“So I need to ask you again, Mrs. Chance,” the officer said, his spoon clinking against the china cup, “where exactly were you on the morning of the day of the shooting?”

“I’ve told you this already,” she sighed. “I was doing the same thing I always do, mornings. Making breakfast for my family. Cleaning up. Getting my sheet music organized for a piano lesson.”

“And remind me: Where exactly was your husband at this point?”

“My husband didn’t usually eat breakfast with the rest of us. Carl was always more of a loner. He’d get up early, read the paper, and head out to the barn or go putter on something in the implement shed. Sometimes I think he just drove around in that truck of his. A lot of the time I never actually knew what he was up to.”

“You yourself remained in the house?” Officer Scruggs asked.

“Yes.” Exasperation in her voice.

“And would there be witnesses to corroborate that?”

“Only my children.”

Nate remembered the day, of course. He’d been back over it a thousand times, trying to imagine how he might have made things turn out different, how he could have kept his dad from doing what he did.

Rufus had been off on a feed run that morning, so Nate and his dad had gotten up before his mother and sister to do the milking. They seldom talked much anymore, but Nate still came along to help him.

That particular day, as Nate watched him lift one of the full buckets of thick, warm, frothy milk, something seemed different about his father. It took a minute before he figured out what it was.

“You shaved,” Nate said.

“Yup,” he said. He was still pouring milk, not looking up.

“Why?”

“I just felt like it. Now and then when I stare into the mirror, I like to remind myself what I look like.”

“I think of you more the other way,” Nate said. “With a scruffly face.”

“I didn’t used to be like this, you know,” his father said. “I used to be more like you. There was a time, I figured I’d be a professor or something. Get myself a college degree. I would’ve shaved every single morning, then. Worn a suit and tie and everything.”

“I like you being a farmer,” Nate said. “If you were a professor, we couldn’t come out to the barn together.”

They worked side by side for a while in silence. Then his father spoke again. “I was just thinking,” he said. “Before long, you know, you’ll be shaving yourself.”

“I don’t need to do that yet,” Nate told him. All he had on his cheeks so far was soft, downy fuzz, like his mother’s Ultrasuede jacket his grandparents had bought her.

“But you will. It’ll happen before you know it.”