Lady Mae sat down on the sofa and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. When they did, she bent to untie her boots, which were clean as she had not seen any patients that day, and no one had brought her any animals. Finding the depot’s letterbox empty was second only to Sundays and proved a much-needed respite from her duties as the butcher. She had been busier than normal lately and attributed the lack of residents’ restraint to the insufferable heat, the incessant dry winds that shook the shacks from dusk until dawn. She rose stick-mouthed and thirsty, went to sleep with burning eyes. There was nothing to lessen her parched flesh and desiccated lips, no salve that could replace what was lost. It was enough to drive someone mad. Lady Mae knew that like her, the residents were on edge—all it would take would be a glance, an accidental bump to the shoulder, to set them off. Perhaps the sweat would drip one time too many into their eyes, or the sun might beat down too mightily upon their scalps. The heat, the unending and lamentable heat, had slithered under everyone’s skin, and no one could get it out.

That day, however, there had been no scheduled atonements, no last-minute statements from the Deputies, no chickens or calves or swine. She spent her required eight-hour shift reading a book from Arbuckle that had arrived when the crocuses and gladioli had just started to peek through the soil. It wasn’t the first book he sent her. Six weeks after he’d left, she received the first package. She tore open its paper and squeezed the book of short stories to her chest. She bent her head, breathed in the smell of the jagged pages and frayed binding knowing Arbuckle was alive, that his hands had touched what she held in her own. For over five years, he had sent her books procured from some unknown person in some unknown place. How he got them, she wasn’t sure. Every few months one of the four Deputies of the settlement left a small package at Lady Mae’s door under the eaves, leaning it up against the sagging screen. She never saw which Deputy it was, but Griffin and Worth, who were new in the last few years, usually patrolled. Deputy Parson, though a fixture in the settlement, tended to stay close to the square. Deputy Daniels—the magistrate for at least the last twenty years—didn’t seem to leave the courthouse. It made no difference who had left the packages; it repulsed her to know they’d been on her porch and that the Deputies’ hands had touched the only thing that still connected her to Arbuckle. Once the Deputies realized she would follow her orders, they left her alone. But whenever she opened her door to something once handled by one of them, she felt both a deep longing and the sick edging her tongue. The Deputy that had dealt her mother’s death blow—she’d never seen him again, gone by the time Lady Mae came out of her haze. But she’d looked. She’d squinted and imagined and hoped for a glimpse, a clue, anything that would tell her where he was. And if she knew, she’d have staked out after him over the hills and peaks to the settlements she knew existed but had never seen.