12

The thing is, Josie actually liked her in-laws. When she explained the dynamics of her husband’s family to friends back home, they would laugh at her descriptions of the Kerr Compound, and at what was, to them, an antiquated notion of family as a unit formed by God that shalt never be broken up.

“You know it sounds just like a cult,” her coworker Francesca told her over lunch, just a week before the move. “A bunch of houses filled with people who believe the same things, separated from the rest of society and unwilling to open themselves up to outsiders?” Francesca had always been the kind of person who would make cynical declarations as an attempt to project confidence and intelligence and a sophisticated sense of humor, and so, in fact, had Josie. But from the moment they decided to leave New York behind, she grew woefully tired of what she believed to be an affect unique to her hometown. Even when you’re sitting across from a friend who may be leaving you for good, someone who doesn’t want commentary, just a friendly ear and quiet companionship, you’re playing for the cheap seats. For what felt like the first time in her adult life, she actually listened to what she said to people. And not only that, she also listened to how she said it. Had she always been a pessimist who treated every conversation like open-mic night and ate twenty-dollar salads for lunch without the slightest hint of enjoyment? All it took was one foot stepping beyond the five boroughs for her to realize how excited she was to escape them entirely.

Josie laughed before explaining, “Well, that’s not really the case, is it? I mean, they let me in.”

Francesca dipped a forkful of kale into a small tub of blue cheese dressing and took a bite. “Yeah, but you had to marry him for that to happen,” she said, showing off the pulverized greens as she made her case. “You literally had to sign a legally binding agreement to be taken seriously.”

“I shouldn’t have described it that way then, because it’s not really as strange as it sounds. I just don’t want to, you know, begin my time there so far outside of town. If I lived at the Compound, I’d be even more of an outsider. But I don’t think I’d have any real problem living close to them. It’s a twelve-minute drive, and there’s never traffic. And the best part? Free childcare! Faye is so lonely now that Leonard passed.”

“I get that,” Francesca said. “But when you live on a literal compound, are you ever alone?”

Josie didn’t know why she bothered telling any of her New York friends about her soon-to-be life in Texas. Her excitement for it required a nuance they were all too stubborn to understand. And Josie sympathized; she’d been on the other side of the conversation countless times before, playing the role of a friend who was expected to provide the perfect balance of genuine support and playful contrarianism. It was the sort of well-practiced attitude required of young coastal professionals when one of their own jumps ship for a place with no direct flights out of LaGuardia.

Josie knew her husband came from good stock, but the Kerrs exceeded every expectation she had for how welcoming and kind a family could be. Knowing how much the stresses of teaching would make her treasure her weekends, Faye had suggested moving their traditional big Sunday-night dinners to Wednesday night, hoping they would provide Josie a midweek reprieve, one that would be more emotionally helpful than a time-consuming Sunday-afternoon affair.

They’d kindly begun the Wednesday dinners the week of Josie and Travis’s arrival, saying there was no use getting them hooked on one routine only to throw a wrench into the whole thing two months later once the school year began. And those early weeks had been lovely, but this Wednesday was the first dinner of the school year, and Josie was surprised to find herself so looking forward to it as the clock ticked toward four-thirty in her classroom.

Fortunately, Mary Alice’s stunt earlier that week hadn’t made too much of an impact. No student was behaving more or less disrespectfully than she expected them to, and the lesson plan she’d created over the summer was proving to be well-paced for all of them. There would always be outliers who needed more or less of her help—that was part of the job and always would be. But, she thought, while putting her folders into her locking desk drawer at the end of the day, her worry had been all for naught. Mary Alice’s interruption was sure enough old news by Tuesday when Greg McAllan called Josie “Mom.”

Every aspect of the job was quieter than it had been in New York, and the small classes afforded her the opportunity to give every student the amount of attention she believed they deserved. Three days in, and she knew she’d made the right decision. Three days in, and she could picture herself five, ten, even twenty years from now, and that picture didn’t make her recoil in shame. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but part of her was even looking forward to it.

As she twisted the key on her drawer, she heard a knock on the doorframe. “Mrs. Kerr,” said a voice, whom Josie soon saw belonged to Amy Huntz. “I have a question.”

“Come on in,” she said with a pronounced, shoveling wave.

Amy sat down and clutched the front of the desk. She was small for her age, not more than four and a half feet tall, but had the sullen face of someone twice as old. Her eyes were big and brown and alert, and typically focused on some invisible thing on the ground to her right.

