Yes, ma’am, Corrine says as she steps backward into the house and gently pushes the door closed in the child’s face.

While the phone rings a dozen times, Corrine fixes herself an iced tea with a smidge of bourbon. When she’s sure Debra Ann isn’t hanging around the yard, she heads back outside for a porch-sit and a smoke. She will stay low, sitting on the concrete step next to the hedges, where she can see what’s going on without anyone noticing her.

At least once a week since Potter died, Suzanne Ledbetter shows up at Corrine’s door with a casserole and an invitation to participate in some damned crochet circle or one of those god-awful recipe swaps where each woman makes the recipe and writes down her observations on a 3x5 notecard before passing it along to the next woman, who also makes the recipe and adds her notes to the card. And so it goes. In this way, the women are able to make a good recipe even better, says Suzanne Ledbetter.

Corrine has learned over the years to say no thank you to get-togethers and recipe swaps. Still, by the time she sits down on her front porch with a drink in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, she has a freezer full of casseroles. And a head full of bullshit too, she thinks as she lowers her bottom onto the concrete step and scoots over to peer through her scraggly hawthorns. Across the street, two young men are carrying a large television console into a rust-colored brick ranch that is a mirror image of Corrine and Potter’s—nine hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one full bath plus a powder room off the dining room. The kitchen window faces the backyard, same as Corrine’s, and the same sliding-glass door leads to a back patio, she imagines, though she never knew the previous tenants, three young men who kept a large mutt chained to a dead pecan tree in the front yard and who, mercifully, took the dog with them when they moved out in the middle of the night.

A white sedan pulls up, and a young girl and her mother start taking several small boxes from the back seat. The woman is heavily pregnant, swollen as a deer carcass on a hot road, and there is no sign of a mister. When the car is empty, the woman stands in the front yard while the child hops around the dead tree. She is the spitting image of her mama—white-haired and round-faced—and from time to time she walks over and hangs on the woman’s maternity smock as if one or the other of them might lift off the ground and drift across the sky, should she let go.

The woman—she looks too young to have a girl that big—rubs her daughter’s back while they watch three young men carry furniture and boxes up the driveway, through the open garage, and into the house. They are still boys, Corrine sees now, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, with sneakers, crew cuts, and cowboy hats in varied shades of brown perched on their heads. Two middle-aged men, wearing the same brown steel-toed boots that Potter used to lace up before he headed out to the plant in the mornings, stand by the front door measuring and re-measuring the doorframe against a massive mahogany door that is leaning against the house like a drunk. Corrine swirls her pinkie in her drink and looks at the pregnant woman with amusement. The front door that’s already there wasn’t good enough for her? Well! She sucks the liquor off her finger.

One of the men holds up his hands in the shape of a door, showing how wide, how tall, and the woman shakes her head. One hand moves to her forehead, the other to her belly, and then, as the man points again at the doorframe, her upper body drifts toward the door, a boat listing ever so slightly, then sinking fast as she folds in half. A cry rises up from the men. Corrine sets down her drink and smacks her lips. By the time she has hauled herself to her feet and pulled on her slippers, the woman is on her hands and knees in the front yard, her belly skimming the dirt. The child hovers anxiously around her mother’s head. Words in both Spanish and English fly around the yard like sparrows. A man runs into the kitchen and returns with a plastic cup filled with water.

Corrine introduces herself and points at her house across the street while the girl, Aimee, plucks at her mother’s maternity blouse. She is a jowly child with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they are nearly invisible. The mother, Mary Rose, gasps as her blouse rises and falls with a contraction, and Corrine thinks she might have seen her back at the high school, just another girl who dropped out and got married. It’s impossible to remember them all.

Corrine tries and fails to remember a single useful detail from the hazy twilight sleep of her labor with Alice, some thirty years ago. Can I drive you to the hospital?

No, thank you. I can drive myself. Mary Rose presses both hands against her belly while she looks up at Corrine. I saw the wreath on your front door. I’m sorry for your loss.

My husband died in February. I just haven’t taken it down. Corrine narrows her eyes and looks at the men and boys who stand quietly in a row, shifting back and forth on their feet, eyeing the rancher’s wife who has gone into labor in the middle of their weekend job, whose husband is well known to them and theirs.

It was a hunting accident, Corrine says. She might as well have swallowed a shovelful of scorpions, the way those words tear at her throat, poisonous, claws out.

A hunting accident. Mary Rose rolls over and sits up, and Corrine is surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. I am so sorry. Listen, we’re still waiting for them to turn on the electricity and I don’t want my daughter sitting around the waiting room by herself. Would you mind if she came to your house for a few hours, just until my husband returns from a livestock auction in Big Springs?

No, ma’am, Corrine says without hesitation. I cannot have anybody in my house right now, sorry. Can I call your mother, or maybe a sister?

No, thank you, Mary Rose says. They’ve got their hands full already.

I want to stay with you, the child whines at her mother. I don’t even know her.

I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and wait with—Corrine pauses while the child glares at her and clutches her mother’s smock—Aimee.

I don’t want her in a waiting room with a bunch of strange men, Mary Rose says.

The women look at each other for a few seconds, the younger woman’s lips a tight seam. She pulls herself to her feet and tells her daughter to run and fetch her car keys, and the little ditty bag she has set in the hall closet. After Aimee scampers into the house through the open garage, Mary Rose asks the foreman to lock up behind them when they have emptied the moving van, and when Corrine starts back toward her own front porch, already longing for the rest of that bourbon and iced tea, hoping that cat didn’t stick its nose in her glass and lick the ice, Mary Rose yells at her, too. Thanks for nothing, she says, but Corrine pretends not to hear. She keeps walking and when she is safely across the street, she dumps her drink in the hedge and goes inside to fix herself a fresh one.

*

It’s not quite dark outside when the phone rings again. Corrine, who is well into that bottle of bourbon, rushes to the kitchen and grabs the phone with both hands. Every goddamn thing in this house buzzes, rattles, or rings. She wraps the cord around the phone’s base and props open the door between the kitchen and garage with her foot. The loose skin on her arms wobbles madly when she lifts the phone over her head. The phone soars into the garage, strikes the concrete and rings twice when it lands next to the Lincoln Continental that she has forsaken in the forty days since Potter chose to remove himself from what he had once described as his situation. It was our situation, goddamn you.

The kitchen is quiet now, save for the ticking of the wall clock next to the kitchen table. Corrine narrows her eyes at it, considering. Empty liquor bottles lie atop the full trash can, along with a stack of unopened doctor’s bills. She picks up a full ashtray and slowly dumps it on the envelopes in the center of the table. Cigarette butts roll slowly across the pile and fall onto the puzzle pieces. The icemaker dumps a batch of ice cubes. Outside the sliding-glass door, the western sky is the color of an old bruise. A mockingbird perches on the back fence, its voice persistent and sad.