“He looked so young without the beard. With all the gray hair gone, with a smooth face, my dad actually looked a lot younger despite having to use a walker. It was weird. His facial expressions had changed though. He was really muted, never laughed out loud, only let out thin little smiles occasionally or microscopic frowns. I think he was thinking a lot at this point. He said stuff like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how much time I’ll have left.’ It was cryptic.”

“He really said that?”

“Yeah. My aunt was talking to him about what the doctor said about walking without a walker again. He told my uncle that it would be about two years physical therapy. He refused it and said that about not having that much time left. He was only sixty-three.”

“Morbid.”

“Baby, it’s a lot of stuff like that. I thought about Missouri a lot when I read Faulkner novels. Except instead of everything being haunted and bad, everything was just boring and bad. Like bad stuff happened and people didn’t even put down the remote. The same muted tragedy everywhere but without all of the confederate ghosts.”

“How were the dogs when he got back? That’s where this is leading to, right?”

“What? Oh, the dogs were fine. My mom had given one away to a woman she worked with, so they were down to ten now. That wasn’t the problem. When my dad came home he found that that rusty truck he had parked out back was gone, along with his big pile of parts and scrap metal.”

“Oh, shit, was it Rodney?”