“What’s up?” Josie sat back down so that she didn’t appear rushed.

“Um,” Amy said, keeping her gaze on the bottom corner of Josie’s desk, a sturdy metal thing that was at least forty years old. “I let Jason borrow a pencil earlier and then I lost mine and I was wondering if I could borrow one to take home tonight. I think I’m . . . I think I’m out.” A pause. “I’d bring it back, duh.”

Josie nodded. “Yeah, you know what, I think I’ve got one right here.” She picked up the cup on her desk, which was overflowing with a firework of pens and pencils and markers of all colors and sizes, and held it out toward Amy. “Take your pick.”

Amy’s eyes widened as they turned to the cup. “I only need one, just because I’m out, and I need to do the homework.”

“Well, why don’t you take a pencil and a pen just in case. Never know when you’ll need an eraser.”

“Sure. Good idea.”

Amy chose a slim yellow pencil and a plain black Bic, the humblest instruments in the cup. Josie saw her thinking, and tried not to react to the pulsing ache deep inside her chest. “All good?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Mrs. Kerr.”

“You’re very welcome. You good on the homework tonight? Everything making sense so far?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Kerr. I get math.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, English is tough this year, though.”

“Really? What’ve you been reading so far?”

“I gotta go, actually.” She stood up and unzipped the front pocket of her backpack, an old maroon Jansport that had seen its share of brief youthful obsessions, drawn on, then removed or drawn over. Patches covering patches. A safety pin holding the cup holder to the side. “I’m going to bring them back, though. The pen and the pencil.”

“I trust you. But if you need them longer, just let me know.”

“I won’t.” She flung the backpack on her shoulders and clutched the straps with her thumbs.

“OK then! See you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Mrs. Kerr.”

Once she was out the door, Josie took a deep breath and forced a smile for the empty seats—a trick she learned at her first job teaching fifth graders in Manhattan. She hated seeing a kid with the odds so clearly stacked against them. She hated knowing there was only so much she could do. But she also knew to avoid waterworks in front of the kids; she’d been told by her first vice principal. “The moment they see you cry, they’ll either join in or lose all respect for you,” she said. “And neither of those options will help your cause.”

One more breath and she locked up the room and strolled to the parking lot, where she learned that it took just eight hours for her car to be blanketed in bird shit. Ah, she thought, this is why no one has taken this spot all week. It was shaded, it was close to the entrance, and it was home to no fewer than seventy grackles for whom life consisted of little more than digestive target practice. But now she knew.

---

•   •   •

The nicest thing about Wednesday dinner at the Compound was that Josie and Travis didn’t have to plan a single aspect of the meal. All that was required of them was to show up by six-thirty. There was no pressure to bring wine or beer or a dessert, and Josie never felt a shred of guilt for showing up empty-handed. Surprisingly enough, this wasn’t one of those scenarios that would lead to years of building resentment, and some enormous meltdown a decade from now in which Josie would be branded as lazy or, worse, thoughtless. Faye just wanted to spend time with them, and thanks to young Henry, Wednesday dinner was as pure and expectation-free as an invitation could get. The love of a grandparent can be suffocating and irrational, formed without the torments of daily caretaking, but indisputable in its authenticity. And though Faye was currently acting as a sort of day care, taking care of him from 7:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., Henry was due to start school next fall and she saw the next nine months as the gift of a lifetime. To have Travis and Josie over for dinner once a week was the icing on the cake. But Faye’s happiness, though centered around Henry, was, in her eyes, thanks entirely to Josie’s sacrifice. That she agreed to leave her own family and bring that child to Billington made her immune from any criticism they could ever dole out, not that any had been festering in their pockets. To them, Josie was a hero. And that was something Josie was more than happy to let them believe.

The second nicest thing about Wednesday dinner at the Compound was that it gave Josie and Travis a rare hour or so of private time. There was no need to pick Henry up before dinner since he was already at his grandmother’s, which hadn’t crossed Josie’s mind until arriving home that day and feeling an instant calm once stepping inside the kitchen. No afternoon snack, no running around the coffee table, just Travis cracking open two Shiner Bocks in the kitchen.

“Home before me!”

“Been here for ten minutes,” he said. “But I waited for you.” He placed both beers in koozies and held one back for ransom: a chaste, closed-mouth kiss. Once satisfied, he handed a beer to Josie.

