All that day before Roh was killed, he had been thinking about how neat it would be if it was just him and Annie. No fair he had to spend all his time looking after someone who wasn’t right in the head. Now he didn’t know what to do with his anger. When he got done hating his pop and himself, that feeling would keep swelling, and all at once he would think of Annie and be filled with the most wonderful anger toward her. Of all the people he could hurt, it was Annie he could hurt the most, and he needed there to be some hurt besides his in the world. Lying down, pressing his face into the earth, he would imagine Annie crying, begging him to talk to her. He would leave her crying sometimes, getting angrier and angrier, and sometimes he would forgive her, and Annie would come live with him and his pop. In that way they would get back at Mr. Celli because he would have lost his daughter. His own daughter would know what he was.

Once he heard the Deere choke and rattle to life in the lower field, he snuck out from under the porch and into the house. On the table lay a letter from his dad. Annie must have written it for him, since his dad couldn’t write. It begged him to be there at supper. It said he was worried sick and needed his son in this difficult time. At the bottom, Annie had written We love you, Lew.

Confused tears, partly rage, started to his eyes. What they needed to write was that they were wrong; his brother had been murdered. He got clothes and went down to the root cellar to get more food. Switching on the light, he jumped as a tiger salamander scattered at his feet. He saw that the shelves at the back were packed with sugar, coffee, and flour. Also a half-dozen oranges, his favorite thing in the world. For just a second he was thrilled—he was so hungry—before it struck him: These things had to have come from Celli’s. Even if his pop could have afforded them, which he couldn’t, it meant he had been in Celli’s store, talking to him, giving him money. If not, he had taken charity, which he never did, and from the man who had killed Roh. He pulled everything off the shelves, smashing what he could, pulping the oranges. The only things he left intact were the vegetables his mom had canned, which they had never touched after her passing.

He ran out of the cellar, straight to town through the fields, and approached Celli’s Grocery through the alley between Novus Shoes and Snyder’s. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing him. Right outside his store, Mr. Celli was helping Tack Metzler load a couple of butane tanks onto his truck bed. Tack had a body like one of them blow-up clowns who came back up if you knocked them down. Mr. Celli was a foot taller, skinny and jumpy as a jackrabbit, but he always did everything he could to make himself smaller than the person he was with, stooping and ducking his head. Tack looked like he was telling a funny story. Celli was listening with his mouth and eyes wide open, so eager he kept jumping the gun and laughing before Tack was done. And when Tack finally finished, Celli squatted down on the sidewalk, howling and slapping the top of his head like Tarzan’s Cheeta.