“DALTON?” Mildred screamed at her from her front door. “YOU TELL EDDIE HIS SON WANTS TO SEE HIM!”

Vivian heard it, but kept shuffling down the street, her nylons rubbing together under the constrictive girdle and skirt. She rounded the corner to where she’d parked the car, out of sight of Mildred’s house. She dropped everything she was clutching right there onto the snow-packed street, and then picked up the pocketbook, fumbling around for the car key as her heart pounded in her ears. She grasped the key tightly and poked around the lock until it finally slid into the slot. The lock sprang up, she flung the door open wide, scooped up the clipboard from the ground, and threw her purse onto the front seat before scrambling into the car.

The car peeled out of the parking spot, and she was willing to bet if there hadn’t been snow on the ground she would’ve left skid marks like Bill Parker did as she tore down the street. At the sight of the black-and-white police car driving toward her she pulled her foot away from the accelerator and let the Buick coast as he passed. Careful! She could hear Edward’s voice in her head from the afternoon way back when he’d taught her to drive.

“Oh, shut up, Edward,” she wheezed aloud in the car. Makes my ass tired even when he’s not here.

She passed four more stop signs before she felt like she could breathe normally. When she spotted a farm supply store she pulled the car into one of the vacant parking slots and turned off the motor and sat there with her chest rapidly rising and falling. The rearview mirror showed her exactly how frantic she’d become in the last five minutes and she gasped at the wild hairdo sticking out every which way from under her hat.

His son wants to see him.

Edward had said Mildred had a “youngster” with her second husband. Was that another lie? Something just for the papers? A wife, a son, and maybe even the damned dog. Brucie. How long did dogs live, anyway, if they didn’t run after a squirrel out into the street and get hit by a car? Vivian closed her eyes and huffed through her nostrils in frustration. In her mind, all she could see was Mildred standing there in her doorway, shouting. Shouting and holding Vivian’s driver’s license in her hand. Oh, Jesus Christ.

It was a Friday. She didn’t have time to worry about the driver’s license. She also didn’t have time to waste, going to sit in some restaurant with a nice hot cup of coffee and trying to collect her thoughts and work through what she had just seen and heard. A-tisket, a-tasket, she hummed, trying to calm herself with the nursery rhyme that had popped into her head as she ran from Mildred’s house . . . Easter basket . . . I can’t believe I dropped it, I dropped it, I dropped it. She pulled the car out of the farm supply parking lot and headed to the county courthouse.