“Hello?” Patricia said. “It’s Patricia Campbell from Pierates Cruze?”

No answer. She’d never been inside Ann Savage’s house before. Heavy old furniture crowded the front room. Liquor store boxes and paper bags of junk mail covered the floor. Circulars, catalogs, and old rolled-up copies of the Moultrie News spilled from the seats of every chair. Four dusty old Samsonite suitcases were lined up against the wall. Built-in shelves around the front door were crowded with waterlogged romance novels. It smelled like the Goodwill store.

A doorway on her left led into a dark kitchen, and a doorway on her right led to the back of the house. A ceiling fan spun lethargically overhead. Patricia looked down the hallway. There was a half-open door at the far end leading to what she assumed was the bedroom. From it, she heard the groaning of a window-unit air conditioner. Surely the nephew wouldn’t have gone out and left his air conditioner on.

Holding her breath, Patricia walked carefully down the hall and pushed the bedroom door all the way open.

“Knock knock?” she said.

The man lying on the bed was dead.

He lay on top of the quilt, still in his work boots. He wore blue jeans and a white button-up shirt. His hands were at his sides. He was huge, well over six feet, and his feet hung off the end. But despite his size, he looked starved. The flesh clung tight to his bones. The sallow skin of his face looked drawn and finely wrinkled, his blond hair looked brittle and thin.

“Excuse me?” Patricia asked, her voice a shaky rasp.

She forced herself to step all the way into the room, put the casserole dish on the end of the bed, and took his wrist. His skin felt cool. He had no pulse.

Patricia examined his face closely. He had thin lips, a wide mouth, and high cheekbones. His looks lay somewhere between handsome and pretty. She shook his shoulder, just in case.

“Sir?” she croaked. “Sir?”

His body barely moved beneath her hand. She held the back of her forefinger under his nostrils: nothing. Her nursing instincts took over.

She used one hand to pull his chin down, and the other to pull his upper lip back. She felt inside his mouth with one finger. His tongue felt dry. Nothing obstructed his airway. Patricia leaned over his face and realized, with a tickling in the veins on the inside of her elbows, this was the closest she’d been to a man who wasn’t her husband in nineteen years. Then her dry lips pressed against his chapped ones and formed a seal. She pinched his nose shut and blew three strong breaths into his windpipe. Then she performed three strong chest compressions.

Nothing. She leaned down for a second attempt, made the seal with their lips, and blew into his mouth, once, twice, then her trachea vibrated backward as air blasted down her throat. She reared back coughing, the man bolted upright, his forehead smacking into the side of Patricia’s skull with a hollow knock, and Patricia staggered backward into the wall, knocking all the breath out of her lungs. Her legs went out from under her, and she slid to the floor, landing hard on her butt, as the man leapt to his feet, wild-eyed, sending the casserole dish clattering to the floor.

“What the fuck!” he shouted.

He looked wildly around the room and found Patricia on the floor at his feet. Chest heaving, mouth hanging open, he squinted at her in the dimness.

“How’d you get in?” he shouted. “Who are you?”

Patricia managed to get her breathing under control enough to squeak, “Patricia Campbell from Pierates Cruze.”

“What?” he barked.

“I thought you were dead,” she said.

“What?” he barked again.

“I performed CPR,” she said. “You weren’t breathing.”

“What?” he barked one more time.

“I’m your neighbor?” Patricia cowered. “From Pierates Cruze?”

He looked out the hall door. He looked back at his bed. He looked down at her.

“Fuck,” he said again, and his shoulders slumped.

“I brought you a casserole,” Patricia said, pointing at the upside-down casserole dish.

The man’s chest heaved slower.

“You came here to bring me a casserole?” he asked.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Patricia said. “I’m…your great-aunt was found in my yard? And things got a little bit physical? Maybe you’ve seen my dog? He’s a cocker spaniel mix, he, well…maybe it’s better you haven’t? And…? Well, I so hope that nothing happened at our house to make your aunt worse.”

