"I got to wrap up this sausage. The flies are going to carry it off."

"Are you a real man, Roby?" She moved closer, lowering her voice.

Roby looked at the Frigidaire. On it was a Polaroid of Jacob and the girls, taken maybe a decade before. A young Marlene was barefoot, in a calico dress, with pig tails and uneven teeth. Jacob was smiling like somebody had a pitchfork in his back.

"Marlene, your momma’s probably starving by now."

She cocked her hip again. "It’s some damned good pie."

"You had some?"

She grinned, her teeth still uneven, and leaned back her head. She looked at him through half-lidded eyes. "Harold says it’s the best in town."

Roby felt his throat tighten. Here was Jacob barely cold, and his daughter was acting like a floozy on his grave. Harold was going to have his hands full with this one, but probably only for a few years. She had the itch. He could see Marlene talking her momma into selling the place off, then jumping a bus for Raleigh or Wilmington or even Pigeon Forge. She looked like the Pigeon Forge type, with her styled hair and shirts that were always a little too tight.

"Ought to get that pie to her," he said, working to keep his voice level. "I’ll fetch along the milk."

Marlene pouted a little, as if she’d used her best bait and hadn’t got so much as a nibble. She gave a little extra shake of her rear as she left, but Roby forced himself not to watch. It wasn’t his place. She had given her heart to Harold, at least for the time being.

Biscuits. A time like this, a good scratch biscuit eased the troubled soul.

He took one out of the Tupperware container and ate it dry, without the butter that sat on a porcelain dish, its yellow edges soft in the heat of the kitchen.

III

By the time Roby entered the sitting room, the widow had eaten half the piece of pie. She chewed with a crooked yank of her jaws, as if she had an aching tooth on one side. Her gaze was fixed across the room where Alfred and Buck were studying over one of Jacob’s rifles. It was a war relic, brought home from Japan by Jacob’s father.