Rose has Lyft up on her phone. She’s loaded in the Arby’s address and a bogus destination. They won’t let events progress without all the boxes filled. On her screen she can see a minuscule car orbiting the area three minutes from the Arby’s. Rose requests a pickup.

For the next three hours Rose surveils Eddie Martinez mowing lawns, clipping hedges, pulling weeds, watering plants, and, inevitably, donning a gas-powered leaf blower that makes as much noise as a diesel truck clawing its way up a steep incline and harassing the leaves.

At each stop, Rose skulks. In residential areas it is harder to find cover, but she makes use of a park, a playground, and a couple of big friendly trees. To pass the time, she texts. An article she’d read said the average high school student texted fifty times a day. Even with time on her hands, Rose doesn’t come close to that. Meditation is more entertaining than texting, and the point of meditation is to do absolutely nothing as long as possible.

Tailing a person via Uber and Lyft proves amazingly efficacious. As soon as she sees Eddie loading his equipment into his truck, she calls for a pickup. The drivers seem delighted to enter into the cloak-and-dagger aspect. Rose suspects her harmless fluffiness puts them at ease. Always a different car and a different driver. Sometimes Rose sits in front, sometimes in back. And, too, Eddie Martinez seems oblivious to the fact that he might be the stalked, not the stalker, for a change.

Five thirty finds Rose back in her booth at the Arby’s across the street from the duplex. She drinks a cup of coffee while he washes his truck with loving care, stroking the hood dry with a chamois cloth.

She calls Mel. “Hit men are really boring.”

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“He was always more or less alone—no witnesses—and surrounded with sharp objects. Besides, I promised I’d call you before I made contact,” Rose says.

Mel, and now Royal, are well and truly in Rose’s perilous pickle. More than once she’s considered playing the authoritarian, insisting Mel keep clear. She hasn’t done it. Mostly because it won’t work. Rose is the younger of two sisters. She’s never had children. Never wanted children. Never even babysat children. Marion didn’t have children, so no little nephews or nieces to dandle. When Mel came along, Rose had no concept of how to be a mother, much less a grandmother. So she just played with the kid. The two of them had been co-conspirators Mel’s whole life. Thirteen and sixty-eight, yet on some plane they are equals. Mel won’t blindly obey Rose any more than Marion will.

Reap what you sow, Rose thinks, not regretting a moment of the sowing.

“Are you coming home? I mean to the teepee?” Mel asks.