Roby had handled visitations and sittings where the widow was practically sending out feelers for a new husband, right there during the mourning period. Some, you’d think they helped their poor old menfolk into the grave, they were so cold. Such things had been done before. A farmer’s wife had a dozen dirty ways to get rid of a man. Most of them had bad arteries from eating too much fat, because no part of an animal was wasted.

For evidence, all you had to do was look at the sausage patties from the Clemens place.

Peggy Clemens had already put the headstone to two husbands, and was known to boil down the entire pig’s head, brains and all, then debone it and run it through the grinder. Roby took no sides in the moral issue of whether brains were proper eating or not, but you had to admit that a Clemens patty had enough grease in it to shine a barn door.

"You gonna help your momma keep up the place?" Roby said.

"I don’t know. I got my place in town and you know things with me and Harold Pennefield are getting sort of serious."

"So I heard. You could do way worse than marrying a mechanic. As least you’ll always have something to drive."

"Yeah. I hate he smells like gasoline and always has those black curves under his fingernails. But he’s regular in church of a Sunday and lets me pick out which movie to see. He took me up to that fancy inn over in Glendale Springs, you know the one."

"The Inn at Glendale Springs, they call it. A rich couple from Florida bought the place and fixed it up. Reckon they couldn’t come up with a good name."

"That meal was over thirty bucks, but Harold didn’t bat an eye. He even ordered me seconds on wine that was four dollars a glass. I didn’t tell him the wine tasted like brake fluid."

"You better learn to cook so he doesn’t have to spend so much money on you."