I wonder how the lab tests are going. Maybe they’ll surprise us with a sudden heroic burst of energy, but I have my doubts.

A waitress asks if I want a drink.

I order a G & T.

“Still serving dinner?” I ask.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ma’am again.

She drops off the dinner menu and, a few minutes later, my drink. First things first, I take a big sip of the cocktail that I have long thought synonymous with summer. It’s lime. It’s crisp. It’s the drink I suspect one day will be my downfall. I know tonight I’ll have two and still want another.

When the waitress returns, I tell her the New York, medium rare.

“Corn or grass fed?” she asks.

“Grass.”

“Baked or fried?”

I can’t do this all night, so I tell her everything she needs to know. “Baked, the works. Salad, bleu cheese, another drink.”

I end by looking at my phone. Rude, I know. I’m not sorry. A text message from Sheriff is brief, but it’s the first thing that has made me smile today.

Called Bernie’s boss.

I give him the thumbs up emoji. I almost send the heart emoji, though I don’t want things to get weird with him. Not that he’s ever been inappropriate. Not by a longshot.

I have a few texts from people in town telling me I did a good job on TV.

I wonder what they think would constitute a poor job. All I did was look hostile as I told the reporter to get off the property. And yes, I showed my badge, but honestly why does that have to go viral? It wasn’t like it was my gun.

Thank God for that.

I sit there in my kitchen, while revisiting the saddest memorial I’ve ever attended. It wasn’t only the flowers from the shroud floating downward into the darkness of an earthen hole, or even the small number of people who came to remember Ida Wheaton. It stirred more memories. Like the tapes. I thought of how Hayden and I never got to pay our respects or grieve for our stepdad at his memorial. In fact, it only crossed my mind just now that he’d probably been buried in Potter’s Field. No service. No friends. No family. Just a kind of nothingness, an extension of the life we’d lived since I was little.

Thirty

Ruth Turner is waiting at my office when I arrive the next morning. She’s dressed in a long-sleeved blouse with a high collar; her skirt is cut below the knee. I take her to my office where she marvels at all the “papers” I have.

“Your work looks so busy,” she remarks before amending, “That came out wrong. You look busy.”

I offer coffee. As expected, she declines.

No caffeine is allowed by order of her husband, no doubt.

“Where’s Eve?”