The two of us pick our way across the grass to the front door, where Chet knocks hard enough to crack the wood. Jamie Holmes is a little deaf.

A little lame, too. I can hear her limping on the other side of the wood, the whomp swish, whomp swish as she makes her way across the room. I hike my bag higher on my shoulder and give her all the time she needs.

“Well, well, well,” she says, and loud enough they can hear her in town. “If it ain’t Miss High and Mighty and her baby brother, Chet. How y’all doin’?”

She softens her words with a grin, and there’s a hole where a tooth used to be—the third that I can spot. I take in her rumpled clothes, her gray skin and uncombed hair, the clear tube hanging from her nose like a skinny mustache. It trails down her chin and snakes around her left side, disappearing into the oxygen tank she drags with her everywhere. Jamie is only fifty, but thanks to the bum knee and faulty heart valve, she looks twice her age.

“Hi, Miss Jamie,” I say. “You’re looking good.”

She laughs, a painful hacking sound. “Liar. Now get your skinny tails in here before you let in all the cold.”

I wait for her to step back, which takes a minute. Jamie’s tank is in the way, the wheels snagged in the shaggy carpet. Chet leans around her to turn the thing around, a sleek piece of metal and plastic on caster wheels. Once she and her tank are pointed in the right direction, I follow her in and shut the door.

Jamie limps into her living room, a cramped space on the front side of the house crammed full of durable, mismatched furniture. A gilded coffee table next to a modern wing chair, an LED floor lamp, a leather couch buried under discarded clothes and junk, newspapers and food cartons and crumpled lottery scratch-offs. I shove everything aside and sink onto a corner. Chet perches on the armrest.

“Can I get y’all some tea or lemonade or something?” She parks her tank next to a plaid La-Z-Boy.

“We’re fine, thanks. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, like crap.” She collapses into the chair and gives a hard yank on the handle. The footrest pops up like magic, revealing ankles swollen to twice their normal size, meaty white skin cinched by the elastic of her sweats. “I’m panting like a dog in heat, and I haven’t felt my toes in a decade. How do you think I feel?”