Mrs. Cowden says she and some of the other ladies have been thinking that I might not want to come to any more meetings for a little while, just until the dust settles and all this ugliness is behind us. Just until I start feeling a little more like myself.

Yes, I think, the old Mary Rose. I hold my fingers beneath the tap for a few seconds and watch the water meander across my skin, the smell of sulfur and dirt rising from the basin. That morning on my front porch, when he was already cuffed and sitting in the back seat of the deputy’s sedan, one of the paramedics, a young man with eyes the color of sandstone, pressed his fingers against the knot on the back of my head. The other handed me a glass of ice water that smelled like cold and sulfur. What the hell happened, they both wanted to know. And I shook my head. I shook and shook, but I could not find one word to say. The medics told me they couldn’t get the two little girls to open the front door, and once they did, Gloria wouldn’t let either of the men near her. I drank the glass of water, and the two men waited on the porch while I went inside and dampened a washrag and held it gently to her cheek.

You’re going to be fine now, I told her, as my daughter stood silently at the edge of the room, watching. You’re going to be fine, I said again, and this time I made sure to include both girls in my glance. I kept washing the child’s face and telling her that we were going to be fine, we were all going to be just fine.

Out there the water flows out of the faucet ice cold, even in the summer, but here in town it comes out warm, with none of the debris and grit of well water. Clean water, clean start, clean slate. She had not cried, not even once, but when the paramedics tried to get her to climb inside the ambulance, when one of them put his hands on the small of her back, she screamed as if she’d been stabbed. We might as well have stood her up on a tree stump and driven an ax through her longways. She fought and kicked and screamed for her mother. She ran over and held on to me as if she were caught in a tornado and I was the last fence post still standing. But by then, I was worn out and heartsick, and I turned away. Even as she was reaching for me, I turned away and stepped inside my house and closed the door. I listened while the men grabbed her and wrestled her into the back of the ambulance and slammed the door closed.

And now, here in town, people are making this child out to be some kind of liar, or blackmailer, or slut. Forgive us our trespasses, all right. I cup my hands together and allow the water to pool in my palms. What will I be a part of, here in Odessa? What will my days look like now, and who will I become? Same old Mary Rose? Grace Cowden? I smile just a little and when the water begins to seep between my fingers, I squeeze them tightly together. I can drink from it, this cup made with my own hands, if I hurry up—and so I do. I slurp loudly, water dribbling down my chin while Grace makes little sounds in her throat. Again, I bend down and allow my hands to fill back up. Maybe discretion is the better part of valor. Then again, maybe it isn’t. And knowing that I have failed another woman’s daughter in all the ways that matter, I now want badly to be a person of valor.

And what will my great act of valor look like?

This: Just as the esteemed Mrs. L. D. Cowden begins to talk about how I should get more rest and maybe think about supplementing with baby formula, I lift my face from the lavatory, hold up my two cupped hands, and fling the water into her face.

Grace stands perfectly still. Finally, she has nothing to say. After a few seconds she lifts her hand and wipes the water from her forehead and flicks it to the bathroom floor. Well, she says. That was rude.

Go to hell, I tell her. Why don’t you go pack boxes for those poor people y’all can’t quit judging?

I could have two sick kids and a pantry full of nothing, and Robert would complain about having to leave the ranch. But the moment he hears about this, he drives into town. It takes nothing for me to close my eyes and imagine the phone ringing off the hook in our farmhouse kitchen, Robert standing there with a bologna sandwich in his hand while some woman, or her husband, expresses grave concern for my well-being. After the kids are in bed, he follows me from room to room hollering and raging while I pick up Aimee’s books and toys. My breast feels like someone is holding a lit torch to it. I fight the urge not to tear off my nursing bra and fling it on the living-room carpet.

Can’t you even try, Mary Rose, he says. Every day, I’m doing my damnedest to keep us from losing everything out there, land my family has worked for the past eighty years. He follows me into the kitchen and watches me pull out a paper bag and start filling it with cans of food he can take back to the farm. You think you’re doing our family any favors by making yourself out to be the town lunatic?

I kneel down and stare at a shelf full of canned goods, trying to do some math. I could have sworn there were still two cans of Hormel chili in there, and a can of corn too.

Robert’s boot is right next to my leg, close enough that I can smell the cow shit lingering on the leather. In the last forty-eight hours, he has lost more than a dozen cows to blowflies. The ones that didn’t die outright, he had to shoot and because blowflies lay their eggs on fresh carcasses, he pushed the corpses into a pile with his bulldozer and poured kerosene over them.

I stack the dinner dishes in the sink and turn on the hot water. What do you want me to say, Robert? People in this town seem bound and determined to believe that this whole thing is some sort of misunderstanding, some sort of lover’s spat.

Well, how do you know it wasn’t?

I plunge both hands into a sink full of water as hot as I can stand it. The smell of bleach wafts off the water, strong enough that I think I must have measured wrong, and by the time I pull my hands out, they are dark red.

Are you shitting me, Robert? Did you hear what they said about her injuries? They had to take her spleen out, for God’s sake. For that matter, did you hear what I told you?

Yes, Mary Rose. I heard it, all thirty times you told it.

I press both hands into a dishrag, trying to take the heat out of them. Everything in the kitchen stinks of bleach. As calmly as I can manage, I speak to my husband. Robert, Gloria Ramírez is fourteen years old. What if it had been Aimee?

Don’t you compare that girl to my daughter, he says.

Well, why the hell not?

Because it’s not the same, he is nearly shouting now. You know how those little gals are.

I pick up a stack of plates that are still in the dish rack from yesterday and set them down on the counter so hard the cabinet door shudders. No, I tell him. You shut your goddamned mouth.

Robert clamps his lips shut. When his eyes narrow and his hands curl into a fist, I yank the kitchen curtains open and start looking around for my big wooden spoon. If we are going to start hitting each other, I want to strike first. And I might want witnesses, too.

Excuse me, Mary Rose, he says, but I don’t believe I will shut my mouth.

He is still yapping when the phone starts ringing off the hook. Leave it, I tell him, there’s a salesman that won’t stop calling. The phone rings and rings, stops for a few seconds, and starts up again. Robert stands there looking at me like I have lost my everloving mind. Leave it, I yell when he moves toward the phone. It’s a goddamn salesman.

After the phone goes quiet, he asks how long I’m going to keep Aimee under house arrest, and I lie and tell him she has made all kinds of new friends here on Larkspur Lane.

When he sidles up to me at the kitchen sink and asks if I don’t miss him even just a little bit, I grab at my breast and tell him about my milk duct.

Jackpot.

I have watched my husband stick his arm up a cow all the way to the elbow to turn a breeched calf and then cry when neither the cow nor the calf survived the night, but one word about his wife’s nipple infection, and he can’t get out the door fast enough.

He takes his canned goods and one of Suzanne’s frozen casseroles and pulls out of the driveway with a little honk to let me know he means it. I take some aspirin and redraw the dishwater. Across the street, Corrine Shepard is sitting on her front porch. I lift my hand from the soapy dish tub and hold it up to the window, and she lifts hers, cigarette held aloft, the small red cherry dancing merrily back and forth in the night. Hello, Mary Rose.

When the phone starts ringing again, it takes every bit of my willpower not to run over and fetch it off the receiver. Well come on over, you bastard, I want to tell them. I’ll be standing on the front porch with my Winchester, waiting for you.