She’s still pissed when she walks to Guillermo’s after school. Every stone or can in the road, she kicks into the corn or the soy or whatever grows in the fields she passes. It’s coming up on late April, and she can’t tell what little shoots are sticking up out of the mud, and she doesn’t care.

Guy’s got a little slice of farmland north of town, a parcel of land with dead fields and a gutted, burned husk of a farmhouse next to a red barn with a deep, drunken lean. Guy doesn’t live in the farmhouse: place burned down a handful of years ago when a nest of squirrels got to chewing the old knob-and-tube wiring in the attic. Killed the older couple that lived there, and from what Atlanta heard, their two charred bodies were found still in bed like they didn’t even know to get up. Then the fire spread to the fields. Took all night to put it out, the story goes.

His double-wide trailer is out back, behind the farmhouse. This time she finds him just past the trailer, taking potshots at cans and bottles on a fence rail with a little .22 pistol.

Pop, pop, pop, pop. A soup can jumps like it was bit in the ass. A bottle neck shatters. Two other shots miss, go off into the field or the trees beyond.

He drops the magazine out of the lean, black, snazzy-looking shooter, and then he turns and sees her.

Guy—Guillermo Lopez, or, as she sometimes jokingly calls him, “Guy-Lo,”—is a taut stretch of rope in a black wifebeater and urban camo pants. His head is shorn to the scalp, and even the day’s barely there sun gives it a slight shine. The smile that spreads across his face is like two doors thrown open wide, and his arms move to match the gesture, spreading out in welcome.

“Oh holy shit, look who the fuck just came slinking up my six like an alley cat! What up, girl?” He moves in to give her a hug, and she extends a finger and presses it hard against his breastbone. All she has to do is give him a look and he gets it and backs off. “Dang, sorry, sorry. Stupid. The fuck was I thinking?”

She shrugs it off even though her body feels as if it just touched an electric fence. Irrational response, of course. She knows Guy. She does. Trusts him like she trusts few others.

More than her own mother, even. And yet. And still. Shit.

They stand there like that for a while. But Guy isn’t comfortable in silence.

“I’m sorry to hear about what happened,” he says. “Fucked up, man. Real fucked up. I, uh, y’know, I gotta ask and all—that shotgun, the little .410 chicken shooter, you didn’t, it wasn’t . . .”

“I did. It was.”