to be —“

“My mistake,” Jo said. “I must have mixed up the days.”

She walked back to the Camry. She sat in it in the Vances’ driveway with the engine running. There were inflatable reindeer on the lawn, sagging in the cold, and a wreath on the garage door, and a sign in the yard. It wasn’t hers. It was a political sign from a school board race in November that nobody had bothered to take down.

She knew. She hadn’t known she knew until she was sitting there, and then she had always known. She thought about the three blocks from the middle school to Sycamore. She thought about the other three blocks from Sycamore, across the creek on the footbridge by the park, to the subdivision off Pine Street. She thought about how Tessa had stopped mentioning Maddie in October, after that first week of unanswered texts, and had never mentioned her again. Not once. Not Maddie said, not Maddie’s mom, not I saw Maddie in the hall. A fourteen-year-old girl who had talked about Maddie Holland roughly every eleven minutes since the age of four had simply stopped saying her name.

Jo had been grateful for that too.

She put the car in reverse.

---

She didn’t pull into the Hollands’ driveway. She stopped in the cul-de-sac, the same place she’d stopped the night she drove by in November, with the sign in the Kellers’ yard behind her and the blue split-level in front. Lisa’s Equinox was in the driveway. The kitchen light was on. It was 3:25 and already the sky was going the color of dishwater.

She got out her phone.

I’m outside the Hollands’. Come out now.

She watched the screen. Delivered. Then, after a moment: Read.

Nothing happened for almost a minute. Then the front door opened and Tessa came out.

She had her backpack on one shoulder and her coat unzipped and Eli’s hoodie on under it. She came down the front steps slowly, looking at the car. Her face was white and set and older than fourteen, and Jo didn’t recognize it for a moment. Then she did. It was her own face. It was the face she’d seen in the bathroom mirror at Lorimer Regional at one in the morning. She’d been looking at herself in the mirror over the sink, holding her phone, and —

Behind Tessa, in the doorway, was Maddie. Small and dark-haired in a too-big sweatshirt, holding on to the door frame with both hands.

And behind Maddie, in the hall, was Lisa.

Jo hadn’t seen her since the hospital. Not since the hallway at Lorimer Regional at one o’clock in the morning. Not since the two of them held each other in front of the janitor’s cart. She hadn’t seen her at church. She’d only felt her there, two pews back, like heat on her neck. She’d seen the Equinox in the driveway and the light in the kitchen window. She’d read four texts and let a dozen calls go to voicemail and never listened to one of them.

Lisa had lost weight. That was the first thing. Her face had gone narrow and there were deep lines by her mouth that hadn’t been there in September. Her hair was pulled back in a clip. She was wearing the blue fleece she always wore around the house, with the bleach spot on the cuff. She stood there in the hallway of her own house and looked out through the glass storm door at Jo in the car, and Jo looked back.

Lisa lifted one hand. It wasn’t a wave, exactly. It was a hand raised halfway, palm out, the way you’d hold up a hand to show somebody you weren’t carrying anything.

Jo didn’t lift hers.

Tessa opened the passenger door and got in and slammed it. Jo put the car in drive and pulled around the cul-de-sac. When she looked in the rearview mirror at the stop sign, the storm door was closed, and nobody was standing behind it.

---

“You lied to me,” she said on Pine Street.

Tessa looked out the window.

“You told me you were at Aubrey’s. You’ve been telling me for weeks.”

Nothing.

“How long, Tessa?”

“Since Halloween.” To the window.

“Since Halloween?”

“She came to the fence at school. At lunch. She was crying. She’d been crying for like a month. She said she didn’t know if I hated her.” Tessa’s voice was very flat. “I said I didn’t hate her. Because I don’t.”

“Tessa —“

“She didn’t do anything, Mom.” Tessa turned and looked at her, finally, and her eyes were enormous. “Maddie didn’t do anything. She’s thirteen. She was asleep. She was home asleep in her bed, like me. She didn’t even know till morning. She’s been my best friend since I was four. You used to call us the twins. You made us matching Halloween costumes, like, five years in a row.” Her voice was climbing. “Caleb did it. Not Maddie. Not Mrs. Holland. Not the house. You can hate Caleb all you want, I don’t care, I hate him too, but you don’t get to take Maddie. You don’t get to take her too.”

They were at the light at Pine and Main. It was red. Jo sat with her hands on the wheel.

“You’re not to go over there again,” she said.

“Mom.”

“You’re not to go over there again. Not until — not for now. I’m not saying you can’t be her friend. At school, fine. But you are not going to that house. And you are not going to lie to me about where you are. Ever. Do you understand me?”

Tessa stared at her.

“You wouldn’t even have noticed,” she said.

The light turned green. Jo didn’t move. Behind them somebody tapped their horn.

“If I’d been gone a week,” Tessa said. “You wouldn’t have noticed. You only noticed today because of a dental appointment. You’d have to look up from your signs.”

Jo pulled through the light.

They drove to the office in silence. Paula cleaned Tessa’s teeth in Room 2 with the door shut. Jo sat at her desk with her hands flat on either side of her keyboard for twenty-eight minutes and didn’t type anything. When Tessa came out, Paula walked her up front and handed Jo the little bag with the toothbrush and floss and travel-size toothpaste in it. She looked at Jo over Tessa’s head with a question in her face, and Jo shook her head. Don’t.

“No cavities,” Paula said. “Great gums. Somebody’s been flossing.”

“Me,” said Tessa, to nobody.

---

Wes got home at six-fifteen. He’d been getting home late all week. Furnace season. He’d been leaving early all week too. Jo had noticed it in the vague way she noticed weather. She woke up at five-forty and his side of the bed was already cold and his truck was already gone. It was December. People’s furnaces went out.

She told him in the garage, where Tessa couldn’t hear. She stood by Dale’s chest freezer with her arms crossed and told him all of it. Aubrey’s mother in the Christmas sweater. The cul-de-sac. Lisa in the doorway with her hand up. You wouldn’t even have noticed.

Wes listened. He leaned against Eli’s truck with his arms crossed, and he listened all the way through without saying anything. When she was done he looked at the floor for a while.

“And you told her she can’t go over there,” he said.

“Of course I told her.”

He nodded slowly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Wes.”

“She’s fourteen, Jo.” He looked up. “Maddie’s thirteen. They didn’t do anything.”

“I know they didn’t do anything —“

“Then what are we punishing them for?”

“I’m not punishing anybody. I’m —“ She stopped. She didn’t know what she was doing. “It’s their house, Wes. It’s his house. He lives there. She’s walking in the door past his shoes on the mat and his coat on the hook and eating their snacks off their counter, and he’s upstairs, and she’s —“ Her voice broke. “I can’t. I can’t have my daughter in that house.”

“Their family,” Wes said quietly, “is not Maddie.”

She looked at him.

He was leaning against the truck with the dust on the hood behind him and his arms crossed, and he didn’t look away. He didn’t look angry either. He looked the way he’d looked in the kitchen when she put up the first sign. I’m asking.

“Whose side are you on?” she said.

It came out of her like something from a teenager. She heard it and was ashamed of it and didn’t take it back.

Wes looked at her.

“I didn’t know there were sides,” he said.

He went inside. She heard him down the hall, knocking on Tessa’s door. She heard the door open. Then, low, his voice, and Tessa’s voice, and the door closing again with both of them on the other side of it.

---

After supper, which was frozen pizza, Tessa came out of her room for the first time and stood in the kitchen doorway.

“Are we doing Christmas?” she said.

Jo looked up from the sink.

“Like,” Tessa said. “The tree. And stuff. Are we doing it. Or are we just not.”

Jo hadn’t thought about it. That wasn’t true. She had thought about it every day since Thanksgiving, which they had skipped. Dale and his wife had invited them. They said no. They ate the Fryes’ tetrazzini at the kitchen table without talking and went to bed at eight. Every store in Lorimer had been playing Christmas music since November first. She’d driven past the Christmas tree lot at the Methodist church on Route 9 a dozen times and every time she felt her hands tighten on the wheel.

“Do you want to?” she said.

Tessa shrugged. “I don’t know.” She looked at the floor. “Maddie says they’re not doing a tree. Mrs. Holland said she can’t.” She looked up quickly, like she hadn’t meant to say Maddie’s name. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry for saying her name.”

Tessa looked at her.

“I’ll get the box,” Jo said.

---

The Christmas boxes were in the basement, three big plastic tubs with red lids, labeled in her own handwriting. XMAS — TREE STUFF. XMAS — LIGHTS. XMAS — MISC./STOCKINGS. She brought up the third one by herself and set it on the kitchen table and took off the lid.

The stockings were on top, folded, wrapped in tissue paper. She’d needlepointed them herself, one a year, starting the Christmas she was pregnant with Eli. Four of them now. Red wool with white cuffs, and a name across the cuff in green, and a small picture on the front that she’d designed. Wes’s had a pickup truck, which had taken her all of 1999. Hers had a cardinal. Tessa’s had a clarinet, which she had added the year Tessa started band, stitching it over the old picture of a teddy bear. It had taken three weekends of picking out the old stitches with tweezers.

Eli’s had a baseball on it. Crossed bats and a ball, and his name in capitals across the top, and a small stain on the heel, faded brown, from the year he was three and dropped a whole mug of hot chocolate into it while it was hanging.

She stood at the kitchen table and held it.

She didn’t know what to do with it. She’d been to so many houses at Christmas the first year after, with a Kitchen Crew ham or a plate of cookies. She had seen every way it could be done. Some families hung the stocking like always. Some hung it with something in it, a letter or a photograph. Some put it away and never took it out again. Some had turned it into a pillow, or had it framed, or laid it in the casket in October and buried it. She’d seen all of them. She had never once had an opinion about any of them. She’d have told anybody who asked that there wasn’t a wrong way.

There wasn’t a wrong way. She knew that. It didn’t help at all.

She held the stocking against her chest, with the stain on the heel against her palm, and stood in the kitchen with her eyes closed.

I can’t, she told God. It was the first time since Hazel’s kitchen that she had said anything to Him on purpose. I can’t hang it. And I can’t not hang it. I don’t know what to do. I’ve told a hundred women what to do, and I don’t know what to do.

Nothing. The refrigerator hummed.

She opened her eyes. Tessa was standing in the kitchen doorway again, in the hoodie, watching her. She didn’t know how long she’d been there.

“We could hang all of them,” Tessa said. “Like normal.” She said it carefully, like somebody putting a foot out onto ice. “And then just — not put anything in his. Or put something. I don’t know. We could figure it out later.”

Jo looked at her. At her daughter, standing in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, fourteen, offering her mother a way through.

“Okay,” Jo said.

They hung them together, on the little brass hooks on the mantel in the living room where they’d hung every year since the house. Wes, then Jo, then Tessa, then Eli, left to right, oldest to youngest, the way Eli had always insisted. They hung them in silence. When they were done they stood back and looked. Four red stockings and one of them empty in a different way.

“Okay,” Tessa said.

She went back to her room. But she left her door open, a few inches. It was the first time in ten weeks. Jo noticed.

12Christmas Eve

Wes went to the candlelight service.

He told her on the twenty-third, at supper, while they were eating the last of the Men’s Breakfast sloppy joe mix on hamburger buns. He said it the way he said most things, looking at his plate, after a long time chewing.

“I’m going to the candlelight service tomorrow night.”

Jo put her bun down.

“You don’t have to come,” he said. “I’m not asking you to come. I’m just telling you I’m going.”

“Why?”

He thought about it. “Because it’s Christmas Eve,” he said. “And I’ve gone every year since I was born. And I’m not ready to find out what happens if I don’t.” He picked up his bun again. “And because it’s not about Nate, Jo. It never was.”

She let that sit. Tessa, across the table, looked from one of them to the other with her chin down, the way she’d looked at them across the table since she was two.

“You want to come, Tess?” Wes said.

“No.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Okay.”

---

He left at six-thirty in his good coat, with his hair wet-combed. He stopped at the door and looked back at Jo on the couch as if he might say something, and then he didn’t, and went out. She heard the truck start and back down the driveway.

Tessa was in her room with the door open four inches. Jo could hear her talking to someone on the phone, low. She did not have to ask who. Jo had not taken the phone away. She had not said anything more about the Hollands’ house. She had lain awake three nights running thinking about Wes in the garage, their family is not Maddie. She hadn’t changed her mind. She hadn’t enforced anything either. She was aware that those were two different things, and she hadn’t decided what to do about it.

She sat on the couch in the living room with the TV off and the tree lights on. They’d done the tree on the eighteenth, her and Tessa, a small one from the Methodist lot, not the big fir they usually got from the farm out past Laurelville. They’d put on the lights and about half the ornaments. When they got to the box of the kids’ homemade ones, the popsicle-stick stars and the salt-dough handprints and the picture frame made of macaroni with a gap-toothed Eli in it, Tessa had said, “Maybe not those,” and Jo had said, “No,” and they had closed the box.

The four stockings hung on the mantel.

At 7:40 she got up and got her keys.

---

She had not driven Kessler Road since the night of October third.

She knew exactly how many times she’d avoided it. It came out to about twice a day, every day, for eleven weeks. Going to work and coming home. Going to the Kroger in Lorimer. Going to Ridgeline for Tuesday group, which she had now gone to three times, and not talked at again, and not stopped going to. Every time she came to the turnoff she felt her hands go tight on the wheel and she drove past it, on Route 9, the long way. It added six minutes. She had spent, by her rough count, almost fourteen hours of her life since October driving the long way around a single curve.

Tonight she turned.

It was very dark. Kessler was a county road, two lanes, no lines on the edges, no streetlights. It ran up out of town past the Petersons’ farm and along the ridge and down again through the woods above the creek. The headlights made a tunnel. Trees came at her out of the black and slid by. She drove slowly, thirty, thirty-five. In her mind she could hear Sergeant Voss saying at fifty-eight, that curve is drivable. She passed the Petersons’ mailbox. She passed the place where the Yoders’ woods began.

She saw the yellow sign first, the one with the bent arrow and 40 MPH under it. Then the curve.

She had thought about this. She had thought there would be a moment. She had thought her body would do something. That she’d have to pull over, or shake, or that the whole night would come up out of the dark at her all at once, like a deer in the road.

It was just a curve. It was just trees. There was the big white oak on the outside of the bend, huge and pale in the headlights, with the bark on the road side scarred to bare wood in a long, pale gash about three feet off the ground. There was a white cross at its foot. The baseball team had put it up the week after. She’d seen pictures on Facebook. There was a pile of things around it, flowers mostly dead, a couple of Reds caps, a baseball, a laminated photo of Eli in his catcher’s gear zip-tied to the cross. A string of battery-powered Christmas lights somebody had wrapped around the crossbeam, blinking red and green.

And in her headlights, standing beside the cross with his hands in the front pocket of a gray sweatshirt, was Caleb Holland.

---

She stopped the car.

She didn’t pull over. She stopped right there in the lane, in the middle of the curve, with the engine running and the headlights full on him. He stood there in them. He didn’t put up his hand to shield his eyes. He didn’t run. He stood with his hands in the pocket of the sweatshirt, which said BURKHART TIRE & AUTO across the chest in faded red, and he squinted into the light. She watched him figure out whose car it was. She saw it happen. It went through his whole body like a small earthquake, and then he went still.

She sat there. Her hands were on the wheel at ten and two.

Nobody else came. It was Christmas Eve, and Kessler Road, and nobody else was going to come.

She didn’t know how long they stayed like that. A minute. Longer. The Christmas lights on the cross blinked red, green, red.

Then she opened the door and got out.

The cold hit her. She hadn’t put on a coat, just a cardigan over her sweater, and the air went straight through it. She stood beside the open car door with the engine running behind her and the dinging of the door-open alarm going ding, ding, ding, and she looked at him across ten feet of dark asphalt and gravel.

Ten feet. The same ten feet as the hallway at Lorimer Regional.

He had grown. That was the absurd thing she noticed first. He was taller than he had been in September, or thinner, so he looked taller. He’d been a round-faced boy, soft around the edges, and something had carved that away in eleven weeks. There were dark hollows under his eyes. His hair needed cutting. He wasn’t wearing the sling.

On the cross beside him, hanging from the crossbeam next to the photograph, there was something new. A small wooden cross on a leather string, the kind they made at church camp. It was two flat sticks glued together and burned with a wood-burning pen, with a name on it she couldn’t read from where she was.

“I’ll go,” he said.

His voice cracked. It was deeper than she remembered too.

She stood there.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go. I didn’t think — I didn’t think anybody would come out here tonight. I just —“ He took one hand out of his pocket and made a small, helpless gesture at the cross, the lights, the pile of dead flowers. “I didn’t want him to be out here by himself. On Christmas.”

“He’s not out here,” Jo said.

Her voice came out very clear in the cold.

“He’s not out here. He’s in the ground at Ashby Cemetery, under a stone that says Beloved Son, with his grandmother on one side and a Civil War soldier on the other. That’s where he is.” She took a breath. “This is just a tree.”

Caleb looked at her. He looked like she had hit him. He nodded, once, very small.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He put his hand back in his sweatshirt pocket and turned and started walking. Not toward her. Away, down the dark road the way she had come, toward town.

She stood by the open car door with the alarm dinging and watched him go. He walked on the gravel at the edge of the asphalt with his head down and his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pocket. He passed out of the reach of her headlights and into the dark. In a few steps she couldn’t see him at all. She could only hear his shoes on the gravel, crunch, crunch, crunch, going away.

Three miles to town. On Kessler Road. In the dark. On Christmas Eve. No reflectors, no flashlight, a gray sweatshirt. Blind curves the whole way down the ridge, and some fool in a pickup coming home from his mother’s with a phone on the dashboard —

She got back in the car and shut the door, and the dinging stopped.

She sat there. She could still hear it, faintly, through the glass. Crunch, crunch.

No, she thought. No. I’m not. I will not.

She put the car in gear. She turned it around in the Yoders’ field entrance, backing and filling, three points, four, her tires spinning a little in the mud. She pointed the car back down Kessler toward town and drove forward very slowly, and the headlights came up behind him.

He was maybe a hundred yards on, walking in the gravel. The light hit him and he flinched and turned around, one arm coming up across his face.

She didn’t stop. She didn’t pull up beside him. She didn’t roll down the window. She slowed to a crawl, five miles an hour, and stayed back, fifty feet behind him. She let the headlights fall on the road around him and ahead of him in a long white wedge, and she waited.

He stood there with his arm up, squinting back at her.

She sat with her foot on the brake.

After a long moment, slowly, he lowered his arm. He turned around. He started walking again.

She followed him.

She followed him at five miles an hour for three miles, all the way down the ridge in the dark. Down through the woods above the creek, past the Petersons’ mailbox, past the fairgrounds, to where Kessler Road came out on Route 9 by the Dollar General under the first streetlight. He walked in her headlights the whole way. He never looked back again. Twice a car came up behind her, saw her creeping along with her flashers on, and swung wide and passed. Both times she saw him move over onto the gravel and wait until they’d gone. He walked with his head down and his hands in his pocket. Once he stumbled on something in the dark and caught himself, and she felt her hands jerk on the wheel.

At the Dollar General he stepped up onto the sidewalk under the streetlight. It was the first sidewalk since town. He stopped there and turned around and stood facing her car. He didn’t wave. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there on the sidewalk under the light, looking at her through the windshield.

She turned left onto Route 9, toward home, and drove away.

---

She got home before Wes. She sat on the couch in her cardigan with the tree lights on and her hands in her lap, and she shook. It wasn’t crying. It was a fine, deep shaking that came from somewhere in the middle of her and went out to her fingers.

She didn’t know what she had done. She knew what she had done. She had lit the road for the boy who killed her son so that he wouldn’t get killed walking home in the dark. She had done it because she couldn’t stand to hear his shoes on the gravel. She had done it because she had spent twenty-one years listening for the sound of boys’ shoes on gravel in the dark, waiting up. She had done it because she was a mother and it was Christmas Eve, and because some things you do before you decide to do them. She had done it because she was furious. She’d wanted him to walk three miles in her headlights and know the whole time whose they were.

She didn’t know which of those was true. She thought maybe all of them.

---

Wes came in at nine-fifteen, smelling like cold air and candle smoke. He had wax on his coat sleeve, a little white drip. He stood in the living room doorway and looked at her.

“It was good,” he said. “Nate did all right. He kept it short. They did ‘Silent Night’ with the lights off, like always.” He took off his coat. “Hazel was there. She asked about you. Said to tell you to bring her another pie, and not a Kroger one this time, she’s got standards.” He almost smiled. “The Hollands weren’t there. Somebody said they go to Lisa’s mom’s church in Chillicothe now.”

“Caleb was at the cross,” Jo said.

Wes stopped with his coat halfway onto the hook.

“On Kessler. I drove out there.” She looked at the tree. “He was standing by it. He’d walked out. Three miles.”

Wes hung the coat up. He did it very carefully, like it was made of glass. He kept his back to her.

“He walked,” he said.

“He put a camp cross on it. One of those wood-burned ones they made at Camp Wildwood. He had one just like Eli’s. They made them the same year.” She looked at her hands. “I told him Eli wasn’t out there. I told him it was just a tree. And he said yes, ma’am and started walking home. In the dark. And I —“

She stopped.

“And you what,” Wes said. He still hadn’t turned around.

“I followed him. To Route 9. With my headlights. At five miles an hour. So he wouldn’t get hit.”

The living room was very quiet. The tree lights blinked.

Wes turned around then. His face was doing something she had never seen it do in twenty-one years. It was working, all over, every muscle, like a man trying to hold a heavy door shut from the wrong side. His eyes were very bright. He opened his mouth. For a moment she was sure he was going to say something. Something big, something that had been sitting in him for weeks. She could feel the shape of it in the room, like a change in the air pressure before a storm.

Then he closed his mouth. He looked down at the floor. He put one hand over his eyes and stood there, a big man in his church clothes in the doorway of his own living room, with his hand over his eyes.

“Wes?”

“I’m okay,” he said, from behind his hand. “I’m okay. I’m just tired.”

He went down the hall to their room. She heard the door close.

---

In the morning there were presents. Not many. They’d done almost no shopping. Jo had bought Tessa some gift cards and a pair of boots she’d been wanting since September, and Wes had bought Tessa a new phone case with a frog on it, because Maddie liked frogs. Jo noticed that and said nothing. Tessa gave each of them a candle from the Bath & Body Works at the mall in Lancaster. Jo gave Wes a new pair of work gloves. They sat on the living room floor in their pajamas at nine in the morning and opened these small things with enormous care, peeling back each piece of tape, as if they had to make it last.

Then Wes got up and went out to the garage and came back with a big box, heavy, wrapped in paper with snowmen on it. It was wrapped badly, with too much tape and the corners bunched up, and the tag was in his handwriting: To Jo.

“I bought that in September,” he said. He sat back down on the floor. He wasn’t looking at her. “We did. He picked it out.”

Jo looked at the box.

She unwrapped it slowly. Under the snowman paper was a cardboard box with a picture on the side. A Dutch oven. Enameled cast iron, big, seven quarts. The red one. The good kind, the expensive kind. She’d looked at it in the kitchen store at the outlet mall three summers in a row and put it back every time.

“He said you always say you want the red one,” Wes said to the carpet. “I said I didn’t know what a Dutch oven was. He said, Dad. It’s the red one.”

Taped to the lid, inside the box, was an envelope. It was one of the little ones that come with a card from the Dollar General. Her name on the front, MOM, in Eli’s handwriting, the capitals leaning forward like they were in a hurry.

She opened it.

The card had a cartoon cardinal on it wearing a Santa hat. Inside, under the printed Merry Christmas, in blue ballpoint, in his terrible leaning scrawl:

Merry Christmas Mama. This is for the Crew. Make me something good in it.
— E.
(Dad paid)

She didn’t make a sound. She sat on the floor of her living room in her pajamas with the card in one hand and the other hand flat on the red enameled lid of the pot. She couldn’t breathe. Beside her Tessa had put both hands over her mouth. Across from her, Wes was looking at the carpet with tears running straight down his face into the collar of his T-shirt. He didn’t wipe them. He didn’t make a sound either. Jo realized she had never, in twenty-one years, seen her husband cry. Not at his father’s funeral, not when the babies were born, not at the hospital on the third of October, not at the graveside. Not once.

He was crying now without any noise, looking at the carpet, as if it was something that was happening to someone else.

She put down the card. She crawled across the carpet on her hands and knees, past the wrapping paper and the frog phone case, and put her arms around him. After a moment Tessa came too. The three of them sat on the living room floor in a knot. Above them on the mantel the four stockings hung, and one of them was empty.

13Sorry You Were Hurt

Nate called on the twenty-eighth and asked if he could come by.

He’d texted before. He’d texted maybe twenty times since October, long messages she read once and didn’t answer. He had sent a card at Thanksgiving, a handwritten one, three pages, and she’d put it in a drawer without finishing it. But he had not called, and he hadn’t come to the house. Wes said he’d told Nate not to. Wait till she’s ready, Wes had told him. She’ll let you know.

She didn’t know if she was ready. She didn’t know what ready would feel like. But Wes was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang, and he looked at the screen over her shoulder and then looked at her. And there was something in his face since Christmas morning, something rawer and nearer the surface, like a burn that had just blistered. So she answered.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Two o’clock. Wes’ll be here.”

“I’ll be there,” Nate said. “Thank you, Jo. Thank you.”

---

He came at two o’clock exactly, in a winter coat and a knit cap, and he didn’t bring anything. She noticed that. He stood on the porch with his empty hands at his sides and she saw him notice her noticing.

“I thought about bringing something,” he said. “I thought about it for about an hour. Kristen made banana bread. And then I thought —“ He looked at the chest freezer, visible through the open garage door, with a stack of foil pans on top of it that wouldn’t fit inside. “I thought you probably had enough.”

“We have enough,” Jo said.

She let him in.

They sat in the living room. Wes took the recliner and Jo took the end of the couch nearest the door, and Nate sat in the middle of the couch, which put him close to Jo and facing the mantel. She watched him see the four stockings. She watched him see the one. He didn’t say anything about it.

He took his cap off and held it in his lap in both hands.

“Before anything else,” he said, “I want to ask you something. You can say no.” He looked at her. “Would you tell me about Eli?”

It was not what she’d expected. She’d expected him to start with Sunday. She had her answer to Sunday ready, rehearsed, filed.

“You knew Eli,” she said.

“I knew him for three years. I knew him as a loud kid in the back row of the youth room who sang too loud in church.” Nate’s voice was careful. “I didn’t know him. I’ve been realizing that. I did his funeral and I didn’t know him. You knew him for eighteen years. I’d like to know him a little. If you’d tell me.”

She sat there. Wes was watching her from the recliner.

“He climbed things,” she said finally.

Nate waited.

“When he was four he climbed onto the refrigerator. I don’t know how. I went to the bathroom for two minutes and came back and he was sitting on top of the refrigerator with his legs hanging down, eating a box of Cheerios he’d found up there, like it was the most natural place in the world to eat breakfast. When he was nine he climbed the silo at the Yoders’. When he was fifteen he climbed the water tower at the fairgrounds. There’s a picture of it in his room. The sheriff’s deputy that brought him home told us he’d only let him off because he’d never seen a kid look so happy.” She was aware of her own voice, of what it was doing. It had gone soft in a way it hadn’t gone in months. “He wanted to be a lineman. Climb poles. Fix the power after storms. He’d have been good at it. He wasn’t afraid of anything that was high. The only thing I ever saw him afraid of was his sister’s hamster.”

Nate laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of him. Across the room, Wes smiled at the carpet.

She told him a few more things. The singing. The Dairy Barn, and how he’d give free sprinkles to little kids who said please, and got written up for it twice. The way he slammed his bedroom door when he was mad and came right back out to say sorry. One of these nights. Nate listened. He didn’t nod along in that hospital way. He didn’t say wow or that’s beautiful. He just listened, with his cap in his hands. When she stopped, he sat quietly for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’d have liked to know him better.”

“You’d have liked him,” Wes said. “Everybody did.”

---

Then Nate turned the cap around in his hands, once, and she saw him gather himself.

“I want to talk about that Sunday,” he said.

Jo waited.

“I’ve been praying about it for twelve weeks. I’ve talked to Wes. I’ve talked to my wife, and a pastor friend in Columbus I trust, and the deacons.” He took a breath. “And I want to say to you, Jo, directly, that I’m sorry you were hurt by what happened that morning.”

The room was quiet.

“That’s not an apology,” Jo said.

Nate blinked.

“I’m sorry you were hurt.” She said it back to him, flat, like reading a label. “That’s not an apology, Nate. That’s a weather report. That’s I’m sorry it rained on your picnic. It’s something that happened to me. Like I was standing in the wrong place.”

