The lights flickered again, more thunder booming outside, and then they stood there in complete darkness. She felt her way around the couch, seeing a bit thanks to a little light coming through the kitchen window. Caddy lit a couple of candles and set them on the table, brightening the small room just a little. Jason’s football jersey had been left to dry over a kitchen chair, paperwork from The River piled up on another.

“Thanks,” Bentley said.

“For what?”

“Inviting me over.”

“I was bored,” Caddy said. “Not much else to do in Jericho but get drunk. And I don’t drink anymore.”

“Sorry we didn’t finish the movie.”

“I’ll show you the rest later,” Caddy said. “You kept on falling asleep.”

Bentley laughed again, leaning onto the kitchen counter, touching her face and grinning in a sleepy way. “Lots of hippie-dippie stuff,” he said. “I guess all that was a long time ago.”

“You should meet my Uncle Van,” Caddy said. “Nobody’s told him the seventies are over. Still wears bell-bottom jeans and smokes weed. He lives in his trailer in this little time capsule.”

“Wasn’t just the clothes,” Bentley said. “Those people had kind of a crazy way of believing how things worked. Whoever made the movie seemed to have a real problem with authority, making it seem like every elected official was a crook.”

“Aren’t they?”

Bentley laughed again in the darkness. “Not all of ’em,” Bentley said. “Some of us squares are trying to make a difference.”

“The movie was one of my daddy’s favorites,” she said. “He trained with the same guy who taught hapkido to the main character. When Daddy was out in Hollywood, he and the actor who played the hero got to be good pals. Daddy was in some Western he made. They stayed friends pretty much his whole life.”

“You don’t think like that,” Bentley said. “Do you? You don’t think everyone with money is evil and wants to take advantage of the poor. Made it seem like the whole system was busted.”

“Isn’t it?” Caddy said.

“Come on, now.”

“No,” she said, the candlelight casting his handsome face in shadow. “You think we’re all doing fine and dandy down in Mississippi? You think we don’t have folks like Posner looking down their noses at Hispanics, blacks, Indians? I watch that movie and I think nothing has changed.”

“When we first met, I told you we shouldn’t talk politics.”

“Or religion.”

“I didn’t say religion,” Bentley said. “You know I’m a Christian. I believe in what you’re doing here. I just don’t like folks who go off on the fringe of things. That doesn’t do anything but make the problems worse. It obscures all the good being done.”