The sedan grinded to a stop on the gravel, and she pretended to touch up her makeup in the mirror so that people would think that was why she stopped. She contemplated calling Barrett, but she didn’t want to owe him anything. She decided to take a twenty-minute detour to loop around to highway 333 and go in toward Barrett’s house from the south.

He didn’t know she was coming, so she wouldn’t be late. She imagined how he would come out of the trailer as she stepped out of her car, still drinking coffee at three in the afternoon, waiting for her to talk first, and she smiled.

“Oh, Lord,” Amelia said to herself. “If I didn’t check up on that man, God knows what he would be living like.”

Amelia put it in reverse and started heading back the long way. It was a calmer drive. No mystery involved. She turned left and headed north on the other backroad.

The car clambered into drive. The gravel appeared near-black when wet after the morning’s storm. Small, shallow pools of water lay uselessly strewn in the ditches framing the slightly (albeit strategically) elevated country roads.

The countryside did seem to evoke something. She liked how the henbit weed made all the empty farm plots burst into purple before they tilled it all up. It didn’t seem appropriate. It seemed almost profane in how neat it was. She remembered the first spring she had been living with Barrett, how she asked him later in the afternoon why all of a sudden the winter farm plots turned purple with that stubbled foliage, how he said, “Yep, they get purple.”

That wasn’t a good enough answer. And how he got tired with her when she said that he had lived out here for his entire life and he didn’t know what the weed was called that turned everything purple. That is what he did. He never got angry with her, not even once. Just tired. She made him tired, and he would get quiet, but she would never let him rest. She got him to call it henbit a few months after she dug the answer up in some agricultural pamphlet.

She liked driving past the henbit. She liked the lack of traffic, so she didn’t feel bad about how she stared out the window for just a few lingering moments too long, probably driving too fast, oozing into all the other lanes of traffic or off the road.

The gravel road crested a hill.

Moments later she saw an odd, splotchy blend of brown and red out of the side of her eye, gyrating slowly as she scanned the muddy purple farmland, and whipped back, and her eyes got wide, and she slowed down the car as she processed the scene.