The three of us stood there looking at the dead animal. For a moment, I thought how quiet everything was, but I heard the crickets then, a sound so loud I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it earlier, like all of nature was grieving.

“I need to move him,” said Grady again. He stepped over the deer, straddled her, and grasped the two front legs at the thin part just above the hoof. He tried to drag her but stumbled back and lost his grip. “Good God, it seems sacrilegious,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll help you. I’ll take this one,” I said, taking the right leg. “If you take that one, we could pull together.” I knew how to lug stuff. I counted us in, already pulling slightly on each count. “One, and two, and three—” We both pulled, and the deer moved about six inches on her back. I counted again, and this time we moved her several feet. I felt terrible dragging her, dead, across the road grit, disturbing her peace. We were nearly at the grass verge between the road and the woods, and we tugged one more time, pulling the doe up onto the grass.

Grady sank down on the ground, leaned his body forward on his bent knees, and breathed hard. His hands hung down, his wrists limp, in front of his bowed head, and I noticed the silver chain he always wore that made him different from the other dads even out here in the dark. “He just ran right out in front of me as I came around the corner,” he explained again.

I was looking at the front of his car. There was a big dent and dark streaks near it, and I wondered if it was the deer’s blood.

“It’s a doe—a she,” I said.

“Is it?” he asked. Maybe they didn’t have deer in the part of Mississippi he was from, but he had lived here a long time, longer than me. It seemed like he should know.

“Yeah, a white-tailed doe. Bucks have antlers. She’s young.” Then I wished I hadn’t said that, because I didn’t want to make him feel worse.

Grady reached out and put his hand on the deer’s hindquarter and left it there for a moment. “I feel real bad about this. Sorry, girl.” He was talking to the deer. I loved him right then, out there in the dark, devastated about the deer. Sage said her dad was likable because he had extreme humility, that he was almost sorry for existing, and that that was why patients liked him. He made people comfortable because there was something slightly uncomfortable about him in himself. It was so strange sitting with him there, the car headlights on us and none of us acting like ourselves.