«Quarter past,» he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back-not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely-and then read the note.

«Got JBQ on the radio,» Steffy had written. «Don't get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that's it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?»

I handed him the note back and took my beer. «Tell her the road's okay because a power truck just went by. They'll be working their way up here.»

«Okay.»

«Champ

«What, Dad?»

«Tell her everything's okay.»

He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. «Okay.»

He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It's his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It's a lie, of course-things are not okay and never have been-but my kid makes me believe the lie.

I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the chainsaw going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned off the chainsaw.

He didn't look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.

«Hi, Brent,» I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw's aggressive roar. I hadn't gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn't look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn't. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that.