“That’s not what I —“

“It’s what you said.” She kept her voice even. It took some doing. “I’ve been on the Kitchen Crew for fourteen years. I have heard every single way people have of saying sorry without saying it. Sorry you feel that way. Sorry if anybody was offended. Mistakes were made. I know them all. I could teach a class.” She held his eyes. “You didn’t rain on me. You did something.”

Nate’s face had gone red to the ears. He looked at his cap. He looked at Wes. Wes didn’t help him. Wes sat in the recliner with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped and waited, the way he waited for everything.

“Okay,” Nate said, very quietly. “Okay. You’re right.”

He put the cap down on the couch cushion beside him. He put his hands together between his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I did it. I’m sorry I asked Caleb to come forward that Sunday. I’m sorry I did it without talking to you and Wes first. I’m sorry I stood up there and said what I said. I’m sorry I made it — I’m sorry.” He stopped, and she saw him start to reach for the next part, the part she’d been waiting for. “But I want you to understand where I was coming from. I really did believe that God was —“

“There it is,” Jo said.

He stopped.

“But.” She shook her head slowly. “You were doing so well, Nate. You were almost there.”

He sat there with his mouth open. She watched him hear it. She watched him replay the last thirty seconds in his head and hear himself say it. Something went across his face. It wasn’t anger. It was worse than anger, for him, she thought. It was a kind of shocked recognition, like a man who’s been told for years that he talks in his sleep and finally hears a recording.

“I don’t want to know where you were coming from,” she said. “Not yet. I know you meant well. Wes told me you meant well. I believe him. But every time you start to apologize, you turn around halfway through and start explaining. And the explaining is about you. It’s about your heart, and what you believed, and what God was doing. When you can say it all the way to the end without the but, you come back, and I’ll listen to the rest. I will. I’ll listen to every word of it. But not until then.”

Nate sat very still for a long moment.

“Okay,” he said.

He picked up his cap. He stood up. He looked at the mantel again, at the stockings, and then at her.

“Can I say one more thing,” he said. “Not about me.”

She waited.

“Caleb’s not coming to Cedar Run anymore. The Hollands aren’t. They’re driving to Chillicothe, to Lisa’s mother’s church.” He turned the cap in his hands. “I’ve been to see him twice. He’s working at Burkhart’s. He’s —“ He stopped. He looked like he was deciding something. “He’s not doing well. That’s all. I thought you should know. I’m not asking you to do anything about it.”

Jo said nothing.

“And some folks at church,” Nate said, carefully, “have been asking me about the sign across from the Hollands’ house. On Pine. Whether that’s — whether it’s right.”

“I didn’t put that sign there,” Jo said. “The Kellers did.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I told them that.”

He didn’t say anything else about it. He didn’t need to. They both knew what he wasn’t saying. She had driven past that sign. She’d stopped in the cul-de-sac and looked at it. She had a Facebook page with four thousand followers and a pinned post with her phone number. She could have picked up the phone and called Ron Keller and said, Ron, would you mind moving that sign to the side yard, and he would have done it in five minutes, because Ron Keller had done everything Jo Pruitt asked him to do since 2009.

She hadn’t called.

Wes walked him to the door. She heard them on the porch, low. She heard Nate say something that sounded like I’m going to keep trying, and Wes say something that sounded like I know you are. Then the door, and Nate’s car starting, and Wes coming back in and standing in the living room doorway.

“You were hard on him,” he said.

“I was fair.”

“You were both.” He rubbed his thumb along the door frame. “That’s all right. He needed both.” He looked at her. “Jo — he said something to me outside.”

“What?”

Wes hesitated. It was a long hesitation, even for him.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’ll keep.”

---

Monica Strand from the Lorimer Ledger came on the second of January, at ten in the morning. She was twenty-six at the most, in a puffy coat and a knit headband, with a small digital recorder and a reporter’s notebook with a spiral top. She’d grown up in Lorimer and gone to Ohio University for journalism and come back. She had interviewed Jo for twenty minutes on the phone in December and wanted to do the rest in person, “for color.”

They sat at the kitchen table. Jo made coffee. She put out a plate of Brenda’s Christmas cookies, the ones with the Hershey’s kisses pressed in the middle, which had come in a tin on the twenty-third with a card that said Thinking of you at this hard time of year! Monica ate three and apologized for eating three.

The recorder sat on the table between them with its little red light on.

Monica asked about Eli. Jo told her, carefully, the public version. Catcher. Dairy Barn. Lineman school. Big laugh. Monica asked about the signs. Jo told her how many, and how the Dairy Barn had put it on their marquee, and how the Lorimer Fire Department had asked for twenty. And how the high school principal wanted her to speak at a pre-prom assembly in April, with the prosecutor’s office and maybe a state trooper. She told her about the state representative’s aide who’d emailed. She said the page had four thousand three hundred followers. Monica wrote it all down.

“And the case,” Monica said. “I know it’s ongoing. I know you can’t say much. I’ve seen the charging documents. The driver’s been charged with vehicular homicide, a misdemeanor. He pled not guilty in November. Can you tell me how you feel about the charge?”

“I wanted a felony,” Jo said. “I told them that. They didn’t think they could prove it.”

“How did that feel?”

Jo thought about it. “Like he’s going to get a slap on the wrist,” she said, “for killing my son.”

Monica wrote that down.

“And the phone,” Monica said. “The charging documents say he was using his phone at the time of the crash. That’s the whole reason for the campaign, right? That’s the heart of it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what he was doing on the phone? Was he texting, or —“

“He was reading a text.” Jo put her coffee cup down. She looked at the recorder with its little red light. “He was driving my son home, around a curve, on a dark road, at night. His phone lit up and he picked it up and he read it. And he looked away from the road for three seconds. And that was all it took.”

“Do you know who the text was from?”

Somewhere down the hall, a board creaked. The loose one by the bathroom.

“It doesn’t matter who,” Jo said.

“Of course,” Monica said quickly. “Of course. I just — readers might wonder. Was it a friend? Was it —“

“Some girl,” Jo said. “His girlfriend, probably. That’s what kids do.” She heard her voice harden. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, he chose a text message over my son’s life. That’s what it comes down to. He had a choice, look at the road or look at the phone, and he chose the phone. And my son is dead. And I want every kid in this county to know that it’s that simple. It’s that fast. It’s one choice.”

Monica was writing fast. The recorder’s red light glowed on the table.

“He chose a text message over my son’s life,” Monica repeated, quietly, getting it down. “That’s — thank you. That’s very powerful.”

In the hallway, very softly, the loose board creaked again, and then a door closed.

---

After Monica left, Jo stood at the stove. The red Dutch oven sat on the back burner where she’d put it on Christmas afternoon. It was still unwashed. The price sticker was still on the bottom. Eli’s card was taped to the tile backsplash behind it. The cardinal in the Santa hat. Make me something good in it.

She hadn’t used it. She hadn’t used anything. She had not turned on the stove except to boil water for coffee in eleven weeks.

She stood there and looked at the card and felt the recorder’s red light still burning somewhere behind her eyes. She felt the word girlfriend, which she had never once said out loud until today, and had said now into a machine to a reporter for the newspaper. She told herself it didn’t matter. It was true, probably. It was likely. It was what kids did.

Something moved under the dark water. Big and slow.

She turned the Dutch oven around on the burner so the card was behind it, and she couldn’t see it, and she went to work.

15June

“Ruthie’s birthday is the twenty-seventh,” Hazel said on the phone. “I need a ride to the cemetery. Carl’s nephew usually takes me, but he’s got the gout.”

“I’ll take you,” Jo said.

“Bring a pie.”

“Hazel.”

“Not a Kroger pie.”

---

She bought it at the Mennonite bakery on Cedar Run Road, the one by the greenhouse. It was a Dutch apple with a crumb top, still warm, in a white box tied with string. She told herself this was a compromise and knew it was cheating. She still hadn’t cooked. The red Dutch oven sat on the back burner with the card taped behind it, turned to the wall. Every morning she made coffee six inches from it and didn’t look.

Hazel opened the box on the porch before she’d even gotten the Buick out the door. She peered in, then up at Jo over her glasses.

“This is from the Yoders’ bakery,” she said.

“It’s homemade.”

“By a Yoder.” Hazel sniffed it. “Well. It’s an improvement. You’re allowed one more of these and then I expect to see your own crust.” She handed the box back. “Put it in the car. We’ll eat it after.”

---

Ashby Cemetery was on a hill at the north edge of town, above the ballfields, with a stone wall along the road and a wrought-iron arch over the gate that said I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE in letters that had rusted to the color of dried blood. The oldest graves were at the top of the hill, thin slate stones worn almost smooth. The newest were at the bottom, near the road, in rows.

Eli was at the bottom, in a row.

Jo drove in through the arch and up the gravel lane to the top of the hill without looking to her left. She had been to Eli’s grave six times since the funeral. She knew the number. She went on Sunday afternoons, alone, while Wes was starting the truck and Tessa was in her room. She stood there for fifteen minutes and did not know what to do with her hands and then drove home. The stone had gone in the week before Christmas. Gray granite, simple. ELI JAMES PRUITT. BELOVED SON AND BROTHER. The dates. Under them, because Wes had asked for it and she hadn’t had the strength to argue, a small carved baseball with crossed bats. Just like the stocking.

She parked at the top of the hill. Hazel’s people were up there, in the old section. It took Hazel eleven minutes to get from the car to the graves, pushing the Buick over the frozen grass. Jo walked beside her with her hand hovering near Hazel’s elbow and not touching it.

There were three stones together under a big bare maple. CARL EDWARD ORMOND, 1932–2001. PFC U.S. ARMY KOREA. A space beside him with Hazel’s name and birth year already cut, and the other date blank. It gave Jo a strange lurch in her stomach to see it. And a small stone, older than the others, white marble gone gray, with a lamb carved on top whose face had worn away.

RUTH ANN ORMOND. JANUARY 27, 1962 – MARCH 12, 1968. SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN.

Hazel stood in front of it, leaning on the Buick.

“Happy birthday, sugar,” she said.

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t pray out loud. She just stood there in her church coat and rain bonnet in the cold with her hands on the walker. Jo stood a few feet back and looked at the lamb with no face, and waited.

After about ten minutes, Hazel turned the Buick around.

“Now June,” she said.

---

June was on the other side of the hill, in a newer section. Hazel pushed the Buick along the gravel lane with her jaw set, and Jo walked beside her. It took a long time. The wind came up off the ballfields, cold and wet, smelling like snow.

The stone was pink granite, polished, with a spray of roses carved in the corner. JUNE ORMOND WELLER, 1929–2009. SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD.

Hazel stopped in front of it. She looked at it for a while.

“Hmp,” she said.

Jo waited.

“Carl’s sister,” Hazel said. “Older by three years. Bossiest woman God ever made. Ran every committee this church ever had for fifty years. Women’s Missionary Union. Flower committee. Bereavement.” She said the last word and glanced at Jo. “Yes. She did your job. Before Mrs. Dillard. She was famous for it. Her ham loaf.” Hazel shook her head. “Everybody loved June. The whole church. She was in the paper twice.”

“What did she do?” Jo said.

Hazel didn’t answer right away. She stood there with her hands on the Buick, looking at the pink granite.

“The day Ruthie died,” she said, “was a Saturday — no. A Tuesday. It was a Tuesday. I told you that. But the Saturday before, there was a bake sale at the church. For the missionaries in Brazil. June was chairwoman. She’d put me down for six pies and a shift at the table from ten till two. I’d told her months before, back in the fall, I’d do it. Before Ruthie got so bad.” Hazel’s hands tightened on the walker. “By March Ruthie was — she was bad. The doctors in Columbus had said. We knew. Carl was home with her. I’d been up with her every night for two weeks. I baked the six pies at four in the morning, sitting by her bed, getting up to check them. And I took them up to the church that morning. Because I’d said I would.”

The wind blew. Down the hill, a car went by on the road.

“And at noon,” Hazel said, “I wanted to go home. I said to June, I need to go. Ruthie’s not good. And June said, Hazel, you signed up till two. We’re short. Peggy Dunleavy’s out with the flu. The pies won’t sell themselves. Carl’s there, she’s got her daddy, what’s two more hours. And she laughed. She laughed like it was nothing.” Hazel’s voice had gone very flat. “And I stayed.”

Jo stood very still.

“I stayed till two. Selling pies for Brazil. And when I got home at two-twenty, Ruthie had had a — she’d taken a turn. Around one o’clock. Carl had called the doctor. She wasn’t — she didn’t really wake up much, after. She lived till Tuesday. But she didn’t —“ Hazel stopped. “She’d asked for me. Around one. Carl said she asked for me. Where’s Mama. And I was up at the church in a paper apron making change for a dollar.”

The wind blew. Hazel stared at the pink stone.

“I never spoke to her again,” she said. “June. Not one word. Not at the funeral, not at Christmas, not when Carl’s mother died, not when Carl died. Forty-one years. We sat in the same church, four pews apart, for forty-one years. I’d walk out of a room when she walked in. She tried. For years, she tried. She sent cards. She sent a ham loaf when Carl had his heart attack, and I threw it in the burn barrel with the dish still in it. Her good dish.” Hazel’s mouth moved. “She stopped trying, eventually. Along about 1985.”

“Hazel,” Jo said quietly.

“Everybody at church knew. Everybody took a side. Mostly hers.” Hazel sniffed. “It’s all right. I’d have taken her side too, if I didn’t know.”

She stood there a moment longer. Then she lifted one hand off the Buick and reached out, slowly, and put it flat on the top of the pink granite stone. She held it there. It wasn’t a caress. It was more like somebody putting a hand on a stove to see if it’s still hot.

“Hmp,” she said again.

She took her hand back and turned the Buick around.

“That’s all,” she said. “Let’s go eat that Yoder pie.”

---

Jo drove down the hill slowly. At the bottom, where the gravel lane curved past the newer rows, she looked left without meaning to. Sixth row, four in. Gray granite. A small carved baseball. Someone had been there since Sunday. There was a fresh baseball sitting on top of the stone, and a laminated index card propped against it, and she couldn’t read it from the car.

She didn’t stop.

“You’re not going to go see him?” Hazel said.

“Not today.”

Hazel looked at her sideways and let it go. Jo kept her eyes on the gravel. After a moment Hazel reached over, the way she had in November, and put her dry, light hand on Jo’s arm for about two seconds. Then she took it back and looked out the window.

---

At work the next day a boy of about sixteen came in for a cleaning with his mother. He was a junior, a wrestler, with the thick neck and the cauliflower ear to prove it. He sat in the waiting room with his phone six inches from his face and didn’t look up once, not when his mother checked him in, not when she asked him a question, not when his name was called. He walked back to Room 2 behind Paula still looking at it. Jo watched him go down the hall with the blue glow on his face.

When he came back out forty minutes later he was still looking at it. His mother was at the window paying, and Jo was running the card, and she looked past the mother at the boy in the doorway, lit from underneath.

“Do you drive?” she said.

The boy looked up, startled. The mother looked up too.

“Uh,” the boy said. “Yeah. Got my license in August.”

“Do you look at that when you drive?”

His face went blank. It was the face every sixteen-year-old in the world made when an adult asked a question they didn’t want to answer.

“Jo,” his mother said. She knew who Jo was. Everybody knew who Jo was now. “Jo, he’s — we’ve talked about it —“

“Do you?” Jo said to the boy.

“No,” the boy said. “I mean. Not really. Like, at red lights.”

“Put it in the glove box,” Jo said. “Put it in the glove box when you start the car and don’t take it out until you turn the car off. Every time. You hear me? Every time.”

He was staring at her. His mother was staring at her. Jo realized her hand had closed around the credit card so hard the edge was cutting into her palm.

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.

She gave the mother back her card and her receipt. The mother took them without a word and put her arm around her son’s thick shoulders and steered him out the door. Jo watched them through the front window cross the parking lot to a Jeep. The boy got in the driver’s side. She saw him sit there for a second, looking at his phone. Then she saw him lean over and open the glove box and put it in and shut the glove box. His mother, in the passenger seat, turned and looked at him.

Paula was standing behind Jo in the hall. Jo hadn’t heard her come up.

“You okay?” Paula said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding a little.”

Jo looked at her palm. There was a thin red line across it, where the card had been.

---

Wes left at five-fifteen the next morning. She heard him get up in the dark. She heard him in the kitchen, the coffeemaker, the cabinet where the thermoses were. She heard him fill two. She’d heard him do it every morning for weeks, two thermoses, and she had never thought about it. Now, lying in the dark with her eyes open, she thought about it.

When he came home at six that night, she was at the kitchen island with a cup of tea.

“You’re leaving early a lot,” she said.

He was taking his boots off by the door. Left heel. He paused.

“Barrett’s got me on the early route,” he said. “Through February. Furnace season.” Right heel. He put the boots on the mat. “It’s a lot of old units out toward Lorimer. People wake up cold.”

“Why two thermoses?”

He straightened. He didn’t turn around right away.

“One for the morning,” he said. “One for later.” He turned around and smiled at her, a little. It didn’t quite reach. “I’m getting old, Jo. I need more coffee.”

She looked at him. He looked at her.

“Okay,” she said.

He came over to the island. He stood across from her with his hands flat on the granite, the way he’d stood the night of the first sign. He was looking at her in a way that he had been looking at her since sometime in the middle of January. She’d noticed it without noticing, the way she’d noticed the early mornings. It was careful. It was searching. It was the way she’d seen him look at a furnace that was making a sound he didn’t like, before he took the panel off.

“Jo,” he said. “Can I ask you something.”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“That night.” He said it carefully, like he was stepping out onto a porch he didn’t trust. “Before we went out. When he wasn’t home. You tried to reach him.”

Something went tight in her chest.

“I texted him,” she said. “I called him. His phone was dead.”

“I know. I just —“ He looked at his hands on the counter. “Did you try to reach anybody else? Caleb, or —“

“I texted Eli,” Jo said.

It came out fast and hard. It came out before he finished the sentence. She heard it hit the air between them like a plate dropped on tile.

Wes looked up at her.

“Just Eli?” he said. Very quietly.

The refrigerator hummed. Down the hall, Tessa’s music was going, faintly, behind her four inches of open door.

“Wes,” Jo said, “I don’t want to talk about that night.”

He looked at her. She made herself look back. She held his eyes and didn’t blink, the way she held a patient’s eyes when she was telling them their insurance didn’t cover a crown. There was a shape at the edge of the room, just out of the light. She did not turn her head. If she didn’t turn her head, it wasn’t there.

“Okay,” Wes said finally.

He took his hands off the counter. He went down the hall to wash up for supper.

She sat at the island with her tea going cold. She realized her left hand was pressed flat over her right one, the one with the thin healing line across the palm. She was pressing down on it hard, the way you’d press on a cut to stop it bleeding.

16Public Comment

The Ashby Local Schools Board of Education met the first Monday of every month at seven p.m. in the high school media center. Nobody went. Jo had lived in Ashby for sixteen years and been to one board meeting before this, in 2015, when they tried to cut the elementary music teacher. She had sat in the back with a sign and Lisa had sat next to her with another one. They’d saved the music teacher, and Lisa bought them both a milkshake at the Dairy Barn afterward to celebrate.

On February second the media center was full.

She had not organized it. She’d posted on the Facebook page, a week before, that she would be speaking during public comment in favor of a proposed policy. The proposal came from a board member named Terry Rausch, whose nephew had been in a wreck on 33 two years ago. Student drivers would have to sign a no-phone pledge to get a parking permit. Driver’s ed would add a distracted-driving unit taught with the sheriff’s office. And the school would run a campaign in the spring, before prom. She had posted, If you believe in this, come stand with me. And she’d pinned it.

They came. The baseball team came, in their jackets, and stood along the back wall with their arms crossed. Coach Dunleavy came. The Dairy Barn kid, Rudy, came in his work shirt. Brenda came, and the Fryes, and a dozen people from church who had not spoken to Jo more than once or twice since October, and who hugged her in the hallway outside as if they’d been waiting to be told where to stand. There were people she didn’t know at all. Mothers, mostly. Mothers who’d found the page and driven in from Lorimer and Laurelville and Adelphi. Some of them held yellow signs.

Wes came. He sat in the second row with his work jacket on and his hands between his knees. Tessa did not.

Monica Strand from the Ledger was there with her recorder. Somebody from the Chillicothe TV station was there with a camera on a tripod. Jo saw it when she walked in and felt her stomach drop and then steady.

---

Public comment was three minutes per speaker. There was a sign-up sheet on a clipboard. Jo was fourth. The first three were about a bus route and a leaky roof on the middle school gym and a teacher contract. The board listened to them with the polite, glazed attention of people waiting for the thing everybody came for.

Then the board president, a retired pharmacist named Lyle Garber, said, “Joanna Pruitt,” and the room went still.

She walked to the lectern. It had a small gooseneck microphone and a digital timer that started at 3:00 and counted down in red numbers. She put her notes down. She had written them out by hand on four index cards and practiced them in the bathroom mirror eleven times. She looked at the first card, and she didn’t need it.

“My name is Jo Pruitt,” she said. “I live on Maple Ridge Road. I’ve lived in this district sixteen years. I’ve had two kids go through these schools. One of them is a freshman. The other one would have graduated in May.”

The red numbers counted down. 2:48.

“On October third, my son Eli was riding home from a bonfire with his best friend. It was eleven-forty at night. They were five minutes from our house, on Kessler Road. The driver was eighteen years old, a good kid, a careful kid, no tickets, no record. His phone lit up in the cupholder. He picked it up and read a text message. He looked away from the road for three seconds.” She looked up. “Three seconds. That’s all. Count it with me. One. Two. Three.”

The room was absolutely silent.

“That’s all it took,” she said. “My son died at twelve thirty-six in the morning.”

2:11.

She talked about the policy. She’d been through it line by line, and she said why each piece mattered. The pledge mattered because it made kids say it out loud. Driver’s ed mattered because a kid who’d seen the crash photos from a real sheriff’s deputy was different from a kid who’d seen a video from a state agency. The spring campaign mattered because of prom, because of graduation parties, because of all the nights coming in May and June when kids would be driving each other home in the dark. She was good at this. She had always been good at this, standing up in front of a room and making a case. She had sold the church on a new dishwasher for the fellowship hall in 2017 in six minutes flat. She could feel the room coming with her. She could feel the baseball team along the back wall, and the mothers with their signs, and the board members leaning forward.

0:47.

“I want to say one more thing,” she said. She put the cards down. She didn’t need them. “I’ve heard people say this was an accident. It wasn’t an accident. An accident is a deer in the road. An accident is black ice. This was a choice.” She looked out at the room. “The boy who killed my son was reading a text from his girlfriend. That’s what he chose. He had a choice between the road and a text from a girl, and he chose the girl, and my son is in the ground. And every kid in this room, every kid in this district, is going to face that same choice. Tonight. Tomorrow. Every single time they get in a car.” Her voice rose. “I’m asking you to give them every chance to choose the road.”

0:00. The timer beeped.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then somebody in the back, one of the mothers, started clapping. The baseball team joined in along the wall, and then the rest of the room, and it came up from the back of the media center like a wave coming up a beach. Someone said yes. Somebody said amen. The board members were clapping. Lyle Garber was clapping, even though he’d have to tell them in a minute that applause wasn’t permitted during public comment.

Jo stood at the lectern and let it wash over her.

She did not think, until she was sitting back down, about the last time a room had clapped like that. She did not think about the sanctuary at Cedar Run, and the wave coming up from the back, and a boy standing at the front in a sling with his face gray under the lights. She didn’t think about it at all. Then she sat down beside Wes in the second row, and the clapping was still going, and she did think about it. Her hands went cold in her lap.

Wes was not clapping. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor between his boots.

---

The policy passed, six to one, on first reading.

Somebody in the room had filmed the speech on a phone. By the time Jo got home at nine-thirty, it was on her Facebook page, posted by one of the mothers from Laurelville with a caption: THIS WOMAN. 😭 Watch till the end. #PutItDownForEli. Jo shared it to the top of the page. She wrote: Thank you to everyone who came tonight. We did this together. For Eli, and for every kid still on the road.

By eleven it had four thousand views.

By the next morning it had twenty-two thousand. The Chillicothe TV station ran thirty seconds of it on the six a.m. news: her face at the lectern, three seconds, count it with me. Somebody posted it on a statewide parents’ group. Somebody else posted it on a page called Ohio Road Warriors that had two hundred thousand followers. By Tuesday afternoon it had crossed a hundred thousand views, and her phone had not stopped buzzing since six a.m.

She read the comments at her desk at work, on her lunch break, and then on her afternoon break, and then in the parking lot in the Camry at five o’clock with the engine off.

This mother is a warrior. 🙏

Praying for you Jo. Eli would be so proud.

Sharing with my teenagers RIGHT NOW.

I’ve been that driver. Never again. Thank you.

She read them and read them. It was warm, like sitting too close to a fire.

Then, further down:

We all know who he is. Small town. Everybody knows.

It was the Holland kid. From Pine Street. Works at Burkhart Tire now.

The girlfriend is Kenzie Ferris, she’s a senior. Wonder how SHE sleeps at night.

A MISDEMEANOR??? He killed somebody and he gets a MISDEMEANOR??? This county is a joke.

Hope he rots.

Burkhart’s is hiring killers now, good to know. Never taking my car there again.

She shouldn’t have been texting him. Both of them should be charged.

Somebody should drive him around a curve at 60 and see how he likes it.

She sat in the Camry with her thumb on the screen.

She thought: I should delete those.

She thought: I didn’t write those. I didn’t say his name. I never said his name. I never said her name.

She thought: Well, they’re not wrong.

She thought about the Kellers’ sign, facing the Hollands’ front door. She thought about how she hadn’t called Ron Keller.

She put the phone face down on the passenger seat and drove home.

---

Tuesday group was that night. She almost didn’t go. She went.

Somebody had seen it. Of course somebody had seen it. The Mitchells had seen it, and Brianna. Phil, who never talked, had seen it. Marcus had seen it. Gary Szabo in the recliner had seen it, because when Jo came in and sat down he looked at her over the toothpick and kept looking. It was worse than if he’d said something.

She talked this time. She hadn’t meant to. When Marcus asked how everyone’s week had been, she heard herself say that the school board had passed the policy. That a hundred thousand people had seen the video. That she’d gotten messages from mothers in Texas and Michigan and Georgia, and a man in Oregon who said he’d been the driver in a crash like hers eleven years ago and had put his phone in his trunk every single day since.

“That’s a lot,” Marcus said. “How are you holding it?”

“I’m fine.”

“The comments,” Gary said.

Everybody looked at him.

“I read ’em,” Gary said. He shifted in the recliner. “Didn’t mean to. My granddaughter showed me. Kid’s name is in there. Where he works. Girlfriend’s name. Somebody in there wants to drive him around a curve at sixty.” He took the toothpick out and looked at it. “That’s not advocacy, Jo.”

“I didn’t write those.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“I didn’t say his name. I never once said his name. I’ve been careful —“

“You said girlfriend,” Gary said.

The room was quiet.

“On TV. You said the girlfriend. Anybody in Ashby with a phone can figure out who his girlfriend is.” He put the toothpick back. “Is it true?”

Jo stared at him.

“Is what true?”

“That it was her. The girlfriend. That she’s the one who texted him.” Gary’s voice wasn’t hard. It was almost gentle. It was the voice, Jo thought later, of a man who’d spent twenty-eight years asking people at crash scenes questions he didn’t want the answers to. “You know that for a fact?”

Jo opened her mouth.

She opened her mouth and nothing came out. She sat in the circle of mismatched chairs with the gas fire going and the fish tank bubbling. Everybody was looking at her: Denise with her rosary, the Mitchells with their hands locked together, Brianna, Phil, Marcus. Her mouth was open and nothing came out of it, and the silence went on and on.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said finally.

“It does to her,” Gary said. “The girlfriend.”

Denise, beside her, very quietly, reached over and put her hand on Jo’s wrist. She didn’t squeeze. She just left it there.

“Let’s take a breath,” Marcus said. “Everybody. Just — let’s take a breath.”

They took a breath.

---

Wes was in the kitchen when she got home. He was standing at the island with his phone in his hand, which was unusual. Wes didn’t look at his phone at home. He said it was for work and the Reds. He looked up when she came in, and she knew he had seen it.

“Take it down,” he said.

She put her purse on the counter. “No.”

“Jo.” He put the phone face down. “Take it down.”

“It’s done a hundred thousand people good, Wes. A man in Oregon —“

“I don’t care about Oregon.” He said it louder than she’d heard him say anything in months. “There’s a girl at that high school. Seventeen years old. Somebody wrote on her car. There’s people calling Lou Burkhart’s shop and saying things to whoever picks up the phone. There’s somebody in those comments talking about driving a kid around a curve at sixty.” He stopped. He breathed. “Take it down.”

“How do you know about her car?”

He looked at her.

