If Cletus gets wind that May’s back, I know he’ll take it and run with it. The last thing Cletus needs is a ghost to dwell on. As if his strange mind didn’t have enough to think about.

I swear. When Ob spotted him snooping around the old Chevy last fall, I warned Ob to have nothing to do with him. I’d been riding the school bus with Cletus for a year, since his family moved up from Raleigh County, and I had decided he was insane. Back when he first came, he had going this collection of potato chip bags. He had practically the whole school saving their Wise and Tom’s and Ruffles bags for him. Heading home on the bus every day, people would be pulling flat shiny bags out of their history books like crazy and passing them to Cletus in the backseat. I didn’t participate. I was certain the boy was a flat-out lunatic.

After that it was buttons. Then it was spoons. He went through a plant phase, which didn’t last too long because he said his thumb just wasn’t green enough. Then it was wrapping paper. Everybody who had a birthday got in touch with Cletus.

Till finally he settled into pictures, and that seems to have stuck. Everybody in seventh grade, probably everybody in Deep Water Junior High, knows about Cletus and his pictures. And ever since Cletus came snooping around Ob’s old Chevy last November, Ob and me know about them, too. Only too well.

Wonder what May would think of us, sitting on the sofa, Cletus squeezed in between, and passing back and forth covers from paperback books, the front panels of cereal boxes (those with the faces), and Life magazine cut to shreds. We’ve looked at newspaper photos of the Kiwanis and those chubby little bears off herbal tea. Dream homes from real estate circulars and cats off 9-Lives.

“Anything with a story to it” is what Cletus says he’s looking for. He keeps telling me I ought to be writing these stories to go with his pictures, since Mrs. Lacey at school has been bragging on those things I wrote for English. But the last thing on earth I plan to do is go digging through the pictures in Cletus’s beat-up vinyl suitcase so we can collaborate, as he puts it. I can just see it: me and Cletus looking at the front of a cornflakes box, searching for deep meaning. Holy bejeezus.

Cletus had been investigating the Chevy because he thought there might be some old newspapers lining its floorboards. Ob looked out at him that Saturday morning after Thanksgiving (which had been a tough holiday without May) and he said, “Who is that boy?”

“That’s Cletus Underwood,” I answered, my mouth completely dropped open in wonder at the sight of him in our yard.

We watched Cletus try the handle of one of the back doors.

“He trying to steal that banged-up old thing?” Ob asked.

“Uh-uh” was all I could say.

Ob watched Cletus a while longer; then he reached for his coat on the back of a kitchen chair.

“Where you going?” I asked.

“To get acquainted,” Ob answered, and he pushed open the door and went out.

Well, of course he didn’t come back alone. There he was, coming into the house with that crazy Cletus Underwood, who had fished his old suitcase from the bushes beside the Chevy and was holding it up against his chest.

“Hi, Summer!” he said with too big a smile.

I wasn’t about to encourage him. “Hi,” I answered dumbly, trying to look too boring to be worth staying for.

But he did. He stayed. He stayed seven solid hours. We fed him lunch just after he got here and dinner just before he left. Seven ungodly hours of crazy Cletus Underwood.

Thing was, though, Ob really liked him. I hadn’t seen Ob interested in one solitary thing since May left us last summer, and here his face was kind of lit up, kind of full of interest and sparkle, as Cletus made himself at home and told us his life story in between showing us the pictures in his suitcase. It turned out that even though Ob didn’t know Cletus’s parents personally — them being from Raleigh County — he did know some of Cletus’s Fayette County relatives and he seemed genuinely interested to know that Joe Underwood was working in a machine shop down in Durham and that Betty Underwood had dyed her blonde hair black and turned her garage into a combination ceramics shop and religious bookstore.

I found out that Cletus’s parents were pretty old, nearly as old as Ob, and they didn’t get out much. Maybe that’s why Cletus and Ob had such an easy time of getting to be friends. Cletus was used to older people. And Ob appreciated anybody crazier than him.

We sat on the sofa looking at Cletus’s pictures while the Lawrence Welk show went on past us on the TV. All those Welk shows were really old, but people loved them, so the station kept on playing them. The only time we lifted our eyes from Cletus’s suitcase was when Ob wanted to watch those two Barbie and Ken dolls dance the tango. Ob loved the tango. Cletus smiled through the whole dance and clapped his hands when it was done. Then we all went back to the pictures.

“This one here I got from the barber shop,” Cletus said, pulling out a heavy piece of paper with a picture of a slick-looking man advertising Brylcreem.

“I think the story here,” he explained, “is that Brylcreem guy’s nerves are bad. He’s always cleaning under his fingernails and tweezing out his nose hairs and picking at his teeth. Probably got a whole box of toothpicks in his glove compartment. Bet he sniffs his armpits, too.”

I was speechless at all this. Just struck dumb. But not Ob. No, he was curious about this Brylcreem guy, now you mentioned it, and he took the picture from Cletus’s chunky hand and studied it.

“I think you got something there,” Ob told Cletus with a confident nod of his head. “Except the part about the armpits. This man’s too delicate a constitution to be sniffing at his armpits. But all the rest I figure is right on the money.”

It’s those kinds of conversations we’ve been having since November. Speculations about the armpits of Brylcreem men.

Still, I guess I am grateful for Cletus. He got Ob through an awful Christmas by bringing over a one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of the Great Pyramids Christmas morning. (Cletus said he and his parents ate turkey and opened all their presents on Christmas Eve and by morning the holiday was over at his house.) He got Ob to sit with him for twelve hours straight putting the puzzle together. Practically all the pieces were brown — brown pyramid, brown sand, brown people. It looked like pure torture to me. But Cletus and Ob were as enthralled as cats in front of a fish tank, so I just kept them happy by cooking five turkey TV dinners in a row and refilling their RC’s. I spent the rest of my time reading one of the Phyllis Whitney paperbacks Ob got me. I can’t ever get enough of Phyllis Whitney. And reading kept my mind off May.

So here we are now, two months later in the heart of dark February, with May slipping in, Ob slipping out, and Cletus and me just grabbing at anything we can save. May used to laugh about moving here to Deep Water, West Virginia. She had a helpless kind of fear about water, about rain, and she’d say God was testing her sense of humor, setting her up in a place called Deep Water. She never failed Him. May would tell strangers where she was from, and I would see her glance up at the sky with a sassy kind of grin on her face when she said the words “Deep Water.” Like she was giving God a friendly nudge with her elbow.

May would tell Cletus and me, if she was here right now, that it’s okay to grab for something or somebody that’s being swept away from you. She’d tell us to hold on tight because we’re all meant to be together. We’re all meant to need each other.

She’d just remind us that there’s more places to be together than this one. She’d tell us we don’t have to give up if this life doesn’t give us everything we want. There’s always another one.

But that’s where May and me always parted company. Because I never could count on another chance at happiness. When I got Ob and May after all those years of having nobody, that was my idea of dying and going to heaven. I never expected something that big to happen to me more than once.

Cletus says I think like a tired old woman. He says I’m going to turn into one of those green-eyed ladies at the Kmart checkout if I’m not careful.

“Summer,” he said to me once, “drop some of them bricks you keep hauling around with you. Life just ain’t that heavy.”

I think I must have got old and heavy when May left us. Ob needed somebody to fill the empty hole she left, and I reckon I thought if I aged about fifty years, I might could fill it for him.

But the only person who seems to be giving Ob anything these days is crazy Cletus. And now, if she plans to stay a while, May.