We still live with Horace, though he quit the sheriff’s office and we had to move into a smaller place. I think he was forced to resign, his whole crazy story of being locked up by his dead wife’s vanished mother a little bit too much for anyone to believe. Horace is running a private security firm now, and you can tell he absolutely hates the shit out of it. But so what? It’s not like my life is peachy keen either. Mom’s schooling did not even remotely prepare me for the SAT, which I have to take next week, and I’m supposed to start thinking about colleges. How the fuck am I supposed to care about college right now? I was almost an accidental cult leader, you know? College frankly seems like a waste of time after something like that.

For a while I figured Horace held it all against me, how I thought he had murdered Mom, how I nearly killed him myself. I mean, if I were him, I sure as shit would. But the other day I was sitting on the back porch, reading the collected works of Frank Stanford, a poet I found from Arkansas. He’s really good. He might be one of the greats, I’m telling you.

Anyway, I was reading outside, the sunset light hitting my book so perfectly it was like the pages were glowing, like they were holy writ handed down from the mountain, and a hummingbird floated over and took a sip out of one of Mom’s old feeders. I was just watching it, this little miracle, wondering if it was real or if it was a vision, when Horace walked up. He sat down across from me, and I thought I was about to get it good, that he was finally going to tell me what a piece of shit I was, how I nearly got him killed.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

I nodded.

“Is it too much for you to think that your mother actually loved me? That she married me because she wanted to?”

I just stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.

A great sadness seemed to swallow Horace then, and it was like he deflated in front of me, like all that tough-guy bullshit faded out of him and he was just a slumped-over middle-aged man, bald and heartbroken.