“ ‘Yeah, I wanted money,’ said Patsy, in her hard voice, ‘and it’s not like he didn’t have it to give. He had it. Just wait till they read his will. He was loaded, and what did he ever do with it? But that’s not what set him off to cursing and shouting at me and then grabbing for his chest and throwing up and dying.’

“ ‘So what did?’ asked Jasmine.

“ ‘I told him I was sick,’ said Patsy. ‘I told him I was HIV-positive.’

“Silence. Then Big Ramona looked at me.

“ ‘What’s she talking about?’ she asked.

“ ‘AIDS, Ramona,’ I said. ‘She’s HIV-positive. It means she’s contracted the AIDS virus. She could come down with full-blown AIDS any time.’

“ ‘I’m the one that’s sick,’ Patsy said, ‘and he’s the one that up and dies because he was mad at me, mad that I got it. You ask me, he died of grief. Grief for Sweetheart.’ She broke off and looked from one to the other of all of us.

“ ‘Grief’s what killed him,’ she went on. She shrugged. ‘I didn’t kill him. You should have seen what he was doing out there. He’d rolled over one row of pansies with his truck, and there he was laying another bed of them, like he didn’t even know what he’d done with his truck. I said, “Look at what you’ve done, you sniveling crazy old man.” He started in on all that, “You sold her wedding dress!” like that wasn’t so over, sniveling crazy old fool, and he said he wasn’t giving me a red cent, and then I told him. I told him I had medical bills to pay.’

“I was too stunned to think, but I heard myself ask her, ‘How did you get it?’

“ ‘How should I know?’ she replied, looking at me with those brittle glossy eyes. ‘From some bastard who had it, probably a user, I don’t know, I’ve got an idea and then I don’t. It wasn’t Seymour, don’t you go blaming him. And don’t you go telling him either. Don’t you none of you tell anybody what I’m telling you. Don’t you go telling Aunt Queen. Seymour and I have a gig tonight. But the thing is, I can’t pay the rest of the pickers unless I have some money.’

“By pickers, she meant the guitar players who’d be backing her up.

“ ‘You expect one of us to go in there and ask Aunt Queen for money?’ asked Big Ramona. ‘Cancel your goddamned gig. You got no business playing music tonight when your father is stone dead at the mortuary in Ruby River City.’

“Patsy shook her head. ‘I’m flat broke,’ she said. ‘Quinn, go in there and get some money for me.’