Boomer stopped me. “Your brother,” he said miserably. “He’d done stuff before he killed your mama and daddy. Bad stuff. Don’t you go thinkin’ it was really you that done it. You was just a little kid, no bigger’n a minute.”

I thought of Chester, lying dead in the deep grass behind the storage shed in back of our double-wide. “What kind of bad stuff?” I asked quietly, dreading the answer.

“Tearin’ things up, mostly,” Boomer said. “Bullying, too. There was a rumor goin’ around that Evie was fixin’ to put him in some kind of institution for a while. That she thought he was dangerous.” His sigh was telling, and for the first time, I linked up with the obvious. Both my parents would have been around Boomer’s age, if they’d lived. Cactus Bend was a very small town, where everyone knew everyone else. Most likely, Boomer, Evie and Ron had grown up together. “I liked Evie,” he went on sadly. “Never thought she got a fair shake, between your no-account daddy—if you’ll excuse me for sayin’ it—and the way things turned out for her in general. She was the prettiest girl in school. Prom queen. Had a scholarship to ASU, too. But she never got to use it. She just seemed to meet with bad luck wherever she turned.”

Bad luck, I wondered, or bad choices?

“Tell me about my dad. I don’t remember much.”

Boomer sighed again, gazing at the headstones as if he could see Ron and Evie’s ghosts standing in their places. “He wasn’t one for hard work, your daddy. Always lookin’ to make an easy buck. Get on the dole someway. I always said, if Ron Mayhugh had put half as much effort into a job as he did into tryin’ to catch himself a free ride, he’d have been a millionaire five times over.”

I felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t afraid of hard work, but there was no denying that I had a certain aversion to the 9-to-5 life myself, as Greer so often pointed out. Was I like my dad?

And, come to think of it, where the hell did Greer come off saying stuff like that, anyway? Since when did selling a business she’d slaved to build and then throwing herself into the role of trophy wife qualify her to criticize my career choices?

“Go on,” I said on a breath, reconnecting with the present moment, in which Boomer figured prominently.