His fingers bit into my flesh, and when I glared back at him I was frightened by the intensity of the anger I saw there.

"All right, fine," I said. Let him think whatever he wanted. I just wanted to get away from him. Anybody can charm a schoolgirl, I thought, but it takes more than a cheap smile to put one over on Maggie Reid. I was coming back to town just as soon as I dropped Sheila off with her Aunt Darlene and Uncle Earl.

Carlucci could look for people all day long, but he didn't know Vernell like I did. I'd see the signs or read the clues far better than he or Weathers could do, and I cared far more about my ex-husband than outsiders ever could. I was coming back, all right, and Carlucci could just deal with it. That is, if he saw me before I saw him.

Chapter Thirteen

Sheila made the trip to Danville a living hell. She didn't want to ride in my car. She didn't want to leave without her CD player. She didn't think the towels I piled on the seats would keep her designer jeans dry. She complained about the smell, the drive, not having a cell phone like all her friends had, and not even owning a pager.

"Mama," she said, "if only I had a phone or a pager, then Daddy could've called me and told me where he was going."

So that was what was at the bottom of all this. "If onlys" were attacking Sheila. If only she'd been available; if only she'd stayed closer to home; if only she'd been the perfect child, her daddy wouldn't have left. I shook my head. I'd seen this same behavior when Vernell had left us for Jolene, the lovely Dish Girl.

"Baby," I said, reaching over to turn down the screaming radio, "if your daddy could've called you, he would've. If he's in trouble it's on account of not seeing what was coming, being blindsided." I patted her knee. "Sweetie, Daddy's a survivor. He'll be all right."

"Mama, my psychology teacher says what you're doing is called denial."

"And what your psychology teacher knows about the real world could be…" I bit my tongue. This would get us nowhere.

Sheila humphed and looked away. I tried again. "Baby, I know you're worried sick about him, but he'll turn up."

Sheila whipped back around. "Yeah," she said, "but will he be dead or alive?"

I was saved from answering her by our arrival at Darlene's trailer. We turned off the two-lane into a narrow dirt drive that was rutted with potholes. Darlene's husband, Earl, says he doesn't level it out more often on account of how it keeps trespassers away. What Earl isn't taking into account is the way it tears up a welcome visitor's car and shortens the life of Earl's own vehicles.

We bounced down the little lane, huge trees on either side reaching down with heavy limbs to almost touch the roof of my car. Sheila was gripping the door handle with feverish intensity and moaning about the water that ran from side to side on the floorboards. I was just trying to keep the car headed in the general direction of the bright yellow light that shone down on Darlene's doublewide.

By the time we stopped, Earl's vicious-looking yard dogs had run around to snarl at the intruders and Earl was standing on the back stoop with his shotgun in hand and Darlene right behind him.

"Mama," Sheila said, "you can't really be thinking we're going to stay here."

"Who's 'we,' kemosabe?" I said, under my breath.

When she recognized the car, Darlene whacked Earl's arm. "Fool, I told you that was them!"

Earl, a tall skinny man in a white undershirt and blue jeans, slowly lowered the gun and started to grin. He was a right handsome, dark-haired man, who'd been totally devoted to Darlene since high school, when he was a football player and she was a tiny cheerleader.

"I know it's them," he said. "But I didn't know until she drove up. According to her, we can't be too cautious."

Darlene stepped out from behind the shelter of Earl. "Baby!" she cried, running down the steps for Sheila.

Sheila dwarfed Darlene by a good six inches. Darlene could be five foot two on a good day, and couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds. She's two years older than me, two sizes smaller than me, and still looks like a freshman cheerleader. When we were born, I got the voice, but she got all the coordination.

Earl had passed us, walking over to my car to pull out Sheila's suitcase and CD player.

"What choo do?" he grunted, "bring all of Greensboro up with you? Thought Sheila was the only one staying?"

"What?" Sheila's voice squeaked out into the darkness. She broke away from Darlene, walked over to the trunk and looked inside.

"Mama, where's your stuff?"

I ran my hand through my hair and prepared for the holy war. "I'm not staying, baby."

"Mama!" Sheila's tone said it all, and Earl and Darlene missed none of it.

"Sheila," Earl said, "come on out to the barn with me. I gotta show you someone."

Sheila didn't want to go-that much was obvious in the way her shoulders stiffened and the slow way she turned to face him. But I did not raise a disrespectful daughter. She followed him slowly, looking back over her shoulder at me, her expression saying that she wasn't through with the discussion.

"Hell," Darlene said, as she watched. "If I were you, I'd hop in that little bug and haul on outta here before that young'un gets back. Jeez," she sighed, "Where'd our little Sheila go, and who's this creature?"

"Teenagers," I said. "That's what it is, a social disease. I reckon she'll be a complete and total idiot for another couple of years and then she'll return back to normal, if there ever was a normal."

Darlene watched Sheila's retreating back. "Well," she said, turning back to me, "it ain't gonna matter much in another minute. You just wait. Here, listen."

We stood in the darkened yard, listening as the barn door swung open and Earl fumbled around for the light. There was total silence and then: "Oh Uncle Earl!" This was then followed by: "Really? He's mine?"

"Darlene," I said, turning back to her, "you didn't. You know that young'un can't keep track of a dog!"

Darlene stuck her hands on her hips and gave me one of her looks. "Well, maybe you'd better think about something. If that young'un's keeping up with a puppy, and tending to its every need, she might be less tempted to produce a litter of her own just yet." The rest of her sentence hung between us, unspoken… "like you did." Maybe it's just my sensitivity, because Darlene's never said one disapproving word to me, but still I thought it. Vernell and I were so young when we had Sheila.

"Hey," Darlene said, "why aren't you staying?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "All right, I'll give it a shot, but I truly don't expect you to get this because I don't fully understand it myself." Darlene and I walked up the steps to her trailer. She waited until we were inside, sitting at stools pulled up to the breakfast bar, before she urged me to go on.

"You know Vernell about as well as I do," I said. "He's lying pond scum on a good day and an alcoholic on a bad one. But all of his sorry little life, I've been looking for the good in that man. And you know it's there." Darlene nodded, but she didn't seem as convinced as I was.

"He loves me and Sheila. I don't doubt that. But something inside that man won't let him be the husband and father he wants to be. Now, he's a right good daddy."

Darlene interrupted. "Yeah, if you don't count him running off and leaving you and Sheila for a bimbo, he's a peach of a father."

She kind of had me there. "But he supports her. He took her in when I was having trouble with her. He loves her, Darlene, even you know that."

Darlene shrugged her shoulders in a grudging admission.

"And when Jolene ran off, hell, even before that, when his brother, Jimmy, died, who'd he come to first? Me."