“Do you hear that?” Josie said, putting her free hand to her ear and stretching her neck toward the rest of the house.

“No . . .” Travis said.

“Exactly.”

“Good one. Real original.”

Josie smiled coyly and took a sip of her beer, then pulled it back to examine the koozie Travis had chosen. A brewery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they’d gone on one of their first dates.

“When do we have to leave?” she said.

Travis looked down at his wristwatch, a vintage silver piece owned by her paternal grandfather that she’d gotten restored for their first anniversary. Thinking it ostentatious, no man in his family—or even his life—had ever worn a Rolex; he didn’t wear it for weeks. Then, one day, she demanded he put it on before leaving the house. Just try it, she said. For one day. Do that for me. If you hate it, never wear it again. But the least you can do is try it. He did. And he wore it every day after that. It’s funny that their fights used to be about Rolexes. It’s funny that they ever had time to fight at all.

“I say, hmm, A.I.S. at six-thirteen?”

Travis proudly had several characteristics Josie referred to as his “country things.” Because she was from Manhattan, any version of life lived west of the Hudson River was baffling to her, but at least cities had movie theaters and record stores and even libraries. Travis’s childhood home was adjacent to a literal farm—not his family’s own, but still. He said “y’all” without irony. He clapped at the television when watching a game. He ordered domestic light beer when they went out to eat. And he said, “Thank you much”—not “so much,” just “much”—to anyone in the service industry. All these “country things” were genuinely charming, even cute, to anyone who encountered him. To Josie, they were also impossibly, and at times overwhelmingly, sexy.

Her therapist said it was simply due to the novelty of his personality and background, and that the charm would eventually wear off—she’d met all kinds of people from all kinds of places in New York City but had never become that close with someone who had no interest in assimilating. Travis was unlike any man she had ever been friends with, let alone dated. He thrived in the big city without pretending to be anything but a kid from the country. So many transplants tried to erase their past, whereas he wore his on his sleeve. And while she had been in public on the arms of plenty of handsome men in her time, none elicited the same response as entering a room alongside Travis Alan Kerr. He had the weathered good looks of someone who’d never been bullied in his life, the body of a baseball player who didn’t wear sunscreen, and the thick, weedlike stubble of someone whose face always believed it was five o’clock. And his smile! A woman once asked Josie if Travis was single while he was in the bathroom on their third date. A caterer flirted with Travis on their wedding day, just as they finished their first dance. In the moment, these things infuriated Josie. But when seen from some distance, as a group, they delighted her. Because they meant that she had won. She was the one he chose.

“A.I.S.,” though, was the first of his “country things” that had actually repulsed her. The first time he said it was just a few months prior, the night before their move. The first car either of them had ever owned in the city, bought in New Jersey a week before, was parked on their street, ready to drive them 1,900 miles to Texas. Their apartment was empty, save for a few stray kitchen essentials and their toiletries, and Travis wanted to leave as early as possible.

“So, seven o’clock?” Josie asked him as they ate what neither would admit was the last good pizza they’d have for the foreseeable future.

“A.I.S. at seven,” Travis said in a tone somewhere between condescending and demanding. Josie searched her brain for what this could possibly mean. Was there an appointment she’d forgotten about? Was the A.I.S. some kind of city department? When nothing seemed to make sense, she went ahead and asked.

“ ‘A.I.S.’?”

“Ass in Seat,” he said, pleased with himself and even more pleased by the bite of white pizza still in his mouth.

“Oh God,” Josie said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“We’ve never had a car before.”

She initially bristled at this new country thing, confused as to whatever could compel Travis to talk like that. But over time, as was generally the case, even the least refined elements of his character—or no, especially the least refined elements of his character—proved themselves to be inevitably sexy.

“A.I.S. at six-thirteen, you say,” she asked, holding her Shiner up for a toast, which he reciprocated with a satisfying clink. “What should we do in the meantime?”

“You mean besides finish our drinks?”

“I think those can wait.”

“You’re right,” Travis said, wedging both bottles between the fingers on a single hand, reminding her of his time as a part-time bartender when they first met. He set them on the bottom shelf of the fridge and lifted her up in a single, graceful semicircle of movement. And then she thought what she always thought in the seconds before they had sex: I can’t believe this is happening. She couldn’t! She really couldn’t. And she couldn’t tell anyone about how she couldn’t believe it, either, because, well, it would just sound like she was bragging. But that was only half true, because the disbelief had a tendency to obscure her enjoyment of the sex itself. This man, the sexiest man she’d ever laid eyes on, was about to fuck her. What could be less believable than that? And why was she questioning reality just before having sex?

