Our parents were brilliant people, once upon a time; before they became alcoholic, drug-addicted disbarred attorneys. And before they’d decided their clients’ criminal lifestyles were more appealing and adventuresome than their own. My mother and Tolliver’s dad found each other on their way down the drain, having shed their original spouses. My sister Cameron and I had gone from living in a four-bedroom suburban home in east Memphis to a rental house with a hole in the bathroom floor in Texarkana, Arkansas. This hadn’t happened all at once; we’d experienced many degrees of degradation. Tolliver had fallen from a lower height, but he and his brother had descended with his father, too. He’d been our companion in that hole in Texarkana. That’s where we’d been when the lightning struck.

My mother and Tolliver’s dad had had two more children together, Mariella and Gracie. Tolliver and I watched out for them as best we could. Mariella and Gracie had no memory of anything better than the life we were living.

What had happened to our other parents: my father and Tolliver’s mother? Why didn’t they save us from the terrifying turn our lives had taken? Well, by that time, my real dad had gone to jail for a long string of white-collar crimes, and Tolliver’s mother had died of cancer—leaving our at-large parents to complete their own downward passage, dragging us and their own children behind them.

So here we were, Tolliver and I, in a run-down motel in a seedy Ozarks tourist town in the off-season, hoping to dodge being charged with murder.

But by golly, we were smart.

We were playing Scrabble when we heard a knock at the door.

It was my room, so I asked, “Who is it?”

“Hollis.”

I opened the door. Hollis saw Tolliver behind me and said, “May I come in?”

I shrugged and moved back. Hollis stepped in far enough to allow me to shut the door behind him.

“You’re here to apologize, I assume,” I said in the coldest voice I could summon. It was pretty damn cold.

“Apologize! For what?” He sounded genuinely bewildered.

“For telling the sheriff I took your money. For implying I cheated you.”

“You did take my money.”

“I left it on the seat of the truck. I felt bad for you.” I was so angry I was almost spitting; I’d gone from cold to hot in less than five seconds.

“It wasn’t on the seat of the truck.”

“Yes. It was.”

He fished his keys out of his pocket. “Show me.”

“No, you look yourself, so you can’t accuse me of planting it.”