Chapter 12: Christmas Eve in June

I crossed the yard at ten o'clock that night in my socks, and I didn't care who saw.

The bunkhouse is a one-room cabin that Grandpa built for the hired man in 1971.

It has a tin roof, a woodstove, and a single window facing the house.

The window was lit.

I knocked.

"It's open," Colby said, and then, a second later, "Casey?"

I opened the door.

He was sitting on the edge of an iron cot with a seed catalog in his lap and his boots lined up by the door.

The cot was made with the corners tucked tight.

"Hospital corners," I said.

"My mother."

"You're thirty-three."

"My mother."

I sat down on the one chair, with my arms wrapped around myself.

"Ginny told me Grandpa wrote that clause because he didn't think I'd last the year."

He put the catalog down and waited.

"She said he told her so at Easter. On the swing."

"Did you believe her?"

"I don't know what I believe. I've known for eight weeks that he never told me about any of this, and she did."

"She didn't."

"She says."

"Casey, I wasn't at Easter," Colby said. "I don't know what he told Ginny. I know what he told me on the eighteenth of April."

"The last Thursday."

"The last good one."

I waited.

"We were on the third hand," he said.

"He put down the cards and said, 'She's going to be mad at me for a month.'"

"I said, 'Who?' He said, 'Casey. When I'm gone.'"

My throat closed.

"Then he said, 'She's the only one of them who'll last.'"

"He said it three times in a row, and then again as we were finishing."

"It's the only time I ever heard Walt repeat himself."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"I don't know what Ginny heard," Colby said. "I know what I heard. And I'd put my hand on a Bible."