And if he’d gotten away from these parts, he wouldn’t have driven out in that backroads part of PickettCounty under the dead moon, drunk as the devil, his foot heavy on the pedal. That night had touched him and shaped him and tied him to these mountains like a Billy goat on a chain.

"Reckon your momma will ever marry again?" he asked.

Marlene smiled this time, though the grief cut shadows beneath her eyes. "No, she was a one-woman man. Some are like that. I can see things with Harold maybe giving out one day, especially if he never opens his own garage. Me, I might get impressed with a traveling salesman or a long-haul truck driver or something. My generation ain’t as stable and reliable as Momma’s."

Roby nodded. He was between those generations, and he was only half-stable. He was reliable on the job, though. He had to be. There was job and there was duty, and he put his heart into it. On the night that changed his life forever, he hadn’t asked the consequences of failure. He took the job. It was the lesser of three evils, or so it had seemed at the time.

"Think she’ll want some coffee with that?"

"All we got is Maxwell House instant. It’s rough enough stuff in the morning. This late, you’re better off with tea."

"Well, I guess she’s sleeping restless as it is. Maybe a glass of milk."

"Lordy, as long as you don’t use the denture glass. I don’t know what she was thinking."

"The grief-struck mind takes an odd turn once in a while. You ever heard of ‘gallows humor’?"

"No, but I’m sure going to hang Buck if he don’t shut up about that tractor. He could at least wait until the other vultures got their fill."

"It’s a damned good tractor."

"A real man deserves that tractor, not somebody like Buck. I want to see a real man on that thing."