“Everybody knows,” he said.

“How do you know about Lou Burkhart’s phone?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why do you care so much?” she said. “It’s true. It’s what happened. He picked up his phone. He read a text. He killed our son. What part of that isn’t true?”

“You don’t know it was his girlfriend.”

The kitchen went still.

“You don’t know that,” Wes said again, quieter. “You said it on TV. You said it to a hundred thousand people. You said it to the Ledger. And you don’t know it. You never asked. You wouldn’t let anybody tell you. In that room with Voss, you cut me off before I could finish the question.”

“Because it doesn’t —“

“If it doesn’t matter,” Wes said, “then why do you keep saying it?”

She stood there with her hand on her purse. The shape at the edge of the room had come closer. She could feel it now, like somebody standing behind her in a dark kitchen. She did not turn around.

“I’m not taking it down,” she said.

Wes looked at her. He looked, she thought, like a man standing at the edge of something high, working out whether to jump or back away.

He backed away. She watched him do it. She watched him decide.

“All right,” he said. He picked up his phone and put it in his pocket. “All right, Jo.”

He went out to the garage. After a minute she heard Eli’s truck start. It was Tuesday night, not Saturday. The engine turned over and caught and idled. It idled for a long time, much longer than ten minutes, and he didn’t shut it off.

---

At eleven Tessa came out of her room with her phone in her hand.

She walked straight to the couch where Jo was sitting and held the phone out at arm’s length, the way she had held out Tyler’s Instagram post in October. Her face was white.

“Mom,” she said. “They put the Hollands’ address.”

Jo took the phone.

It was a comment under the video. It was from someone Jo didn’t know, a woman with a sunset for a profile picture. It was the whole address, house number and all. In case anyone wants to go tell him what they think of him in person. 😡

It had forty-one likes.

“Maddie lives there,” Tessa said. Her voice was shaking. “Mom. Maddie lives there.”

Jo looked at the address. She knew that house. She knew where the key was, in the fake rock by the downspout, and which step on the back deck was soft. She knew the crack in the backsplash.

She gave Tessa the phone back. She picked up her own phone off the coffee table. She went to the video and scrolled down to the comment, and pressed on it, and chose Delete. It asked her if she was sure. She was sure.

She sat there with the phone in her hand. Tessa stood over her.

“The rest of them,” Tessa said.

Jo looked at the screen. There were four hundred and eighty comments now.

“I got the address,” she said.

Tessa looked at her a moment longer. Then she turned and went back to her room. This time she shut the door all the way. It didn’t slam.

17Paint

The phone at Burkhart’s started ringing at 7:02 Tuesday morning and didn’t stop.

Lou answered the first one. Caleb was in bay one, mounting a set of Firestones on a Malibu, and he heard Lou pick up and say Burkhart Tire in his usual voice. Then he heard Lou not say anything for a while. Then Lou said ma’am, I’m going to hang up now in a voice Caleb had never heard, very quiet and very even, and put the receiver down.

It rang again ninety seconds later.

By noon Lou had stopped answering it. He let the machine get it. The machine was an old one with a tape, and the tape filled up by one-thirty. After that the phone just rang and rang on the wall of the office until Lou went in and unplugged it from the jack.

“People are bored,” Lou said, when he came back out into the shop. He was wiping his hands on a red rag though they weren’t dirty. “People in this county are bored in February. They’ll find something else by Sunday.”

Caleb nodded. He finished torquing the lug nuts on the Malibu. His hands were shaking. He kept having to start the pattern over.

He didn’t have a phone, and he didn’t have Facebook or Instagram. Nobody had told him about the video. He didn’t need anybody to tell him. He saw it in the faces of the three customers who came in that morning. Two of them turned around in the lot when they saw him through the bay door and drove away without getting out. The third came into the office and stood at the counter looking at him. Then he said, very clearly, I’ll wait for Lou, and went and stood by the window with his back turned until Lou came.

At two-fifteen Lou came out of the office with a sheet of paper from the printer. He stood in the middle of the shop looking at it. Then he folded it in half and in half again and put it in the chest pocket of his coveralls.

“What is it,” Caleb said.

“Google,” said Lou. “Reviews.” He shook his head. “Fifty-one years. We had four-point-eight stars. People loved us. Mrs. Kimbrough wrote a whole paragraph about how I fixed her flat for free in a thunderstorm in 2019.” He patted the pocket. “One-point-nine as of lunch.”

“Lou.” Caleb put the impact wrench down. “Lou, I’ll go. I’ll quit. You don’t have to —“

“You’ll do no such thing.” Lou didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. “I’ve got a Silverado coming in at three needs a front-end alignment. You’re going to watch me do it. You’re going to learn it this time, not stand there nodding like a dashboard dog.” He turned toward the office. Then he stopped and turned back. “Fifty-one years,” he said. “I’ve buried a wife and a brother and most of my customers. I’ve had people cuss me out in this shop for charging too much and cuss me out for charging too little. I had a man pull a pistol on me in 1994 over a set of retreads. I’m too old to let some woman in Chillicothe with a sunset for a picture tell me who works in my shop.”

---

Mr. Pruitt was at the Marathon on Wednesday morning at ten till six. He was there Thursday. He was there Friday. The coffee was there. The farm report was on.

He didn’t talk. He’d been talking a little before the snow, before the fourteenth, a word here and there. Shoulder? Eat more. Since the fourteenth he’d gone silent again. It wasn’t the old silence, the burning stove. It was heavier than that, and it pressed down. He drove with both hands on the wheel and his jaw tight. Twice on Wednesday Caleb saw him take one hand off the wheel and press the heel of it against his eye, like a man with a headache.

On Friday, as they pulled into Burkhart’s lot, Mr. Pruitt spoke.

“I asked her to take it down,” he said.

Caleb looked at him.

“The video.” Mr. Pruitt was looking at the dented bay door. “I asked her. Tuesday night.” He breathed out. “She won’t.”

“It’s okay,” Caleb said.

“No.” Mr. Pruitt turned his head and looked at him. “It’s not okay. Don’t say it’s okay. It’s not okay, son. None of it’s okay.”

Caleb didn’t know what to say.

“I’m going to tell her,” Mr. Pruitt said. “This weekend. I don’t — I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to tell her. I should have told her three weeks ago.” His jaw worked. “I’ve been a coward.”

“You’re not a coward,” Caleb said.

Mr. Pruitt laughed. It was a short, hard sound with nothing funny in it.

“You don’t know what I am,” he said. “Get out. You’ll be late.”

---

Kenzie came to the shop at three o’clock on Friday. She was waiting in her car in the lot when he came out, her white Jetta with the pink steering wheel cover, parked by the air pump with the engine running. There was a smear on her driver’s side window, a pale ghost where something had been written in marker and scrubbed off.

He got in the passenger side. She didn’t look at him. She was looking straight ahead through the windshield with both hands on the wheel. Her eyes were swollen.

“I got called out of chemistry,” she said. “The guidance counselor. She wanted to check on me. Because apparently there’s a thread.” She laughed, and it came out broken. “My mom’s getting calls at work. Somebody put our address in the comments. My little brother got off the bus yesterday and there was a guy parked across the street just sitting in his truck. Just sitting there, Caleb.”

“Kenz. I’m sorry. I’m so —“

“Tell me who it was.”

He stopped.

She turned and looked at him. It was the look he’d seen on her face since October. She was trying to see something through a window with the blinds down.

“You know it wasn’t me,” she said. “You know. You’re the only other person in the world who knows for sure it wasn’t me. Everybody else thinks it was. My mom asked me. Last night. She asked me if it was me and I was lying to her.” Her voice cracked. “And you could make it stop. You could just say. You could tell anybody. Tell your lawyer. Tell the paper. Tell that woman. And you won’t. And I don’t understand why you won’t, unless —“ She stopped.

“Unless what.”

“Unless it’s somebody you care about more than me,” Kenzie said.

He sat there. The Jetta’s heater was blowing on his feet. Through the windshield he could see Lou in the office window, looking out at them. Then Lou turned away.

“I can’t,” Caleb said.

Kenzie nodded slowly. She nodded for a long time, looking at the steering wheel.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I can’t either.”

She didn’t cry. She put the car in drive. He understood that meant get out. He got out. He stood in the lot and watched the Jetta pull onto Route 9 and go toward town, and he watched until it went over the hill by the grain elevator. Then he went back inside and sat on an upturned tire in the stockroom in the dark for a while.

His mom picked him up at three-thirty. She was on the phone when she pulled in, and she hung up fast when he got in the car. Her face was the color of paper.

“What,” he said.

“Nothing.” She put the car in reverse. “Nothing, baby. Let’s just go home.”

---

The word was on the garage door.

It was red. Spray paint, the cheap kind that runs. Somebody had done it fast. The letters were big and uneven, dripping at the bottoms. It went all the way across both panels of the double door, so you could see it from the cul-de-sac, from the Kellers’ front yard, from anywhere.

KILLER.

His mom pulled into the driveway and stopped, and they sat in the car looking at it.

“When,” Caleb said.

“The school called me at lunch. Maddie’s teacher. Somebody saw it on the bus route this morning and was showing everybody pictures.” His mom’s voice was very flat. “Maddie’s been in the nurse’s office since ten. I picked her up at one and brought her home and went back to get you. She’s in her room. She won’t come out.” She stared at the garage door. “Your dad’s calling the sheriff.”

“It won’t do anything.”

“I know it won’t do anything.”

His dad came out the front door. He was still in his sleep clothes, sweatpants and a Lorimer Distribution T-shirt, and he had a gallon can of paint in each hand and a roller and a tray under his arm. He walked past the car without looking at them and set the cans down on the driveway in front of the garage and started prying the lid off one with a screwdriver.

“Rob,” his mom said through the open window. “Rob, the sheriff’s going to want pictures —“

“I took pictures.” His dad got the lid off. “They can have the pictures. I’m not letting my daughter look out her window at that one more hour.”

Caleb got out of the car.

He stood beside his dad and looked at the can. It was primer, white, the kind that covers anything. His dad poured some into the tray. His hands were steady. His face was not. It was set so hard it looked like it had been carved.

“Let me,” Caleb said.

His dad looked at him.

“Let me do it,” Caleb said. “Please, Dad.”

His dad looked at him. Then he handed him the roller.

Caleb painted. He started at the K. He rolled the white primer over the red, up and down, the way his dad had taught him when they painted the deck the summer he was twelve. Long strokes, don’t press, let the roller do the work. The red bled through the first coat. It came up pink under the white, the letters still there like a bruise. He kept going. K. I. L. His shoulder ached, the old ache. His dad stood beside him and didn’t help and didn’t go inside. He just stood there with his arms crossed, in the cold, in his sweatpants, watching his son paint over the word.

When Caleb got to the second L his dad spoke.

“I switched to nights so I wouldn’t have to look at you,” he said.

Caleb stopped rolling.

“In November.” His dad was looking at the garage door, not at him. “I was on days. Days since you were ten. I asked for nights in November. Told your mother it was the differential. Extra dollar-fifty an hour.” He shook his head slowly. “That wasn’t it. I couldn’t — every time I looked at you I saw that car. I saw that tree. And I thought, my son did that. And I didn’t know how to be your father and think that at the same time. So I went on nights.” He swallowed. “So I’d be asleep when you were awake.”

Caleb stood there with the roller dripping white on the driveway.

“I’m sorry, bud,” his dad said. His voice cracked in the middle of it. “I’m sorry. You’ve been by yourself in this. I left you by yourself in it.”

Caleb couldn’t answer. He turned back to the garage door and finished the second L. Then the E, then the R. His dad stood beside him the whole time. When he was done, his dad took the roller out of his hand and did a second coat over the whole thing himself, both panels, top to bottom, in long strokes. Caleb stood and watched him do it, and neither of them talked.

When it was done you could still see it, faintly. Pink under white, like a scar.

“Need a third coat,” his dad said. “Tomorrow. When it’s dry.”

---

His mom didn’t sleep that night. He heard her. He was lying in his bed with his eyes open and he heard her in the kitchen at midnight, at one, at two. He heard her phone. She’d been reading the comments. He knew she had. She had been reading them since Tuesday, on her lunch break at the school, in the car, in the bathroom with the door locked. He’d heard her in there crying on Wednesday night with the fan running so nobody would hear.

At two-thirty he heard her say, out loud, alone in the kitchen, in a voice like something tearing: “Girlfriend.”

---

In the morning, Saturday, she was dressed and standing at the kitchen counter with her keys in her hand when he came downstairs. She had her coat on. Her hair was brushed and pulled back tight. Her face was very calm. He’d learned in the last four months to be afraid of that calm.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Kroger.”

He looked at the clock on the microwave. It said 9:41.

He knew. Everybody in the Holland family knew. Mrs. P did her grocery shopping every Saturday morning at ten at the Kroger in Lorimer, because that was when the bakery put out the fresh bread and before the after-lunch crowd. She’d done it for twenty years. When he and Eli were little, she and his mom used to go together and take the boys and let them ride in the race-car carts.

“Mom,” he said.

“I need milk.”

“Mom. Don’t.”

She looked at him. Her face didn’t change.

“You promised,” he said. “In the car. In November. You promised —“

“I promised not to tell anybody,” she said. “I’m not telling anybody. I’m telling her.”

“Mom —“

“There’s a word on our garage, Caleb.” She said it without raising her voice at all. “There’s a man sitting in a truck outside Kenzie Ferris’s house. Your sister’s in her room and won’t come out. Lou Burkhart’s business is going under. There’s a woman with forty-one likes telling people where we live.” She picked up her purse. “And she’s standing up in front of a hundred thousand people saying girlfriend, and she knows. She knows, baby. She sent it. And she’s letting all of this land on you and Kenzie and your sister, and Lou, and me. Letting it land on everybody but her.”

“She doesn’t know, Mom, I don’t think she — Mr. Pruitt said —“

He stopped.

His mom turned and looked at him.

“Mr. Pruitt said what?”

He stood in the kitchen with his mouth open.

“When did you talk to Wes Pruitt?”

He couldn’t answer. His mom looked at him for a long moment. Something went across her face that he couldn’t read. Then she turned and walked out the back door.

“Mom!”

He went after her. He went out the back door in his socks and across the frozen deck, the soft step, and down into the driveway. She was already in the Equinox. The engine was already running. He grabbed at the passenger door and it was locked. He banged on the window with the flat of his hand, and she looked at him through the glass, once. Then she backed out of the driveway and around the cul-de-sac and was gone.

He stood in the driveway in his socks.

He couldn’t drive. He didn’t have a phone. His dad was asleep; he’d worked till seven. Maddie was twelve feet away in her room with the door locked.

He went back inside and stood in the kitchen. He picked up the house phone off the wall, the old landline his mom kept because of the storms, and he stood there holding it. He didn’t have Mr. Pruitt’s number. He didn’t have Mrs. P’s number anymore. It had been in his phone, and his phone was in an evidence bag in a locker in Lorimer. He’d never memorized it. He’d never had to.

Then he thought of the truck door.

MILLER HEATING & COOLING — ASHBY, OHIO. And a phone number. He’d seen it every morning for two months, painted on the door in blue letters under We’ll keep you comfortable. He closed his eyes and saw it.

He dialed.

It rang four times. Then a woman’s voice, bored, answering-service flat. Miller Heating and Cooling after-hours line, is this an emergency?

“I need to get a message to Wes Pruitt,” Caleb said. “Please. It’s — yes. It’s an emergency.”

Is this regarding a no-heat situation, sir?

“No. Please. Can you just — can you tell him Caleb called. Tell him —“ He stopped. He didn’t know what to tell him. He stood there in the kitchen with the phone cord stretched and his socks wet and the clock on the microwave turning over to 9:52. “Tell him my mom’s going to the Kroger,” he said.

There was a pause.

I’ll pass that along, sir.

He hung up. He stood there. Then he went out the front door and stood in the driveway in his wet socks in the cold, in front of the garage. The primer had dried overnight. In the flat gray Saturday morning light you could see it perfectly well through two coats of white. The whole word, ghostly, all the way across both doors.

18Aisle Nine

The Kroger in Lorimer put out fresh bread at ten on Saturdays. Jo had been there for it at ten on Saturdays for twenty years. She’d done it through two pregnancies, and the year of her mother’s cancer, and the fall Wes had his back surgery. She’d done it every Saturday since October. Not because they needed bread. They had casseroles. She did it because it was on the list, and when you were Jo Pruitt you did what was on the list.

She got a loaf of the sourdough and a bag of kaiser rolls and put them in the child seat of the cart, where Eli used to ride. Then the Tessa seat, then nobody. She pushed the cart through produce. Bananas, apples, the little clementines Tessa would still eat. A bag of salad that would go bad in the drawer. She pushed it past the deli and past the meat counter. Past the pharmacy, where she had once stood in line behind Lisa Holland for forty-five minutes on a Saturday in 2008, while they both waited on amoxicillin for boys who’d come down with strep the same week. The whole time they’d talked about whether it was too early to sign them up for tee-ball.

She turned into aisle nine. Cereal. Tessa ate the frosted mini-wheats, the store brand, the one in the big bag.

She had the bag in her hand when she looked up and saw Lisa at the end of the aisle.

---

Lisa didn’t have a cart. That was the first strange thing. She stood at the end of the aisle, between an endcap of Pop-Tarts and a display of Valentine’s candy, in her good winter coat. Her purse was on her shoulder and her hands were empty at her sides. She wasn’t shopping. She’d come for this.

Jo stood very still with the bag of mini-wheats in her hand.

Lisa walked toward her down the aisle. She didn’t hurry. She walked the way Jo had walked out of the sanctuary in October, one foot and then the next, like a woman walking into weather. A woman with a toddler in her cart was halfway down the aisle looking at oatmeal, and she glanced at Lisa and then at Jo and then, slowly, pushed her cart on past, around the end, and was gone. They were alone. Somewhere overhead the Kroger radio was playing a song from the eighties, all synthesizers, that she had danced to at a roller rink in 1991.

Lisa stopped four feet away.

Up close, her face was terrible. It was calm, which was the terrible part. She’d lost more weight since December. Her skin was the color of skim milk, and there were bruised hollows under her eyes. Her mouth was set in a way Jo had seen once before, twenty years ago, the day Lisa’s first husband left. Lisa had driven to his new girlfriend’s apartment in Chillicothe with all his clothes in contractor bags in the back of her car and dumped them on the girlfriend’s lawn. Jo had been in the passenger seat. She’d helped.

“Somebody painted killer on my garage door,” Lisa said.

Jo held on to the bag of cereal.

“Yesterday. Red spray paint. Maddie saw it from the school bus. The whole bus saw it. They were passing pictures around. She’s been locked in her room since one o’clock yesterday afternoon and I can hear her crying through the door.” Lisa’s voice was very level. “There’s a man sitting in a truck outside Kenzie Ferris’s house. Her little brother’s afraid to get off the bus. People are calling Lou Burkhart’s shop, a seventy-six-year-old man who’s been fixing flats in this county since Nixon, and saying things to whoever picks up the phone. Somebody posted my address. My house. Forty-one people liked it.”

“I took that down,” Jo said.

It was the first thing she’d said. It came out small.

“You took that down.” Lisa nodded slowly. “Okay. You took that down. Thank you, Jo. Thank you for that.”

Jo’s hand had closed on the bag of cereal. She could feel the plastic crinkling.

“Lisa,” she said, “I never said his name. I never once —“

“You said girlfriend.”

Jo stopped.

“You said it in the paper. You said it to the school board. You said it on the six o’clock news. The boy who killed my son was reading a text from his girlfriend. A hundred and forty thousand people.” Lisa took a step closer. Her voice was still level, but something was moving under it now, fast. “Kenzie Ferris is seventeen years old. She went home from that bonfire at ten-thirty. She was asleep in her bed. She didn’t text anybody. She’s never texted my son while he was driving in her life, because she’s a good girl and she’s scared to death of that kind of thing. Her daddy’s a paramedic. And now she can’t walk down the hall at school.”

“It doesn’t —“ Jo started.

“Don’t,” Lisa said. “Don’t you dare say it doesn’t matter.”

The radio overhead went to a commercial. A man’s cheerful voice about a sale on chicken thighs.

“He wasn’t texting Kenzie,” Lisa said.

Jo looked at her.

“He wasn’t texting anybody. He was reading. You got that part right. He was reading a text.” Lisa’s eyes were very bright. “You want to know who from?”

No, said something in Jo, very clearly. No. No. No.

“Caleb, it’s Jo,” Lisa said.

The aisle tilted.

“Eli’s not answering. Are you two on the way? His dad is waiting up.” Lisa said it flat, word for word, the way you’d read something back that you’d read a hundred times. “Eleven forty-one and forty-seven seconds. Read, eleven forty-one and fifty-two. It’s in the phone report. It’s in the discovery. Grant Mahler showed it to us in November. Three seconds later he hit the tree.”

Jo stood there.

She was aware of the bag of mini-wheats in her hand. She was aware of the fluorescent light, and the endcap of Valentine’s candy, pink and red, and the linoleum under her feet. That was all she was aware of. Everything else had gone quiet and far away, as if she were standing at the bottom of a pool.

“He wouldn’t let Grant use it,” Lisa said. Her voice was breaking now, finally, all the level going out of it. “Did you know that? Grant says it could keep him out of jail. Grant says the judge would understand, any judge would understand, a boy looks down because his best friend’s mother texts him at midnight, he thinks something’s wrong at home. And Caleb said no. He sat in that office and said no. He said she didn’t do anything. He said I’m not doing that to her. He’s eighteen years old and he’s going to go to jail, Jo, he’s going to go to jail, and he won’t let them say your name. He’s protecting you.” She was crying now. “And you’re on TV. And you know. You sent it. You had to know. And you let everybody think it was Kenzie. You let them paint it on my garage.”

Jo opened her mouth.

“Ask Wes,” Lisa said. “Wes knows.”

Then she stopped.

She stopped because she was looking at Jo’s face. Jo didn’t know what her face was doing. She couldn’t feel it. She only saw Lisa’s face change as she looked at it. The fury went out of it all at once, the way water goes out of a tub when you pull the plug. What came in behind it was something Jo had seen on that face once before, at one o’clock in the morning, in a hospital hallway. Horror.

“Oh my God,” Lisa whispered. “Oh my God. Jo. You didn’t —“

Jo didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

“You didn’t know,” Lisa said. “Did you. You really didn’t — oh, God. Oh, God, I thought —“ She put both hands over her mouth. She stood there in the cereal aisle with her hands over her mouth and tears running down over her fingers, looking at Jo. Then she took one hand away and reached out, halfway, the way she had lifted her hand in the doorway in December. Palm out. Nothing in it.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “No. I’m not — I’m not sorry you know. You needed to know. But I’m sorry I —“ She shook her head. “Not like this. I didn’t mean — I’m sorry, Jo —“

Jo put the bag of mini-wheats down in the cart. She did it very carefully. She set it down beside the sourdough and the kaiser rolls in the child seat, and she squared it up so it was straight.

Then she let go of the cart and walked away.

She walked down the aisle away from Lisa, past the oatmeal and the granola bars. She turned at the end and walked past the dairy case and past the checkout lanes and out through the automatic doors, which opened for her with a soft hiss. She walked out into the gray Saturday cold. She walked across the parking lot to her car. She didn’t run. She walked the way you walk when stopping is not an option.

Behind her, in aisle nine, her cart stood abandoned with the bread in it. She never went back for it. She would never set foot in that Kroger again. For the rest of her life she’d drive the extra eleven miles to the one in Lancaster.

---

She didn’t remember the drive home. She was on Route 9, and then she was turning onto Maple Ridge, and then she was in her own driveway with the engine running, beside her yellow sign. Wes’s truck was gone. Tessa’s bedroom blind was down.

She turned off the engine. She sat there.

Her phone was in her purse on the passenger seat. It had been buzzing. She had felt it through the purse the whole drive, over and over, like something alive trying to get out. She took it out. Eleven missed calls from Wes. Four texts from Wes. Where are you. Jo call me. Jo please. Please call me.

She didn’t call him.

She opened her messages.

She scrolled. She knew she was going to do it the way you know you’re going to throw up, a second before. Her thumb moved on the screen by itself. Wes. Tessa. Renee Castillo. Brenda, forty messages from Brenda. Nate. Lisa, the gray bubbles of four months of unanswered texts. Paula. The Kitchen Crew group chat. Hazel, who texted in all capitals, one word at a time. She scrolled all the way down. Down past October, into September, into August, into summer, where the names changed. Pool party, dentist reminders, Eli, mom can u get more mountain dew.

There was no thread for Caleb.

There had been. For six years there had been. Caleb H, with a little baseball cap next to it that Eli had added one time when he borrowed her phone. Six years of carpool texts, here! and running 5 min late and can u tell Eli to call his mother. She had texted Caleb Holland maybe a thousand times since he was twelve years old.

It wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there since the third of October.

She sat in the car in her driveway. The shape stepped out of the dark and into the light, and she turned her head and looked at it.

---

At 11:41 on the night of October third she had been on the couch with the cooking show on mute. Wes was asleep in the recliner with the remote on his chest. She’d texted Eli, your phone is dead isn’t it, and then she’d sat there for about thirty seconds and felt the little flare of irritation. One of these nights. And she had thought, well, Caleb’s phone isn’t dead. Caleb always charges his phone. Caleb is the responsible one. She’d scrolled up to Caleb H with the little baseball cap, and she’d typed it with her thumb, fast, without thinking about it at all. Why would she think about it? She had typed a thousand of them.

Caleb it’s Jo. Eli’s not answering. Are you two on the way? His dad is waiting up.

She had hit send. She remembered the little whoosh. Then she had put the phone face down on the couch cushion and gone back to watching a woman on TV make a pie crust with vodka in it. She remembered thinking the vodka was a gimmick. She remembered thinking she’d try it at Thanksgiving.

She hadn’t looked at the phone again until the hospital.

---

At 1:14 in the morning, in the restroom at Lorimer Regional, she’d sat down on the closed lid of the toilet in the handicapped stall. It had pink soap in the dispenser and a fluorescent light that buzzed and flickered. She sat there because her legs wouldn’t hold her. She had just held Lisa in the hallway. She had just seen Eli in the other room, where she was not going to think about it. She took her phone out of her bathrobe pocket, because she had to call someone. She had to call Wes’s brother, and her sister in Dayton, and Nate. She had to start the list. She opened the phone.

It opened to Messages, because that was the last thing she’d had open.

It opened to Caleb H.

There was her text at the bottom, in the blue bubble. Caleb it’s Jo. Eli’s not answering. Are you two on the way? His dad is waiting up.

And under the blue bubble, in small gray letters, the way it always showed, the way she’d seen a thousand times and never once thought about:

Read 11:41 PM

She had sat on the toilet lid and looked at it.

The doctor had said twelve thirty-six. That was the time of death. She didn’t know yet what time the car went into the tree. Nobody had told her. Nobody had to. She had driven around that curve at 12:15 and seen the lights. She knew when Eli’s curfew was, and how far the Petersons’ was, and how long it took to get from the bonfire to the Yoder place. She knew the math the way you know the shape of your own kitchen in the dark. She looked at Read 11:41 PM and she understood, all at once and completely, in her whole body, what it meant.

She understood it. Then, in the same instant, she did something she had never told anyone. She had never told God. She had never once let herself remember it, not in four months, not in the dark at two in the morning, not on her knees in Hazel’s kitchen.

She put her thumb on the thread and swiped left.

Delete.

Delete this conversation?

Delete.

Then she’d put the phone back in her bathrobe pocket and stood up and washed her hands with the pink soap. She’d looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. She’d dried her hands on a paper towel and thrown it away. Then Wes had knocked on the door and said her name, and she’d opened it and walked out into the hall. From that moment on, for four months, she had not known it.

She had not known it the way you don’t know where a step is in the dark. Your foot knows. Your body knows. Some part of you never stops knowing, so that you never, ever put your weight there.

---

She sat in the Camry in her driveway with the phone in her lap and the engine off. The cold came in through the glass. The yellow sign stood in the yard beside the car, the first one, the one Wes had pulled up beside and looked at in November. PUT IT DOWN. For Eli.

She had not prayed about it.

That was the thing that came to her, sitting there. It wasn’t the text. It wasn’t even the deletion. It was that she had prayed about everything else. She had prayed about the funeral, and the casket, and the Sunday after, and Nate, and Caleb, and Tessa, and the stockings. She had prayed about the signs. She had prayed in Hazel’s kitchen with her hand hitting the table, you could have made him look up. She had prayed about every single part of this except the one part that was hers. She had built a whole life for four months around that one part, a campaign and a Facebook page and a hundred and forty thousand people, and she had built it the way you’d build a house around a hole in the floor, so you’d never have to walk over it.

You could have made him look up.

