She’d stayed up with them all night, until a white sun washed through their curtains and over their soulless faces. Both full of whiskey, packs of cigarettes, totally spent from telling a volume worth of Gina stories.

Gina once adopted a stray cat that had a cyst the size of an orange in its throat. She cried and cried until her daddy took it to a country vet who cut it out for five hundred dollars. That old cat lived for another fifteen years and ate grits with honey and sugar.

And then there was the time Gina thought she’d created the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. She called the folks at Nestle and asked them if they’d pay her a million dollars for the recipe. That’s when she was fifteen and, to be honest, to Perfect, Gina sounded kind of stupid.

But Perfect nodded and nodded.

Why were they telling her all of this after all these years? the Fishers asked. They’d barely spoken about dear Gina since the accident.

Yeah, Perfect wondered, as she combed the platinum hair back over the left eye and adjusted the rubber bracelets on her wrists.

When they got to the point about Luke, the tractor, and the wedding ring, she knew she had them. She just watched their faces fall, their hearts empty like a broken water main, and their bodies convulse with memories buried for far too long.

She didn’t even have to ask. She simply walked to the phone and called for the Cobra – her little pet name for the casino’s oily attorney.

Within fifteen minutes of the contract signing at breakfast, she was washing that really god-awful Vidal Sassoon mousse from her hair in a room Humes had gotten for her. For some reason, Duran Duran songs kept playing in her head like a bad insult to a horrible night.

Soon they’d be kissing her ass before she headed back to her small apartment in Memphis where she lived with her ‘sixties picture books and her antique mirrors.

The money would come Western Union.