“Pffft. We didn’t have to. We trusted Odell as much as you did. With the cash in the pantry and what’s stashed in the attic, we set for life,” Daddy said.

“After me and Mac pass on, you won’t never have to work again if you don’t want to. It’s a shame poor Odell ain’t going to be around to help you enjoy all that money.” When Mama started crying, I left the room.

We never discussed the money again. But at least two or three times a week since his death, “poor Odell” was my parents’ favorite subject. They’d even had one of our wedding pictures enlarged and framed. It was on their living-room wall. Every time I saw it, my blood boiled. I threw out the wedding pictures I’d displayed all over the house I had shared with him. When Mama noticed, I told her that the clumsy men who had helped me move had accidentally destroyed them. My lie went on to say that they hadn’t secured the boxes on the back of their truck. The one with my wedding pictures had tumbled off, and the truck had backed up and run over it. When Mama had duplicates made of her copies and gave them to me, I was horrified. My explanation that it was too painful for me to look at pictures of Odell satisfied her, and she stored them in her attic. I didn’t want anything in my house that would remind me of that man. Estelle didn’t count. It helped that she didn’t look anything like him.

Buddy and Sadie were still gossiping busybodies, but they were managing the store so well the money was still rolling in. A week and a half after Odell’s funeral, I had decided to go over the books that covered the last five years, with a fine-tooth comb. There was evidence that Odell had started embezzling and stealing merchandise two months after he started managing, around the same time Betty Jean entered the picture. Not long after that, he had set up some phony accounts. Two of the businesses he’d been “paying” invoices for each month had gone under the year before. Three others had never existed in the first place. I’d keep this information and his affair with Betty Jean to myself until the day I died. However, there was the possibility that somebody who knew Odell might end up in Hartville some day and hear about him and Betty Jean from one of his former friends over there. It was a slim possibility and I’d already decided if it came to that, I’d dummy up and claim complete ignorance of it. Acknowledging it would have caused a lot of people too much pain.