She had said that to God. She had said it with her hand flat on Hazel’s Formica, crying. And the whole time, the thing that made him look down was in her own pocket.

A sound came out of her. It wasn’t crying. She didn’t know what it was. It was low and it came from somewhere underneath her lungs, and it went on for a long time. She sat in the car in her own driveway with her hands over her face and made it. Across the street a curtain moved in the Dickersons’ front window and fell back.

She didn’t hear Wes’s truck pull in behind her. She didn’t hear his door. She didn’t know he was there until the passenger door of the Camry opened and the cold came in, and he got in beside her, a big man folding himself into the small seat. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t touch her. He sat there.

When she could, she took her hands down from her face and looked at him.

He was looking at her. His face was gray. His eyes were red. He looked like a man who’d been driving around the county for an hour looking for somebody he was afraid he’d find in a ditch.

“Lisa told you,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. She understood from how he said it, and from his face, that it wasn’t news to him. That it had never been news to him. That he’d had it longer than she had. Or no. Not longer. She’d had it since 1:14 in the morning on October fourth. But he had known it longer, in the daylight, with his eyes open. He’d known it and carried it around the house in his pocket like she had, while she carried hers. The two of them had passed each other in the hallway every day with the same thing in their pockets.

“How long,” she said.

Wes looked at the windshield.

“Since January,” he said.

“How.”

He didn’t answer. He sat there with his big hands on his knees, looking at the yellow sign through the windshield. She watched him. She watched him go to the edge of whatever it was, the way he had in the kitchen on Tuesday night. She watched him stand there and look down.

This time he didn’t back away.

“Caleb told me,” he said.

19Rain

They went inside because Tessa’s blind had moved.

Jo saw it from the car, over Wes’s shoulder. The slat went down and the slat came back up. She thought, she’s been watching, she’s been watching the whole time. The thought was so ordinary and so motherly, and it arrived in the middle of everything else so exactly on time, that it almost made her laugh.

“Inside,” she said.

They went in the kitchen door. Tessa’s bedroom door was shut. Jo stood at the island and Wes stood at the other side of it, where he’d stood the night of the first sign and the night of the video. He put his hands flat on the counter. She didn’t put hers anywhere. She held them against her stomach, one inside the other, like something she was carrying.

“Tell me,” she said.

He told her.

He told her about the second week of December. There was an early call out past the Marathon on Route 9, an old furnace at the Lutheran parsonage. It was sleeting. He’d come up behind somebody walking on the gravel in the dark in a yellow safety vest, and he’d slowed down because you slow down, and he’d seen who it was. He told her he had not decided anything. He’d pulled over before he knew he was going to. He’d rolled down the window and heard himself say get in the truck in the voice he used to use on kids at Little League who were about to walk into a swinging bat.

“And he got in,” Wes said. “And I drove him to Burkhart’s. And I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything. And I dropped him off and went and fixed the Lutherans’ furnace. And I sat in the truck in the parsonage driveway after for an hour. I couldn’t feel my hands.”

“And the next day,” Jo said.

“The next day I went back.”

“Why.”

He looked at the counter.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve asked myself every day. I don’t know.” He was quiet a while. “Because he was walking on Route 9 in the dark. Because the coal trucks. Because I kept thinking about some fool on his phone coming over the hill by the elevator.” He stopped. “Because I didn’t want another one.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

He told her about the Marathon. Ten till six. The coffee. How he’d started pouring a second thermos after New Year’s without deciding to. How the boy drank it every morning even though it was terrible. The farm report. The silence. Shoulder? Eat more. He told her about the fourteenth of January, the snow, tell me about the bonfire. He told her about Eli on the hay bale with a marshmallow stick, conducting the freshmen. He told her about the song. His voice cracked on that and he stopped and started over. He told her about was it your girlfriend, and it doesn’t matter, and it matters to me. He told her about the fence post. He said he’d stood in the snow in the ditch on Route 9 with his hands on the barbed wire for ten minutes and asked God to strike him dead, or strike her dead, or strike the boy dead, anybody. Or to just make it not true. And God didn’t do any of it, and after a while his feet got cold, and he went back and got in the truck.

“He won’t let his lawyer use it,” Wes said. “I asked him why. He said, because she didn’t do anything.”

Jo made a sound.

“I told him not to tell you,” Wes said. “I told him let me. I said I’d be the one.” He looked up at her. “And then I didn’t.”

---

She had been standing very still. Now she felt it come up through her, the way the anger had come up through her in October, through the floor, like heat. It didn’t feel clean this time. It didn’t feel bright. It felt like something being dragged up out of mud.

“Every morning,” she said.

“Most mornings.”

“You got up in the dark. You made two thermoses of coffee in my kitchen. You got in your truck and drove three miles out of your way and picked up the boy who killed our son, and you sat with him, and you poured him coffee. And then you came home at six o’clock at night and took your boots off at that door and sat down at this table and ate supper with me. And you looked me in the face.”

“Yes.”

“For two months.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew.” Her voice was rising. “Since January you knew it was my — you knew, and you let me stand up in front of the school board. You let me go on television. You sat in the second row and watched me say girlfriend to a hundred thousand people. You let me put her name —“

“I asked you to take it down.”

“You didn’t tell me why!”

“No,” Wes said. “I didn’t.”

“Why?”

He took a long time. She almost screamed at him to hurry. She didn’t. She stood there and watched him take his long time, the way she’d watched him do it for twenty-one years, and hated it, and waited.

“Because I was a coward,” he said.

She stared at him.

“That’s the first thing. I was scared. I was scared of what it would do to you. I saw you in that room with Voss. I saw you cut me off. I heard you say some girl to the reporter. I was standing in the hall. And I thought, she doesn’t know. Or she knows and she can’t. Either way, if I say it, I’m going to break something in her that won’t go back together.” He breathed. “So I didn’t say it. I told myself I was waiting for the right time. There wasn’t ever going to be a right time. I knew that. I was scared.”

“And the second thing?”

He looked down at his hands on the counter.

“The second thing is worse,” he said.

She waited.

“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d make me stop.” He said it to the counter. “The rides. If you knew about the text, you’d know about the rides. And you’d make me stop. And I —“ His voice went. He got it back. “I needed it, Jo. I needed one thing. One thing in this whole mess that I did right. That I could stand in front of God and say, there, that one, I did that one the way You’d want. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t bring him back. I couldn’t make you better. I couldn’t make Tessa talk. I couldn’t even go in his room. But I could stop on Route 9 and pick up a kid walking in the sleet. I could do that. And I was selfish with it. I kept it for myself. I let you walk around in the dark so I could keep it.”

She stood there.

“You chose him,” she said.

Wes closed his eyes.

“Every morning at ten till six you chose him. Over me. You chose the boy who killed our son over your wife, and you hid it, and you lied about Barrett’s early route and two thermoses —“

“I didn’t choose him over you,” Wes said, with his eyes closed. “I chose him over the thing that was eating me.”

“That’s a pretty speech.”

“It’s not a speech.” He opened his eyes. “It’s the truest thing I know. There was something in me after the third, Jo. I felt it come in. The first Sunday, when that boy walked past us up that aisle, I felt it come in and sit down in me like it paid rent. And every day it got bigger. And I’d lie awake at night and feel it growing, and I knew what it was going to do to me if I let it. I watched my own father let it in, after my brother. I watched it eat him for thirty years. I watched him hate a man at the lumberyard till the day he died, over a thing that man didn’t even do on purpose. I wasn’t going to let it have me. I couldn’t hate that boy and still be anybody I’d want Eli to see.” He looked at her. “So I picked him up. It was the only thing I could think of. You can’t hate somebody the same way once you’ve poured them coffee. I found that out. I didn’t know it before.”

“Stop it.”

“You asked.”

“Stop it.” She was crying now, furious, her hands still locked against her stomach. “Don’t you stand there and make it holy. Don’t you make me the one who’s — you lied to me. For two months. You lied to me every morning, and you kept a thing from me that was mine, Wes. It was my text. It was my — it was mine to know. And you and that boy decided between you in a truck that I couldn’t handle it. That I needed protecting. Like I was a child. Like I was something fragile.” Her voice cracked in half. “You and Caleb Holland. Sitting in a truck. Deciding what I could stand.”

He didn’t answer. He took it. She saw him take it, standing there with his hands on the counter, not defending himself. She hated him for that too.

“I need you to not be here,” she said.

He looked at her.

“I need you to go. Tonight. Go to Dale’s. I can’t — I can’t look at you. I can’t be in a house with you. I need you to not be here.”

“Jo —“

“Please,” she said. It came out of her as a sob. “Please, Wes. Please go.”

He stood there a long moment. Then he nodded, once, slowly.

He went down the hall to their bedroom. She heard him in the closet. She heard the zipper of the old duffel bag, the one they’d taken to Myrtle Beach in 2011. She heard him in the bathroom, his toothbrush, his razor. She heard him stop outside Tessa’s door. She heard him knock, and say something low, and heard the door not open. She heard him stand there a while longer. Then he came back up the hall with the duffel on his shoulder and his work jacket on. He stopped in the kitchen doorway.

“I’ll start his truck Saturday,” he said. “Next Saturday. So the battery doesn’t die. I’ll come by at eight and start it and go.”

She didn’t answer.

“I love you, Jo,” he said. “That’s not a speech either.”

He went out. She heard his truck start in the driveway and back out and go.

---

She stood at the island for a long time. The light outside the window went from gray to darker gray. It started to rain around four, a cold February rain, not quite freezing. It ran down the kitchen window in sheets and made the yard look like it was underwater.

At some point she noticed that Tessa’s door was open.

She went down the hall. Tessa was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up in Eli’s hoodie, which she had worn so many days in a row now that the cuffs were black. She had her phone in her hand but she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at the doorway, at Jo.

“I heard,” Tessa said.

Jo leaned against the door frame.

“The whole thing,” Tessa said. “I heard all of it. Mrs. Holland. The text. Dad.” She looked at the phone in her hand. “I had my earbuds in but they weren’t on.”

Jo had nothing to say to that.

“Is Dad coming back?”

“I don’t know,” Jo said. “I don’t know anything right now, Tess.”

Tessa nodded slowly. She looked at Jo. Jo braced herself for it, whatever it was going to be. How could you. You knew. You lied. You let them paint it on Maddie’s house. She deserved all of it and she stood there in the doorway and waited for it.

“Are you okay?” Tessa said.

Jo’s knees almost went.

---

At eleven o’clock that night it was still raining. Thirty-eight degrees, according to the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Jo put on her rain jacket and a pair of Wes’s work gloves, got the big flashlight out of the junk drawer, and went out to the car.

She didn’t know she was going to until she was doing it. She’d been sitting on the couch since supper, which neither of them had eaten, with the TV off. She’d been looking at the yellow sign in the front yard through the rain-streaked window, lit by the porch light. At a quarter to eleven she’d gotten up and walked out the front door in her socks and pulled it out of the ground. The wire stakes came out of the wet dirt with a sucking sound. She stood there holding it in the rain. It was a piece of corrugated plastic, eighteen by twenty-four inches, and it weighed nothing at all.

She’d come back inside and put on her shoes.

She had the list. She had always had the list. It was in a spreadsheet on her laptop. Every sign, every address, who’d asked for it and when. She’d kept it for the reorder. A hundred and eighty-seven signs. She printed it out. It was three pages.

She was backing out of the driveway when the passenger door opened.

Tessa got in. She had her own rain jacket on, the purple one, over the hoodie, and her hair was already wet from the walk across the yard.

“Go back inside,” Jo said.

“No.”

“Tessa. It’s eleven o’clock at night. It’s raining. You have school on —“

“It’s Saturday,” Tessa said. “I’m coming.” She reached over and took the three pages of the list out of Jo’s lap. She looked at them under the dome light. “Where first?”

Jo looked at her daughter. Fourteen, dripping, holding the list.

“Pine Street,” she said.

---

The Kellers’ yard first.

She pulled into the cul-de-sac in the rain with the headlights on. They swept across the Kellers’ lawn, and the sign, and the blue split-level across the street. The headlights hit the Hollands’ double garage door. On it, under two coats of white primer, faintly, like something seen through water, was a word.

Jo sat with her foot on the brake.

“That’s it,” Tessa said quietly. “That’s what Maddie saw.”

Jo put the car in park. She got out in the rain. She walked across the Kellers’ wet lawn with the flashlight in one hand. She put her gloved hand on the sign facing the Hollands’ front door and pulled. The stakes came up out of the sodden ground. She stood there holding it. Upstairs in the blue split-level, a light was on. The light in Caleb’s window. She didn’t look at it long. She turned around and walked back to the car and put the sign in the back seat.

“One,” Tessa said, and made a mark on the list with a pen.

---

They got a hundred and forty-one signs that night.

They drove the whole county in the rain. The fairgrounds fence, three signs zip-tied in a row. Tessa cut them loose with the kitchen scissors from Jo’s purse. The ballfield by the high school, ten of them along the backstop, where Coach Dunleavy had put them. The Mercers’. The Fryes’. The Kimbroughs’, who had never once returned a pan. A row of them along Route 9 by the grain elevator that she hadn’t put there. Somebody had taken them from the stack in the church foyer and put them up on their own, and she took them anyway. Houses in Laurelville she’d never been to, whose people had messaged the Facebook page. Farm lanes. A sign stuck on the chain-link fence around the Dollar General parking lot. The one at Burkhart Tire & Auto. She’d forgotten about that one. It was out by the road at the edge of Lou’s lot, and somebody had put it there in November. It must have been there every day. Every day that boy had come to work, and every day he’d gone home.

She didn’t get the Dairy Barn marquee. There was no way to get up there. It was lit up in the rain on its pole over the dark parking lot, the black plastic letters: PUT IT DOWN FOR ELI. SPRINKLES ALWAYS FREE. She sat in the car and looked at it.

“I’ll call Rudy,” she said.

On Walnut Street the porch light came on at Hazel’s house when the headlights swung into the drive. The storm door opened. Hazel stood there in her quilted bathrobe with the Buick, a small bent shape against the lamplight behind her, and watched Jo walk up the ramp in the rain and pull the sign out of the grass by the concrete goose.

Jo looked up at her.

Hazel looked at Jo for a long moment through the rain. Then she lifted one hand off the walker, just a little, just a few inches, and set it back down. She went inside, and the porch light went out.

---

They were on Route 9 at two in the morning, coming back toward town. The trunk and the back seat were full of wet yellow plastic. The heater was going full blast and the wipers were going and neither of them had said anything in half an hour. Jo’s hands were numb inside Wes’s gloves. Tessa’s hair was plastered to her head.

They came up on the turnoff for Kessler Road. Jo didn’t take it. She drove past it. She felt it go by on the right like a cold spot.

“Mom,” Tessa said.

“Mm.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Jo drove.

“The text,” Tessa said. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything. You texted him to find out where Eli was. You texted people all the time. It’s not like you — he’s the one who picked it up. Even Caleb says so.” Her voice was very careful. “It’s not your fault, Mom.”

“I know,” Jo said.

Tessa looked at her.

“I know it’s not,” Jo said. “That’s not the problem.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Jo didn’t answer right away. She drove through the rain. The headlights made a tunnel. Somewhere to the left, in the dark, was the Marathon at Old Furnace Road. Its canopy lights were on over the empty pumps. Beside the air pump, under the canopy, was the spot where a boy had stood every morning for two months at ten till six in a yellow vest, waiting for her husband.

“I knew,” she said.

She said it out loud in the car. It was the first time she had ever said it. Her daughter was the only other person there, and the wipers and the rain. It came out of her quiet and very plain, the way you’d tell somebody your address.

“At the hospital. That night. I saw it on my phone. Read, eleven forty-one. I knew what it meant. I knew right away. And I deleted it.” Her voice held. She didn’t know how. “And then I didn’t know it anymore. For four months. I made myself not know. I made up a girl. I made up a girlfriend, Tess. I said it to the newspaper. I said it on television. And a real girl got it painted on her car. And Maddie had to see that word from the bus. And that boy let everybody in Ashby think it was his girlfriend so they wouldn’t know it was me. He let them call his job and put his address on the internet and paint his house. He’s going to go to jail for it. And he wouldn’t let his lawyer say my name.” She had to stop. She drove. “That’s the problem. It’s not that I sent it. It’s what I did after. I made everybody else carry it for me. Everybody. Caleb, and Kenzie Ferris, and Lisa, and Maddie. And your dad.” She swallowed. “And you.”

Tessa didn’t say anything for a long time.

The rain came down. They passed the high school, dark. They passed the Dollar General.

“Me?” Tessa said.

“You’ve been carrying me since October,” Jo said. “I let you. You stood in the doorway of his room and I didn’t turn around.”

Tessa made a small sound.

She didn’t say anything else. Neither did Jo. They drove the rest of the way home in the rain with the heater roaring. When they pulled into the driveway, Tessa didn’t get out. She sat there in the passenger seat with the dome light on and her wet hair and the list in her lap, all three pages marked. Then she leaned across the console, all at once, and put her arms around Jo’s neck and held on. Her wet cheek was against Jo’s wet cheek. Neither of them said anything. It was the first time since October.

---

At three in the morning, alone at the kitchen table, Jo opened her laptop. She went to the Facebook page, Put It Down for Eli, with its four thousand eight hundred followers and its pinned video with a hundred and forty-three thousand views. She clicked on the three little dots. Delete video. It asked her if she was sure. She was sure.

She sat there with her hand on the laptop, looking at the empty space where it had been.

Then she got up and went out to the garage. She sat down on the concrete floor beside Dale’s chest freezer with her back against it, in her wet clothes, in the dark. Eli’s blue truck sat in the second bay with dust on the hood. The back seat of her car behind her was full of wet yellow plastic.

She tried to pray.

She had nothing. She didn’t have Psalm 88, and she didn’t have anger. She didn’t have you could have made him look up. She’d spent that. She sat on the cold concrete with her back against a freezer full of other people’s casseroles, each one labeled in her own handwriting with the worst thing its maker had said, and opened her mouth, and what came out was one word.

“Mine,” she said.

That was all. She said it to the dark garage, to the truck, to God.

“Mine.”

She sat there. Nothing lifted. Nothing changed. It was still dark. It was still raining on the roof. Wes was still at Dale’s, and Eli was still in the ground at Ashby Cemetery with a Civil War soldier on one side. There was still a boy on Pine Street going to jail for a thing that was half hers, and she still had no idea what to do about any of it.

But she had said it. For the first time, to the One who had known it since 1:14 on the morning of October fourth. She had said it out loud and put her own name on it, like a strip of blue tape on a lid.

She sat there until the sky started to go gray in the windows of the garage door. Then she got up and went inside and lay down on Eli’s bed in her wet clothes and slept.

20What Is Mine

On Monday morning Jo called Sam Whitcomb at 6:45 and told him she wasn’t coming in.

There was a silence on the line. In eleven years she had never once called in. She’d come in with bronchitis. She’d come in two days after her gallbladder surgery with a pillow held against her stomach. She had come in on day eleven after her son’s funeral because the recall list was three weeks behind.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Jo — okay. Take the week.”

“I don’t need the week.”

“Take it anyway,” he said. “Brittany can run the filter. I showed her.”

She hung up and stood in the kitchen in her robe. The house was very quiet. Tessa had gone to school. Jo had heard her get up and eat cereal and leave, and at the door Tessa had called back, Bye, Mom, the first time in weeks. Wes’s side of the bed hadn’t been slept in. Wes’s two thermoses were upside down in the dish rack where he’d left them to dry on Friday.

She got out Renee’s folder and found Marcus Oyelaran’s card, the one he’d given her at the first Tuesday group, and called the number on the back.

---

He saw her Tuesday at four-thirty, before group, in a small office upstairs in the farmhouse. It had a slanted ceiling and a window that looked out over a bare field. There were two armchairs, a lamp, a bookshelf, a box of tissues, and a small wooden cross on the wall by the door that she hadn’t expected. He saw her look at it.

“Hospice put it up,” he said. “Before my time. I left it.” He sat down in one of the armchairs and took his reading glasses off his forehead and folded them. “Some people find it helps. Some people ask me to turn it around. I’ve had it both ways.”

“Leave it,” Jo said.

She sat down. She had planned what she was going to say. She’d written it down on an index card, like the school board. She took the card out of her purse and looked at it and put it back.

“I don’t know how to start,” she said.

“That’s all right. Most people don’t.” He waited. “What happened?”

She told him.

She told him the whole thing, start to finish, in order. It took a long time. The text at 11:41. The cooking show with the sound down. The restroom at Lorimer Regional, the pink soap, Read 11:41 PM, her thumb. The four months. Some girl. The Ledger. The school board. Kenzie Ferris’s car. The red paint on the Hollands’ garage. Lisa in aisle nine. Wes in the passenger seat, since January. The rides. The rain. A hundred and forty-one signs. Mine.

He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t nod along or make the small sympathetic noises she’d been trained to make in kitchens. He sat in the other armchair with his hands folded and his reading glasses in them and listened. Once, when she got to the restroom, he closed his eyes for a moment. That was all.

When she stopped, the light in the window had gone orange. It was ten after five.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s a lot to carry up a flight of stairs.”

“I’ve been carrying it for four months.”

“No,” Marcus said. “You’ve been carrying something for four months. I’m not sure it was this.”

She looked at him.

“Can I try something?” he said. “It’s going to sound a little like a worksheet. I apologize in advance. I’m a counselor. We love a worksheet.”

She almost smiled. “Go ahead.”

He leaned forward and held up one finger.

“A boy was driving a car at night,” he said. “His phone lit up. He picked it up and read it while the car was moving. He took his eyes off the road for three seconds on a curve, and the car went into a tree, and your son died.” He looked at her. “Whose choice was that?”

“His.”

“His. Yes. Not yours. The law says so. The sheriff says so. The boy himself says so, apparently, pretty loudly, to anyone who’ll listen.” He put up a second finger. “A mother sent a text to her son’s friend at eleven-forty at night because her son’s phone was dead and he was late for curfew. Is that wrong?”

“No,” she said. “People do it all the time.”

“People do it all the time. You’d done it, what, a thousand times?”

“About that.”

“About that.” He nodded. “Nobody in the world, Jo, not a judge, not a jury, not a pastor, not God, would look at that text and call it a sin. It was a worried mother doing an ordinary thing. It went into the world at the worst possible second, and it ended up in the middle of a terrible thing. But it wasn’t the terrible thing.” He held her eyes. “That’s not guilt. I want to be very clear about that. That’s grief. It’s grief that happens to look a lot like guilt, because your text is in the story. But it’s grief. You don’t confess grief. You can’t. There’s nothing to confess. You grieve it.”

She sat there. Her throat was tight.

“Third,” Marcus said. He put up a third finger. “At one-fourteen in the morning, in a hospital restroom, forty minutes after being told her son was dead, a mother saw something on her phone that her mind could not hold. And she deleted it. And for four months she could not look at it.” He paused. “I want to tell you something about that, and I want you to hear it as information, not as an excuse. Minds do that. After something like what happened to you, the mind does things to protect itself that aren’t decisions, exactly. They’re closer to reflexes. You pull your hand off a stove. You don’t decide to. I’ve sat with a lot of people who did something in the first hours after a death that they couldn’t explain later. Threw away a letter. Washed a shirt they wished they’d kept. Lied to a police officer about something small for no reason. Went to the grocery store.” He looked at her. “That restroom was shock. I don’t know if it was sin. I’m not qualified to say. But I know it was shock.”

“And the four months?” Jo said.

He was quiet a moment.

“That’s the fourth thing,” he said. “And that one’s harder.”

“Say it.”

“The four months are yours,” he said gently. “Not the restroom. The months after. Some girl. The reporter. The school board. The girlfriend. The signs across the street from their door. The comments you read and didn’t take down. I think maybe some of that was still shock, at the start. But somewhere in there, I suspect, it turned into something else. And I think you know where. You’d know better than I would.”

She did know. She knew exactly where. It was a Tuesday night in February, alone in her car in the parking lot at work, reading comments under a video. She’d read hope he rots and thought well, they’re not wrong, and hadn’t deleted it.

“I think that part’s yours,” Marcus said. “And I think you’ve known that since Saturday. Maybe before.” He folded his glasses again. “Here’s the thing I’d want you to take home, if you only take one. There’s a difference between guilt that’s accurate and guilt that isn’t. Guilt that isn’t accurate, the text, the thing you didn’t do wrong, can’t be confessed. There’s nothing there to confess. It can only be grieved. And if you try to confess it, you’ll confess it and confess it and confess it and it’ll never go anywhere, because there’s no wrong for forgiveness to land on. People can spend years that way. I’ve watched them.” He paused. “Guilt that’s accurate is different. It has a shape. It has edges. You can pick it up and hand it to somebody. It can be confessed. And it can be repaired, some of it. Not all of it. Some of it.”

Jo sat very still.

“What does your faith tell you to do with accurate guilt?” Marcus said.

She looked at the little wooden cross by the door.

“Confess it,” she said.

“To whom?”

“To God.” Her voice cracked. “And — to the people I did it to.”

Marcus nodded slowly.

“That’s your department,” he said. “Not mine. I’m not going to tell you how to do that. But it sounds like you know.”

---

At the end he asked if she’d come back. Weekly, for a while. He said it gently. He said he thought she’d been through a trauma on top of a loss, and that those were two different things, and that the second one sometimes needed its own kind of attention. He said he could keep seeing her, or he could refer her to someone in Lancaster who specialized in exactly this. Either was fine. He said it wasn’t a sign of anything except that she’d been hit by a truck and was still walking around.

“You said some people ask you to turn the cross around,” Jo said at the door.

“Some.”

“Do you believe in it?”

He looked at the cross. He thought about it longer than she expected.

“I’m a counselor at a hospice, Jo,” he said finally. “I’ve sat with four hundred people while they died. I don’t know what God is doing. That’s not my department either.” He smiled a little. “But I’ve never once asked anybody to turn it around myself.”

---

She sat in the Camry in the gravel lot afterward with the engine running and the heat on. Through the farmhouse windows she could see people starting to arrive for group. Gary’s pickup pulled in. Denise’s little red Kia. She didn’t go in. She wasn’t ready for the circle yet.

She put her hands on the wheel at ten and two.

“God,” she said.

It wasn’t like Hazel’s kitchen. It wasn’t like the garage floor. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t one word. It was just her voice, in the car, plain. She said it the way she’d tell Sam Whitcomb that the Delta Dental claim had been denied again. It was a fact, reported to the person who needed to know.

“I lied,” she said. “For four months. I made up a girl because I couldn’t stand to look at what was on my phone, and a girl who didn’t do anything got it written on her car. I read the comments and I didn’t take them down, because some part of me was glad. I wanted somebody besides me to be the one.” She was crying now, but her voice kept going, level. “I let that boy carry it. And I stood up in Your church and walked out on him, and the whole time I had it in my pocket.”

The engine ran. The heater blew.

“That’s mine,” she said. “Not the text. The rest of it. I did it. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to fix it. But I’m not going to keep it in my pocket anymore.”

She stopped.

There was a verse. It came up out of her from somewhere, from the flannelgraph box in her basement, from the fourth- and fifth-grade girls, from Sunday school in 1990-something. It was the King James, because that was what she’d memorized it in, sitting on a metal folding chair in the basement of her mother’s church in Dayton.

“If we confess our sins,” she said, “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

She’d taught that verse to eleven-year-olds. She’d made them say it back to her for a sticker. She had never once in her life said it in a car, alone, with her hands at ten and two, meaning it about herself.

She waited.

Nothing lifted. Nothing happened. There was no light in the car. The heater blew. Through the farmhouse window she could see Marcus setting out the coffee urn.

But something had moved. She couldn’t have said what. It wasn’t that she felt forgiven, not the way she’d told a hundred families they would feel. It was smaller than that. It was more like the moment on the Kitchen Crew, after a long day, when you finally set down the last casserole dish on somebody’s counter. You’re still standing there. Your arms still ache. But your hands are empty for the first time in hours, and you realize you’d forgotten what that felt like.

---

That night she wrote a post for the Facebook page. It took her two hours. She wrote it eleven times. In the end it was six sentences.

I have said publicly that the driver in my son’s crash was reading a message from his girlfriend. That was not true. I did not know it to be true, and I said it anyway, and a young woman who did nothing wrong has been hurt because of me. Lou Burkhart has been hurt too, for nothing but giving a young man a job; if you called his shop or wrote a review of it because of anything I said, please stop, and take it down. I am sorry. I have taken down the signs, and I am stepping away from this page.

She read it forty times. She took out the word truly before sorry, because she’d seen it on a thousand non-apologies and didn’t trust it. She took out a sentence about being in a lot of pain, because it was true and it wasn’t the point. She thought about adding the text was from me. She sat with her finger over the keys.

