Daddy looked out the window again. He’d always taken a lot of pride in the way his farm looked, crop rows so straight you’d have thought they’d been marked off with a plumb line, hay bales stacked in the barn loft with the precision of a mason laying brick. What he saw now was a barbed-wire fence that needed mending, a barn roof browned by rust, a pulp-wood truck whose tires were flat from dry rot. Nothing sprouted but broom sedge in the bottomland, and the pond held more silt than water. He was dying and his farm was dying with him.

He scratched the white hairs sprouting on his chin. Just as he’d kept everything on his farm tidy, he’d done the same with his own appearance. He’d shaved every morning, and when he came in from his fields he never sat down at the supper table without taking a shower first. But that didn’t seem very important to him now. Maybe letting things go made it easier.

Daddy took another sip of coffee, a longer sip. Coffee dribbled onto his chin like tobacco juice.

“Can’t run a farm, can’t hardly even swallow no more,” he said. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “If it wasn’t for that chemotherapy I might be able to do more things. That stuff’s probably killing me more than the cancer.”

“I could milk her. I haven’t forgot how.”

“No, Joel will be here directly. He just has to get his own chores done first.”

Daddy looked at the salt shakers. “I reckon Luke Miller was there last night.”

“Yes.”

“And talking all his nonsense.”

“He had his say.”

Daddy looked at me. I knew he wanted to comment more and probably would, not just about Luke but about Luke and me.

“Let’s not talk about Luke now,” I said.

My father’s hands lay on the table before him and they trembled.

“I got things I need to say,” he said.

I had never seen him cry, not when he’d visited Ben in the hospital, not when Momma died. But he looked as though he might do so now. It’s the medicine, I told myself.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, and finished my coffee with one long swallow. I could always eat breakfast at Mama Tilson’s.

I stood up and pushed the chair back under the table and went to the bedroom. I locked the door behind me and shoved clothes and toiletries into my suitcase.