Caddy liked to clean. She liked the order of it, not caring if it was inside the string of little shacks she offered to homeless families and battered women or the dusty old barn that had been the heart of her ministry. Caddy wanted to concentrate on the barn today, focus on its rugged simplicity as the genesis of everything she hoped to accomplish. She remembered Jamey Dixon first finding the place, sitting there crooked, alone, and abandoned on some logged-out land along a dry creek bed. This was the place, he’d said. We’ll start it all here. The fallow land, the crooked barn, all of it his rock to build upon. And now she had to drive down the road and see the bones of the big new outreach building that probably would never be finished. She wished like hell she’d never even started it. Being incomplete and useless up on the hill was a slight to everything Jamey had wanted.

She’d heard the car pull up as she started sweeping the wooden floor, rugged one-by-sixes they’d laid down a few years before, stripped from an old house, secondhand and repurposed like everything else. Caddy had been thinking about Jamey most of the day, wearing one of his flannel shirts that morning, feeling safe and comfortable back in the barn and prepping for tomorrow’s Sunday service.

The big double doors of the barn were open, and she turned to see Bentley walk inside, hands in his pockets, hanging his head, not saying a word, just watching her work. She’d collected a pile of dirt in the center of the floor, the mismatched pews pushed off to either side while she swept.

“I tried to call.”

Caddy didn’t answer, only returned to her sweeping.

“I stopped by your mother’s house,” he said. “She told me you’d come out here. I know you’re upset. I can’t say I blame you.”

Caddy didn’t answer, sweeping, trying to forgive herself for being so almighty stupid as to trust someone like Bentley Vandeven. She’d let him into her private space out at The River, introduced him to her family, to her son, and brought him into her bed. So damn stupid. She wondered if anything he said had been true, running his hands over her body and telling her that her scars were so beautiful. Caddy came upon some broken glasses, pushing them into the pile of dirt, knowing the worst part of holding service in the barn was the cleanup. You never could quite clean up an old barn.

“I don’t like what’s happening,” he said. “I don’t like any of it. I’ve always done what my father has asked. I’ve always believed he had some kind of good business plan. He always dismissed Vardaman. He called him a joke, just some dumb hick with crazy ideas.”