Not here. Not on the internet, in a Facebook post, between an ad for a weight-loss app and a video of somebody’s cat. That wasn’t where it went. She knew where it went. She didn’t know how yet.

She posted it at 10:52 p.m. and turned off the laptop and went to bed.

---

The Ferrises lived out on Township Road 14 in a white ranch house with a basketball hoop over the garage and a big Ford ambulance-service decal in the back window of the pickup in the drive. Jo went on Thursday, at four in the afternoon, when she figured Kenzie would be home from school.

A man answered the door. He was big, fifty or so, with a gray crew cut, in a navy T-shirt that said ROSS COUNTY EMS on the chest. He looked at her, and she watched him know exactly who she was, and she watched his face close.

“Mr. Ferris,” she said. “I’m Jo Pruitt.”

“I know who you are.”

“I’d like to speak to your daughter. Just for a minute. You can be there. You should be there. I’ll stand right here on the porch.” She held her purse in both hands. “I don’t want to come in. I just want to say something to her. And then I’ll go.”

He looked at her. She stood there and let him look. It was cold on the porch. She didn’t put her hands in her pockets.

“Kenz,” he said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off Jo.

Kenzie Ferris came down the hall. She was small and blond with her hair in a messy bun and a Lorimer Regional scrub top on, which Jo guessed was her dad’s or a hand-me-down from somebody. She stopped behind her father when she saw who it was. Jo saw her face do the same thing her father’s had.

Jo had seen her before. Many times. At ball games, in the stands with Maddie. At the Hollands’ kitchen table, doing homework with Caleb. At church on Wednesday nights. She had been a nice girl, polite, a little shy. She’d once asked Jo for her poppy seed chicken recipe and actually made it, and brought a piece to church the next Sunday for Jo to try. It had been good. Jo had told her so.

“Kenzie,” Jo said. “I’m sorry.”

The girl didn’t move.

“I said you texted Caleb that night,” Jo said. “I said it to the newspaper and I said it at the school board and it went on TV. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know anything. I said it because I needed it to be somebody, and you were the easiest somebody. That was wrong. It was a lie, and I told it about you, and people hurt you for it. Somebody wrote on your car. Somebody sat outside your house.” Her voice was steady. She’d made sure of it, driving over. “I’m sorry. There isn’t anything that makes that right. I just wanted you to hear me say it. To your face. Not on Facebook.”

Kenzie looked at her. Her father had put one arm across the doorway, not quite in front of her, not quite not.

“Who was it?” Kenzie said.

Her voice was very small.

“Who texted him. If it wasn’t me.” She looked at Jo. “He wouldn’t tell me. I asked him and asked him. He wouldn’t tell anybody. I broke up with him because he wouldn’t tell me.” Her eyes were filling up. “I kept thinking, it must be somebody he cares about more than me. Somebody he’d go to jail for. I couldn’t think who. I still can’t think who.”

Jo stood on the porch in the cold.

“It was me,” she said.

Kenzie stared at her. Her father’s arm dropped to his side.

“It was me,” Jo said again. “I texted him at eleven forty-one because Eli’s phone was dead. Caleb, it’s Jo. He picked it up to read it. I didn’t know — I knew. I knew that night. I didn’t let myself know it for four months.” She took a breath. “He wouldn’t tell you because he was protecting me. He’s been protecting me since October. From everybody. His lawyer. His own mother. You.” She stopped. “I didn’t ask him to. I didn’t know he was doing it. I don’t know why he did it. I don’t think I’d have done it for him.”

Kenzie had both hands over her mouth now. Behind her, her father was looking at Jo with an expression Jo couldn’t read at all.

“I’m going to say so,” Jo said. “Publicly. I haven’t yet. I’m going to say it in court, at his sentencing. That’s where it belongs, I think. In front of the judge. In front of him.” She looked at Kenzie. “I know I don’t have any right to ask you anything. But I’m asking. Would you let me be the one to say it? Would you let me say it there first?”

Kenzie took her hands away from her mouth. She looked at her father. Her father looked at Jo. Nobody said anything. A school bus went by on the township road behind Jo and didn’t stop.

“Okay,” Kenzie whispered.

“Thank you.”

Jo turned to go. She got as far as the bottom step.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” Kenzie’s father said.

She turned around.

He was standing in the doorway with one hand on the frame, a big man in an EMS T-shirt. He looked at her the way, Jo thought, he probably looked at a lot of people on a lot of roadsides, at night, under work lights.

“I work Ross County,” he said. “Eighteen years. I’ve worked a lot of those. Kids and phones.” He was quiet a moment. “I’ve never once had a parent come to the door and say that.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t say it was all right. He didn’t say he forgave her. He just said that, and nodded once, and went inside with his arm around his daughter, and shut the door.

Jo walked down the driveway to her car. Beside the garage, under the basketball hoop, there was a white Jetta with a pink steering wheel cover. There was a pale smear on the driver’s window, where something had been written in marker and scrubbed off. It was still there. It was fading. It wasn’t gone.

21Four Seconds

Mr. Pruitt was at the Marathon on Monday at ten till six. Caleb almost didn’t go. He had lain awake all Saturday night and all Sunday night, waiting for something. A knock on the door. The house phone. A sheriff’s car. Anything. Nothing came. His mom had come home from the Kroger on Saturday at eleven-fifteen with no groceries. She went straight to her bedroom and shut the door and didn’t come out till supper. When she came out her face was swollen, and she wouldn’t tell him anything except she knows, baby. She knows. I’m sorry.

So he went. He stood under the canopy by the air pump. At ten till six the white truck pulled in.

There was no coffee in the cupholder.

Caleb got in. Mr. Pruitt didn’t pull out. He sat with his hands on the wheel and the engine running and the farm report on low. He looked like he hadn’t slept either. He had on the same canvas coat, but his stubble had gone past stubble, and there was a crease down one side of his face like he’d slept on a couch cushion.

“She knows,” Mr. Pruitt said.

“Yes, sir. My mom said.”

“I’m staying at my brother’s.”

Caleb looked at him.

“She asked me to go. Saturday.” Mr. Pruitt looked at the Marathon’s front window, where the skinny clerk with the neck tattoo was restocking cigarettes. “She had every right. I lied to her for two months. About this.” He tipped his head a quarter inch toward the passenger seat, toward Caleb, toward all of it. “I’m not going to lie to her anymore. So this is the last one.”

Caleb nodded. He’d known. He’d known since Saturday morning in the driveway in his socks.

“It’s not because of you,” Mr. Pruitt said. “I want you to hear that. It’s not because I changed my mind about anything. It’s because I was doing it behind her back. If I do it again, it’ll be in front of her, or it won’t be at all.” He was quiet a moment. “That’s hers to say now. Not mine.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Pruitt reached down beside his seat and came up with a plastic Walmart bag and handed it across. Inside was a headlamp, the kind with an elastic strap, and a reflective vest, a better one than Caleb’s dad’s, with lights built into the stripes that blinked. There was a pack of batteries too.

“Lou says he’ll pick you up,” Mr. Pruitt said. “I called him last night. He says he goes right by the end of your street anyway, which is a lie. He lives in Adelphi.” Something almost like a smile went across his face and didn’t stay. “But that’s for when he can’t.”

Caleb held the bag in his lap.

Mr. Pruitt put the truck in drive. He drove the seven minutes to Burkhart’s without saying anything else, with the farm report on. Barrows and gilts steady. At Burkhart’s he stopped by the bay door with the dent, and Caleb got out, and stood there holding the door.

“Thank you,” Caleb said. “For all of it.”

Mr. Pruitt looked at him.

“You were the last one who saw him happy,” he said. “You know that? On the hay bale. With the marshmallow stick.” His voice went. “You gave me that. Nobody else could’ve.”

He pulled the door shut himself, gently, and drove away.

---

Lou picked him up Tuesday morning at 5:55 at the end of Pine Street, in a Dodge Ram older than Caleb, with the heater broken. He didn’t say anything about it, and he did it every day after that.

---

Pastor Nate came by the shop the next Wednesday at lunch.

He’d been twice before, in December and January. Both times he’d stood around in the office in his nice coat, looking like he didn’t know where to put his hands. He asked Caleb how he was doing and Caleb said fine. He said he was praying for him and Caleb said thanks. He’d said something about the prodigal son, and Lou had come in and needed the office, and that was that.

This time he asked if Caleb wanted to eat in his car.

It was a Honda Pilot with two car seats in the back and a smell of Goldfish crackers. Nate had brought Subway, two footlongs, and he handed one across without asking what Caleb wanted. It was turkey. Caleb didn’t like turkey. He ate it.

“I heard about Saturday,” Nate said.

Caleb chewed.

“Wes called me the Sunday after it happened. He told me.” Nate looked through the windshield at the side of the Burkhart’s building. “All of it. The text. The rides. Kroger.”

“Is she okay?” Caleb said.

Nate turned and looked at him.

“That’s the first thing you ask,” he said slowly.

Caleb didn’t know what that meant. He took another bite.

Nate put his sandwich down on its paper on his knee. He sat there a while.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

Caleb stopped chewing.

“That Sunday. The aisle.” Nate was looking at the steering wheel now. “I’ve been trying to apologize to Jo for four months, and she keeps telling me I can’t finish a sentence without explaining myself. She’s right. I’ve been working on it. And somewhere in there I realized I never apologized to you.” He took a breath. “I used you, Caleb. I didn’t mean to. But I did. You came to my office drowning, and I saw a story. I saw the church in crisis and a way to hand everybody hope, and you were the — you were how. I wanted it to be a good Sunday. I wanted it so bad I didn’t think about what it would cost you to walk that aisle. Or what it would cost her. I told you she wouldn’t be there because I wanted her not to be there.” He stopped. “I think I wanted a story where it was already over. Where God had already fixed it, ten days in, and all we had to do was clap.”

Caleb looked at the sandwich in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” Nate said. “No but. I’m sorry.”

Caleb put the sandwich down.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“It’s not, really,” Nate said. “But thank you.”

They sat there. A car pulled into the lot, saw Caleb through the windshield, and pulled back out.

“Can I ask you something?” Nate said. “You can tell me to go jump in the creek.”

“Okay.”

“That Sunday. When you walked the aisle. What did you want to happen?”

Caleb thought about it. He’d thought about it a lot. Mostly at three in the morning.

“I thought if I did it,” he said, “I’d feel forgiven. That’s what I thought. I thought God would — I don’t know. Take it. Like you said in your office. I thought I’d walk up there and everybody would see and it’d be real, and then I could breathe.”

“Did you?”

“For about four seconds.” Caleb looked at his hands. “When you put your hand on my neck. Like four seconds. And then they started clapping. And then she walked out.”

Nate nodded slowly.

“I told you in my office it was something you receive,” Nate said. “It is. I still believe that. The cross is enough.” He turned the sandwich paper over on his knee. “But I left out the rest. I made it sound like a feeling. Like you pray the words right and it’s done. It’s more like a road. Telling the truth, all of it. Taking what’s coming. Fixing what can be fixed.” He looked at Caleb. “What it isn’t, is getting her to say it’s okay. That’s not yours to get. I should have told you that in October, instead of walking you up that aisle to go get it.”

Caleb sat very still.

“I wanted her to come up there,” he said. His voice cracked. “That Sunday. When I turned around. I wanted her to come up and hug me. In front of everybody. I wanted it so bad.”

“I know,” Nate said gently. “So did I. So did the whole church.” He looked out at the side of the building. “That’s what the clapping was.”

---

Kenzie called the shop that afternoon at three-ten, right before his shift ended. Lou handed him the phone with his eyebrows up.

“She came to my house,” Kenzie said.

He didn’t understand. “Who?”

“Mrs. Pruitt. Last Thursday. She came to my house and stood on the porch and my dad stood in the door, and she said she was sorry. For the girlfriend thing. She said it was a lie and she told it about me, and she was sorry.” Kenzie’s voice was shaking. “And then I asked her who it was. And she told me.”

Caleb stood in the office with the phone pressed to his ear.

“She told you,” he said.

“She said, it was me. She said you wouldn’t tell anybody because you were protecting her. Since October. From everybody.” Kenzie was crying now. “Why didn’t you just tell me, Caleb? I’d have — I wouldn’t have told anybody. I’d have understood. I wouldn’t have —“

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Kenz, I’m sorry.”

“She’s going to say it in court,” Kenzie said. “At your sentencing. She asked me if I’d let her be the one to say it first. I said okay.” She sniffed. “I wanted you to know. So you weren’t surprised. I thought you should know.”

He couldn’t say anything.

“She put a thing on Facebook too,” Kenzie said. “About me. Saying it wasn’t true. My mom cried when she read it.” A pause. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said. It was true.

---

He called Grant Mahler from the office phone at three-thirty with Lou standing outside the door pretending not to listen.

“I want to plead guilty,” he said. “To the charge. The way it is. I want to do it as soon as I can.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Okay,” Grant said. “Okay. That’s what I’d have advised you, bud. I’ll call Firth. We can probably get on the docket for a change of plea next month.” Papers rustled. “And the sentencing memo —“

“No.”

“You haven’t heard what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say the text.”

Grant sighed. “I was going to ask you one more time. That’s my job.”

“No,” Caleb said.

“Okay.” A pause. “Can I tell you something I’ve heard, Caleb? Unofficially?”

Caleb waited.

“I’ve heard, through the grapevine, from people who talk to people at the prosecutor’s office, that Mrs. Pruitt might have something to say at sentencing.” Grant’s voice was careful. “About that night. I don’t know what. I don’t know if it’s true. But if it is, you should be ready for it.”

“She’s going to say it herself,” Caleb said.

“You know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant was quiet.

“Well,” he said finally. “That changes things. That changes a lot of things.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Caleb said. “I’m the one who looked down.”

He hung up. He stood in the office with his hand on the phone, the way he’d stood there after Kenzie’s first call in January. Out in the shop the radio was playing a song he didn’t know. It was three-forty. The funeral home commercial had come and gone hours ago.

He thought: she’s going to stand up in front of everybody and say it.

He thought about the church. The long walk down the side aisle by the windows, the clapping running out around her like water out of a tub. He thought about Kessler Road on Christmas Eve, and three miles in her headlights.

Don’t let them make it her, he’d prayed, at the kitchen sink in November. It was the first real thing he’d ever asked for.

Nobody was making it her. She was doing it herself.

He didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know what to pray. He stood there in the office that smelled like rubber and burnt coffee and didn’t pray anything at all. After a while Lou knocked on the door frame and said, “Ready?” Caleb got his coat and the Walmart bag with the headlamp in it, and followed him out to the Ram.

22The Bake Sale

She told Hazel on the last Saturday in February. She hadn’t planned to. She’d planned to tell Hazel the way she’d planned the school board speech, with index cards, in order. Instead she stood on the ramp in the cold with no pie. When Hazel opened the storm door, Jo said, “It was my text,” and that was the order it came out in.

Hazel looked at her through the storm door for a long moment.

“Get in here,” she said.

---

They sat at the yellow Formica table. Jo told her all of it. It went faster than it had with Marcus. She knew the shape of it now. She had said it out loud four times now. Every time it got a little less like pulling something out of her own body and a little more like just telling what happened.

Hazel listened without interrupting. She sat with her hands folded on the big King James and her pale eyes on Jo’s face. When Jo got to the restroom at Lorimer Regional, the pink soap, delete, Hazel closed her eyes. She kept them closed through the rest. Jo wondered once if she’d fallen asleep. She hadn’t.

When Jo finished, Hazel opened her eyes. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she pushed herself up from the table, which took a while, and went to the sink and ran water into the kettle and put it on the stove. She stood there with her back to Jo, waiting for it to boil.

“I lied to you,” Hazel said.

Jo looked up.

“About June.” Hazel was looking out the window at the swing-set frame. “At the cemetery. The bake sale. I told it wrong.” She turned off the burner before the kettle whistled, and stood there with her hand on the knob. “I’ve been telling it wrong for fifty-eight years. I told it wrong so many times I stopped knowing I was doing it.”

The kitchen was quiet.

“At noon,” Hazel said, “I went to June and said I needed to go home. That part’s true. And she looked at me across that table full of pies, June in her apron with her hair all done, and she said, Go, Hazel. Go on home. I’ll cover your shift. Go be with your girl.” Hazel’s voice didn’t change. It stayed flat and level, the voice she’d used at June’s grave. “And I didn’t go.”

Jo didn’t move.

“I said, no, I’ll finish. I said, Peggy’s out, you’re short, I signed up. I said Carl was with her. I said she was sleeping, she’d been sleeping all morning, she wouldn’t even know I was gone.” Hazel took her hand off the knob. “Every word of that was true, and not one word of it was the reason.”

“What was the reason?”

Hazel turned around. Her face was very still.

“I wanted two hours,” she said. “That’s the reason. I wanted two hours where nobody was dying. I’d been in that room for fourteen months. I’d been up every night for two weeks. I wanted to stand at a table in the fellowship hall with the sun coming in the windows and sell pies to the Methodists and make change and talk about the weather. I wanted to be a woman at a bake sale. For two hours.” She swallowed. “And at one o’clock my girl woke up and asked for her mama, and her mama was selling a chess pie to Mrs. Garber for a dollar seventy-five.”

Jo put her hand over her mouth.

“When I got home and Carl told me,” Hazel said, “I couldn’t — I couldn’t hold it. It was too big. It was going to kill me. So I told him June kept me there. I said it in the kitchen that night with Ruthie in the next room. June wouldn’t let me leave. And Carl believed me, because why wouldn’t he, and he told his mother, and his mother told the church. By the funeral everybody knew. Poor Hazel, June kept her at that bake sale while her baby was dying. And June —“ Hazel stopped.

“June didn’t say anything,” Jo said.

“June didn’t say one word.” Hazel sat back down at the table, slowly, heavily. “Not to anybody. Not ever. Forty-one years. She could’ve. Everybody would’ve believed her. She was June. She was in the paper twice. All she had to do was say, I told her to go home. One sentence. And she never said it. She sat four pews behind me for forty-one years while the whole church thought she’d kept a mother from her dying child over a pie table. She sent me cards. She sent me a ham loaf, and I burned it with her dish. And she never said it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Hazel’s eyes were wet. It was the first time Jo had ever seen them wet. “I’ve had fifty-eight years to think about it and I don’t know. I think maybe she knew I’d die if she did. I think maybe she thought I’d come to it on my own, and she’d wait.” Her mouth moved. “I never did. She died in 2009 at Lorimer Regional, in the room right down the hall from where they had your boy. I didn’t go. Her daughter called and said she was asking for me, and I didn’t go.”

Jo sat very still.

“I made June carry my part for forty-one years,” Hazel said. “She let me. Maybe she shouldn’t have. I don’t know. But she let me, and she carried it, and I let her, and I told myself every day she’d earned it.” She looked at Jo. Her pale eyes were steady now, and very clear. “And then you walked in here today and said it was my text without even taking your coat off.” Hazel shook her head slowly. “Took you four months. Took me fifty-eight years.”

“Hazel —“

“Don’t you do that to that boy,” Hazel said.

She said it quietly. She put her hand flat on the King James.

“Don’t you let him carry it. You forgive him or don’t, that’s between you and the Lord. But don’t you make him June.” Her voice cracked. “I’m eighty-one years old and I’m going to die with June in my mouth like a stone. Don’t you do it.”

Jo reached across the table. She took Hazel’s hand, the dry light papery one, and held it. Hazel let her. They sat there with the kettle not whistling on the stove and the swing-set frame in the window. Neither of them said anything.

“I’m going to say it in court,” Jo said finally. “At his sentencing.”

Hazel nodded.

“Good,” she said. She squeezed Jo’s hand, once, hard. “I’ll be there. I’ll bring the Buick. I haven’t been to a courthouse since Carl’s DUI in 1979.”

Jo laughed. It came up out of her so suddenly it hurt, and then she was crying, and then she was laughing and crying both. Hazel sat there holding her hand and watched her do it, with the corner of her mouth twitching.

“Carl’s what?” Jo said.

“Oh, it was nothing. He hit a mailbox. It was the Baptist preacher’s mailbox, though, so it got around.” Hazel let go of her hand. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. Make the tea. My hands are shaking.”

---

Jo drove home on Route 9. She passed the Marathon at Old Furnace Road without meaning to look. There was nobody under the canopy. She passed the Mennonite bakery, and slowed down, and didn’t stop.

She went into the Kroger in Lancaster, eleven extra miles. She walked through it with a cart and a list she’d written in the parking lot on the back of a receipt. Ground chuck. Two cans of kidney beans. Diced tomatoes. An onion. A green pepper. Chili powder, because hers was old. Cumin. A block of sharp cheddar. Saltines, the Kroger brand, because that was what Eli liked. He said the name brand ones were too fancy, which made no sense at all, and she had bought the Kroger brand for eleven years.

At home she put the bags on the counter and stood in front of the stove.

The red Dutch oven sat on the back burner where it had sat since Christmas. Eli’s card was taped to the backsplash behind it, turned to the wall. She’d turned the pot so she wouldn’t have to see the card, and then she’d stopped seeing the pot. She’d made coffee six inches from it every morning for eight weeks.

She picked it up. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked. She turned it over and peeled the price sticker off the bottom with her thumbnail. She washed it in the sink with hot soapy water. She dried it with a dish towel and set it on the front burner, the big one, and turned on the gas.

Then she turned the card around.

Merry Christmas Mama. This is for the Crew. Make me something good in it. — E. (Dad paid)

“Okay,” she said out loud, to the card. “Okay, buddy.”

She made chili.

She hadn’t made chili since September. She’d made it probably four hundred times in her life. It was the only recipe she’d never written down, because she’d never needed to, and she found out now that her hands still knew it. The onion first, in a little oil, until it went soft and clear. The green pepper. The ground chuck, broken up with the wooden spoon. The spices. The good smell came up out of the red pot and filled the kitchen. She stood over it and stirred and found that she was crying again. She let herself, because nobody was there. Then she found that she’d stopped, and was only cooking, and that was all right too.

She put in the beans and the tomatoes, turned it down low, put the lid on, and let it go.

At five-thirty Tessa came out of her room.

She came down the hall slowly and stopped in the kitchen doorway, in Eli’s hoodie, with her phone in her hand. She looked at the stove. She looked at the red pot with the lid on, steam coming out from under it. She looked at Jo, who was sitting at the kitchen table grating cheese into a bowl.

“Is that chili?” Tessa said.

“Yes.”

Tessa stood there.

“You’re cooking,” she said. Her voice was very careful, like she was afraid to say it too loud.

“I’m cooking.”

Tessa came into the kitchen. She went and stood by the stove and lifted the lid, and the steam came up in her face, and she stood there breathing it. Then she put the lid back. She turned around and looked at the card on the backsplash, turned face out now. She read it. Her lip did something. She pressed it flat.

“Can I have the saltines,” she said. “The Kroger ones.”

“They’re in the bag.”

Tessa got them out of the bag. She got two bowls down from the cabinet, and two spoons from the drawer, and set them on the table. Then she stood there holding a third bowl. She looked at it. Jo looked at it too.

Tessa put it back in the cabinet.

They ate at the kitchen table, the two of them, at six o’clock. Chili in the good bowls, with too much cheese and the cheap crackers crumbled on top, the way Eli always did it. Tessa had three bowls. She didn’t say anything about it being good, and she didn’t have to. Halfway through the second bowl she started talking about a girl in her English class who had dyed her hair green with Kool-Aid and gotten sent home. She talked for ten minutes straight, about nothing, about the Kool-Aid and the principal and whether it would come out in the shower. It was the most Jo had heard her say about anything that wasn’t grief since September.

Jo sat and listened to her daughter talk about Kool-Aid, with her spoon in her hand, and didn’t interrupt once.

---

After Tessa went back to her room, Jo went out to the garage.

She opened the chest freezer. The cold came up at her. The dishes were stacked the way she’d stacked them in October, labels up. Blue painter’s tape, her own handwriting, fading a little now under a scrim of frost.

Poppy seed chicken — Brenda Tully. “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”

She picked it up. She held it in both hands and looked at the label for a long time.

Brenda Tully had been wrong. Brenda was wrong about God, and wrong about what to say, and wrong about almost everything she’d said to Jo since October. She’d said it all with her hand on Jo’s arm and tears in her eyes, meaning every word. Brenda had also taken over the Kitchen Crew the week after the funeral, without being asked and without complaining. Jo knew, because she’d checked the spreadsheet, that Brenda had fed eleven families since then. She’d driven to the Kimbroughs’ three times to get the pans back.

Jo put her thumbnail under the corner of the tape and peeled it off.

It came up in one long strip, stiff with cold. She held it up and looked at it: “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Then she wadded it up in her fist and put it in the pocket of her cardigan. She carried the poppy seed chicken into the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator to thaw for tomorrow.

She didn’t do the rest. Not that night. There were twenty-two more dishes in the freezer with twenty-two more things written on them. Some of those she wasn’t ready to peel. Some she might never be.

But she’d done one. She stood in the kitchen with the wad of tape in her pocket and the red pot soaking in the sink, and the house smelled like chili. Down the hall behind four inches of open door, her daughter was on the phone with somebody, laughing.

24Burkhart Tire

She went on a Tuesday, the tenth of March, at a quarter to three.

She’d thought about calling first. She’d thought about writing a letter. She’d thought about asking Renee Castillo whether it was allowed. Renee said there was no order against contact. It was up to Jo, and Caleb’s lawyer would probably have a fit, and Renee would rather she didn’t go alone. Jo went alone. She told Wes she was going. That was the new rule. He stood in the kitchen that morning with his coffee and looked at her a long time and said, “Do you want me to come?” She said no. He said, “Okay,” and didn’t say anything else, and she loved him for it.

She parked on the far side of the Burkhart’s lot, by the air pump. She sat in the Camry and looked at the blue cinder-block building, the two bay doors, the dent in one of them with the rust stain running down like a tear. The sign on the pole. BURKHART TIRE & AUTO — SINCE 1971. There was a square of bare, churned mud by the road at the edge of the lot where her sign had been. She had pulled it out of the ground in the rain a month ago. It had left a mark.

Through the open bay door she could see him.

He was at the tire machine, in coveralls too big for him, with a set of tires stacked beside him. He was working the bead breaker, bending and pulling, the way you’d work a pump handle. He had both arms. She’d last seen him in the sling at the altar. She’d seen him in her headlights at Christmas without the sling, but in the dark, in a sweatshirt, she hadn’t really looked. Now she looked. He was thinner. He moved like somebody much older, carefully, as if the world had edges he had to watch for now.

An old man came out of the office with a coffee cup. He saw her car and stopped. He stood there looking at it, and she knew he knew. She watched him look at her through the windshield across the lot. Then he went back into the office and shut the door. It wasn’t a slam. It was more like drawing a curtain.

She got out of the car.

---

Caleb saw her when she was halfway across the lot. She saw him see her. He stopped with his hands on the tire machine. He didn’t move. He stood there in the bay door in his coveralls with his face gone the color of the concrete.

She stopped at the edge of the bay, where the concrete met the asphalt of the lot. Ten feet. The same ten feet.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” he said.

“Caleb.”

Neither of them said anything. Behind him, on a shelf over the workbench, a radio was playing country music, low. The whole place smelled of rubber and cold concrete and burnt coffee.

“Can we talk,” she said. “Out here. It won’t take long.”

He looked back over his shoulder at the office door. It stayed shut. He wiped his hands on a red rag that was hanging out of his back pocket, slowly, one finger at a time. Then he came out of the bay into the gray afternoon and stopped a few feet from her. He didn’t come closer. She noticed that. He left her the distance.

“Your lawyer wants to use the text,” she said.

He stood there.

“In the sentencing memo. He thinks it’ll keep you out of jail. Lisa told me. Kenzie told me. Grant Mahler probably told half of Lorimer.” She kept her voice level. “And you told him no.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to tell him yes.”

He looked at her.

“Tell him to use it,” she said. “Tell him to put it in the memo. Tell him to say it in court. His best friend’s mother texted him at eleven forty-one, he thought something was wrong at home, he picked it up. All of it. Use my name. I don’t care.”

“No,” Caleb said.

“Caleb —“

“No, ma’am.” He said it quietly. He was looking at her now, straight at her, and it seemed to cost him something. “I’m not doing that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s true you sent it.” His voice was shaking a little, but it held. “It’s not true that’s why. I’m the one who picked it up. I’m the one who was driving. I’ve heard Mr. Voss’s thing in my head a thousand times. At fifty-eight, that curve is drivable if you’re paying attention. I wasn’t paying attention. That’s mine. It doesn’t matter who it was from. It could’ve been from anybody. It could’ve been from my mom. It could’ve been the Pope.” He swallowed. “You didn’t make me look down.”

Jo stood there.

It could’ve been the President, she had said, in October, in the conference room in the county annex, cutting Wes off. He picked it up. That’s what matters.

