“Nothin’. Sherrel’s taken the kids to see Santa Claus and a movie. I’m over here by myself. Can you get off?”

I glanced up at the stairs. Better if I was gone anyway, probably. “Yeah,” I said. “You want me to come pick you up?”

“Just get ready,” he said. “Got something I want to talk to you about.”

I pulled my boots on and grabbed a sweater. I took my drink into the kitchen and sat on one of the barstools until I finished it. I yelled up the stairs at Mary Annie where I was going. And before long Bobby pulled up.

We rode the night woods. That took me back about ten years, when I did that most every night. The hardest memory was of a fistfight with a state trooper and the cuffs on my wrists, my little babies out in the car the next morning when she came to the jail to get me after borrowing the money from her mother. Yeah. Those days, bad times on the land, bad times all around. I could have been nothing so easily. Sometimes I still wanted to be. I pretended to be something, like everybody else. It was good to be off like that again.

Bobby had a fifth of Crown and a two-liter Coke and cups and ice. “Jim’s fulla shit, ain’t he?” he said, and I didn’t say if he was or wasn’t. “I didn’t know what to tell him that day. Here. Mix yourself a drink.” He turned the interior light on and I mixed up two strong ones. We rode for a while, made small talk. He’d had his old truck for about twenty years. He just kept putting motors and transmissions in it, said he wouldn’t ever buy a new one. He talked that around for a while, before he got down to it.

“Long time ago,” he said, “when Daddy was just a young man. During the war. His mama died when he was four years old. Just died suddenly one night. They don’t even know what she died from. Things was different back then, though. I think she’d been sick for a while. He talks like he remembers her. He says he does. But I think he wanted to remember her so bad he made up a lot of stuff when he was a kid, you know?”

“He probably did,” I said. I was going with the flow. I knew that Bobby was about to tell me something that was close and deep within him, something that maybe nobody else had ever heard. I was ready to hear it. I wanted an answer for that day, even though I was pretty sure I already knew it.