But right now, with both of them already breaking a sweat, the answer was, well, everything in her line of sight. As she leaned into Travis’s neck, buried in the nook of her own, she examined the kitchen as though seeing it for the first time. Suddenly, it was real. They lived here, and they would for years to come, she could feel it. The cabinets were just what she wanted, white with slate fixtures and glass fronts. The counters were quartz, so much more practical than a trendy and expensive material like marble. The appliances were all brand-new. And there, on the front of the fridge, was a drawing Henry had done of the three of them standing in front of their new house. Travis, a tall stick person with scraggly hair. Josie, a stick person of the same height with longer scraggly hair. And Henry, the only one of the three with an open-mouth smile, hands raised as a bird flew above them. To the right, a blue square with wheels. “What’s this?” Josie had asked when he first showed it to her.

“The pool men,” he said.

Did this make her silly? Was Henry’s memory of his mother as a woman obsessed with building a frivolous and expensive therapeutic tool in her backyard something he’d return to in the future as proof of, what? Her unhappiness? Her family wealth? Her distance? She didn’t even know if those things were true, but there must have been some reason he’d included it in the drawing. When she brought it up with Travis, all he’d said was, “He drew them because they was there.” He was right, she thought. He drew it because it was what he had experienced. Henry had simply told the truth.

Travis took her hand and the two of them walked up to the bedroom, where she rolled off him in just a few minutes. She hadn’t come, but wasn’t unsatisfied. Other things were on her mind, and it was fine to let them dominate her thoughts. When she returned from the bathroom, Travis was already back downstairs finishing his drink.

“How was school today?”

“Better,” Josie said. “Nothing exciting to report. It was just a day of school.”

“That’s good. That’s what you want.” She wasn’t sure if he was exactly right, but he was close.

“How was the family business today?” she said cheekily.

“Oh, the same. Phone calls. Just a bunch of phone calls. I didn’t leave my desk except for when I grabbed lunch from the kitchenette. I need to start taking a walk or something or I’m gonna put on some pounds before too long.”

“I thought I’d miss walking, but I don’t so far. The drive is nice.”

“Is it even long enough to enjoy?”

“Just about. Today I zigzagged. Took a long route and added three or four minutes to the drive.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Worried?”

“You avoiding anything?”

“No!” Josie laughed and took another swig. “It’s the opposite, in fact. I just like being in the car.”

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t learned to drive at fifteen. You New Yorkers who learn in your twenties always seem to enjoy it so much more.”

“We have more respect for it. I bet if you checked all the statistics, you’d find out we’re safer drivers, too.”

“Maybe.”

“Pool’s starting to look like a pool, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Three more weeks. Think it’ll still be hot enough to swim?”

“Jo, I’m sure it’ll be hot enough to swim on Christmas.”

It was the first time they’d had anything resembling a normal one-on-one conversation in weeks, if not months, and when they had exhausted every other topic, Josie followed a sip of room-temperature beer with a question that had been on her mind since the planning meeting the night before. Something that felt off-limits, even in her own house. “Did I tell you I met Ellie Hall last night at Mary Alice’s?”

“Yeah. I always liked her.”

“Did you know her son?”

“Kenny? Yeah. Nice. Smart. Shy. We weren’t buds or anything. Everyone knows everyone. You’ve learned that already, I’m sure.”

“Of course. I mean, and I know this is so morbid, but what happened there? He and Mary Alice’s son died the same summer, didn’t they?”

Travis’s head rocked from left to right as he jogged the memory from its place. “It’s just one of those sad stories, that’s all.”

“But can you tell it? Because I feel like it will, I don’t know, help me understand these people better.”

“You mean Mary Alice.”

“Yes.”

Travis sighed. “It was the morning after graduation, Kenny and Mikey’s class. There was some big party, and on the way home, Kenny’s car got hit by a drunk driver who survived without a scratch, basically.”

“And Kenny wasn’t drunk?”

“Nope.”

“But what about Michael? That was just a coincidence?”

