I cocked my head. I saw Marion whenever I went into the Bait & Tackle, but I couldn’t imagine what in particular she’d want to discuss with me. “Talk to Marion about what?”

“That guy Izzy’d been fooling around with.”

“Wait, what . . .” I felt about ten steps behind. “How’d you know about that?”

My mama smiled, showed off her yellow teeth. “Same way I know about everything, Eve. I pay attention.”

• • •

My mama doesn’t really have friends. Not the kind you’re thinking of, anyway. No one she goes to lunch with or tells her secrets to. No one she can count on when the chips are down. But if she was pressed to name a friend, Marion is probably who she’d pick. They’ve known each other their whole lives, from what I can gather. To say they like each other might be stretching the truth. I’ve heard my mama bitch about Marion more often than she’s praised her. But they’re cut from the same cloth, honor the same code. Stick together, don’t snitch, hit first, and hit hard. They understand each other, my mama and Marion.

I didn’t see Marion as often as I used to, when she was a frequent visitor to my mama’s trailer. Her family had owned the falling-down Bait & Tackle for generations, but it was a place I generally tried to avoid—dark, cramped, and smelly. I only set foot inside when I was desperate for some essentials and both the Piggly Wiggly and the general store were closed. I always swore a half gallon of milk from the Bait & Tackle left an aftertaste of rotten fish in your mouth. Buying anything there made you feel poor and dirty. The Bait & Tackle might have been an institution around here, but anybody who could afford it drove ten miles down the road to buy their hooks and worms somewhere else.

The one constant inside the store, besides the smell, was Marion herself. She held court from behind the cracked counter, an ancient cash register on one side of her and an overflowing, ceramic ashtray on the other. My mama smokes, but Marion smokes. Takes after a carton of cigarettes like it’s her job. So it wasn’t exactly a shock to find her puffing away on an unfiltered Marlboro when I stepped through the door.

“Well, good goddamn,” Marion said, loud. “Is that little Evie Taggert I spy?”

“Hi, Marion,” I called, picking my way past buckets writhing with worms.

“Don’t mind those,” Marion said. “Fucking Earl Willows thinks he’s gonna get rich digging up half his backyard and bringing it in here. Man’s a moron.” She shook her head, tapped a long cylinder of ash off her cigarette. “How you been, girl?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, looking away.

“Not good, is what I’m guessing. Some kind of bullshit, what happened to your Junie.”

In other places, the murder of two little girls would have blanketed the entire town in horror. Here, it was just another bad day. I hesitated, not sure of the appropriate response, before finally settling on a half-hearted “Yeah, it was.”