She’d been right. She had been exactly right, for the wrong reason. She had said it so she would never have to hear whose it was. He was saying it now for the opposite reason. He was saying it so she’d never have to be the one.

“That’s not the part I mean,” she said.

He waited.

“I’m not talking about the crash. The crash is yours. I know it’s yours. I’m not trying to take it from you.” She took a breath. The cold went down into her. “I’m talking about after. I knew, Caleb. I saw it on my phone at the hospital that night. Read, eleven forty-one. I knew what it meant. And I deleted it. And I made up a girl. I said it to the paper. I said it on TV. I let them paint that word on your garage and call Lou’s shop and follow Kenzie home. I put that sign across from your front door.” Her voice was going now. She let it. “I let you carry it. My part. Not the crash. The knowing. You’ve been carrying my part since October, on top of your own. You let everybody in this county think it was Kenzie so they wouldn’t look at me. You told your lawyer no. You told your own mother no. You walked three miles in the dark on Christmas Eve and never said a word.” She stopped. “And I’m telling you that you don’t get to do that anymore. It’s not yours. It never was. I’m taking it back.”

He was staring at her. His eyes had filled up. He stood there in the cold in his too-big coveralls with the red rag hanging out of his pocket.

“I’m going to say it at sentencing,” she said. “Myself. In front of the judge. You can tell Grant or not. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to say it.”

“People will look at you,” he said. It came out of him cracked. “Like in church. Everybody. They’ll all turn around and —“

“Let them,” Jo said.

---

The radio in the shop went to a commercial. A man’s voice, soft and slow, about a family-owned funeral home in Portsmouth, serving families since 1952. Caleb flinched. It was small, but she saw it. He turned his head a quarter inch toward the sound, and then made himself turn back.

They stood there until it was over.

“I’m not ready to forgive you,” Jo said.

She said it plainly. She’d decided on the drive over that she would say it plainly, because he deserved to know where he stood. He’d spent five months not knowing. Wes had told her that, in the truck. He doesn’t know where he stands with anybody. He’s been standing on nothing since October.

“I don’t know when I will be,” she said. “I don’t know if I will be. I’m trying. I’m praying about it, which I wasn’t before. But I’m not there. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I am, because I think you’ve had enough people tell you things that weren’t true.”

He nodded slowly.

“I know,” he said.

“And I’m not asking you to —“

“I stopped asking.”

She looked at him.

“For you to forgive me.” He was looking down at the concrete now, at the place where the bay floor met the lot. “I used to. In my head. Every day. That’s why I walked up the aisle. I wanted you to come up there. I wanted you to hug me in front of everybody and say it was okay.” He had to stop. “That wasn’t mine to get.” He swallowed. “So I stopped asking. I’m just — I’m going to plead guilty. Thursday. And I’m going to do whatever the judge says. And I’m going to try to be somebody who wouldn’t do that again. That’s all. That’s all I’ve got.” He looked up at her. “You don’t owe me anything, Mrs. Pruitt. Not anything.”

The wind came across the lot off Route 9 and blew a Styrofoam cup past them along the asphalt, bouncing.

Jo stood there. She thought about the aisle at Cedar Run, and his gray face under the stage lights. Terrified, she had thought. Like he’d broken something in my house and come to tell me before I found it. She had walked out on that face. She had been right to walk out. She knew she’d been right. It had also been a boy, eighteen, with a broken collarbone, who’d been told that if he walked forty feet it would be over. And she had shown him, with her back, all the way down the side aisle, that it was not over.

It wasn’t over. It still wasn’t. But he’d stopped asking her to say it was.

“He said something,” Caleb said suddenly. “At the end. In the car. Right before.” His voice was very quiet. “When your text came up. He saw it on the screen and he laughed and said something. I don’t know what it means. I’ve been trying to figure it out for five months. I thought maybe you’d —“

“Not here,” Jo said.

It came out of her fast. He stopped.

“Not here,” she said again, softer. “Not yet. I can’t —“ She put her hand flat against her stomach. “Not in a parking lot. I’m sorry. I want it. I do. I just can’t hear it standing in a parking lot.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Hold on to it for me,” she said. “Will you? Whatever it was. Don’t lose it.”

He looked at her.

“I won’t,” he said.

---

She walked back across the lot to her car. She didn’t look back until she had the door open. When she did, he was still standing at the edge of the bay in the gray light with the red rag hanging out of his pocket, watching her go. The office door had opened. The old man was standing in it with his coffee cup, looking at her over the top of it.

“Somebody took that sign down,” the old man called across the lot. “Out by the road. Back in February. In the rain.”

“I did,” Jo said.

The old man looked at her. He didn’t go back in.

She walked over. She hadn’t planned to, and she didn’t let herself stop and plan it now. She stopped at the bottom of the office step, below him.

“Mr. Burkhart. The phone calls,” she said. “The reviews. People coming into your lot and turning around. That came off my page, off things I said. I’m sorry.”

Lou Burkhart turned his coffee cup a quarter turn in his hand.

“My grandson showed me what you put up,” he said. “On the computer. About the girl. About the shop.” He looked out at Route 9. “Most of the calls quit after that. Some of the reviews come down. Some didn’t. We’re at three-point-one.” He said it the way he’d have said a tire pressure. “Mrs. Kimbrough went on there and wrote another paragraph. About the thunderstorm again. Longer, this time.”

“If there’s anything —“

“There’s not.” He didn’t say it unkindly. “A man at the Marathon won’t let me pump my own gas without telling me what he thinks. Couple of fellows I’ve done their trucks for twenty years haven’t been back, and I don’t guess they will. You can’t buy that back. I wouldn’t let you try.” He looked at her over the rim of the cup. “You said it, though. Out loud. On the same computer. That’s more than most.”

“Hm,” he said, like he’d surprised himself, and went back inside. He left the door open this time.

---

She sat in the Camry at the edge of the Burkhart’s lot with the engine running and the heat on and her hands on the wheel at ten and two. She didn’t pull out. She watched the bay door through the windshield. After a minute Caleb went back to the tire machine, and she watched him work. Bend and pull. Bend and pull.

She thought: he protected me.

It was the plainest, strangest thought she’d ever had. The boy who killed her son had protected her. For five months, from everybody, at his own cost, without being asked, and without her knowing. He’d done it the way June had done it for Hazel. Except June had only let it land on herself. He’d let the whole county think the worst of him, and of a girl he loved, a girl who’d been asleep in her bed that night, and never said one sentence that would have made it stop. He’d made Kenzie Ferris carry it too, and nobody had asked her. Jo had made the lie. He had let it stand. The girl with the smear on her car window had paid for both of them.

What he’d done for her, she couldn’t pay back. There wasn’t any way. She didn’t even know what it would look like. It didn’t make up for anything. It didn’t touch the curve, or the tree, or the white oak with the gash in its bark. It didn’t bring back one second of her son. It didn’t make her ready.

It just sat there in her, where she couldn’t get rid of it. It was a debt that went the wrong direction.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” she said, out loud, in the car. To God. “I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t want to owe him anything. I don’t want him to be the one who — I don’t want him to have given me something.” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “But he did. He did, and I can’t give it back.”

Nothing answered. The heater blew. Across the lot, the tire machine hummed.

Somewhere back in her, in Pastor Harlow’s voice and then Nate’s, from sixteen years of communion Sundays, the old words came up out of the pew Bible. While we were yet sinners. She didn’t do anything with them. She didn’t make them into a lesson for the fourth-grade girls. She let them sit there next to the other thing, in the car at the edge of a tire shop on Route 9.

Then she put the car in reverse and drove home the long way. Not to avoid anything. Just because it was the long way, and she wanted the time.

25Night Shift

His dad went back to days the second week of March.

He didn’t say anything about it. He just stopped coming home at seven-thirty in the morning and going to bed. One Monday Caleb came down at five-forty to wait for Lou at the end of Pine Street, and his dad was standing in the kitchen in his Lorimer Distribution polo, making coffee.

“I’ll take you,” his dad said.

“Lou’s coming.”

“I called Lou.” His dad poured two cups. “Told him I’ve got it. He said it’s about time, he’s been driving twenty minutes out of his way in a truck with no heat, and his wife thinks he’s got a girlfriend.” He handed one of the cups to Caleb. “Get your coat.”

They drove to Burkhart’s in his dad’s pickup with the radio off. His dad didn’t talk much, and neither did Caleb. It wasn’t like the farm report silence in Mr. Pruitt’s truck. It was something else. It was two people learning where to put their elbows in a small space. At Burkhart’s his dad pulled up by the bay door with the dent and sat there with the engine running.

“Three o’clock?” he said.

“Three.”

“I’ll be here.”

He was. Every day. He’d leave the distribution center at two-thirty, which Caleb found out later was costing him the last half hour of every shift. The supervisor let him do it because Rob Holland had never missed a day in eleven years.

---

The change-of-plea hearing was set for Thursday, March twelfth, at nine a.m.

The night before, Caleb found his mom in the kitchen at eleven, sitting at the table with a cup of tea she wasn’t drinking. She’d been doing better since February. Not good. Better. She’d stopped reading the comments. The Facebook page was quiet now. Mrs. Pruitt had posted the thing about Kenzie and then nothing else. The video was gone. People had found something else to be angry about, the way Lou said they would. There was a fight on the county Facebook group about a dollar store they wanted to build out by the reservoir. His mom had gone back to Cedar Run twice, alone, and sat in the back row by the sound booth and left before the benediction. She hadn’t told anybody why.

He sat down across from her.

“Mom,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”

She looked up.

“Kroger,” he said. “Did you tell her you were sorry?”

His mom’s face changed. She looked down at her tea.

“I said I was sorry,” she said. “At the end. I don’t think she heard me. She just walked away.”

“Would you tell her again?”

She was quiet.

“I’m not sorry she knows, baby,” she said finally. “I’m not. I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and I can’t be sorry about that. She needed to know. You needed her to know. You were going to go to jail with her name in your mouth.”

“Not for that,” Caleb said. “For the way.”

His mom looked at him.

“In the cereal aisle,” he said. “In front of people. On a Saturday. When she didn’t even have — when she didn’t know it was coming.” He looked at his hands on the table. “I just think. She walked out of church in October because somebody did a thing to her in front of everybody without asking her. And then you did it too. Kind of.”

His mom put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m not saying you were wrong,” Caleb said. “I’m just saying the way.”

She sat there with her hand over her mouth. Then she took it down and wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“When did you get so old,” she said.

He didn’t know what to say to that.

“Okay,” his mom said. “Okay. I’ll tell her.”

---

The courtroom was on the third floor of the Lorimer County Courthouse, a stone building from the 1880s with a clock tower and a dome and bad heating. The courtroom had wood paneling and tall windows and an American flag and an Ohio flag. The judge’s bench was high up, like a pulpit. Caleb had been there once before, in November, for the arraignment. He’d forgotten about the pulpit thing. He noticed it now.

Grant Mahler met them in the hallway outside in a suit that fit worse than his usual clothes. He walked Caleb through it one more time. The judge would ask him questions. He would answer yes or no, mostly. She’d ask him if he understood what he was giving up. She’d ask him if anybody had promised him anything or threatened him. She’d ask him how he pled. Then she’d ask him to say, in his own words, what happened.

“Short,” Grant said. “Keep it short. Just the facts. You don’t need to say who the text was from. It’s already in the record. Nobody’s going to make you.”

“Okay.”

“And bud.” Grant put a hand on his shoulder, briefly. “They’re here. The Pruitts. Both of them. And the victim advocate.”

Caleb nodded. He’d known they would be.

---

They were in the second row on the left, behind the prosecutor’s table. Mr. Pruitt in the gray suit, the funeral suit. Mrs. Pruitt in the navy dress. Renee Castillo on the aisle in her cardigan with her lanyard. Caleb saw them when he came in through the double doors. He looked away fast and sat down at the defense table next to Grant, with his parents in the first row behind him. He could feel them across the aisle the way he’d felt Mrs. Pruitt in church in October. Like a stove.

“All rise.”

Judge Margaret Ellery was about sixty. She had short silver hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and a voice like a middle school principal who liked kids but didn’t take anything from them. She sat down and looked at the file and then over her glasses at Caleb for a long moment.

She asked him the questions. He answered them. Yes, Your Honor. No, Your Honor. I understand, Your Honor. She asked if he’d had enough time to talk to his lawyer. She asked if he was on any medication, or under the influence of anything. She asked if he understood that by pleading guilty he was giving up his right to a trial, and to confront witnesses, and to make the State prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. She asked if he understood the maximum penalty was six months in jail and a fine and a license suspension. He said yes to all of it.

“How do you plead to the charge of vehicular homicide, a misdemeanor of the first degree?”

“Guilty,” Caleb said.

It was the first time he’d said it out loud in a courtroom. In November he’d stood in this same spot and said not guilty because Grant told him to. It had felt like a lie, the biggest one of his life. This felt like setting something down on the floor that he’d been holding up over his head for five and a half months.

“Mr. Holland,” Judge Ellery said, “I need you to tell me in your own words what happened on the night of October third. Take your time.”

Caleb stood up. Grant stood up beside him.

He looked at the judge. He didn’t look to his left.

“I was driving my friend Eli home,” he said. “Eli Pruitt. From a bonfire. On Kessler Road. It was about eleven-forty at night. We came to the curve by the Yoder place. My phone lit up in the cupholder. I picked it up and read the text message. I took my eyes off the road.” He had to stop. He made himself go on. “I looked up and we were going off the road. I jerked the wheel. We hit the tree on his side. He died.” He swallowed. “It was my fault. I was driving. I picked up the phone. Nobody made me. I knew better. I’m the one who looked down.”

The courtroom was very quiet.

Judge Ellery looked at him over her glasses for a long moment. Something moved in her face.

“Thank you, Mr. Holland,” she said. “You may sit down.”

He sat down. His legs were shaking so badly under the table that Grant put a hand on his knee.

The judge accepted the plea. She found him guilty. She ordered a presentence investigation, expedited. She said a probation officer would contact him and interview him and his family, and prepare a report for her. She said the victim’s family would have the opportunity to address the court at sentencing, which she set for two weeks out, Thursday, March twenty-sixth, at one-thirty in the afternoon. She said he’d remain on his current bond conditions until then. She asked the lawyers if there was anything else. There wasn’t.

“We’re adjourned,” she said.

“All rise.”

---

In the hallway outside the courtroom, people stood around in clusters under the tall windows the way people stand around after church. Grant was talking to his parents about the presentence report. Mr. Firth, the prosecutor, was talking to Renee Castillo. Caleb stood by a radiator with his hands in his pockets and his back to the wall, trying to breathe.

He saw his dad look across the hallway. He followed where he was looking.

Mr. Pruitt was standing by the elevator with his hands in his suit pockets. Mrs. Pruitt was a few steps away, talking to Renee, with her back half turned.

His dad walked across the hallway.

Caleb went cold. His mom saw it too. She said Rob under her breath, and put out a hand, and didn’t catch him. His dad walked across the marble floor in his church shoes, straight to Mr. Pruitt, and stopped in front of him. The two of them stood there. Two big men in suits that didn’t fit. They’d been assistant coaches together for four Little League seasons. They had grilled hamburgers side by side at twenty church picnics. They hadn’t said a word to each other since October.

“Wes,” his dad said.

“Rob.”

His dad’s hands were shaking. Caleb could see it from across the hall. He put them in his pockets and took them out again.

“I didn’t know,” his dad said. “Till February. About the rides. He never told us. His mom figured it out, and then he told me.” He stopped. His jaw worked. “I was on nights. I was asleep. I left him out there on Route 9 in the dark by himself, because I couldn’t look at him. And you picked him up.”

Mr. Pruitt stood very still.

“I don’t know how to —“ His dad’s voice cracked straight down the middle. “Thank you. For driving my boy. That’s all. I don’t know what else. Thank you for driving my boy.”

Mr. Pruitt looked at him.

Then he took his right hand out of his pocket and held it out. His dad looked at it. Then he took it. They shook hands in the hallway of the Lorimer County Courthouse, once, hard, and held on a second longer than a handshake. Neither of them said anything else.

Caleb looked past them.

Mrs. Pruitt had turned around. She was standing beside Renee with her purse held against her stomach in both hands, and she was watching them. Watching his dad and her husband shake hands. Her face didn’t do anything Caleb could read.

Then she looked across the hallway, and she looked at him.

It was the first time since the tire shop. She looked at him across thirty feet of marble floor, over the heads of the clusters of people. He stood with his back against the wall by the radiator and looked back. He didn’t look away. He’d learned that much. She had stood in the lot at Burkhart’s and told him I’m not ready. She’d told him the truth. He could at least stand here and let her look.

She didn’t nod. She didn’t do anything. She just looked, for maybe three seconds.

Then she turned and said something to Mr. Pruitt, and he let go of Caleb’s dad’s hand. The two of them walked to the elevator together and the doors opened and they got in. The doors closed.

His mom was standing beside him now. She had her hand on his arm.

“She looked at you,” his mom said. Her voice was very quiet.

“Yeah,” Caleb said.

“What was that? What did that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

He didn’t. He stood there by the radiator in the cold courthouse hallway and thought about it all the way home in his dad’s truck. He thought about it that night in bed. He didn’t know. She hadn’t looked angry, or sorry, or anything. She had just looked at him. Like she was seeing what was there.

He thought maybe that was all it was. Maybe that was enough for now.

26The Porch

She found out about the grave by accident, the Thursday after the plea hearing.

She’d left work early. Sam had started making her, one afternoon a week, since Marcus. Go home, Jo. Go to your appointment. Go sit in the sun. I don’t care. She drove past the cemetery on her way home, on the road below the ballfields, and saw a purple rain jacket halfway down the hill in the newer rows.

She pulled over by the stone wall and sat there.

Tessa was sitting cross-legged on the cold grass in front of Eli’s stone with her back to the road. Her backpack was beside her. She was bent over something in her lap, writing, and every so often she stopped and looked up at the stone and said something. Jo couldn’t hear it from the car. She watched her daughter talk to a piece of granite with a baseball carved on it. She had watched Hazel talk to a lamb with no face on the other side of this hill two months ago.

She thought of the fresh baseball on top of the stone in January. The laminated index card propped against it. She’d seen it from the car on Ruthie’s birthday and hadn’t stopped.

She got out of the car.

---

Tessa heard her on the gravel and turned around fast, the way you turn when you’re caught, and her face went white and then red. She had an index card in her lap and a Sharpie in her hand. There was a stack of them rubber-banded together in the grass beside her backpack. Maybe thirty cards.

“I’m not skipping,” Tessa said. “School’s out. It’s three-forty.”

“I know.”

Jo stopped a few feet away. She looked at the stone. ELI JAMES PRUITT. BELOVED SON AND BROTHER. The little baseball. On top, a real baseball, grass-stained. Propped against the base, a card in a plastic sleeve, the kind you put baseball cards in.

“What are those?” Jo said.

Tessa looked at the stack. She didn’t answer for a long time.

“It’s stuff that happened,” she said finally. “Every week. I write it down and bring it. Like, what happened at school. What Maddie said. What was for lunch. Dumb stuff.” She picked at the rubber band. “He always wanted to know what was for lunch. Remember? He’d text me from the high school, what’d they have at the middle school, like he was jealous. The middle school had better tater tots.”

Jo sat down on the cold grass beside her.

“How long?” she said.

“Since November.” Tessa’s voice was flat. “Every Thursday. I take the bus to the stop by the ballfields and walk up.”

“Every Thursday. Since November.”

“You never noticed.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that. It was true.

Tessa pulled the rubber band off the stack. She held the cards out without looking at Jo. Jo took them. They were in Tessa’s handwriting, rounded and careful, one card for each week, dated at the top.

Nov 13. Tater tots. Kaylee Brandt is still the worst. Mr. Reyes asked me to come back to band. I said no. Mom’s putting signs everywhere. Dad doesn’t talk. I talked to Maddie at the fence. Don’t tell Mom.

Dec 18. Mom found out about Maddie. She was so mad. Dad took my side. We did stockings. Yours is empty. We didn’t know what to put in it. I’m sorry.

Jan 8. Chicken patty. Mom was in the paper. I didn’t read it. Everybody at school did.

Feb 12. Dad left. Mom and me took all the signs down in the rain. She told me something about the text. I’m not going to write it here. She cried in the car. I hugged her. First time since you.

Mar 12. Mom made chili!!!! In the red pot. The one you picked. I had three bowls. Dad came home. We stood in your door. Nobody went in. Sorry about that.

Jo stopped reading. She held the cards in her lap and couldn’t see them.

“Everybody asks how you’re doing,” Tessa said.

She said it to the stone. Her voice had changed, gone thin and high.

“Everybody. At school. At church, when I went. The lady at the Dollar General. Mrs. Frye. How’s your mom holding up? How’s your mom doing, sweetie? Tell your mom we’re praying for her. Every single person. Five months.” Her voice cracked. “Nobody asks me. Not one person. Not once. Like I’m not — like it’s not mine. Like he was your son and Dad’s son and I’m just, like, somebody who lives at the house.”

“Tess —“

“And you didn’t turn around.” Tessa was crying now. It was the first time Jo had seen her cry since October. “That first Sunday. I stood in his door. You were lying on his bed. I stood there forever. I know you heard me. The board creaked. You heard me, Mom, and you didn’t turn around.” She was sobbing. “I lost him. And then I lost you. I lost both of you in one week. And everybody kept asking me how you were.”

Jo put the cards down in the grass.

There wasn’t anything that would make it smaller, and she wasn’t going to try. She turned on the cold ground and put both arms around her daughter and pulled her in. Tessa fought it for about two seconds. Then she didn’t. She folded into Jo’s chest the way she had when she was three and had a fever, all knees and elbows, and she cried. She cried the way Wes had cried in the truck, from all the way down, the whole five months of it coming out of her at once, onto the front of Jo’s coat.

Jo held on. She rocked her a little, the way she used to. She put her mouth against the top of Tessa’s head and said the only true thing she had.

“I heard you,” she said. “I’m sorry. I heard you and I didn’t turn around. I’m so sorry, baby. I’m turned around now. I’m here. I’m right here.”

They sat there on the cold grass in front of the stone for a long time. A truck went by on the road below. The wind came up off the ballfields. When it was over, Tessa sat up and wiped her face on the sleeve of the purple rain jacket. Jo gathered up the index cards and put the rubber band back around them and handed them back.

“You keep bringing them,” Jo said. “If you want. Every Thursday.”

Tessa nodded.

“And I’ll ask,” Jo said. “How you’re doing. Every day. You can tell me to shut up.”

Tessa laughed, wet. “I will.”

“Okay.”

Tessa looked at her. “Can I go to Maddie’s?”

Jo looked at the stone. At the little carved baseball.

“Yes,” she said.

---

Lisa came on Saturday.

Jo was on the front porch steps with her coffee at ten in the morning, because it was the first warm day, fifty-eight degrees, and the sun was out. Wes was in the garage. Tessa was at Maddie’s. Jo had driven her there herself and dropped her at the end of the Hollands’ driveway and watched her walk up to the door. She’d driven away before it opened.

At ten-twenty Lisa’s Equinox pulled into the driveway.

Jo didn’t get up. She sat on the steps with her coffee and watched Lisa turn off the engine and sit there. Then Lisa got out and stood beside the car with her keys in her hand. She had on the blue fleece with the bleach spot on the cuff. She didn’t come any closer. Ten feet. Maybe twelve.

“Tessa’s fine,” Jo said. “If that’s why you came.”

“She’s fine. She’s in Maddie’s room with the door shut, doing whatever they do.” Lisa looked at the grass. “That’s not why.”

Jo waited.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “For Kroger.”

Jo held her coffee.

“Not for you knowing.” Lisa looked up. “I’m not sorry you know. I’ve thought about it for six weeks, and I can’t be. My son was going to go to jail with your name in his mouth. He was going to let the whole county think it was Kenzie Ferris for the rest of his life so nobody would look at you. I couldn’t let him. I’m not sorry about that.” She took a breath. “But I’m sorry for the way. In the cereal aisle. In front of strangers. On a Saturday, when you’d come in for bread. I walked up on you with no warning and I dumped it on you, the way I dumped Kevin’s clothes on that girl’s lawn in 2004. I did it in public on purpose. I wanted it to hurt.” Her voice cracked. “Caleb said something to me. He said you walked out of church in October because somebody did something to you in front of everybody without asking. And then I did it too.”

Jo looked at her coffee.

“He said that?” she said.

“He said kind of,” Lisa said. “He said, you did it too, kind of. He’s very fair. He gets it from Rob.”

Jo almost smiled. It surprised her.

“And the other thing,” Lisa said. She was holding her keys so tightly her knuckles were white. “I knew in November. Grant showed us the phone report the week before Thanksgiving. I sat in that office and saw your name on that page, and I could have come to you then. I could have driven over here in November and knocked on that door and told you in your kitchen, gently, with a pot of coffee, the way you’d have told me. And I didn’t.” She swallowed. “Caleb made me promise not to. That’s true. But that’s not why. I let you keep going. The signs. The paper. The Facebook page. I watched you do it and I let you. Because part of me wanted you to find out the worst way there was. Part of me wanted you to find out in front of everybody, like he had to walk up that aisle in front of everybody.” She was crying now. “That part of me got exactly what it wanted in aisle nine. And I’ve been sick about it ever since.”

Jo sat on the porch step with her coffee going cold.

“Come sit down,” she said.

---

Lisa sat down on the step. Not right beside her. One step down and a few feet over. Jo went inside and poured a second cup of coffee in the mug Lisa had always used at this house, the one with the chip on the handle. She’d never thought about it until now, but it had sat in the cabinet all winter in its usual place, and nobody had used it. She brought it out and handed it down. Lisa took it and looked at it and didn’t say anything, and held it in both hands.

“I’m sorry too,” Jo said.

Lisa looked up.

“The signs. The Kellers’ sign. I never put that one there, but I drove by it and looked at it, and I was glad. I was glad, Lisa. I sat in the cul-de-sac and looked at Caleb’s window and felt something like — satisfaction.” She made herself keep going. “The girlfriend. The school board. The comments. I read hope he rots and I didn’t take it down, because I agreed with it. I let them put your address up. I only took it down because Tessa made me. And your calls. All of them. I never listened to one voicemail. They’re still on my phone. Thirty-one of them. I’ve never played one.”

Lisa made a small sound.

“I made Maddie see that word from the school bus,” Jo said. “I’m sorry.”

They sat there on the steps in the sun. A car went by on Maple Ridge Road and slowed down when it saw them, and then sped up again. Jo imagined how it looked. Jo Pruitt and Lisa Holland on the Pruitts’ front steps, drinking coffee. She imagined the phone calls that would start before the car got to the stop sign.

“I would have done what you did,” Lisa said quietly. “The hospital. The phone. If it was me. I’d have done the exact same thing.” She turned the chipped mug in her hands. “I think I did do what you did. With the report. I just did it with somebody else’s name.”

Jo turned her own mug in her hands.

“This isn’t —“ Lisa stopped. “I’m not saying we’re okay. I don’t know what we are. I don’t know if we can be what we were. I don’t think so. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.”

“No,” Jo said. “Me either.”

“But I didn’t want to never say it.”

“No.”

They sat there. The sun was warm on the steps. In the garage behind them, Wes had the radio on. It was the farm report. He listened to it on Saturdays now too.

“I have your dish,” Jo said.

Lisa looked at her.

“Your Pyrex. The white one with the blue flowers. The chicken and rice. Brenda brought it in October.” Jo looked out at the yard. “It’s still in the freezer. I never ate it. I never threw it out. It’s been in the back, behind the sloppy joe mix, for six months.”

Lisa put her hand over her mouth.

“You can take it now,” Jo said. “If you want. I’ll go get it.”

Lisa sat there a long moment with her hand over her mouth. Then she took it down and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Keep it. For now.”

“Lisa, it’s your good dish. It’s got the chip from the Fourth of July —“

“I know what it’s got.” Lisa almost laughed. “Keep it. You’ll give it back when you give it back.” She looked at Jo. “You’re the one who taught everybody. Label the dish so you can return the pan. You’ll know when.”

Jo looked at her.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll bring it back.”

Lisa finished her coffee. She stood up. She held out the chipped mug, and Jo took it. Their fingers didn’t touch. Lisa walked back to the Equinox and got in, and sat there a moment, and then rolled down the window.

“She’s going to say it at sentencing,” Lisa said. “Isn’t she. Kenzie told Caleb. You’re going to stand up and say it.”

“Yes.”

Lisa nodded slowly. She looked at Jo through the open window.

“I’ll be there,” she said. “Two rows behind you. Like always.”

She backed out of the driveway and went.