“Everyone was messed up after Kenny died. Everyone. It wasn’t just death. It was this instant cautionary tale. It’s one thing for the drunk driver to die or get hurt, but you know, this was more tragic. Sounds awful to say, but it’s true.” He twisted his mouth and squinted his eyes, not quite stopping a tear but perhaps preparing for it. “Anyway, like I said, everyone’s messed up. No one’s taking this well. But Michael Roth is taking it worse than anyone. There was a sort of memorial bonfire for Kenny at someone’s place a couple days later. More like a vigil. Pretty much everyone in school went, so did some parents. Totally dry, no booze, out of respect. But in comes Michael, absolutely shithouse drunk. Someone tried to talk to him, I remember that, but he brushed them away and drove off. I remember thinking, ‘Oh Christ, he’s gonna die just like Kenny,’ but he must’ve made it home in one piece because he showed up to Kenny’s funeral the next day. He brought a flask and barely tried to hide it. And that’s the last I ever saw him. I think it’s the last time anyone I knew saw him. Then, a few weeks after that, his obituary is in the paper. Suicide.”

“Oh my God,” Josie blurted out. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. “They actually said it was a suicide?”

“No, but what else could it have been? He clearly wasn’t in his right mind and we could all see he wanted to be dead, whether by a gun to the head or driving drunk into a ditch.”

“I had no idea,” she said, her hand now covering her mouth. “Did you go to his funeral?”

“There wasn’t one. That obituary was pretty much the last time anyone ever talked about Michael, at least that I know of. By the time I graduated the next year, it already felt like ancient history. I guess it was all too sad for anyone to think about.”

“Yeah,” Josie said. “I guess that sounds right. So they were best friends, Kenny and Michael?”

Travis curled his lip. “At least.”

“Oh, I see. But did anyone know for sure?”

“Nah, but I mean, everyone did the math. They were pretty inseparable.”

“Right,” Josie said. “God, how awful. No wonder the two of them are so close.”

“Who?”

“Ellie and Mary Alice.”

Travis nodded, then glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Oh shit, we gotta go,” he said before tossing his empty bottle in the trash and kissing Josie on the forehead. Before she could respond, he was in the garage, already far from the memory of those two dead boys.

But the image of Kenny and Michael, still basically kids when their lives were cut short, stuck with Josie for the rest of the drive. The trip to the Kerr Compound was beautiful by central Texas standards, with views of flat farmland and the hint of the Hill Country’s rolling beginning in the distance. There was just enough development to avoid a feeling of eerie isolation, and to keep Josie distracted. Once outside the town limits, which they reached in just under a mile, it would be mostly farmland, with the occasional home dotting the middle distances to the left and the right every mile or so. The road was two-way and smooth gray asphalt, which had been done a decade prior. Barbed-wire fence ran the length of the crops, running parallel to the road some twenty feet from both edges of the road, and kept on going until, suddenly, there was a green-brown burst of tree line, where the crops came to a stop. It was there they turned right onto a smaller road, which they took for four more minutes, and that’s when the Compound came into view.

The main dwelling—an old farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a tin roof and navy shutters—where Faye lived, was closest to the road. All the lights on the bottom floor were on, and the rooms were a blurry buzz of activity. Mae and Freddy’s house looked nearly identical, apart from the fresh coat of paint, and it wasn’t more than five live oaks away. Diagonal from both was the barn, which was really just a shed. Beside it, a stable for their four horses. Behind that, a chicken coop where they kept two dozen of the most contented birds in the state. And if you stood on Faye’s back porch and scanned the property from north to south, you’d probably notice a shimmering patch of grass on the far end and think, Why, that’d be the perfect spot for another house. Or at least that’s what Faye had hoped.

Josie could see it then, just as she could see it the first time they approached the Compound after their engagement. It could be scary to arrive in such an ostentatious display of wealth and comfort, in the middle of nowhere. And given more context, to know they deliberately removed themselves from the towns where they did all their business could be interpreted as dismissive or judgmental. Freddy and Mae made money surveying land for residents of Billington, and yet they chose to live fifteen miles away from them, holed up with their own, much too far to be visited for a neighborly favor. At least Travis lived in town, and Josie felt even more certain that her decision to buy Margaret Rose’s house was the right one.

