Foster drank off some of his own and immediately wished he’d brought cigarettes in with him. But went forward, where he was determined to go. He said, “I been thinking about all you had to say this afternoon. Up there in the cemetery. It was a pretty good job, seems like. I felt like I was being led around. But what I came after is why my grandmother came back down here after her mother and couldn’t find her and so went home where she was loved and needed and chose instead to walk up in the woods and kill herself. You haven’t told me one thing that gets close to explaining that. Why she did it. And what I think is if anybody knows it’s you. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that her daddy being her mother’s half brother or whatever the point of your story this afternoon was, it doesn’t make anything clearer to me.”

Mebane lifted his glass and sighted along the rim at eye level and then drank some. Put the glass down and looked at it. “In its way,” he said, “it was part of it.”

“Her part or your part?”

“Could be they’re much the same thing.”

Foster drained down his own glass and set it on the table and poured for himself from the bottle and turned to look at Mebane. “The way I heard it, when she got back home she kept talking to herself about some old man set up on a block with a rope around his neck and doused down with kerosene and set afire so he burned up until he jumped off the block to kill himself. You know what I’m talking about? Mister Mebane? Sir?”

Mebane sat silent gazing off across the table, into the piles of books and newspapers and old ledgers there as if it was a place he longed to go. He ran his one index finger around the rim of his glass without looking down at it. “I do.” His voice loose upon itself, a soft strangle. He added, “Mister Pelham. Sir.”

Foster said, “I didn’t intend to be rude.”

“A man can’t handle his whiskey hadn’t ought to drink.”

“I can handle it just fine. What’s giving me a problem is feeling like I’m in the middle of some old duck-and-dodge. I think I’m patient, otherwise.”

“But you have an end to that patience, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Everybody does, I guess.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No sir.” Then added, “Not yet.”

“Good,” said Mebane. He took up his whiskey and sipped. “Good for you Foster Pelham. You see, we’re beginning to understand each other.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Oh yes you do. It just hasn’t occurred to you that way yet.”

“Sir?”

“What there is between us is something not either one of us wants. But it’s here. It’s what we have.”

Foster was quiet.