I jerk my head up from the baby, ready to tell her that I’m fine, my kids are fine, we don’t need anything from anybody, but Corrine is eyeing me like a blackjack dealer watches a card counter.

I could tell her the truth, that some nights I dream Gloria is knocking on my front door again, but I don’t answer it. I stay in my bed with my head under the pillow as the knocking grows louder and louder and when I can’t stand listening to it anymore, I get out of bed and walk down the hall of my new house. When I pull the heavy door open, my Aimee is standing on the porch, beaten and torn up, her feet bare and bleeding. Mama, she cries, why didn’t you help me?

I could tell her about the phone calls I’ve been getting, almost since the day the phone company turned on our new line, and I could say that some nights I can’t tell the difference between being tired and being afraid.

Instead I say, I’m just fine. Thank you for asking.

Corrine starts digging through her pack for another cigarette, her third, but finding it empty, she crumples the package and shoves it in her pantsuit pocket. I could have sworn I had at least a half pack of cigarettes left, she says. Since Potter died, I can’t remember a damned thing. Last week, I lost a blanket. A blanket! She looks longingly across the street at her garage door. Well, I better go move the sprinkler and fix myself another iced tea. Going to see a hundred degrees today. In June!

She has already disappeared into her house by the time I realize she left Debra Ann Pierce in my front yard. I stand there and watch the girls, who occasionally look over at me, grimace, and then ignore me completely. When the baby wakes up, I shepherd everyone into the house and lock the door. While the girls play in Aimee’s room, I try to nurse him. My right breast is burning up, and a hard knot next to the nipple suggests an infected milk duct. When the baby latches on, the pain travels the entire length of my torso.

By the time we are ready to leave for the Ladies Guild, it is nearly ninety degrees out and Aimee is mad that I sent her new friend home. She sits in the front seat kicking the glove box and fiddling with the air-conditioning vent while the baby fusses on the seat between us.

Did you have fun with Debra Ann? I ask.

It was okay, she says kicking, kicking, kicking.

Stop it, Aimee. Do y’all have a lot in common?

I guess so, she says. She has a bunch of friends, but I think most of them are imaginary.

This will be my second meeting with the Ladies Guild. When we moved to town, I decided we should maybe give up our Baptist radio and find a real church. It might be good for us to be part of something, and Aimee has started to talk about getting saved. But today’s meeting is a horror. The swamp cooler runs constantly, to no avail, and the heat only exacerbates the burning in my breast. When I arrive, some of the ladies are talking about having their husbands take boxes of old summer clothes out to the families living on the outskirts of town, in makeshift oil camps that have appeared overnight, it seems.

Those camps are just awful, Mrs. Robert Perry tells us. Trash everywhere and most of them don’t even have running water—she pauses and lowers her voice—and full of Mexicans.

A murmur of assent goes through the room. It’s terrible how they do, somebody says, and someone else reminds us that it’s not all of them, just some, and I sit there with my mouth hanging open. As if I have never heard this kind of talk in my life, as if I didn’t grow up hearing it from my daddy at the dinner table, from all my aunts and uncles at the Thanksgiving table, from my own husband. But now I think about Gloria and her family and it rankles, like an open sore that I can’t stop picking at.

Aimee and the baby are down the hall in the church nursery. This is a church, I told myself when the teenaged girl squealed and plucked the baby from my arms. They will be safe here. I close my eyes and press my hand to my forehead. Maybe I’m running a little fever. My right side, from beneath my armpit to my rib cage, feels like someone took a blowtorch to it.

Mary Rose, are you all right? B. D. Hendrix’s wife, Barbie, is standing next to my chair. She lays a hand on my shoulder. Someone says I’m probably worn out and then someone else mentions the awful business with the Ramírez girl, and there is another murmur of assent. It’s a real shame. How on earth is Mr. Strickland’s mama sleeping at night? She must be worried sick about her boy and all because of a misunderstanding.

This was no misunderstanding, I say. It was a rape, and I am sick and tired of y’all pretending otherwise. I pause and let my eyes wander around the fellowship hall. It is hot as perdition in here. Several ladies who have been fanning themselves with their copies of the charter now sit perfectly still on the edge of their folding chairs, as if they are awaiting a revelation, and I take this as a sign that I ought to continue speaking. In a few short hours, I will recognize this for the terrible error it is, but not now.

Because you can call a sandstorm a little breeze all day long, I tell them, and you can call a drought a dry spell, but at the end of the day, your house is still a mess and your tomato plants are dead and—my voice tightens up and, to my horror, my eyes begin to fill. I am not going to cry in front of these good ladies. I can still stop talking and everything might be okay, eventually, more or less.

I saw her, I tell them. What he did to her.

Excuse me, Mary Rose—the voice comes from over by the swamp cooler—I know what you think you saw, but last time I checked we still live in America, where a man is innocent until proven guilty.

A murmur wanders around the room, gentle bullshit passed from one good woman to another. While they are right about Strickland’s constitutional rights, it seems to me they have already convicted a teenage girl. If y’all will excuse me, please, I say, and make a break for the ladies’ room.

Eventually they send the treasurer, Mrs. L. D. Cowden, to check on me. Mrs. Cowden is a senior member who claims her grandmother planted the town’s first row of pecan trees back in 1881—the same year the five Chinese railroad workers died in an explosion out near Penwell. A windstorm snapped all twenty-five of the first saplings in half. The story is a bald-faced lie. Everybody knows it was Mrs. Shepard’s granny Viola Tillman who planted those trees, but nobody likes to admit it. Corrine was asked to resign her membership six years earlier, Suzanne told me, after a little scuffle with Barbie Hendrix. It all might have been forgiven, or at least lived with, given Corrine’s deep roots in the community, but then she stopped getting her hair done on Thursday afternoons. I’m done with all this, she told the good women of the guild. From now on, I’ll jack it up my own damn self, all the way to Jesus.

Mrs. Cowden finds me in the ladies’ room next to the fellowship hall, hunched over the sink and trying not to cry. She leans quietly against the bathroom door while I splash lukewarm water on my face and mutter to myself. What bullsh— What bull. Can’t even believe this.

Can I bring you a glass of iced tea? Mrs. Cowden says.

No, thank you.

Listen, she says, people know what that little gal is saying happened out there. We just don’t need to be reminded of it all the time. And that word is so ugly.

I turn off the water and stand up straight to face her. You mean rape?

She winces. Yes, ma’am.

When I went into labor several weeks early with unpacked boxes at the new house and Robert losing his mind over a missing bull, Grace Cowden brought over a week of dinners and a stack of Archie comics for Aimee. She hasn’t spoken a single unkind word to anybody in her life, as far as I know. I hold my hand out to her. I’m sorry, Grace.

She takes my hand and presses it to her heart. Well, I’m sorry too, Mary Rose. She chuckles gently. What a few months it has been. A preacher’s son sitting downtown in a jail cell. Ginny Pierce running off to God knows where, leaving her family like that. And you with a new baby son, and a trial to boot. And this heat, it’s mean as a snake.

She holds my hand while she wonders aloud if the judge might let me just write a letter or something. It might be less upsetting for my family and me. Besides—she leans in close—Lou Connelly heard the girl’s mother was deported and the girl had been sent to Laredo to be with family. Heck, she might not even come back for the trial. Not unless there’s some money in it for her.

I gently remove my hand from Grace’s heart and turn back to the sink, my fingers working the faucet, while she yammers on. As for the Ladies Guild, she says, well, these meetings are supposed to be fun. Nobody comes to these meetings to feel bad about herself.