As they stepped in that evening, twenty-nine minutes after six, they looked at this house in a new light, still. The previous week of babysitting had sealed the deal. Even if their house was twelve miles away, this wasn’t simply a visit. This was their second home, and Josie loved it. Though the structure itself had been standing for nearly a century, the interior was only twelve months old. Retirement had left Faye and Leonard with two things: a comfortable nest egg and a newfound obsession with home renovation shows. The combination proved incendiary, and led to a near-gut job of the entire house. Carpet was ripped up, rooms were combined, and walls were stripped of their paper and reduced to their most basic form, planks of wood dusted with a coating of whitewash that even Tom Sawyer would call unfinished. Josie had watched the same shows as her in-laws from the confines of her little Brooklyn apartment, and seeing the aesthetic in person was so exciting she felt embarrassed by the crazed look in her eyes the first time she saw it post-renovation. It was like walking into her TV set and into a gray, white, and brown fantasyland where space and light are infinite, time is measured exclusively on giant wall clocks, and family is always around the corner. She loved it, and that made her feel absolutely crazy.

When Henry heard the door he dropped his book and burst from the plush gray couch in front of them into their arms. “I’m hungry,” he said, leaning into his flair for drama.

Josie picked him up, caressed the back of his head, and laughed. “I am starving, actually. I hope Grandma made a good dinner. Think she did?”

“Yeah. I think she made a good dinner.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Chicken-fried steak,” screamed Faye from the kitchen. “And mashed potatoes.”

“Anything green?” Travis yelled back while kicking his shoes off, laces still tied.

“Salad!” she screamed before poking her head around the corner. “Not from a bag!”

Josie looked back down at Henry. “That sounds good, doesn’t it?” Henry nodded, then wriggled his shoulders. “Oh, you want to be put down? Use your words, then.”

“Can you put me down?”

“Yes, I can.” She lowered him a foot and he jumped out of her arms like a cat, then he bolted down the hall and disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.

“Don’t you hate ‘use your words’?” Travis said. “I mean, it just sounds so ridiculous.”

“Yeah, well, it works,” Josie said, nipping that conversation in the bud. Their parenting styles were rarely at odds, but a stray piece of methodology would occasionally cause a rift between them. “Use your words” was one of those things.

“You two fall asleep in there? Party’s in the kitchen!”

Travis rolled his eyes and led them down the hall, lined with framed collages of the Kerr family, and into the kitchen, a grand communal space that felt out of place in such an isolated location, with not one but two islands, the biggest fridge any of them had ever seen, and a farmhouse table with bench seating on the two large ends that could contain everyone on the Compound comfortably, even more if they squeezed. And no one in the Kerr family minded a squeeze.

“So,” Faye said, removing a tenderized and liberally breaded slab of sizzling beef from the pan and setting it beside at least a half dozen more on a wire cooling rack. “How’s your first week?” She was a sturdy, oval-shaped woman with a chic yet spartan uniform consisting of stretchy blue jeans, a tucked-in T-shirt, and a flowy plaid overshirt. A mop of wavy dark gray hair peppered with bobby pins that never seemed to serve any purpose sat atop her head, which was a vessel for two extremes: generally exuberance, but occasionally scorn. She was a woman you would describe as loud before hearing her voice; like a knob on a stereo turned all the way to the right without anything playing.

“You know what,” Josie said, “it’s actually fine.”

“What’d I tell you? There was nothing to worry about.”

“Well, there was a little something, and I guess there still might be, but maybe not.”

“Spit it out, sweetheart. What you mean?”

“Mary Alice Roth came by on Monday and caused, well, it wasn’t a scene, exactly, but it wasn’t nothing.”

“She come back since?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t worry about her, then. Like I said, she’s all bark and no bite.”

“Then why do I feel like I’ve been gnawed at?” Josie reached for a chip from the bag on the island and dipped it in a tub of salsa Faye had placed beside it.

“That feeling will pass.”

“Tell her about the meeting, though,” Travis said, playfully shoving Josie’s hand out of the way so he could grab another chip before she could.

“What meeting?” Faye asked.

“Jo decided she wanted to help out at the picnic this year.”

“Why would you go and do something like that?! You’re a young woman!”

“Why don’t you do it, Faye?” Josie asked. “Plenty of the ladies there were your friends.”

“Honey, I don’t do it because I don’t hate myself. We do plenty for that picnic that doesn’t involve taking orders from Mary Alice Roth.”

“What’s that?”

“Where do you think they keep all the supplies for the booths? In our damn barn! Leonard and I always lug ’em over and set ’em up, then tear ’em down and bring ’em back every year. That’s our contribution, though I guess it’s just mine from now on.” Faye’s gaze left the room for a moment and focused on the memory of her husband, but the pop from a frying piece of steak brought her right back.

“Is it too late for me to change jobs?” Josie asked.

