He got in the truck—so did I—and he threw the white bags onto the dashboard. He slammed the door shut.

“I forgot to put the fucking DVD in the case.”

I said we could go get it and bring it back, but Fellis said no, that we could do it another day.

“What’s one more late fee for Beth?” he said.

At the intersection Fellis turned left, and I asked if he remembered which way was home.

“I’m taking the highway and then the long loop back,” he said. “Air this fucker out.”

The long loop made no difference. We had to drive through that rotting road again, but before we hit the bridge we stopped at Jim’s and Fellis bought a pack of smokes, two thick cheap cigars, and two tall cans of Arizona Iced Tea. Before he pulled Einhell onto the bridge he parked along the road and we each lit one cigar and let the cab of the truck fill with thick smoke. We drove in a self-made fog that was nowhere but inside this machine, and it helped ward off the smell of bait enough for us not to gag, but we were gagging from the thick smoke by the time we got to his aunt Alice’s, and the clouds of smoke rolled out of the truck as Fellis got out and put the meds in her mailbox. He raised the little red flag.

. . .

I called Tabitha when we got back to Fellis’s. I leaned on the wall by the back door. Fellis was looking around the house for the Redbox movie, Transcendence.

“You were in the bathroom long enough,” Tabitha said.

“Fellis didn’t know what he was talking about,” I told her. “He gets like that after his treatment.”

Fellis yelled something at me from the living room, but I ignored him.

“Well where were you?”

I told her what we did, but she had nothing to say about it.

“When are you coming back?” she said.

“Tomorrow,” I told her.

“Come home tonight,” she said. “I want to talk.”

I switched the phone to my other ear. “I have to watch Fellis. Why don’t you come over here?”

“I don’t want to go over there,” she said.

“They ain’t like that here,” I said. “It’s different in this house.”

“Please come home tonight,” she said. “I just want to talk. We need to talk.”

“Look, I gotta go, I’ll call later.”

“Dee,” she said. “Today’s our—”

I hung up and then removed the phone from the hook.

. . .

Beth got home four hours early. Fellis and I were on the couch, watching reruns of The People’s Court and sipping warm Arizona Iced Tea. The sun was still shining, and when I heard the car door bang shut I thought it was Tabitha and I got excited, but then I saw it was just Beth.

She came into the house and clunked her keys onto the table by the back door.