“I hope you’ll all remember that Sunday’s a workday for them when they’re on the road and they live in trailers too crowded for a lot of clothes they wouldn’t normally need, so some of them might not be dressed up. But Braz was their friend and I’m sure they’ll be mourning for him just as sincerely as if they were in suits and ties and Sunday dresses.”

Several started to scold me for even suggesting that they’d judge a person’s worth by their clothes, but I knew it would undercut the ones like Doris and also help the kids keep an open mind.

Another car arrived with A.K. driving April and Ruth. No Andrew.

“He just flat refuses to come,” April said despairingly. “And there’s nothing I can say that Seth and Mr. Kezzie haven’t already said. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”

Duck Aldcroft had sent a funeral car for Tally and her family, but they weren’t due for another half hour.

I slipped out of the house while the others were exclaiming and tsk-tsking, and a few minutes later I was easing my car’s low-slung chassis across a couple of erosion barriers in the lanes between the homeplace and Andrew’s house.

As I expected, he was out back at the pens with some of his rabbit dogs.

“Don’t you start on me!” he said as soon as he saw me. “I’m not going and that’s that. You can just turn around and march yourself right back over to Daddy’s. You hear?”

“I hear,” I said, and kept coming till I reached the step of the little viewing house he and the boys had built in front of the quarter-acre training pen so that they could watch the dogs in comfort when the weather was rainy or cold.

I didn’t say anything, just sat on the step and waited while he raked the dog dirt out of the gravel yard of each pen, filled their pans with fresh water, and checked their ears for mites and ticks. His hands were gentle with them, if a bit unsteady, and his face still had a pasty look from all the liquor he’d drunk this weekend.

“You had no call to tell April,” he said angrily.

“I didn’t go looking for her, Andrew. She came to me. To find out why you’d crawled in a bottle to hide.”

He glared at me. “I won’t hiding!”

I just sat there and looked back at him.

“I won’t hiding,” he muttered.

“No? What do you call this?”

He turned back to the dogs without answering, but when next he looked at me, he said, “You don’t go on, you’re gonna be late for the burying.”

I shrugged. “She’ll have lots of other aunts and uncles there.” I let a moment go by. “No father, though.”

“I ain’t—” He broke off with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Oh, hell, Deb’rah. She don’t want me there.”

“You won’t know that for sure unless you go.”