“If you already told Mary Alice yes, I’m afraid so. Just don’t do it again! Let this year be a lesson to you.”

“She yelled at me for being late. In front of everyone.”

“She’s just mad that you took her job.”

Travis swallowed another chip and interrupted them. “She didn’t take her job, Mom. She got a job that happened to be the one Mary Alice resigned from.”

“What I’m trying to say is she’s intimidated by you,” Faye said, dropping her tongs on the spoon rest with a force just shy of confrontational. “What do they say about wild animals? They’re more afraid of you than you are of them?”

“So you’re saying Mary Alice is, what, a bear?”

“More like a mountain lion.”

“That’s not any better!”

“Fine, then. She’s a, I don’t know, a bee.”

“Still stings.”

“Then what happens? It dies.”

“Well, that’d be helpful.”

“Oh, there goes my mouth again. I shouldn’t have said that. That poor woman’s been through enough death.”

“Her son died, right? Ellie Hall tried to bring me up to speed at the meeting and Travis filled me in a little earlier.”

“Ellie Hall, now, there’s a friend you want. You know she lost her boy, too, just a few weeks before Mary Alice. They were best friends. But did you know about Sammy?”

Travis groaned. “Mom, can we please not do this?”

“What! The more you know. Might help dull all this misery she feels about that poor woman.”

“It’s gossip.”

“It ain’t gossip if it’s the truth.”

“I don’t think that’s true but whatever.”

Just then the back door swung open and in came Mae, Freddy, and their seven-year-old, Brooklyn, a name Josie always had trouble saying without a smirk. “Hello,” they shouted in a singsong, directing most of their energy toward Josie in particular. After the awkwardness of the week, that sort of greeting was like a salve, she thought. Her parents and siblings had always been close, and she loved them deeply, but their love was more like a steady simmer, and rarely boiled over like the kind the Kerrs shared several times a day. They were a family of bear hugs. Hers was a family of side hugs. One no better than the other, to be sure, but there was something to be said about a big, booming hello to make her feel not only welcome, but essential.

“What’re we talking about?” Freddy said as he nudged Brooklyn toward her cousin.

“Samuel Roth.”

“Oh God, why?”

Until that moment, Josie wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be let in on every detail of Mary Alice’s life, but she couldn’t help but find something titillating in the various Kerrs’ reactions. All she’d known was that he’d died long ago, when Mary Alice was a young mother, and that she’d never felt like remarrying, or even seeing someone else. That was enough, she had assumed, to paint a clear enough portrait of this woman. But she was starting to suspect the version she’d created had gotten the colors and features all wrong.

“Well, first of all, he probably killed himself,” Mae said.

“Mae!” Faye said, admonishing her daughter while conveniently overlooking the fact that she herself had started the conversation.

A hint of red appeared on Josie’s cheeks. “Oh, I had no idea it was a suicide.”

“Well, it wasn’t,” Faye said. “At least not officially. But her boy killed himself, too, and depression’s in the genes, so it all makes sense. They found Samuel’s body in the lake over at their place way out west of town. You think we’re in the boonies? They’ve barely got electricity out there.”

“So people think he . . .” Josie said, too nervous to finish her thought.

“Well, there wasn’t a note, and he brought a change of clothes along, and I remember something about a tank of gas,” Freddy said. “But, what can I say, you’d just have to have known him.”

“Oh please, you were practically a baby when it happened, so don’t pretend you know any more than what your father and I told you. Anyway, Josie’ll never have the opportunity to know Sammy Roth at all.”

“I didn’t realize they were both suicides.”

“There wasn’t even a funeral for poor Michael. But I can’t say I blame his mom. After going through all that death, who could bear it.” Faye went silent for a few seconds, as if realizing she may have disrespected the dead. “Now, who’s ready to eat?”

Henry raised his hand and ran to his normal seat at the table, reminding Josie, and every adult in the room, that they had been discussing something so terrible in front of someone so innocent. They quickly changed the subject and spent the rest of dinner talking about better things, things that had nothing to do with anyone in town. Things that were even farther away from Billington than they were. But Josie’s mind stayed on Michael, and Samuel, and the tragedy of the Roth family. There was something about them, Michael in particular, which she couldn’t shake. Even with the ultimate ending, his story felt strangely unfinished. Maybe it was because he was about her age. Maybe it was because she thought it would help her understand Mary Alice. Whatever the case, she knew she had to find out more. More than that, she knew she could.