“What do you mean ‘out to get you’?”

“He didn’t want to bequeath to me, said I wouldn’t be any good there at the helm. Yelled it across the whole settlement.”

“Well, he didn’t have no say in that I reckon.”

“I told him as much. But he weren’t wrong. What I got to do at the cannery, not sure how I’ll fare. He… I—”

“It’s okay, Arbuckle. You don’t need to tell me.”

“I do, though. Got to just come right out and say it because I’ve been holding it in here.” He brought his hand to his chest. “Ain’t no good in there, and if anything happened to you I just don’t know what I’d do.”

“What’s anything got to do with me?” she asked.

“He came home late in the night. Been drinking. I’d been asleep and all of a sudden he’s got his hand around my throat.” He brought his own hand to his neck.

“Arbuckle! Why ain’t you never tell me this?”

“And say what? My own pa tried to kill me?”

“You could’ve told the Deputies—they would’ve—”

“They’d had made me inherit then and there. And I ain’t gonna lie. Don’t want nothing of this inheritance at all. But that’s not the worst of it,” he said.

“What d’you mean?” Lady Mae pushed her plate away and leaned forward.

“Told me that if I didn’t disappear, he’d make sure you ended up like your mama.”

“End up like her?”

“Yes.”

“What’d that mean?”

“Not sure. Figure dead is what.”

“Why’d he want me dead?”

Here Arbuckle paused, though he kept his hand in Lady Mae’s. He wasn’t telling all, and although she could sense that the words were there in his breath, he kept them in. “That weren’t all he said, Lady Mae.”

“Go on now. Ain’t no use keeping it from me.”

“He said if I didn’t get, he’d sic after you. Said he’d only be doing what the Deputies wanted all along.”

“What? Kill me dead?”

“Aye.”

“Why’d they want me dead?”

But she knew why they’d want her dead. What Ruby had said was true: in her pulsed the same blood as her mother’s, and there in the kitchen she felt it. She was her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, and their goodness was in her, too. And try as she might to avoid it, she felt the soft touch of their ghosts. She’d long believed the residents despised her for being the Deputies’ minion, but now that Ruby had said her piece, even if it was out of fear and compliance, maybe it weren’t all true after all.

“Don’t know,” Arbuckle said. “But he knew something.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” she said finally. She swallowed that which she didn’t know how to say, leaned in to his presence, and kept her fingers on his.

“Me too,” he said, and Lady Mae watched the small joint on his jaw move outward and inward, over and over again, as if the answer to her question was there in his mouth, in the gentle spaces between his teeth.