---

That night, Jo sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and the folder Renee had given her in October. It had her name typed on a label on the front. Inside was a sheet titled Victim Impact Statement — Guidance for Families. It said she could write it or say it or both. It said she could talk about Eli, about who he was, about what his death had done to their family. It said she could tell the judge what she thought an appropriate sentence would be, or she could choose not to. It said there was no wrong way.

She’d written eleven drafts since the plea hearing. She’d torn up all of them. Every one of them had been a speech. They were good speeches. She was good at speeches.

She tore off the eleventh draft and folded it and put it in the trash. She sat looking at the blank yellow page.

Then she wrote one line at the top, in her normal handwriting, the way she’d label a dish.

Tell the truth. All of it. Then sit down.

She looked at it for a while. Then she started.

27Statement

Thursday, the twenty-sixth of March, was warm. It was the first day that spring warm enough to go without a coat. The first redbuds were coming out along Route 9, that shocking purple against the gray woods. Jo noticed them on the drive to Lorimer and thought, he never once noticed a redbud in his life, and then thought, that’s not true, that’s not fair. He noticed everything. He just didn’t say it.

Wes drove. Tessa sat in the back. She had asked to come, and then insisted when Jo hesitated. It’s mine too. You said you’d ask. She wore the navy dress she’d worn to the funeral. It was too short now. She’d grown an inch since October, and nobody had noticed that either.

---

The courtroom was fuller than Jo had expected.

Renee met them in the hallway and walked them in. She sat them in the second row on the left, behind the prosecutor’s table, where they’d sat for the plea. Jo sat on the aisle, then Wes, then Tessa. Renee sat behind them.

Across the aisle on the defense side, the Hollands were in the first row. Rob in a sport coat. Lisa in her good gray suit, the one she’d bought for her father’s funeral. She turned around when the Pruitts came in and looked at Jo, and Jo looked back, and neither of them did anything else.

Behind the Hollands, a few rows back, sat Lou Burkhart in a brown suit that looked like it had been bought for a wedding in 1975. Then Kenzie Ferris with her father, who was in his EMS uniform. Pastor Nate, alone, near the back. Monica Strand from the Ledger, with her notebook but no recorder.

And on the Pruitt side of the aisle, a few rows behind them, Hazel Ormond. She was on the end of a bench with the Buick parked in the aisle beside her, brakes set. She wore her church coat and her rain bonnet, though it wasn’t raining. When Jo turned around and saw her, Hazel looked back over her glasses with that long, flat look. Then she nodded once and went back to reading the courtroom rules posted on the wall.

In the very last row by the door, in a flannel shirt and a Lorimer Fire Department cap, which he took off when the bailiff looked at him, sat Gary Szabo. Jo hadn’t told him. She’d said it in group on Tuesday, the date and the time, without looking at anyone. He looked at her across the courtroom and lifted two fingers off his knee, the way men in trucks wave to each other on country roads.

---

Caleb came in through a side door with Grant Mahler. He was in a white shirt and a tie that was too wide, probably Rob’s. He’d gotten a haircut. He looked about fifteen. He sat down at the defense table and put his hands flat on it and didn’t look to his left.

“All rise.”

Judge Ellery came in and sat down and put on her reading glasses on their beaded chain. She opened the file. It was thick now. She said they were here for sentencing in State of Ohio versus Caleb Holland. She said she’d received and reviewed the presentence investigation report. She said she’d received the sentencing memorandum from the defense and letters from the community. She said she’d received a written statement from the victim’s father, and she thanked Mr. Pruitt for it. Jo hadn’t read Wes’s letter. He’d asked her not to, and she hadn’t. She said she understood the victim’s mother wished to address the court in person.

Mr. Firth stood up first. He was brief. He went through the facts, the curve, the speed, the black box, the phone. He said the State recognized that the defendant had accepted responsibility, had no record, and had shown what the presentence report called significant remorse. But he said a young man was dead because another young man had chosen to read a text message on a curve at night, and that the sentence needed to say so, clearly, to every other young man in this county with a phone in his cupholder. The State asked for ninety days in the county jail, followed by community control, and a lengthy license suspension.

Grant Mahler stood up. He talked for twelve minutes. He talked about Caleb’s record, which was nothing. His grades, which were good. His job at Burkhart’s, where he hadn’t missed a day since November. His letters. From Lou Burkhart, who wrote, Grant said, I’ve had a lot of boys through my shop in fifty-one years and I’d give this one the keys to the building. From Coach Dunleavy. From Pastor Nate Albrecht. Grant said Caleb had pled guilty without any agreement on the sentence, and had never once tried to shift responsibility to anyone. He asked for community control, with no jail time, and extensive community service. He sat down.

He never mentioned the text. Jo waited for it, and it didn’t come. Grant sat down at the defense table, and she saw him glance, very briefly, across the aisle at her.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” Judge Ellery said. “You may come forward. You can speak from the lectern or from your seat, whichever you’re more comfortable with.”

Jo stood up.

---

She walked to the lectern. It was a wooden one between the two tables, with a microphone on a gooseneck, like the school board. No timer this time. She put her legal pad down on it. There were four pages in her own handwriting. At the top of the first page, in blue ink, the line: Tell the truth. All of it. Then sit down.

She looked up at the judge. Then, because she had decided she would, she turned a little, so she could see the defense table. She could see Caleb. He was looking at the table in front of him, at his own hands.

“My name is Joanna Pruitt,” she said. “Eli was my son.”

She had written about Eli first. She told the judge about the refrigerator and the Cheerios. The water tower at the fairgrounds. The Dairy Barn and the free sprinkles. The lineman program with $$$? in red pen. The singing. The slammed doors and the apologies thirty seconds later. She didn’t make it long. She had cut it down to a page, because she’d learned something from Tyler Beck and the Ledger and a hundred and forty thousand strangers. You couldn’t hand your son to a room. You could only hand them a little piece and trust them to know it wasn’t all of him.

“He was coming home,” she said. “He was five minutes from home.”

She turned the page.

“What happened to our family,” she said, and told them. The chest freezer. The empty stocking. The door to his room that his father couldn’t open for five months. A fourteen-year-old girl on a school bus, and at a cemetery every Thursday since November, writing on index cards. The silence in the house. Her husband crying in their son’s truck with the engine running so nobody would hear.

Her voice held. She didn’t know how. She had practiced in the bathroom mirror, and in the Camry, and in Marcus’s office. Marcus had said, you don’t have to hold it. If it breaks, it breaks. That’s allowed. It didn’t break. Not yet.

She turned the page.

“Caleb,” she said.

He looked up.

“You picked up your phone,” she said. “On a curve, at night, with my son in the seat beside you. You’d been taught not to. My husband taught you, in the church parking lot, in Eli’s truck, when you were fifteen. You knew better. And you picked it up anyway. You took your eyes off the road for three seconds, and my son is dead.” She held his eyes. “That’s yours. I want you to hear me say it, because I know you’ve been saying it yourself. It’s true. It will always be true. Nothing I’m about to say changes it.”

He nodded, very slightly. His face was white.

She turned to the judge.

“The text he picked up was from me,” she said.

---

The courtroom was very quiet.

She’d known it would be. She’d imagined it, the silence, a hundred times. She had imagined the rustle, people shifting on the benches, the sound of a roomful of heads turning. That was the sound she’d heard in October in the sanctuary, a field of sunflowers turning toward her. She heard it now. Behind her. The benches creaking. Somebody letting out a breath. She could feel them looking at the back of her neck.

She let them.

“It’s in the report,” she said. “I know Your Honor’s seen it. Caleb, it’s Jo. Eli’s not answering. Are you two on the way? His dad is waiting up. Eleven forty-one and forty-seven seconds. I sent it because Eli’s phone was dead and he was late for curfew, the way he was late every Friday night of his senior year. I’d sent Caleb a thousand texts like it since he was twelve. I didn’t think about where his eyes were when it came in. I never once did.”

She looked down at the legal pad, though she didn’t need it.

“That text isn’t why he looked down. He’s right about that. He’s said so to his lawyer and to me, and I suspect he’ll say it again to you in a minute. He could have not picked it up. That’s his.” She took a breath. “But I want Your Honor to know what I did after. Because that part’s mine, and I’ve let other people carry it long enough.”

She told them.

The hospital restroom. 1:14 in the morning. Read 11:41 PM. Her thumb. Delete. The four months of not knowing what she knew. The newspaper. The school board. The boy who killed my son was reading a text from his girlfriend. A seventeen-year-old girl with a name, who had done nothing, sitting in the back of this courtroom right now with her father. Jo didn’t turn around. She knew where Kenzie was. The comments she had read and not deleted. The address. The sign across from the Hollands’ door, and the word on their garage.

“And the whole time,” she said, “he knew. Caleb knew it was me. He knew in November. His lawyer told him it might keep him out of jail, to say so, and he said no. He said I didn’t do anything. He let this whole county think it was his girlfriend. He let them paint his house. He let the girl he loved take it, rather than say my name. She paid for his silence and for my lie, and she hadn’t done anything.” Her voice finally went, a little, at the edges. “I didn’t ask him to. I didn’t know he was doing it. I didn’t deserve it. He did it anyway. He carried my part for five months on top of his own. And I stood up in front of our church and walked out on him.”

She stopped. She stood there at the lectern. Somewhere behind her someone was crying quietly. She thought it was Lisa. It might have been Tessa.

She turned the last page.

“I forgive him,” she said.

She said it to the judge. Then she turned and said it to him.

“I forgive you, Caleb.”

He was crying now. He was sitting at the defense table with his hands flat on it, looking at her, with the tears running straight down his face. He didn’t wipe them. Just like Wes.

“What I mean is, I’m not going to wish you harm,” Jo said. “I’m putting down what I’ve been holding against you, and I’m not going to pick it back up.” She looked up from the pad. “It doesn’t mean what you did didn’t matter. It doesn’t mean we’re what we were. It doesn’t mean you can come to my house. I don’t know what we’ll be.” She held his eyes. “But we’re not going to be enemies.”

She turned back to the judge.

“I’m not going to ask you for a number,” she said. “In October I asked the prosecutor for a felony. I wanted him to hurt as much as I did. I don’t know what’s just. I don’t think I’m the right one to say. That’s your job, and I’m grateful it’s not mine.” She took a breath. “I’ll only ask one thing. Whatever you give him, I’d ask that part of it be telling the truth. To other kids. At the high schools. About the phone, and the curve, and what it costs. I think he’d tell it true.” She paused. “And I’ll be telling mine. At Ashby High School, on April ninth, before prom. All of it. The text too. So it won’t just be him up there.”

She closed the legal pad.

“That’s all,” she said. “Thank you.”

She walked back to her seat. It was fifteen steps. She didn’t look at anybody. She sat down on the end of the bench beside Wes, and he took her hand, and his hand was shaking. On his other side Tessa had both her hands over her face.

Behind them, somewhere near the back, Jo heard a single, dry, cracked old voice say, very quietly, amen. Then she heard the Buick’s brakes release with a click, and set again.

---

Judge Ellery asked Caleb if he wished to say anything before she pronounced sentence.

He stood up. Grant stood up beside him. Caleb didn’t have any paper. He stood there with his hands at his sides.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was wrecked. “To Mr. and Mrs. Pruitt. And Tessa. To everybody. I’m not asking anybody for anything. I just want to say it.” He swallowed. “I’ll tell the truth to whoever you want me to, Your Honor. For as long as you want.”

He started to sit down. Then he stopped. He turned, just a little, toward the second row on the left.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” he said. “Thank you for telling the truth.” His voice cracked all the way through. “It was still me.”

“I know,” Jo said, from her seat, out loud, in the courtroom. The bailiff looked at her. The judge didn’t say anything. “I know it was.”

He sat down.

---

Judge Ellery took off her reading glasses and let them hang on their chain. She was quiet for a while.

She said a number of things. Jo would read them later in the Ledger, quoted exactly, and would not remember hearing most of them. She said she’d been on the bench for nineteen years and had sentenced a great many people who’d hurt someone behind the wheel of a car. She said she had never had a victim’s family member stand in her courtroom and take responsibility for something the law didn’t require her to take. She said she’d never had a defendant refuse, against his own lawyer’s advice, a piece of evidence that might have kept him out of jail, to spare the victim’s mother. She said neither of those things changed the facts of the case. A young man had chosen to read a text on a curve at night, and another young man was dead. The law, and the community, and Eli Pruitt’s memory required a sentence that said so.

Then she said them. One hundred and eighty days in the county jail, with ninety suspended, so ninety to serve. Five years of community control. License suspended for five years. Two hundred and fifty hours of community service, which the court directed should include speaking to students at high schools in the county, under the supervision of the probation department and the sheriff’s office. He’d be remanded to custody today.

“Mr. Holland,” Judge Ellery said. “Please stand.”

He stood.

“Deputy.”

A deputy came forward from the side of the room. He was the young one, Jo realized, the young one from the night on Kessler Road. The one with his arms out, saying ma’am, ma’am, ma’am. He had the handcuffs in his hand. He stood beside Caleb and said something quietly. Caleb held out his wrists. The cuffs clicked.

Across the aisle, Lisa made a sound Jo had heard once before, in the hallway at Lorimer Regional, at one in the morning. Rob put his arms around her.

The deputy put a hand on Caleb’s elbow and turned him toward the side door. As he turned, Caleb looked back. Not at his parents. He’d look at them in a second; he’d have to. But first, for one second, he looked at the second row on the left. He looked at Jo.

She looked back at him. She didn’t look away.

Then he looked at his mother. Lisa reached out across the rail with both hands, and the deputy let him lean toward her for a second. Then the side door opened, and he went through it, and it closed.

---

In the hallway outside, afterward, Monica Strand came up to her with her notebook. She was careful. She had learned something too.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know — would you want to say anything? For the paper?”

“No,” Jo said. “I said it inside.”

Monica nodded. She closed the notebook and put it in her bag and didn’t ask again.

Across the hallway, by the tall windows, Lisa stood with Rob’s arm around her. She looked at Jo. Jo looked back. It wasn’t like the courtroom, or the cereal aisle, or the doorway in December. It wasn’t like anything. It was two women in a hallway who had each lost a son that year in different ways, one for good and one for ninety days. They looked at each other from twenty feet apart, and neither one of them moved, and neither one of them looked away.

Then Hazel came between them, pushing the Buick, with her rain bonnet tied under her chin.

“Well,” she said to Jo, loud enough for the whole hallway. “That’s the first time I’ve been to a courthouse since Carl hit the preacher’s mailbox. It was better than that.” She stopped the Buick and looked up at Jo with her pale eyes. “Take me home. I want to lie down. And then I want a pie. A real one. Yours.”

28Pages

The county jail was in the basement and first floor of the sheriff’s building behind the courthouse. It smelled like floor cleaner and something underneath the floor cleaner that the floor cleaner was there to cover.

They took his tie and his belt and his shoes and his father’s sport coat, which his mom had made him wear, and put them in a plastic bag with his name on it. It was the same kind of bag the deputy had put his phone in, in October. He noticed that. They took his picture against a height chart. They took his fingerprints on a glass screen. They gave him an orange jumpsuit, two pairs of socks, a pair of rubber slides, a thin towel, a toothbrush the length of his finger, a plastic cup, and a rulebook. A deputy who was not the young one walked him down a hallway and through two doors that buzzed, and into a unit. It was a common room with steel tables bolted to the floor and a TV behind plexiglass, and cells around the edges on two levels. The deputy stopped at a cell on the bottom level and said, “Bottom bunk’s taken,” and left.

The man on the bottom bunk was fifty-something, heavy, gray-bearded, lying on his back reading a paperback western with a horse on the cover. He looked at Caleb over the top of it.

“You the texting kid,” he said.

Caleb stood in the doorway with his towel and his cup.

“Seen you on the six o’clock,” the man said. “They had it on in the common room. Your lady was on there. Walking out of the courthouse with the old woman with the walker.” He put the book down on his chest. “Dwayne.”

“Caleb.”

“I know.” Dwayne picked the book back up. “Top bunk. Don’t step on my face getting up there. I’m in for child support. Eleven months behind. Don’t ask me about it. I don’t ask nobody what they did, they don’t ask me. That’s how it works in here.” He turned a page. “’Cept I already know what you did. So I guess you’re even.”

---

The first night he didn’t sleep.

The lights didn’t go all the way off. They dimmed to a sort of permanent dusk. Somebody down the row was crying, and somebody else was yelling at him to shut up, and somebody else was yelling at him to shut up. The mattress was two inches thick and wrapped in plastic. Every time he moved it crackled. Dwayne snored like a chainsaw.

Caleb lay on his back on the top bunk and looked at the ceiling, which was eighteen inches from his face.

He thought about the courtroom. He thought about her standing at the lectern, turning to look at him. I forgive you, Caleb.

He had wanted it so bad. In October. He’d wanted it so bad he walked up an aisle for it. He’d wanted her to come up there in front of everybody and put her arms around him and say it was okay.

She hadn’t said it was okay. She’d said it wasn’t. She’d said it was still his, and would always be his, and nothing she said would change it. She’d said he couldn’t come to her house. She’d said she didn’t know what they’d be. Then she’d said it anyway, the thing he’d wanted. And it didn’t feel anything like he’d thought it would.

He’d thought it would feel like the weight coming off. Like somebody taking their foot off his chest.

It didn’t feel like that. The weight was all still there. He was lying on a plastic mattress in an orange jumpsuit eighteen inches from a jail ceiling. Eli was still in the ground at Ashby Cemetery. The weight was exactly the same. He’d looked down. He’d always have looked down.

It was something else. He didn’t have a word for it. It was more like — he tried to think. It was like when you’ve been carrying something heavy by yourself for a long time, up a long hill, and somebody comes up beside you. They don’t take it from you. They don’t even offer. They just start walking with you. And it’s still just as heavy, but you’re not by yourself anymore.

He lay there with that until the lights came back up at six.

---

There was a Bible on the shelf in the cell. A Gideon Bible, the little ones with the dark cover that they put in motel drawers. Dwayne said it had been there when he came in. He said he’d read Revelation twice because it was the most like a western.

Caleb read it at night, when the lights were at dusk and he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t know where to start. He flipped. He read about David, because Pastor Nate had talked about David in his office in October and Caleb hadn’t followed it then. He read the part with Bathsheba and her husband, and the prophet Nathan, and the story about the rich man and the poor man’s lamb. And thou art the man. He read it three times. He thought about how David didn’t try to explain. He didn’t say, but I was tired, but I was lonely, but she was right there. He just said, I have sinned.

He read the psalm that was supposed to be David’s after that. Fifty-one. There was one verse he read over and over until he had it.

For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.

It didn’t say it went away. It said it was always there, in front of him. And David was still talking to God anyway, the whole rest of the psalm. He was asking to be washed. Clean heart, right spirit. All of it. With the thing right there in front of him the whole time.

Caleb thought that was probably how it was going to be. He thought maybe that was all right.

---

His mom and dad came on the first visiting day, the Sunday after. Visiting was through glass, with phones, for thirty minutes. His mom cried the whole time and kept saying are you eating, are you eating. His dad sat beside her with the phone and didn’t say much, and at the end he put his hand flat on the glass. Caleb put his hand flat on the other side. He felt stupid doing it, like something from a movie. He did it anyway.

“Maddie wanted to come,” his mom said. “They don’t let under sixteen. She’s writing you. Everybody’s writing you. Lou wrote you. Kenzie wrote you.” She hesitated. “Nate’s coming Tuesday. He got on the clergy list.”

“Okay.”

“Baby.” His mom leaned close to the glass. “The Pruitts. Jo. Did she —“ She stopped. “Has anybody from the Pruitts —“

“No,” Caleb said.

“Okay.” She nodded fast. “Okay. That’s okay.”

---

The letter came on the thirtieth, the Monday after.

Mail came in the afternoon, after count. A deputy came down the row with a stack and called names. They’d all already been opened and looked at. That was the rule. A deputy read everything that came in. Caleb had gotten six letters by then, in four days: one from his mom, one from Maddie with a drawing of a frog in a jail cell, which was supposed to be funny, and he supposed it was. One from Lou, four lines in pencil. Your job is here when you get out. Don’t let them feed you too much of that bologna. Bay two needs you. — L.B. One from Kenzie, in purple ink. One from Coach Dunleavy. One from Tanner and Josh and the Wilkes twins, all four of them signing it, from the group chat, CATCHERS AND SMASHERS, with no Eli.

The deputy stopped at his cell and said, “Holland,” and held out a plain white envelope.

He knew the handwriting. He’d known it his whole life. It was on permission slips and birthday cards and the notes in his lunchbox on field-trip days, when she’d packed for both boys. Caleb — have a good day at the zoo! Don’t let Eli feed the goats your sandwich.

He sat down on the edge of Dwayne’s bunk. Dwayne was in the common room watching a court TV show. He held the envelope a while before he took the letter out.

It was one page. Her handwriting, in blue ink, on paper from a legal pad with the top edge torn.

Caleb,

I don’t know how to write this, so I’m going to write it the way I’d label a dish. Plain.

I meant what I said in court. All of it. I’m not taking any of it back.

There’s something you should know that I don’t think you do. In January of his junior year, Eli had to write an essay for the lineman program application, about a person he admired. I thought he’d write about his dad. He wrote about you. He wrote that you were the most careful person he’d ever met. That you always did things right even when nobody was watching, and even when it made you slower than everybody else, and that it used to drive him crazy. He wrote that he wanted to be more like that, because linemen who aren’t careful die. He never showed it to you. He’d have been embarrassed. I found it on his computer in February.

I’m telling you that because I think it’s true, and because I think you’ve forgotten it. Three seconds doesn’t make it not true. It just makes it harder.

At Burkhart’s you said he said something at the end. In the car. You said you didn’t know what it meant. I told you not yet.

I’m ready now.

Would you write it down for me? All of it. That whole night. The bonfire, and the hay bale, and the song, whatever you remember. What he ate. What he said. What he was wearing. Anything. Wes told me some of it, from the truck. I want it from you. You’re the only one who has it. Take your time. You’ve got some.

I don’t know what we’ll be. I meant that too. But I’d like to have this, if you’re willing.

— Jo Pruitt

---

He read it four times. Then he sat on the edge of Dwayne’s bunk with the letter in his lap and cried. He didn’t try to stop, and he didn’t care who heard. Somebody down the row yelled at him to shut up. Somebody else yelled at that guy to shut up and leave the kid alone.

When Dwayne came back from the common room, Caleb was still sitting there. Dwayne looked at him and looked at the letter. He didn’t say anything. He climbed onto his bunk around Caleb, careful of his feet, and lay down and picked up his western.

“You’re going to need paper,” Dwayne said after a while, to the ceiling.

Caleb wiped his face.

“Commissary’s Thursday. Legal pads are a dollar ten. Pencils are a quarter, but they only give you the little golf ones, so you can’t stab nobody.” Dwayne turned a page. “I got half a pad you can have till then. It’s under the mattress. Don’t touch nothing else under there.”

---

The first thing he wrote on Dwayne’s half pad wasn’t for Mrs. P.

Kenzie’s letter was a page and a half in purple ink, the same purple she used for chemistry notes. She’d been in the courtroom. She said her dad cried in the truck on the way home, which she had never once seen him do, not even when her grandpa died. She said she wasn’t mad anymore, mostly. She said she understood now why he wouldn’t tell her. She said Mrs. Pruitt had come to their porch, and she’d believed her, and that it was weird to believe somebody you’d spent a month hating. She said she didn’t know what she wanted. She said he didn’t have to write back.

He’d read it about thirty times. Every time, he got stuck on the same word. Understood.

He wrote back that night, sitting on the edge of Dwayne’s bunk with the pad on his knee. It took four tries. The first three were about Mrs. P, and why, and what he’d been thinking in October, and he tore them off and folded them small and put them in the trash under the steel sink, because they were all explaining. The fourth one was short.

Kenz —

You said you understand now. I don’t want you to understand. I mean I don’t want you to think it was all right.

I knew it wasn’t you. From the first day. I was the only one who knew for sure. And I let it land on you anyway, because I didn’t want it to land on her. I told myself I was protecting somebody. I was. But I did it by standing you in front of it. Your car. Your little brother at the bus. Your mom asking you if you were lying to her. You didn’t owe her that. You didn’t owe me that. I decided it for you and I never asked you.

I’m not saying sorry you got hurt. I’m saying sorry I did it.

You don’t have to write back. I’m not writing so you will. I’m not writing so anything changes.

— Caleb

He read it over once. It didn’t make anything better. It was just true, and it was his.

He gave it to the deputy the next day at mail call.

---

He wrote it over nine days.

He wrote it at the steel table in the common room during free time. Then on his bunk at night in the dusk light, with the pad on his knees and the golf pencil, which he had to sharpen by scraping it on the concrete wall. He wrote it the way he told it to Mr. Pruitt in the snow on Route 9, only slower. Now there was time, and nobody was driving, and he could stop and think.

He wrote about the letterman jacket and no real coat. Tanner’s dad’s pallets. The freshmen huddled on the far side of the fire, and Eli walking over with a bag of marshmallows. Patience, grasshopper. The raw hot dog. The guitar. The country songs with the made-up words. The old church song about flying away, and everybody singing, even the guys who never went to church. Eli standing on the hay bale conducting with a burnt marshmallow on a stick. Dude, this is the best night. What he ate: four s’mores and the hot dog and half a bag of Doritos that belonged to Josh Wilkes. He wrote about the car. The loose radio knob. Eli with his long legs jammed up against the dash, singing.

He wrote about the curve. He didn’t write about the tree. She didn’t need that. She’d seen it.

He wrote about the phone lighting up in the cupholder. Mrs. P. And Eli leaning over and seeing it, his face green in the light from the screen, and laughing.

He wrote down exactly what Eli said. He’d kept it the way she asked him to, in the parking lot at Burkhart’s. Hold on to it for me. He’d kept it for five months without knowing what it was. He’d been afraid he’d lose it, or get a word wrong. But when he wrote it down on the half pad of Dwayne’s legal paper, it came out exactly the way he’d heard it. Like it had been waiting.

He said, “Oh no, is that my mom?” And then he laughed and said, “Tell her one of these nights.”

I don’t know what that means. I’ve tried to figure it out. I thought maybe it was a song. I thought you might know.

I’m sorry it’s the last thing. I wish it was something better. I wish it was something I understood.

That’s all I remember. I think that’s all of it. If I remember anything else I’ll write it down and send it.

— Caleb

---

It was fourteen pages. He folded them in thirds, which was hard, because there were so many. He put them in an envelope from the commissary and addressed it to the house on Maple Ridge Road. He’d known that address since before he could write. He gave it to the deputy at mail call on the eighth of April, unsealed, because that was the rule. The deputy took it and looked at the address and looked at him.

“This the Pruitt woman?” the deputy said.

“Yes, sir.”

The deputy looked at the thick envelope for a second. Then he put it on top of the stack, not the bottom, and went on down the row.

Caleb went back into the cell and climbed up onto his bunk and lay there with his hands on his chest, looking at the ceiling eighteen inches away. Down below, Dwayne was reading.

“Get it all?” Dwayne said.

“I think so.”

“Good.” A page turned. “That’s good, son.”

It was the first time since October anybody had called him son except his own father and Mr. Pruitt. He lay there and thought about that. After a while, for the first time in the jail, he fell asleep before the lights went down.

29Chicken and Rice

Hazel fell on the ramp the Tuesday after the sentencing.

It wasn’t bad, as falls went for eighty-one-year-olds. The Buick’s front wheel caught on the lip of the ramp where the men’s group had never quite gotten the boards flush. She went down on her left side and put her hand out, and the bone in her wrist cracked like kindling. Carl’s nephew found her an hour later, sitting on the ramp with her back against the railing and her rain bonnet still on, saying she’d been waiting for somebody to come along, she wasn’t going to crawl, she had some dignity. They put her wrist in a cast at Lorimer Regional and sent her home the same night with a bottle of pills she refused to take.

Jo found out from Brenda, who called her at work.

“I’ve got her on the Crew list,” Brenda said. “I put her down for Thursday. I’m doing my baked spaghetti. But, Jo —“ Brenda paused. It was the first pause Jo had ever heard Brenda take on purpose. “She said she doesn’t want mine. She said she wants yours. She said, and I’m quoting, tell Joanna Pruitt I’m still waiting on that pie and I’ve upgraded to supper.”

---

Jo made the pie on Wednesday night.

She had not made a pie since the Fourth of July. She stood at the kitchen counter with flour on her hands and the butter cold from the freezer and the recipe in her head where it had always been. She thought about Hazel in the Kroger parking lot in 1968, eating a store pie with her fingers because she couldn’t make one. She thought about the woman on the cooking show on October third, with vodka in her crust. She’d thought the vodka was a gimmick, and had meant to try it at Thanksgiving.

She didn’t use vodka. She used ice water, the way her mother had, and her mother’s mother. Apple, because it was the only fruit in the house. She crimped the edge with her thumb and first finger all the way around, the way she’d crimped four hundred pie edges in her life, and her hands did it without her.

