“Not really. She’d go to Sunday school and sit quiet, listen to the lesson, make her craft. She didn’t wiggle around or whisper. A dog-mill puppy, like I said. It was why I started inviting her family up for Sunday lunch. To give Lexie a little fun. How she loved that carousel! Coral Lee can be . . . a challenge, and Lexie’s daddy was a stern man, too. But Preston was in construction, just like Larry, and they had similar politics and church thoughts, so the boys had things to talk about. After a couple years, a foreman job came up with Larry’s outfit, and Larry helped Preston get it. Two months later he was dead. Freak accident. He fell at a job site and cracked his skull open. Before Larry got him hired on, he’d been working demo for years, which is so much more dangerous! Larry felt responsible, I think.”

“So he offered her a job.” Not a question, just keeping her on track.

“Not just the job. A place to live, so she could rent her house out for some income and keep homeschooling.” She finally took a sip of her drink. He’d already finished his. “Her husband had insurance, thank God. Enough to pay off the mortgage, but she didn’t want to stay there. Hard, you know, looking every day at all those places where she’d see the shape of her husband and him not there. I understood it after Larry died. I moved right in here. Then, a couple years later, I regretted it so. All I wanted was to see his places and shapes. She must have been the same, because after a year and change she did get a full-time job and move home. Lexie was eleven or maybe twelve when she finally went to school.”

He had a sense of something she wasn’t saying or that he hadn’t understood. Something important. He leaned in. “They were living with you?”

She laughed. “No, no. A single woman? Larry said we’d look like Mormons! We let her live on the property, at Funtime. In Larry’s hidey-hole.”

He felt himself get very still. “Hidey-hole. You mean, like a bomb shelter?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. More like a cabin, but built back into the hill. It was for Armageddon.”

She was so matter-of-fact, blinking at him with those dark-bright eyes. He leached all judgment from his voice, made his tone mild and interested. “So Larry was a survivalist.”