“I just thought that maybe you’d tell him to bring his swimsuit and he and Stevie can go swimming off my pier.”

“I bet he’d like that,” she said. “I’ll call him right now before I forget it.”

“Be sure and tell him I’m particularly looking forward to seeing him. I haven’t had a chance to talk to either of them in a long time.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “You want to speak to your daddy a minute?”

“Has it ever been more than a minute?” I asked.

She laughed. “Hang on, honey.”

A moment later, I heard Daddy say, “Yeah?”

No How you doing? How’ve you been? Everything all right? He expects us to state our business and get off the phone.

And much as it pains him to take a local call, long distance makes him crazy, even when he’s not paying for it. My brother Adam, one of the little twins, will deliberately call from California and see how long he can keep Daddy on the line before he says, “Well, less’n you got something to say worth ten cents a minute to say it, I’m gonna get off ‘fore you go broke.”

Adam hasn’t yet made it to five minutes.

“You going to be there for the next hour?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. I’m just Ieaving, the festival here in Dobbs. I’ll run past my house and change clothes and then I’ll be over,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s—” I hesitated. No point in just blurting it out. Better to wait till I could soften the news with words and judge his reaction as to how much to tell.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“Fine,” he said, and hung up.

Next I called Haywood’s house. I didn’t really expect Stevie to answer, so I wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t. I left a message on the machine that I hoped would sound innocuous to Haywood or Isabel but would let my nephew know I meant it when I said I really wanted to catch up with everything that’s been happening to him lately.

Dwight should know by now that I won’t leave trouble alone when it involves my family.

As a teenager, I used to make the drive from the farm to Dobbs in just under twenty minutes. With all the new housing developments and population growth, the speed limit’s dropped to forty-five miles an hour and it now takes me closer to thirty, which means that there was plenty of time for Daddy to drive down the lane past Maidie’s house, through the cut, and around the fields to my house.

His truck was parked at my back door when I pulled into my yard, and he was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette.