After that, everything blurred together in Doris’s mind. When they got to the car, Lucinda came over faint, a chill, she said, she’d be fine, just needed some water after running around in the hot sun. Doris drove Cady to the hospital, and while they were checking her into the pediatric unit, Lucinda fainted. She was dead by morning. Doris never left her side, lying next to her in the bed as she shivered and sweated her life away in the ICU.

“Did you see the cans, Dorrie?” she muttered once through her cracked lips. “Cans behind tents.”

Sometime in the middle of the night, Dr. Kiel had looked in. He’d been distraught, a surprise, since he didn’t seem like the kind of man to care about his technician. When the nurses took Lucinda out of Doris’s arms, they gave Doris an injection, told her to come back at once if she started feeling sick, come back in a week for a recheck.

Doris hadn’t bothered. What difference would it make? She didn’t want to put one foot in front of another on a morning where Lucinda wasn’t next to her in bed, waiting for her morning coffee. You’re up with the birds, farm girl. You can pamper me in the mornings. I’ll take care of you at night.

Sometime in that hard first week alone, alone except for Emerald coming back for the funeral, Doris had heard that Jenny Perec was dead. She’d driven off the road, off K-10 where it crossed the Wakarusa and landed in the river. People said she’d remembered she’d run away without her baby and was making a U-turn, going back to find Cady, and lost control of the car. And then the fire burned down the hippie tents. Probably set by Major Schreiber; he’d seemed like that kind of bully.

Doris didn’t believe in Jesus or heaven or any of those things. Lucinda was ambivalent, but she went into town to worship at St. Silas most Sundays—the music refreshed her spirit even if the pastor was a narrow-minded old fool.

Doris had wanted cremation, to spread the ashes over the garden where they’d sat on summer evenings smelling the honeysuckle, but Emerald was Lucinda’s daughter. She wanted a proper burial for her mother, and the daughter’s wishes trump a friend’s, every time. They did the whole thing, Doris in a hat that Emerald had chosen for her, the choir singing Lucinda’s favorite hymns, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Amazing Grace,” the pastor preaching about Jesus and how our sister was in his arms, in glory, today.