I park behind his old 740 and quickly make my way through the dark garage. This house has never grown familiar to me—the house I grew up in was burned to the ground by Ray Presley in 1998. Once I gain the hall, I spy a faint glow beneath Dad’s study door. Walking softly, so as not to wake my mother, I find him sitting at his study desk, smoking a Partagas and poring over a thick book, his trifocals gleaming in the light of the reading lamp.

“Dad?” I say softly.

He looks up and smiles. “Come in, son. I tried to sleep earlier, but it was no use.” Closing the book on a brass marker, he sets it aside. “I’ve been reading Shelby Foote.”

Naturally. My father’s future hangs by a thread, and he’s reading Civil War history.

“Did you know he died this past June?” he asks, as though we have nothing more urgent to discuss. “Heart attack, secondary to a pulmonary embolism.”

“I didn’t know that.” I take a seat in the more comfortable of the two chairs that face his desk. Behind him, his shelves are filled with rare books sent by dozens of friends and dealers who felt compelled to offer some tangible expression of solace after his library burned. Only now do I realize that Dad is wearing a multicolored robe that my sister and I gave him for Christmas thirty years ago.

He’s not going to change his mind, I realize. He’s really going to make my mother watch him walk to a sheriff’s cruiser in handcuffs.

“Dad, Billy Byrd is going to arrest you tomorrow morning.”

His smile fades but doesn’t quite disappear. “He’ll enjoy that.”

“What’s the deal there? Shad says Sheriff Byrd has some kind of personal grudge against you.”

“Oh … well, I treated Billy’s wife for years. She had a long history of suspicious bruises and lacerations, plus one fracture. Need I continue?”

“Sheriff Byrd is a wifebeater?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And he knows you know that?”

“Yes.”

“The wife told him?”

“No. Billy came in for a physical, and I told him that if his wife showed up in my office with another suspicious injury, I’d swear out a warrant against him with the chief of police.”

I sit back and try to process this. “Well, given that history, don’t you think you’d do well to stay out of the county jail?”

Dad lays his hand on the volume of Foote and sighs. “I’ve treated most of those deputies down there, or their parents. I think that will probably balance the sheriff’s ill will. Billy finally divorced that wife, by the way, to her everlasting good fortune.”