It was bright daylight when they woke up. The spoon player had left in his flop-eared car, and the old woman was rattling around in the kitchen, frying eggs. Lily went out on the porch and looked down at the lake, glittering in the morning sun. Its dark comforts of the night before were gone, and now it looked like something brittle that had shattered into little sparkling chips.

“Look,” said Louise, “we forgot all about Mama’s ashes.” There was the plastic urn still sitting on the top step, with dew beaded up on the gold. They took it down to the edge of the lake, Louise prized off the lid, and without any ceremony she flung the ashes out over the water. A few ducks waddled over, stomped around for a while, then dabbled and rooted around in the mud and shallow water, smacking their bills together, chucka chucka chucka—for all the world, thought Lily, like a pair of spoons.

The Green Bus

THERE’S NOTHING hotter than the parking lot of a north-Florida Wal-Mart Superstore in mid-August, but that’s where they had been living for over a week when Alice found them and took them home with her—the man, the woman, and the snaggletoothed Chihuahua. They’d been living in their broken-down Volkswagen bus, with a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR sticker on the front and a hand-lettered NEED REPAIRS sign strapped across the back. They had set up two folding aluminum chairs in the shade of a blue FEMA tarp.

They were modern hippies, hippies without a cause from the new millennium; but still it took Alice back—the wild hair, the woman’s tie-dyed skirt, the smells of patchouli and sweat, the man’s lackadaisical gait.

“Them goddamned slouching hippies,” Alice’s father had called the hippies in 1967, when Alice had fallen in love with one of them living on a commune behind the old Elmslie place. Roger, with the golden mustache and the dreamy eyes. When they had first moved in with their chickens and their hand plows, her father had thought the hippies were some new kind of earnest farmer, and he gave them an old blue ’41 Ford truck he had out back. He spent an afternoon replacing hoses and gaskets, got it running, and gave it to Roger. But the hippies wouldn’t use Sevin dust, and flea beetles got their eggplants, and slugs got the lettuces, and possums ate the chickens one by one, and besides, it was the summer of love.

“I gave him my truck, and he took my child!” Alice’s father said.

The hippies loved that truck though, and they rode all over in it, hanging out the windows, piled up in the back—Alice, too. It was before the days of seat belts.

“She done took up with them,” her father said.