Marcelline bought him a tank of gas and gave him $20 that made him sick to take. She said she’d be at the same pump at six o’clock at night and eight o’clock in the morning for the next three days, just like John’s times so it would be easy to remember.

“You can do this,” she said.

Roy nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” She smiled, a small sad twitch at the corners of her mouth that had nothing to do with her being happy, but everything to do with trying to help him not be too sad. Or too scared. He wanted to die.

•  •  •

John didn’t show up the next morning at the eight o’clock time either. Roy waited until ten. It felt weird. He counted to sixty to cancel out the sick flutter in his middle and to see if he could make his counting match up to a real minute. One twenty. Two minutes. Six hundred. Ten. John had never missed both times of a meetup before. Marcelline was relying on Roy, but he didn’t know what it meant that John hadn’t come after Roy left the quarter on the curb.

Roy avoided the service station and Marcelline, burning up gas just to drive miles out of the way around it. He went back to the McDonald’s at six. Just in case. No John. He didn’t know what to think. Maybe John hadn’t seen the coin. Maybe someone had picked it up. Maybe something had happened to him?

Would that change anything? He owed Marcelline this.

Roy had plenty of gas in the Explorer for a change, but he’d only had a bag of pork rinds and a bottle of tea since the sandwich with her at the diner. His stomach squeezed down into a grumbling knot and stayed that way, twisting and stabbing every now and again to remind him that it was still empty.

The twilight thickened into nightfall, and Roy drove old back roads to a spot he’d found where the crumbling asphalt bled into a sloping grassy verge so close to the riverbank that it flooded when it rained. But it hadn’t rained in a while, so the run down to the water was nothing but bare, bent grass. Roy pulled the truck off the lane and rolled down the windows. The frogs were louder than the old engine’s idling.

John didn’t hate him because of the painting. John hated him to keep him easy, to make him do what John wanted him to do. Marcelline had understood this. So she forgave Roy for shooting her. Did she know that her forgiveness also kept him easy? That it made him do what she wanted him to do?