“Not too young,” my brother said. We’d changed sides in the Manfred argument, I realized. Suddenly, I was trying not to smile. I realized the pain pill I’d taken at the cabin was definitely working. I had the blooming warm sense of well-being, the chatty feeling of affection for all mankind. If I ever became addicted to any pharmaceutical, pain pills would be my drug of choice. But I didn’t plan on becoming addicted. Once the pain was gone, the pills would be. I had to watch myself, after the example my mother had set me.

“The trick to avoiding these pills is not to get hurt,” I said seriously.

Tolliver had a little trouble catching up to this conversational line, but he got there. “Yes, you don’t want to end up in the hospital again,” he said. “For one thing, you can’t do your share of the driving while you’re on them.”

“Oh, yeah, like you care,” I said.

He smiled. I felt better. “But I do,” he said.

The lot of Mount Ida Baptist Church was already full of cars. One of the local cops was directing the overflow parking. Tolliver asked if he could drop me off right in front of the church, and the cop nodded. I got out of the car awkwardly and stood just inside the vestibule, waiting. As other people passed me and went in, I glimpsed Twyla sitting at a table just inside the door. She had a clear plastic box in front of her, a box with a slot cut in the top.

There was a sign on the front of the box that read “Please help our families bury their children.” It was already half full of bills and change.

Twyla glimpsed me, too, and made a beckoning gesture. I maneuvered through the doors and went to sit in the vacant folding chair beside her. She leaned over to give me a half hug.

“How you doing, girl?” she asked.

However I was doing, it had to be better than Twyla. Everything wrong with me would heal. Not so, her. “I’m okay,” I said. “They’ve got you working, I see.”

“Yep, they thought it would be more effective if a relative sat here,” she said. “So here I am. If you say six of the boys were local, we need at least four thousand dollars for each burial, so our goal is twenty-four thousand. We got these up all over town, but this is a poor place. I think we’ll be lucky to get six thousand through these collections.”

“How do you expect to make up the rest, or do you think that just won’t happen?”

Twyla looked grim. “I think it won’t happen. But we’re doing the best we can. Maybe if the poorer families can just make a good down payment on the funerals through these donations, each individual family can pay the rest on time.”