Tessa came and sat at the island and watched.

“Can I do the lattice,” Tessa said.

Jo looked at her. Tessa had never once asked to help with a pie. That had always been Eli. Eli with his big clumsy hands weaving the strips, and the lattice coming out crooked every single time, and him saying it’s rustic, Mom, it’s supposed to look like that.

“Yes,” Jo said.

Tessa’s lattice came out crooked.

“It’s rustic,” Tessa said, and then stopped, and looked at Jo with her eyes suddenly wide. Jo understood that she hadn’t known she was going to say it. That it had just come out of her in his voice.

“It’s supposed to look like that,” Jo said.

They put it in the oven.

---

On Thursday after work she made chicken and rice.

She had not made chicken and rice since before. She’d made it for the Kitchen Crew probably two hundred times in fourteen years. It was the thing the Crew brought first, always, to every family, the Tuesday or Wednesday after, because it was soft and plain and warm, and you could eat it when you couldn’t eat anything. It wasn’t fancy. It was chicken and rice and cream of mushroom soup and a little onion and some cheese on top. It was the first thing she’d taught every new Crew volunteer. You bring this first. You don’t bring the fancy thing first. You bring the thing a person can eat when their mouth doesn’t work.

She made it in the red Dutch oven. Then she went out to the garage and opened the chest freezer.

The dishes were still there. Fewer now. She and Wes and Tessa had been eating through them since February, a few a week, and she’d been peeling the labels as they went. She didn’t peel them all at once. It had to be one at a time, when she was ready, with each one’s words in her hand before it went in the trash. At least you had eighteen years. Gone. He’s in a better place. Gone. We’re believing God is going to use this, from Tyler and the youth group. That one had taken her the longest. She’d held it for a whole evening before she peeled it. Gone.

There were four left, in the back.

She moved the sloppy joe mix, still labeled Men’s Breakfast with nothing underneath. She’d never written anything under that one. The men had just shown up with it in the driveway, in a cooler, and hadn’t said a word. Behind it, where she’d put it in October, was the white Pyrex with the blue cornflower pattern and the glass lid.

Chicken & rice — Lisa Holland (via Brenda).

Nothing underneath. Lisa hadn’t said anything. Lisa hadn’t come.

Jo lifted it out. It was heavy with frost. She turned it over and found the chip on the underside of the rim, near the handle, from the Fourth of July when the boys were nine.

She carried it inside. She ran warm water in the sink and set the frozen dish in it to loosen. When the block of frozen casserole slid free, she looked at it for a long moment. Then she put it in a freezer bag and put it back in the chest freezer, and she wrote on the bag, Lisa’s chicken & rice. Oct. She would eat it. Not yet. She’d know when.

She washed the Pyrex. She dried it. She held it up to the kitchen light and looked through the blue flowers.

Then she set it on the counter and left it there, empty and clean.

---

She took the red Dutch oven to Hazel’s, wrapped in two dish towels, with the pie on top in a carrier.

Hazel was on the green davenport with her left arm in a cast from knuckles to elbow, propped on a pillow. The Buick was parked beside her. Carl’s nephew let Jo in, a big soft man named Darrell with gout in both feet, and then went out on the porch to smoke. He said Aunt Hazel had been impossible all week and it was Jo’s turn.

“You made it,” Hazel said. She was looking at the pie carrier.

“I made it.”

“Let me see.”

Jo took the lid off. Hazel leaned forward and looked at the crooked lattice.

“Who did that lattice?”

“Tessa.”

Hazel’s mouth moved. “Well,” she said. “It’s rustic.”

Jo sat down in the rocking chair with the cushion tied on. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d tried.

She fed Hazel chicken and rice on the davenport, because Hazel couldn’t manage a fork and a plate with one hand. Hazel let her do it without complaint, which told Jo how much the wrist hurt. It was strange and intimate, feeding an old woman with a spoon. Jo had done it for her own mother at the end. She hadn’t done it since.

“This is good,” Hazel said, after the third bite. “This is very good.”

“It’s just chicken and rice.”

“I know what it is. June used to make it. For the Crew, when it was hers.” Hazel chewed. “Hers was better. She used real cream. I never told her.”

Jo fed her another bite.

“Nate said a thing,” Hazel said. “Sunday. Palm Sunday. You weren’t there.”

“I heard.”

“You heard from Brenda. Brenda doesn’t know how to tell a thing.” Hazel swallowed. “He got up after the palms. Before the sermon. And he said he had something to confess to the church. And he stood up there with no notes and said, In October, the Sunday after Eli Pruitt’s funeral, I did something to the Pruitt family in this room that I should never have done. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’m not going to explain it.” Hazel looked at Jo. “And then he stopped. He didn’t say but. He just stood there. And then he said, We’re going to sing now, and Carolyn played ‘Just As I Am,’ and nobody came forward, and nobody clapped. We just sang it. All four verses. And then he preached on the donkey.”

Jo sat in the rocking chair with the spoon in her hand.

“All four verses,” she said.

“All four. I haven’t heard all four since 1971.” Hazel held out her good hand for the spoon. “I’ll do the rest myself. You’ll put me to sleep.”

---

“I went to see June,” Hazel said later, when the chicken and rice was half gone and the pie was cut, two thick slices, on the saucers with the gold rims.

Jo looked up.

“Before I fell. The Saturday after the courthouse. Darrell drove me.” Hazel was looking at the console TV that didn’t work. “I took her flowers. Carnations. Pink ones, from the Kroger. She’d have hated them. She was a rose woman.” Hazel’s mouth moved. “First time in fifty-eight years I took her flowers. I put them on the stone. And I stood there, and I told her.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her I stayed.” Hazel’s pale eyes were wet. “That’s all. I didn’t make a speech. I’m too old for speeches. I said, June, you told me to go home and I stayed. I’m sorry I made you carry it.” She sniffed. “It didn’t do a thing. She’s dead. She’s been dead seventeen years. It didn’t fix one blessed thing.”

“No.”

“But I said it.” Hazel picked up her fork with her good hand and cut into the pie. “Out loud. To her face, more or less. Pink granite. And I came home and slept all night for the first time since Ruthie. Isn’t that something? Fifty-eight years.” She took a bite of pie. She chewed it slowly. “This is a very good pie.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. It’s better than June’s.” Hazel put the fork down. “Don’t you ever tell anybody I said that.”

---

The school assembly was the next Thursday, the ninth, at one o’clock in the Ashby High School gym.

Jo would not remember much of it, afterward. She remembered the bleachers full of teenagers. The smell of floor wax and gym mats. The principal, Mr. Hartley, introducing her. A state trooper who spoke before her. The Chillicothe TV camera on its tripod by the scorer’s table. She remembered walking out to the microphone at center court. It had a microphone stand and nothing else, no lectern. She stood there with no index cards. She had decided in the car not to bring any.

She remembered telling them about Eli. The refrigerator. The water tower. She remembered the three seconds. Count it with me. She remembered the gym going quiet in that particular way, four hundred teenagers deciding at the same moment to listen.

And she remembered telling them the rest. The text. Caleb, it’s Jo. The hospital restroom. Delete. The four months. The girlfriend who wasn’t. She’d told it in court two weeks ago, and it was already in the Ledger. Half of them already knew. She told it anyway, all of it, standing on the center-court logo with four hundred kids looking at her.

“I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me,” she said. “I’m telling you because every one of you has a mother, or somebody like one, who texts you. Who texts you at eleven-forty at night because you’re late. And every one of you has a phone that lights up in a cupholder. I want you to think about both ends of that. I want you to put it in your glove box when you start the car. And I want you to tell your mothers —“ Her voice caught. She let it. “Tell them what I didn’t know to think about. Tell them to call. If you don’t answer, you’re driving. Tell them to wait.”

She didn’t remember much after that. There was applause, but it was different. It wasn’t a wave. It was the ragged, uneven clapping of teenagers who aren’t sure they’re supposed to. It died out on its own. Nobody stood up. She was glad.

On her way out, a boy caught her by the gym doors. Sixteen, thick neck, cauliflower ear. The wrestler from Ashby Family Dental in January.

“I put it in the glove box,” he said. “Every time. Since you said. My mom checks.”

“Good,” Jo said.

He nodded, embarrassed, and went back to his class.

---

The envelope came on Friday.

It was in the mailbox with the electric bill and a seed catalog and a postcard from the dentist in Lancaster reminding Tessa she was due for her six-month visit! She’d switched practices, because Paula had cried at her cleaning. It was a thick envelope, the cheap white kind, and it had been opened and taped shut again. In the corner was a stamp that said LORIMER COUNTY JAIL — INMATE CORRESPONDENCE in purple ink. The handwriting on the front she’d known since he was six, when he started signing his own name on his birthday cards to Eli in huge crooked capitals.

She stood at the mailbox at the end of the driveway holding it.

She didn’t open it there. She carried it inside. She put it on the kitchen table and looked at it. Then she went and got Wes from the garage, and Tessa from her room. The three of them sat down at the kitchen table, with the envelope in the middle and the red Dutch oven on the stove and the card on the backsplash, face out.

“Do you want me to read it?” Wes said.

“No,” Jo said. “I will.”

She opened it. Fourteen pages of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds, written in pencil that had been sharpened on something rough. She could see where the lead had skipped. She unfolded them and flattened them on the table with both hands.

She read it out loud.

She read about the letterman jacket and no real coat. She read about Tanner’s dad’s pallets, and the freshmen on the far side of the fire, and the bag of marshmallows. Patience, grasshopper. Wes laughed, one wet sound, at that. He’d said it to Eli a thousand times when he was teaching him to fish. She read about the raw hot dog and the half a bag of Josh Wilkes’s Doritos. Tessa laughed at that, and then put her face in her hands. She read about the guitar, and the made-up country songs, and the old church song about flying away, and everybody singing it, even the guys who never went to church. She read about the hay bale and the marshmallow stick. Dude, this is the best night.

She read about the car. The loose radio knob. Eli with his long legs up on the dash, singing.

She didn’t have to read about the tree. He hadn’t written it.

She got to page thirteen.

The phone lit up in the cupholder. It said Mrs. P. Eli leaned over and saw it. His face was green from the screen. He laughed. He said, “Oh no, is that my mom?” And then he laughed again and said, “Tell her one of these nights.”

I don’t know what that means. I’ve tried to figure it out. I thought maybe it was a song. I thought you might know.

Jo stopped reading.

She sat at the kitchen table with page thirteen flat under her hands. She couldn’t see it anymore.

One of these nights. He would come through the door at 11:41 or 11:44, all loose-limbed and apologetic, smelling like woodsmoke. He’d kiss the top of her head on his way to the refrigerator. She would say one of these nights. He would say one of these nights. They’d been saying it for a year. It was a whole conversation.

He’d leaned over in the car on Kessler Road and seen her name on Caleb’s phone, and laughed. And the last thing her son ever said in this world was the other half of their joke. He’d sent it back to her. Five minutes from home. Tell her one of these nights.

He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t hurt. He didn’t know. He was laughing. He was thinking about her, and he was laughing.

She put her head down on the kitchen table on top of the fourteen pages. Wes’s hand came down on her back. Then Tessa’s, beside it. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t ask her what it meant. They both knew. They’d both heard it, a hundred Friday nights, through the kitchen door.

---

Later, much later, after supper, after Tessa had gone to her room and Wes had gone out to the garage, Jo sat at the kitchen table with a pen and a sheet of paper from the legal pad.

She wrote:

Caleb —

It was ours. His and mine. When he came home late I’d say “one of these nights,” and he’d say it back. For a year. It meant I’m mad but I’m glad you’re home. It meant you’re going to be the death of me. It meant I love you.

He was answering me. He was laughing.

Thank you for keeping it.

— Jo

She read it over once. She didn’t change anything. She folded it and put it in an envelope and addressed it to the Lorimer County Jail, the way Renee had shown her. She put a stamp on it. She put it on the counter by the door, next to her keys and next to the white Pyrex with the blue cornflowers, which was still sitting there, washed and dry and empty, where she’d left it the night before.

Then she went out to the garage.

Wes was sitting in Eli’s truck with the door open and the radio on, not the engine. The farm report wasn’t on at night. It was a Reds game, early in the season, from Cincinnati. She stood in the doorway and listened to the announcer call a ground ball to short.

“Two left,” Wes said, nodding at the chest freezer.

She went and opened it. In the back, in the corner, two dishes. She took them out and looked at them.

Sloppy joe mix (2 qt.) — Men’s Breakfast. Nothing under it. She peeled it anyway, because it was time.

And Taco bake — Tyler Beck & the youth group. No. She’d done that one. She looked again. It wasn’t Tyler’s. It was one she’d forgotten. The label was faded almost to nothing under the frost. She scraped the frost off with her thumbnail.

Broccoli cheese casserole — Hazel Ormond. And underneath, in smaller letters, pressed hard, her own October handwriting:

(didn’t say anything)

Jo stood in the garage holding it. She didn’t remember Hazel bringing it. She must have, the week of the funeral. She must have come up the driveway with the Buick and left it on the porch without knocking, and gone away.

She peeled the label off in one long strip. She didn’t throw it away. She folded it in half, sticky side in, and put it in the pocket of her cardigan to keep.

30Reach Hither Thy Finger

Easter came on the fifth of April that year. The Pruitts didn’t go.

Nobody asked them to. Nate didn’t call. Brenda didn’t call. The Kitchen Crew had its Easter ham list, and the Pruitts weren’t on it, on either side. It had been Hazel who said it, on the davenport, with her cast propped on a pillow and a forkful of Jo’s apple pie. Easter’s for the ones who are ready. Don’t let them rush you into Easter. The Sunday after is for the rest of us.

“Is that in the Bible?” Jo had said.

“Not in so many words.” Hazel chewed. “But it’s in there.”

---

On the twelfth of April, the Sunday after, Jo got up at six-thirty and made coffee in the kitchen with the red pot on the back burner and the card on the backsplash, face out. She stood at the window and drank it and watched the light come up over the yard. There was no sign by the mailbox. There was a square of bare dirt where it had been, going green at the edges now.

Wes came in at seven in his gray suit. The funeral suit. He owned one. He stood in the kitchen doorway and rubbed his thumb along the frame.

“You sure?” he said.

“No.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

Tessa came down the hall at seven-forty in a dress Jo had never seen, blue, with small white flowers on it. It fit. She must have bought it herself, somewhere, with the gift cards from Christmas. She stood in the kitchen doorway beside her father and looked at Jo.

“I’m going,” Tessa said. “In case anybody was going to ask.”

“Nobody was going to ask,” said Jo.

“Well.” Tessa lifted her chin. “In case.”

---

They took Kessler Road.

Jo drove. She’d said she would. She got in the Camry and put her phone in the glove box and shut it before she started the car. She’d done it every time since the school assembly. She was surprised how much it felt like something. It was a small click. A door shutting on something small.

Wes was in the passenger seat. Tessa was in the back.

At the fairgrounds Jo turned left onto Kessler instead of going straight on Route 9. Wes looked at her. She kept her eyes on the road. It went up out of town past the Petersons’ farm and along the ridge. In daylight, in April, it was a different road. The woods were coming green, that first bright almost-yellow green. The redbuds were out along the fence lines, and there were wild phlox in the ditches, and the Yoders’ pasture was full of new calves lying in the sun.

She drove thirty-five. She kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two.

The yellow sign. 40 MPH. The curve.

She slowed down and pulled off onto the gravel of the Yoders’ field entrance and stopped. She turned off the car. The three of them sat there.

The white oak stood on the outside of the curve, enormous, coming into leaf. The long pale gash in the bark on the road side had begun to darken at the edges. It was already starting to close. It would never close all the way. She’d asked Wes, who knew trees a little. He said the bark would roll in over the edges for years and leave a scar, and the tree would grow around it, and the scar would get bigger as the tree got bigger. But the tree would live.

The white cross was still at its foot. Somebody had cleared away the dead winter flowers and put fresh ones, daffodils in a mason jar. The Reds caps were gone, taken by the weather. The laminated photograph of Eli in his catcher’s gear was faded almost white, zip-tied to the upright.

On the crossbeam, on its leather string, hung the small wooden camp cross. Two flat sticks, glued, burned with a wood-burning pen.

Jo got out of the car.

She walked across the gravel to the cross. She hadn’t been close to it. At Christmas she had stood by the open door of the car ten feet away, in the headlights. She stood beside it now in her church shoes in the April grass, and she reached out and took the little camp cross in her fingers and turned it over.

CALEB, it said, burned into the wood in crooked eleven-year-old capitals. And under it, smaller: WILDWOOD 2019.

It was the same as Eli’s. Exactly the same. Eli’s hung from the rearview mirror of Wes’s work truck, where it had hung since the week after the funeral. Wes had never said a word about it and she had never asked.

She held Caleb’s in her fingers for a long moment. Then she let it go, and it swung a little on its string, and hung still.

She didn’t take it down. It wasn’t hers to take down.

---

They walked into Cedar Run Baptist Church at 10:52.

She’d known the room would hush, and it did. But it was different from October. She couldn’t have said how at first. People turned in the pews, and saw who it was, and she watched their faces go through their small fast adjustments, looking for the right key. But nobody got up. Nobody came across the carpet with their arms open. Nobody said oh, honey. Brenda Tully half rose out of her pew by the piano, and Jo saw Ron Tully put his hand on her arm, gently, and Brenda sat back down. Nell Frye looked at Jo across three pews with her eyes full, and nodded once, and turned back around.

They were letting her come in.

It was the strangest thing. It was the kindest thing. They were letting her walk down the aisle to her own pew in her own church like a person, not like a story. She understood later that somebody had told them to, and understood later still that it had been Hazel. Hazel had sat in the fellowship hall after Wednesday night supper with her cast on and told the women’s circle, in a voice that carried: When Joanna Pruitt comes back, and she will, you leave that woman be. You let her sit down. You hug her in June.

She sat down in the third pew from the front on the left side. Second from the aisle, where she’d always sat. Wes beside her.

Tessa stood in the aisle a moment. Then she stepped past both of them and sat down on the end. On the aisle. Where he had sat, with his long legs out.

Jo looked at her. Tessa looked straight ahead at the baptistry and the wooden cross Eli and Wes had rehung. Her chin was up. Her hands were folded in her lap on her blue dress with the small white flowers.

Across the aisle, in the third pew on the right, Hazel Ormond sat with her cast in a blue sling, reading her bulletin. She looked up over her glasses at Jo with that long, flat look. Then she looked at Tessa on the aisle. Something moved in her old face. She went back to her bulletin.

Behind Jo, two rows back, somebody sat down. She knew who it was without turning around. She knew the weight of her on a pew. She’d known it for twenty years. She felt the old strap between her shoulder blades start to cinch tight, out of habit, the way a hand closes on a banister. Then, slowly, on its own, it didn’t.

She didn’t turn around. Not yet.

---

They sang “Be Still, My Soul.” Carolyn played it slower than usual, the way she played it at funerals. Jo held the hymnal open and didn’t sing the first verse. She listened. Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side. On the second verse she found that she was singing, very quietly, under her breath. She hadn’t decided to. Her mouth was just doing it.

On her right, on the aisle, Tessa was singing too.

She was singing loud. Not as loud as Eli. Nobody would ever be as loud as Eli. And not flat, because Tessa had perfect pitch and a clarinet player’s breath and had never sung flat in her life. But loud. Louder than a fourteen-year-old girl sings in church when she’s worried about who’s looking. She stood on the aisle in her new blue dress with her chin up and sang every word as if the church had hired her to.

Jo stopped singing and listened to her daughter. Wes did too. Jo felt him go still beside her. The two of them stood there with their hymnals open and listened to Tessa sing on the aisle. Across the aisle, Hazel had stopped singing. So had Nell Frye. And two rows back, Jo heard the voice she’d been hearing behind her on that pew for twenty years falter on a word and go quiet.

Tessa didn’t look at any of them. She sang to the end.

---

Nate preached on John twenty.

He stood behind the pulpit and read from the old pew Bible, slowly, the way he’d read First Thessalonians in October. He read about the disciples in the locked room on the evening of the first day, and Jesus coming and standing in the midst, and showing them His hands and His side. He read about Thomas, who wasn’t there, and who said he wouldn’t believe it. Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And he read the next part, eight days later, the Sunday after. The disciples in the room again, and Thomas with them this time.

“Then saith he to Thomas,” Nate read, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.”

He closed the Bible.

He didn’t preach long. Jo would remember that. Maybe fifteen minutes. He didn’t wander the stage with the wireless mic. He stood there behind the pulpit with both hands on it.

“We usually preach this as a story about doubt,” he said. “Doubting Thomas. Don’t be like Thomas. And I’ve preached it that way. More than once.” He paused. “But I want to point out something I never noticed until this year. Something I think I didn’t want to notice.”

He looked out at them.

“He still had the wounds,” Nate said. “After. Jesus. Risen, glorified, resurrected. Death beaten. The best thing that ever happened in the history of the world. And when He came back into that room, the nail prints were still in His hands. The hole was still in His side. God raised Him from the dead and did not take the wounds away.” He was quiet a moment. “I’d always sort of thought resurrection meant everything was fixed. Put back the way it was. Clean. Like it never happened.” He shook his head slowly. “It didn’t happen that way. Not even for Him. The wounds came through to the other side. And He held them out. Here. Put your finger here. Touch it. It happened. It’s real. And I’m alive.”

The sanctuary was very quiet.

“This church got in a hurry this year,” Nate said. “I did. I got in a hurry to get to Easter. I wanted us to skip from the Friday to the Sunday and go straight to the good part. I wanted the wounds to be gone already.” He didn’t look at the third pew on the left. He didn’t have to. “And I was wrong.” He looked down at the closed Bible. “Thomas got eight days. The Sunday after. Nobody hurried him. And when he finally came into that room, Jesus didn’t scold him. He held out His hands.”

He stopped. He didn’t make it into three points, and he didn’t explain it a second time.

“Let’s pray,” he said.

---

They sang “Just As I Am” at the invitation. All four verses.

Nobody came forward. Nobody clapped. Carolyn played it through, and they sang it, and at the end Nate gave the benediction. Then he said, the way he always did, Before you go, turn around and greet somebody near you. The sanctuary broke into its small ordinary Sunday noise. Hands and hellos and people turning in their pews.

Jo turned around.

Lisa was two rows back, on the end, in her good gray suit. Rob was beside her. Maddie was beside Rob, small and dark-haired, with her eyes going back and forth between them all. Lisa had half stood up and then stopped, uncertain, with her hand on the back of the pew in front of her.

Jo looked at her.

She didn’t go back two rows. She didn’t know yet if she could. She reached back over the pew between them, the Fryes’ pew, empty now, the Fryes gone up to talk to Nate. She held out her hand.

Lisa looked at it. Then she reached forward over the empty pew and took it.

They didn’t hug. They didn’t say anything. They stood there two pews apart in the middle of the Sunday noise and held hands across the back of the Fryes’ pew for about three seconds. Then Lisa squeezed, once, hard, and let go. Jo let go.

“Maddie’s birthday’s today,” Lisa said. “She’s fourteen. We’re doing cake at four. Just us. If Tessa wants to come.”

“She’ll want to,” Jo said.

---

Out in the gravel lot, Brenda caught her by the car.

“Oh, Jo,” Brenda said. She had both hands clasped in front of her. Her eyes were shining. She’d held herself back all through the service, and it had cost her. “Oh, it is so good to have you back. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s just like old times. It’s like none of it ever even happened!”

Jo looked at her.

In October she would have said something. She’d have had the Sharpie in her hand. She’d have written it on a strip of blue tape, pressing hard, and stuck it on a lid.

“It did happen, Brenda,” she said.

Brenda’s face fell a little.

“But it’s good to see you,” Jo said. And she meant it. She was surprised to find how much she meant it. “Thank you for running the Crew. I checked the spreadsheet. Eleven families. You went and got the Kimbroughs’ pans three times.”

Brenda stared at her. Then her face crumpled all at once and she threw her arms around Jo in the gravel lot. Jo let her. She even put her own arms around Brenda, after a second, and patted her back.

Across the lot, by the Fryes’ Buick, Hazel was watching from beside the real Buick, with her cast in its sling. She caught Jo’s eye over Brenda’s shoulder, and snorted, and turned away.

---

At four o’clock Jo drove Tessa to Pine Street.

The white Pyrex with the blue cornflowers was on the passenger seat, full. Chicken and rice, still warm, with the glass lid on and a dish towel around it. She’d made it after church in the red Dutch oven and spooned it into Lisa’s dish. She didn’t put any tape on it. There wasn’t anything to label. Everybody knew whose dish it was.

Tessa had a present in her lap wrapped in paper with frogs on it.

The Hollands’ garage door was blue now. New paint, a deep blue, two coats and a third. Rob had done it the weekend after the sentencing, Tessa said. You couldn’t see anything under it. You could only see it if you knew.

Jo pulled into the driveway, all the way in, not the cul-de-sac. Tessa got out with the frog present and ran up to the front door. It opened before she got there, and Maddie came out and grabbed her, and the two of them went inside shrieking about something.

Jo sat in the car with the dish in her lap.

The front door opened again, and Lisa came out onto the step, in jeans and the blue fleece with the bleach spot on the cuff. She stood there looking at the car.

Jo got out. She carried the Pyrex up the driveway in both hands, the way she’d carried two hundred dishes up two hundred driveways. She stopped at the bottom of the front steps and held it out.

Lisa looked at it for a long time. The white dish with the blue flowers. The chip on the underside of the rim near the handle, from the Fourth of July when the boys were nine, going after the same Popsicle.

She came down the steps and took it. It was warm. She held it against her stomach with both hands.

“You return the pan,” Jo said.

Lisa made a sound, half a laugh, half not.

“You want to come in?” she said. “There’s cake. It’s from the Kroger. I didn’t have it in me.”

Jo looked past her at the open front door, the hallway. She knew that hallway. She knew where the key was hidden, in the fake rock by the downspout, and which step on the back deck was soft. Upstairs, on the left, was a bedroom whose window she’d looked up at from the cul-de-sac in November, feeling something hard and bright, like a coin. The room was empty now. It would be empty till the end of June.

“Not today,” she said.

Lisa nodded. She didn’t look hurt. She looked like someone who’d expected it.

“Next time, maybe,” Lisa said.

“Maybe next time.”

They stood there. Inside, the girls were laughing about something, high and loud, and the sound came out the open door into the driveway.

“He called yesterday,” Lisa said. “From the jail. He said he mailed you something.” She held the dish. “He was scared you wouldn’t want it. He said he wasn’t sure he got it right.”

“It came,” Jo said. “He got it right.” She had to stop. “I wrote him back. It goes out tomorrow. Tell him — just tell him it’s coming.”

Lisa nodded. She didn’t ask what was in it. She didn’t need to.

“Four-thirty?” Lisa said. “For Tessa?”

“Six,” Jo said. “Let them have it.”

---

She drove home the short way.

Kessler Road. Up out of town past the Petersons’ farm and along the ridge, with the phone in the glove box and the evening light coming slantwise through the new leaves. She drove thirty-five, both hands on the wheel. The redbuds were almost glowing in that light, purple against the green. The Yoders’ calves were up and wobbling around in the pasture.

The yellow sign. The curve.

She didn’t stop this time. She slowed, and took it at thirty. She kept her eyes on the road. She didn’t look at the white oak, or the white cross, or the small wooden one hanging from the crossbeam on its leather string, turning a little in the wind. She knew they were there. She kept her eyes on the road all the way around the bend, the whole curve, until it straightened out on the other side and the woods opened up and she could see down the ridge toward home.

She came down Maple Ridge Road at ten till five.

Wes was on the front porch. He was sitting on the top step in his shirtsleeves with a cup of coffee, the way she’d been sitting the day Lisa came. The Reds game was on the radio behind him in the open door, a man’s voice counting balls and strikes. He watched her pull into the driveway and turn off the engine and get out.

She came up the walk. He looked at his watch, and then up at her.

“You’re late,” he said.

She wasn’t. She had said she’d be home by five. It was ten till. He knew it. She knew he knew it. He looked up at her from the porch step with the coffee in his hand, and his face was doing something small and careful and brave. It was almost a smile. He was waiting to see if she’d let him.

Jo stood at the bottom of the steps. The evening was warm. The yard smelled like cut grass from somebody’s first mowing of the year. There was a square of bare dirt by the mailbox going green at the edges, and a truck in the garage that got started every Saturday at eight. Down the hall there was a door that didn’t get closed anymore. And across town, in a blue split-level with a new blue garage door, a clean white dish with a chip on its rim was sitting on somebody else’s counter where it belonged.

“One of these nights,” she said.

She sat down on the step beside him, and he handed her the coffee.

END