Tashi didn’t say anything, listening as she drove, heading past Olive Branch and that big Ford dealership, a supersized Walmart, and a grouping of the regular suspects of Starbucks, Applebee’s, and an O’Charley’s.

“When we were kids, we had to drive up to Memphis to go shopping,” Caddy said. “It always seemed like the center of our Southern universe.”

“Just how long did you live in Memphis?” Tashi asked.

“Too damn long,” Caddy said. “About four years.”

“Why’d you leave home?”

“You’ve been there,” Caddy said. “Does Tibbehah seem like the kind of place a woman in her twenties would want to live?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tashi said, both hands gripping the wheel, intently staring at the rainy highway ahead through those thick black glasses. “I think Jericho is a pretty charming little town. With the Square and all those little restaurants and shops. I get a little tired of Brooklyn’s preciousness. Jericho is real to me. Real South. Real America.”

“Maybe too real at times,” Caddy said. “There wasn’t much on the Square when I left. Nearly every business was boarded up. Most of the buildings had fallen in on themselves. Vines and weeds growing through the busted glass. Looked like the A-bomb had hit the town. It was either be a checkout girl at the Piggly Wiggly or marry some loser and be trapped forever.”

“What about college?”

“Ha,” Caddy said. “Not everyone can go to college. You either get a scholarship or your family has money. My family’s not poor, but they didn’t have the money to send me or Quinn to school. My daddy rarely paid child support. And my momma worked when she could, receptionist-type jobs at the high school or some doctor’s office. It was tough. The way you see Jericho now isn’t the way it was. When the recession hit, we barely even knew it.”

“Was Memphis better?” Tashi asked.

“For a while,” Caddy said. “When I was clean. But you can’t do the kind of work I was doing sober.”

“As a dancer?”

Caddy laughed, sort of snorting through her nose. This girl really was on her best behavior, really wanting to find Ansley Cuthbert by calling Caddy a dancer. There wasn’t a thing about dancing in her whole show, although back then she might have argued it. She used to have a canned answer about song selection, acrobatics, and connecting with her customer. In truth, all she did was show her tits and grind her hips for more than minimum wage.

“Is that not right?” Tashi asked.

“No, ma’am,” Caddy said. “I was anything but a dancer. Do you want to see where I worked?”

“Was that where Ansley worked, too?” Tashi asked, heading over the Tennessee state line. THE VOLUNTEER STATE WELCOMES YOU.