“But I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. You’d like it here. You would.”

“I’m sure I would, but I have to work,” he said. The hissing noise of emptiness pervaded the phone lines. “Come home,” he finally said.

“That sounds like an order.”

“See? See how you do that? I was trying to tell you I want to see you, and you act like I’m ordering you around.”

“I have to go.”

“You have to go?”

“I do. I’m out running errands. I’ll call you later.” I hung up as I felt my stomach lurch. There is static of the mind that comes with emotional confusion, like a loud rock band with discordant notes thrashing against one another, and this confusion wouldn’t allow me to define what I have always ignored. But there in Bayside I understood finally: manipulation. A serrated word I’d never allowed to cross my spirit or allowed myself to believe about anyone I love. But there it was, as if the word were emblazoned in capital letters across the Bayside horizon.

Rusty used his words and his extremes, sweetness and rage, to keep me doing and saying and being exactly what he wanted me to do, say, and be.

No more.

I walked back toward Pappy’s and resumed my discussion.

“So,” I asked Pappy, who was wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, “how do they grow seedless watermelons? I mean, what seeds do they use?”

“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “I really don’t. So much of anything these days is a mystery to me.”

“Me too,” I said as I paid for my produce and left the change on the counter.

“Now you have a good day, Ms. Ellie. Don’t be letting other people go ruining it for you.”

“I won’t,” I said as I walked off, and I realized he’d changed his farewell, not uttered his usual, “Now go do what you need to do.”

The county commissioner’s office was on the far end of the main street in a cement building, a cornerstone of the town and the block. The marble steps were chipped on the edges, veined and cracked like an old woman’s legs that have stood too long at their job. The double-wood doors had iron handles as large as my arm. I entered the air-conditioned hallway and shivered. To the right, an older woman with a leaning tower of hair, her glasses perched on her nose, looked up at me, squinting. “May I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like to see Micah Reynolds.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said. “My mother and he were good friends in the sixties. She just passed and I wanted to say hello to him, meet him.”

“Oh, darling, I am so, so sorry you lost your mama.”

“Thank you,” I said.