Every day at work, Marina received money for styling hair because that’s what she was supposed to do, but a customer never left her chair without thanking her for her work. Why should family be an exception? Was it really so hard to occasionally utter two words?

It was too late to demand respect from Harold. He’d clearly crapped the bed on that one. But at some point, she needed to work on her relationship with Avery. Her daughter was hyperintelligent and funny and a genuinely good person, but she was also headstrong and tended toward selfish a lot of the time. Marina hoped as she got older their relationship would mature into something more like what she and Halcyon had, but that was a lot of years off.

The water started to shift from steaming hot to mildly warm and Marina took that as her cue to get out. She toweled off and pulled on a clean tank and boy shorts and strolled into the kitchen to rummage for dinner. She still hadn’t had a chance to make a real grocery store run, so her options mostly consisted of cheese, lunch meat, bread, Goldfish, a bottle of wine, sodas, and her secret chocolate stash. Since Halcyon had given her a toaster oven she didn’t use, she opted for grilled cheese with wine and chocolate. She popped the bread and cheese into the oven and poured a glass of wine, then went to the back door to let Snooze out since he was whining.

“Do not get in the bayou,” she said as he headed off the porch. “You don’t want a bath and I don’t want another one.”

He gave her a long-suffering look, then headed down the steps and into the yard-slash-field of weeds. Another thing on the long list of items she needed to address. She had no intention of sodding the yard, but mowing around the house would cut down on bugs and the snake potential. The snake potential was a real fear. Marina hated snakes.

She headed back into the kitchen to check on the grilled cheese and that’s when Snooze started to bark. Loudly. And this wasn’t his I-found-something-interesting sound. This was his I-found-something-I-don’t-like sound. Marina grabbed a flashlight and the pistol Halcyon had lent her out of a kitchen drawer and headed outside.

At the edge of the back porch, she stopped to figure out what direction she needed to go. Sound carried over water and sometimes it was hard to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. Snooze barked again, sounding more agitated than before, and she shifted to the left, locking her gaze on the row of cypress trees that lined one side of the property. She shone the flashlight in that direction, but it didn’t reach far enough for her to see anything. When she was unpacking, she’d put her rubber boots on the porch, so she pulled them on and headed into the yard.

The weeds rubbed the bare skin on her legs and made her itch. If this turned out to be a rabbit or a raccoon, she was going to cut off that dog’s treats for a week. She hadn’t even unpacked everything and had no idea if she had calamine lotion. And since the drugstore closed hours ago, she was looking at a long night of scratching.