Chapter 10: Cool Off

"Takes them where?" I said. "Mom, takes them where?"

She let go of my wrist.

Her face had gone the color of the courthouse steps.

"You heard the judge," she said, louder, for the people around us. "Go home and rest."

Daddy came down the steps and put his arm around her, and she let him walk her to the mail truck.

She didn't look back.

By noon the county attorney had dropped the theft complaint.

That evening I drove to their house with a pound cake from the Piggly Wiggly as a peace offering.

The front door was locked.

I knocked, and the porch light came on, and nobody opened the door.

Daddy came around the side of the house from the garden in his undershirt.

"She's lying down," he said. "Sugar, she cried all afternoon."

"She signed papers to have me locked up."

"I know it." He took the pound cake from me and held it against his chest. "She said she'll talk to you when you quit."

"Quit what, Daddy?"

He looked at the dark window of the sewing room.

"That judge's phone," he said quietly. "I saw it."

"I know you did."

"I don't know what I saw." He rubbed his face. "But I saw it."

He hugged me with the pound cake between us.

"I set three plates every morning," he said into my hair. "And every morning I don't know why it looks wrong."

I drove out to the river road with my eyes stinging.

Jesse was sitting on his porch steps in the dark with two beers.

He handed me one and I sat down next to him.

The frogs were loud down by the water.

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