Nate stood there in the driveway for a minute. As the car pulled away Naomi turned around to give him a goofy look out the back window. She was crossing her eyes and making circles in the air, the sign for crazy, in the direction of her mom. She pulled out a hank of hair as if an electrical current had run through her and made it stand on end.

He turned and walked back to the house while she could still see him, stiff legged, with his arms out front, like he was Frankenstein. Only, unlike Frankenstein, he was smiling.

Fifteen

OFFICER SCRUGGS WAS BACK. HE SHOWED UP AT THE door as Nate was heading in from the implement shed.

“How’s it going, son?” he said. The two of them stepped into the kitchen together.

What was a person supposed to say to that? My dad’s in a mental hospital, our farm is going bankrupt, and my mom’s under suspicion—by you—for shooting my dad. Otherwise, things are great?

Nate’s mother must have known Officer Scruggs was coming, because she’d changed out of her bathrobe. As she poured him a cup of coffee her hand shook—a regular problem these days. She didn’t fix herself a cup, just took her seat at the table across from the policeman with a look of weary resignation.

“Go tend to your chores, Nate,” she told him. “I need to speak privately with Officer Scruggs.” He left the room. But only for his usual spot in the back hall, where he could listen.

“You may not have heard, Mrs. Chance,” the policeman began, “but one of our detectives paid another visit to your husband. We’d learned from the doctor up there that in spite of his injuries, he was speaking more lucidly. Our man thought he might get some long-overdue answers concerning the shooting and the whereabouts of the gun.”

“So he told you he did it?” Nate’s mom said. “He told you, right?”

“He can speak just fine, I’m happy to say,” the officer said. “But he says he has no memory of that day. No memory of what happened. Anytime we try to ask him more, it’s like a curtain goes down, and he’s done talking.”

“My husband is a troubled man,” she said. “I told you that already.”

“He’s a man that got shot,” Officer Scruggs said. “We just need to find out who did it.”

In the hallway Nate leaned against the wall. The good news was, his father could speak. That stuff the women had said at the five-and-ten that day, about him being a vegetable, wasn’t true. But evidently, the police were still ready to believe that Nate’s mom might have shot his dad.