“I didn’t mean to,” he said finally. “It happened fast. It all got away from me. So fast.” His voice broke, and fat tears spilled down his cheeks. He covered his face with both hands and wept. I turned back to the river, watched the wind ruffle through the grass on the far side. I could be patient. I could let him cry, and talk, and explain. None of it mattered because this was already ending only one way.

“Please,” he said, reached out and laid a hand on my arm. I looked down at his fingers, imagined breaking each one until he let go. “Let me . . . let me tell you what happened. It’s not what you think.”

I nodded, even though I was pretty sure it was exactly what I thought. He’d valued something more than Junie’s life. End of story. But the sooner he started talking, the sooner he’d be done.

“I was doing it for her. For Junie.”

That surprised me, and my head whipped in his direction. “Doing what for Junie?”

“The money. I wanted her to be able to leave this place, go to college, something. Get out. But what I make isn’t enough, not even close. And one night I ran into Matt and he started saying how Land had been giving them some hassle about how big the operation was getting. How they could really use someone on the inside to help things run a little more smoothly. At first I told myself I was only listening. I wasn’t actually going to do anything. But then I talked to Jimmy Ray and it seemed like a perfect deal.” He shrugged. “They were selling the drugs anyway. Whether I helped or not. Why not gain something from it? It’s not like I was stealing from babies. It seemed like a fair trade.”

What did people around here always say? That you could take the kid out of the holler, but you could never take the holler out of the kid. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, but Cal and I were living proof. Dress us up in a cop uniform, give us a child to care for, and we might walk the straight and narrow for a while. But our history always rose up to meet us. Or dragged us down to its level. That night in the bar, Cal had been right. We were exactly who Mama’d raised us to be.

“And it was going fine,” Cal continued. “I was making good money. Socking it away for Junie. I never spent any of it.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. But not until it was time for her to use it. I figured you wouldn’t object as much if the money was right there when she needed it. And by then I planned to be done with all that, anyway.”

If he actually believed that, then he had no real idea about how Jimmy Ray worked. He never would have let Cal walk away. “She didn’t need money from you,” I told him. “She could have gotten a scholarship if she wanted to go to college, or I could have figured something out.” But we both knew I couldn’t have. As much as I’d loved my daughter, there were some things I never would have been able to give her, no matter how much I wanted to. As Mama liked to say, you couldn’t get blood from a stone.