But they lived only three blocks from Val and Billy.

Surely, Laurie wouldn’t refuse to help if Valentine really needed it.

He heard a car rev up a couple of blocks away. Then he heard the sound of some kid-probably in the high school marching band-practicing on an instrument that sounded hideously like a tuba. It was all bleats and squeaks. Hugh-Jay wondered how the band director would ever get the young “musician” ready to play in time for half-time at Homecoming in November.

We’re such a small town, he thought.

Val Crosby glanced away in embarrassment at his implication that she might need rescuing, but then she nodded, with her face bent toward her son. The boy was still concentrating on his toy gun, and in that instant he aimed and “shot” it toward the sound of the tuba practice.

“Bang,” the boy said. “Bang, bang, you’re dead, but not really.”

“Not really?” Hugh-Jay asked him.

Collin looked up at his great height. “On TV. They shoot them, but they’re never really dead. It’s like a game.”

“Real guns aren’t a game,” Hugh-Jay reminded him.

“I know,” the boy said solemnly, and then he aimed his toy at his own head and pulled its trigger.

“Collin!” his mother cried, with a little scream. “Don’t ever do that!”

“Not even in play,” Hugh-Jay told him, feeling horror-struck by the kid’s action and lack of reaction. “Never. Not as a joke. Not playing around. Never on anybody else, and most important of all, not on yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said, and looked as if he meant it.

WHEN HE GOT BACK behind the steering wheel, still feeling shaken by what the seven-year-old had done with the gun, Hugh-Jay found Chase in the passenger side of the front seat.

“Did you see that?”

“We all did that kind of thing. On ourselves. On Belle.” Chase smiled at the memory of tormenting his sister. “That was fun. Don’t you remember?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Yeah, it’s irresistible. We played around, just like him.”

Hugh-Jay shook his head, finding that hard to believe but feeling comforted nonetheless. They were all still alive. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. “Dad would have killed us,” he said, still skeptical. “Mom would have killed us and then killed us all over again.”

“Not if they didn’t see it.”

“You were a big help just now,” Hugh-Jay said then, with mild sarcasm. He told his brother about their father, about the truck, about how Chase was going to have to get out again and drive Billy’s truck over to Hugh-Jay’s home. “You can park it behind the garage. Make sure it’s out of sight. I hope we aren’t making things worse for her.”

“Again.” Chase put a hand on the door handle. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”

“That’s what I said earlier, that I hoped we weren’t making things worse.”

His brother shot him a suspicious glance. “You’re not screwing around with her, are you?”

“Billy’s wife? Are you kidding? Hell, no.”

“She kept looking at you.”

“Beats looking at you.”

Hugh-Jay laughed, and Chase grinned at him.

“Give me some credit, will you?” the younger brother requested.

“For what, respecting another man’s marriage?”

Chase grinned again, as he opened the door again. “No, for having better taste in women.”

It hit Hugh-Jay wrong, and was one of the few moments in his life when he didn’t like his middle brother very much. “Let’s go home,” he said sourly. “To my home. My wife. My supper. My television set.”

“Sheesh,” Chase joked as he stepped out. “Possessive, are we?”

THAT EVENING SEEMED to pass peacefully in Rose and on the farms and ranches all around it. Chase parked Billy’s truck behind his brother’s garage and threw the keys onto their kitchen table, where they remained until he got ordered to set the table. He flirted supper out of his pretty sister-in-law, Laurie, and then pushed his giggling three-year-old niece Jody on the swing in the backyard. Then he walked over to Bailey’s Bar & Grill for a few beers before returning to a guest bedroom at his brother’s house.

Hugh-Jay called their father to ask about the truck, and Hugh Senior said, “Valentine told your mother in the grocery store last week that Billy was still driving, in spite of his license suspension. She told your mother that sometimes he has their little boy in the car when he’s been drinking. Your mother and I discussed it, and we agreed that we could not with good conscience allow that to continue. So we decided to take the truck away from him in the way best suited to help his wife and son. I suppose we could have reported him to the sheriff, who could have set up a trap for him, but how would that help Valentine pay the rent? It wouldn’t. But purchasing the truck for more than they can get for it from anybody else will help them, plus it will keep Billy from killing himself or somebody else on the road.”

Hugh-Jay couldn’t argue with his parents’ logic.

He was proud of them for doing it.

Out at High Rock Ranch, Annabelle and Hugh Linder ate a light supper of cold fried chicken with their youngest child, Bobby. Even their daughter Belle was gone, spending the evening at her bank-cum-museum, closing a deal on a stuffed buffalo head. Over Annabelle’s cold green bean salad and her radish-potato salad, Hugh lectured Bobby about college, and Bobby lectured his dad about giving tenth chances to “losers like Billy Crosby.” Annabelle finally told them to lay off each other or else she wouldn’t let them eat the last of her chocolate-vanilla marble cake, which was their favorite.

That being the price of goodness, father and son simmered down.

Inside the little white frame house three blocks away from Hugh-Jay and Laurie and Chase, Billy Crosby woke up late from his nap and went outside looking for the truck he wasn’t supposed to drive.

Moments later seven-year-old Collin heard his father yelling and his mother crying. Then he heard his dad slam the front door, and then he went back to reading a book that was two grades above his own level because his teacher recognized a high IQ when she occasionally saw one. His heart was pounding hard, and he knew that if he could get lost in a story, the sad feelings might go away. The book was about a courageous knight on a quest to kill a monster so he could marry a beautiful princess and inherit the kingdom. Collin read until his eyes burned, and then he kept reading to the happy ending.

4

THE NEXT DAY dawned equally hot in that year of drought in Henderson County. A few ranchers’ stock tanks had already dried up, and water was being expensively shipped into some herds; crops had turned to brown before they even fully greened, much less reached harvest.

Hugh Senior’s wife, Annabelle, watched tempers start to fray early that Wednesday, as Hugh issued commands to their grown children as if Hugh-Jay, Chase, Bobby, and Belle were all still teenagers. He might have tried it on Annabelle, too, if she hadn’t shot him a don’t-you-dare glance that backed him off.

“Get into town and make those bank deposits,” he commanded his third-born, Chase, who had driven in early with Hugh-Jay to get that day’s orders. Chase had made the mistake of offering his parents an amiable good morning when he ambled into the kitchen looking for breakfast to complement the eggs and sausage his sister-in-law already served him in town.

His father barked at him, “You were supposed to do that yesterday.”

“Dad!” Chase raised his arms in humorous defense. “I was working the pens with you yesterday!”

“You can’t accomplish two things in one day?”

If Chase had been with his friends instead of his parents, he might have joked, Only if one is blond and the other brunette. Instead he half grinned at his mother, who put a forefinger to her lips to warn him against arguing or getting fresh with his father that morning. “Just do it,” her finger said. Chase was smart enough to know good advice when he saw it. Grabbing the deposit envelopes with their checks made out from cattle buyers to High Rock Ranch, he sacrificed a second breakfast for the sake of peace in the family.