And Marya, who happened to be in the garage at the time, ran terrified to the house, shouting that Lee had been killed.

LEE WAS SUPPOSED to have finished with the Jelinski car by noon but he’d wasted time that morning, friends of his had been hanging around the garage; and now he was in a hurry. Everard, in town on business, was due back soon. Lee might have been a little careless with the jack, he didn’t remember. But he didn’t think so. He didn’t really think so. He hadn’t after all wanted to kill himself.

By this time his friends had gone home. The younger children were playing back in the lot, Alice was away somewhere, only Marya happened to be within earshot . . . so Lee shouted for her to bring him a Coke from the house. He was dying of thirst, he said. He was having a fucking hard time with the car.

Marya said that Wilma wouldn’t let her take a Coke from the refrigerator, and Lee knew it. (It was the wrong time of the day, too many Cokes disappeared from the house, they didn’t, as Wilma said, “grow on trees.”) But Lee said for her to get her ass in the house and bring him a Coke. “Just don’t let Ma know,” he said.

So Marya ran across the sunny tarry patch of pavement to the house. And let herself into the kitchen as stealthily as possible. And went to the refrigerator, and opened it, and took out a Coke—all without Wilma knowing. (Wilma wasn’t in fact inside the house at that time, she was out in the back yard hoeing in the tomato patch. And though her ear was so attuned to the sounds of the household that she might ordinarily have heard the refrigerator door open and close, even at that distance, she didn’t hear Marya that day; Marya must have been unusually cautious.)

She had the presence of mind to open the bottle in the kitchen—if she’d gone back to the garage without opening it, and without the opener, Lee would give her hell—and even to dispose of the cap in the garbage bag beneath the sink. So that, until she counted the remaining Cokes in the refrigerator, if she troubled to count them at all, Wilma wouldn’t know that one was missing.

She also took a small swallow of the drink on the way back to the garage, reasoning that Lee wouldn’t notice. Which of course he didn’t.