“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that? A goddamn liar.” She pumped the gas and backed away so fast she could have plowed into someone if they’d had the bad fortune to stand in her path.

She tore down Highway 15 clutching the wheel so hard she could have ripped it off the base. Tears stung her eyes. Usually when she was upset like this, she would head to St. Peter’s and release her wrath on the organ—just sitting at the console calmed her. She could practically hear the toccata from Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique raging in her head—it sounded like Dracula music. Her mother loved that piece. “Imagine what it was like for some poor sinner in the nineteenth century to walk into a cathedral and hear this! Who wouldn’t believe in God’s wrath?”

Raylee sat quietly with her chubby hands on her lap. She had dirt under her nails. Sherri appreciated her silence. She wasn’t a bad kid, she was just painfully lonely, and here Sherri had gone and abandoned her—she hadn’t even given her more than a passing thought all summer long, and soon she would be gone for good.

“Sher, I forgot my corn.”

Sherri reached into her bag and handed the girl a twenty-dollar bill from her separate stash of spending money. “There’s no way I’m going back there. Here, go get some more. And use the rest of the money to buy that doll you were talking about, OK?”

“For real?”

“Yeah. At least one of us should get exactly what we want.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sherri dropped off Raylee, picked up a quarter barrel of beer, and drove to Arthur’s house in her new boat of a car. Mitch had asked her why she didn’t get a sports car, and she wondered the same thing as she steered. It seemed to hug both sides of the road. She absolutely hated it.

Arthur’s sleek red car sat in his driveway. When she knocked on his front door, nobody answered. It was funny, she thought, how she could feel the soullessness of an empty home—it was the same bad feeling she’d had on the few occasions she’d returned to her apartment on the square.