She was insured for two million, after all.

“I didn’t mean for her to get hurt,” Jacob said.

“That’s a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?”

“Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you’re the only one I ever wanted to kill.”

Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn’s tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.

“When’s the last time you visited her grave?” Joshua said.

Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, where a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn’t damage real estate values.

“Why would I visit Mom’s grave?”

“Ain’t her I was talking about.”

“Mattie doesn’t have a grave.”

“The other one. Christine.”

“That burial was for Renee. She was still Catholic then.”

“So you think the dead sleep better in tiny pieces, scattered on the wind?”

“Except for those like you who go to hell.”

“Mattie could have been buried here,” Joshua said, nodding toward the family plot that held three generations of the Wells dead. “You know kin is always welcome under home ground.”

Something thumped outside the room, a sound eerily similar to the one Mother had made while tumbling to her death down the stairs. Jacob tried to stand, then gave up.

“We have a guest,” Joshua said, showing teeth that were brown from tobacco.

“Renee?”

“No, she’s Thursday, remember.”

“Not...”

“Heh. I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk about. It ain’t been that long, has it?” Joshua called out of the room. “Honey, we’re in here.”

Jacob lay back on the bed again, his head swimming, his pulse sluicing through the veins of his temples like liquid barbed wire. He wondered how quickly a physical addiction to alcohol could cause a case of delirium tremens. Footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway. He closed his eyes against the dawn.

“Hello, stranger,” she said.

He didn’t have to look to picture her. Her face was dark, the tan color of a worn football, eyes as black as midnight crows. She was several inches shorter than Joshua but she’d be standing straight, her breasts small and firm beneath the men’s shirt she always wore. Her hands would have their first wrinkles now, the fingernails chipped. Her hair was thick and dark and flowed down her back to her waist. Drinking would have been hard on the skin around her eyes, and he wondered if she had let her hygiene deteriorate to match the environment in which she lived. But she had made her bed, tangled its blankets, stained its sheets, and now she could lie in it and rot for all Jacob cared.

“He’s in a mood,” Joshua said.

“Poor chiquito,” she said. “He always was the sensitive type.”

Her voice hadn’t changed over the years. It was still that same husky silk that even a telephone line couldn’t diminish, the clipped accent not much influenced by her exposure to eastern Tennessee. He could even smell her now, a woodsy, animal odor, a wisp of sweat, a perfume that blended patchouli and cinnamon. Beneath that lay the faintest scent of her vagina, as if she and Jacob had made love in the bed across the room from him as he slept.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. She would never do such a thing. Nothing to tease him or hurt him. Or remind him that he would never be Joshua, no matter how much he tried.

“Come on, look at me,” she said, and all that old bravado was back, her cruel and tantalizing indifference. He wished he could run to her, throw his arms around her, clamp his hands around her throat, kiss her and slap her and bite her lip.

But in the end, all he could do was obey her. Just like always.

“Carlita,” he said.

Her eyes were hard and flat, dry obsidian marbles. That was all he allowed himself to absorb at first glance. It was drink to a drunk, heroin to a junkie, d-Con to a starving rat.

“Your face is red,” she said. “Are you blushing?”

“Jake got a little too close to the campfire while he was roasting his weenie,” Joshua said.

“Oh, that thing. I didn’t know you still had one,” she said to Jacob.

Life had marked her, the plows of time and hardship dragging furrows into her face. But her lips were as robust as October persimmons, though the corner of her mouth twisted in disdain. She had probably been born with that mannerism, hatched in the dirty hut of an illegal immigrant’s shack in Piney Flats, where the Christmas tree farms leached their insecticides into the slow-moving creeks. On land that Warren Wells had owned and lorded over.

He couldn’t look away from her eyes. They were as deep and dark as that grotto into which he had descended while hospitalized. They held the promise of cool suffocation, a slow and pitiless drowning. Though her skin had changed, losing some of that caramel luster, her eyes were untouched by the years that had passed since he had last seen her. Those eyes were as ancient as Mayan idols.

“How is the wife and kids?” she asked.

Jacob looked at Joshua, who smiled as if he had swallowed a greasy lizard. “You told her, didn’t you?” Jacob managed.

Joshua shrugged and snuffed his cigarette against the wall. “Family secrets.”

Jacob’s head throbbed, the sun now high and bright and piercing him as if its needles were sewing his skin to his flesh. “I need a drink.”

“Drinking is a want, not a need,” Joshua said.

Carlita lifted her bottle of beer and drank. The bottle was beaded with moist drops of water, further arousing Jacob’s thirst. She twisted her mouth again and pressed the Corona Light to her forehead, the motion causing her unbridled breasts to sway beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her denim jeans were tight around the curves of her thighs. She hadn’t borne any children. She had moved too fast to be pinned down, had evaded all sperm that swam upstream against her unwelcoming currents.

Jacob closed his eyes again and turned his face against the pillow. His back was sore.

“Sorry to hear about your kids,” she said. “That’s mal mucho.”

“Joshua,” Jacob said, eyes clenched shut. He actually whimpered. “Make her stop.”

Carlita came closer. Her beer breath wafted on his face. She whispered, “Told you it would never work. You cannot run away from who you are.”

“Joshua,” Jacob repeated, his voice cracking like a teenager’s. “I’ll give you anything. Just let me go.”

Carlita’s lips brushed against his cheek. He fought a slithering snake of vomit that wended up his esophagus. Despite his revulsion, a rush of warm blood surged through his groin.

“You didn’t need them, Cacatua,” she whispered. “Just me. Just me.”

Jacob screamed, or maybe something inside him tore open and the sound that filled his ears was the wrenching of flesh from bone.

When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t tell if seconds or minutes had passed. Drops of cool sweat clung to him like tiny leeches. Carlita and Joshua were sitting on the bed across the room, holding hands. They shared a kiss, no tongue, like kids with braces who were trying something new.

“I’ll give you anything,” Jacob said. “Just make it go away.”