Wanda checked to make sure the boys had resumed playing. “Then you know what I mean when I say we look after our own. We look after our neighbors before we look after people who come here and tell us to our faces we’re stupid hillbillies. We look after our own fathers before we worry about the father of someone we’ve never met.”

Wanda gave me my change, dropping it in my hand so our flesh didn’t touch.

“Goodbye, Wanda,” I said.

I walked back to the room and took two aspirin, then picked up the phone. He answered on the third ring.

“You’ve heard about Randy, I guess.”

“Yes, Margaret called me,” Daddy said, his voice guarded.

“I was there when it happened.”

“I know that too.”

Daddy paused. A vacuum cleaner roared to life in the hall outside my door, and I cupped the receiver closer to my ear.

“Margaret said Reverend Tilson will have a service of sorts on the river come morning.”

“Where on the river?” I asked.

“There at Wolf Cliff.”

“That’s not an easy place to get to, even after the bulldozers,” I said. “And it’s slippery.”

“Randy’s momma and wife want it there. I reckon Reverend Tilson feels he’s got to do what they ask. I’d go if I thought I could walk back out once I got down in there, but that chemotherapy’s taken the starch out of me.”

“You’re feeling worse?” I asked.

“No worse than what the doctors said I’d feel. It ain’t nothing I wasn’t expecting.”

In my mind I followed the telephone lines up Highway 76 and through pasture and orchard edge, down Damascus Church Road, then across the pasture to where my father sat in his front room, the glassed photographs of his wife and children staring down on him.

“About last week,” I said, and paused. What I wanted to say was I was sorry, sorry for a lot of things.

But the words wouldn’t come. Because I was imagining how Wanda or Jill Moseley would react to my words, how they’d be justified in saying it was a damn convenient time for me to be so suddenly forgiving. Daddy could say much the same.

“You told me what you believed,” he said, petulance sharpening his voice. “You got what you think of me out in the open.”

The vacuum cleaner shut off. I could hear it being rolled farther up the hall.

“I want things better between us,” I said.

“You haven’t much acted like it,” Daddy said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since you been up here.”

Anger sparked inside me for a moment but didn’t catch. I was too weary to nurture it.

“I’m going to try harder,” I said.