“You brought me a casserole because my aunt died,” he said, as if explaining it to himself.

“You didn’t come to the door,” she said. “But I saw your car outside so I stuck my head in.”

“And down the hall,” he said. “And into my bedroom.”

She felt like a fool.

“No one here thinks twice about that,” she explained. “It’s the Old Village. You weren’t breathing.”

He opened his eyes wide and closed them tightly a few times, swaying slightly.

“I am very, very tired,” he said.

Patricia realized he wasn’t going to help her to her feet, so she pushed herself up off the floor.

“Let me clean this up,” she said, reaching for the casserole dish. “I feel so stupid.”

“No,” he said. “You have to leave.” He wavered, his head jerking in little shakes and nods.

“It’ll only take a minute,” she said.

“Please,” he said. “Please, just go home. I need to be alone.”

He ushered her out his bedroom door.

“I can get a cloth and make sure it doesn’t leave a stain,” Patricia said as he pushed her down the hall. “I feel awful for barging in when we haven’t been introduced, but I could see you weren’t breathing, and I was a nurse—I am a nurse—and I was so sure you were ill, and I feel like a nummy.”

As she talked, he propelled her into the cluttered front room, and he had the front door open, and he stood behind it, squinting hard, eyes streaming water, and she knew he wanted her to go.

“Please,” she said, standing with one hand on the handle of his screen door. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you like that.”

“I need to get back to bed,” he said, and his hand was on the small of her back, and then she was through the screen door, standing in the hot sun on his front porch, and the door closed firmly in her face. Patricia hoped that no one had seen her go inside. If anyone else knew about her stupidity, she would just die.

She turned and jumped as the front of a large tan sedan nosed up into the front yard, right on top of her. Behind the sun’s glare on the windshield, she saw Francine, the woman who did for Ann Savage. Francine was older, with a face like a dried apple, and not many people still hired her in the Old Village because she had a vinegary nature.

She and Francine locked eyes through the glass. Patricia lifted one hand in the barest semblance of a greeting, then tucked her head down and scrambled up the street as fast as she could, mentally ticking off all the people Francine might tell.

CHAPTER 7

All the way home Patricia tasted Ann Savage’s nephew on her lips: dusty spices, leather, unfamiliar skin. It made the blood fizz in her veins, and then, overcome with guilt, she brushed her teeth twice, found half of an old bottle of Listerine in the hall closet, and gargled it until her lips tasted like artificial peppermint flavoring.

For the rest of the day, she lived in fear that someone would drop by and ask what she’d been doing in Ann Savage’s house. She was terrified she’d run into Mrs. Francine when she went to the Piggly Wiggly. She jumped every time the phone rang, thinking it would be Grace saying she’d heard Patricia tried to perform CPR on a sleeping man.

But night came and no one said anything, and even though she couldn’t meet Carter’s eyes at supper, by the time she went to bed she’d forgotten the way the nephew’s lips had tasted. The next morning she forgot about Francine somewhere between figuring out where Korey needed to be dropped off and picked up all week, and making sure Blue was studying for his State and Local History exam instead of reading about Adolf Hitler.

She made sure Korey and Blue were enrolled in summer camp (soccer for Korey and science day camp for Blue), she called Grace to get the phone number of someone who could look at their air conditioner, and she picked up groceries, and packed lunches, and dropped off library books, and signed report cards (no summer school this year, thankfully), and barely saw Carter every morning as he dashed out the door (“I promise,” he told her, “as soon as this is over we’ll go to the beach”), and suddenly a week had passed and she sat at dinner, half listening to Korey complain about something she wasn’t very interested in at all.

“Are you even listening to me?” Korey asked.

“Pardon?” Patricia asked, tuning back in.

“I don’t understand how we can almost be out of coffee again,” Carter said from the other end of the table. “Are the kids eating it?”