Thank you. Did that young man threaten you?

Judge, he was like—nothing I have ever seen. It was like the devil himself drove into my front yard. I have never in my life seen such evil.

Clemens is back on his feet. Objection! It’s a yes or no question.

Did he threaten you, Mary Rose, or your family?

No. Sir.

Good girl, Clemens says, and Judge Rice leans back in his chair. He crosses his hands behind his head. Mr. Clemens, do you have any more questions for this young lady?

Just one more. Mrs. Whitehead, were you pointing a gun at Mr. Strickland?

I see Keith sigh in his chair, shuffle some papers around, and lean forward. But I do not look at Strickland. Yes, I was.

*

Victor Ramírez is already standing next to his car with his hand on the door when he sees me running across the parking lot. We’ve got ten minutes before we have to be back in court and even though I’ve hardly run more than a few feet, I am out of breath. I glance down, just to be sure there’s no milk on my blouse, and then step close to Mr. Ramírez, as if standing close to him might make me feel better.

I’m sorry, I say. I want to help Gloria.

Glory, he says and stands looking at the sky, as if I haven’t said a word.

Can I see her and talk with her, ask her if she’s okay?

A small chuckle rises in his throat. No, ma’am, he says. No, you may not. He opens the driver’s side door and sits down. When I try to grab the door, he gently pushes my hand away.

Are you leaving?

Yes, ma’am.

Please, Mr. Ramírez, make her testify.

You people won’t hear what Glory has to say. Do you understand that, Mrs. Whitehead? Then he pulls the door closed and starts the car and drives away.

*

Keith stands up and gives his collar a few good tugs. Mary Rose, can you describe for all of us one more time what Gloria Ramírez looked like when she showed up at your front door that morning?

Yes, I can.

Well, let’s make it quick, Judge Rice says. If I keep the missus waiting and they run out of that prime rib special, I’ll be sleeping outside with my horses tonight. The courtroom erupts with laughter. Dale Strickland laughs, a flat and hollow sound that sets my teeth on edge. Even Mrs. Henderson cracks a smile. Me and Keith Taylor are the only two people in that room who are not laughing.

On my way back to my seat, Strickland reaches out and presses his thumb lightly against my hand. The hair stands up on my arms. A door opens in the back of the courtroom, and a thin shaft of light illuminates the dust motes floating in the air between us.

Keith is moving fast in our direction, but the rest of the court is quiet, or not paying any attention. Or maybe there is plenty of noise and everyone sees, but this is how I will remember it: a silence that makes me want to scream for days.

Mary Rose, Strickland speaks so softly I can barely hear him. His thumbnail scratches gently against my palm. His hands are still cuffed, and I feel the metal against my wrist. Mary Rose, he says—how I hate that he knows my name—I want to tell you how sorry I am for the trouble I’ve brought to you and your family. He smiles, mouth closed, lips pressed tight. When this is all over, he says, I hope to see you again under better circumstances, maybe at your ranch or here in town.

He has spoken so quietly, I’m not even sure I’ve heard him correctly. But I am about to learn something else about Dale Strickland—he’s smarter than me. Because when I answer him, I make sure everybody in the courtroom hears it. Well come on over, I tell him. I will look forward to blowing your fucking head off.

She’s crazy, someone says, and then everyone starts talking all at once, a quick murmur that rolls like thunder across the courtroom. Dale Strickland grins at me, and then Judge Rice slams the butt of his pistol against his desk. His lips are a tight seam. I sure hope your husband can take care of that baby without you tonight, Mrs. Whitehead, he says, because you are in contempt.

Fine, I tell him, I’m not afraid of you, old man. And the bailiff leads me away.

I won’t spend the night in jail—just six hours in the holding cell. Long enough, Judge Rice says when he stops by the cell after the court closes at four o’clock. You ready to go home, young lady? You learned your lesson?

Yes, I tell him.

Yes, what?

Yes.

He looks at me for a long moment, and I wonder if we are about to have another standoff, but he shakes his head and walks out to the reception area.

By the time they find the keys and let me out, my blouse is soaked through, my breasts so heavy with milk, I can barely stand up straight. My purse is pressed tight against my shirt when I walk past the officer at the desk, and I can hear them laughing all the way down the hall. They are still laughing when I step out of the station and close the door behind me and walk across the parking lot to my car.

*

By the time I get to Corrine’s house, the baby is so frantic that I tear a button off my blouse, trying to get him settled. He screams and paws at me, his sharp little nails leaving long scratches on my breasts. When he latches on, we both sigh and close our eyes, our bodies loosening.

Back at the house, my daughter doesn’t say a word while I open some cans and get dinner on, not a word while I nurse the baby for the second time in as many hours. When I stay put in my chair while the phone rings and her daddy leaves a message on the new answering machine, she is quiet then, too. It is an easy bedtime.

At dusk Corrine walks across the street and we settle in. I make a pitcher of salty dogs and carry it, along with the vodka, out to the patio. Corrine grabs an ashtray. We turn out the porch light and leave the patio door cracked open, sit out in the backyard under the darkening sky. It is tinged purple, a sign that there might be a dust storm coming our way.

So, Corrine says, where the hell were you all afternoon? She strikes a match and her eyes glitter in the brief light. Tonight, there’s a small wind loose in the world, and it can’t make up its mind about which way it wants to blow or how big it wants to be. Every match that flickers and dies feels personal, like a closed fist.

Well, I think, here’s my chance to reach across the darkness and tell somebody the truth. But the story I tell Corrine is a comedy about a lady with leaky tits who sasses a judge and lands herself in the pokey. I set the scene for her, me telling Strickland that I’d happily shoot him and Keith Taylor saying, oh shit, and Judge Rice banging his pistol against his wooden desk so hard we thought the wood was going to crack, and I tell the story so well that Corrine laughs and laughs. That is one of the best courtroom stories I have ever heard, she says. I’ll remember it until the day I die.

So will everybody in this town, I say.

She hands me the bottle and I add some vodka to a glass half filled with grapefruit juice. Don’t worry about it, she says. They’ll move along.

Oh, sure. People will forget all about it in a week or two. We both laugh. We both know this is going to follow me around for years, and Aimee, too. She will be the girl with the crazy mama who spent an afternoon in jail. This day will change the two of us. Now when we play cards, I will make her fight for every win, and when she loses, I will make sure she knows why—and not always in the kindest of ways. We will spend hours in the backyard shooting cans off the fence, and when she starts whining that she’s tired, she wants to go play with Debra Ann or one of the other girls on the street, I will tell her to run into the alley and gather up the cans. Set them on the fence, and do it again. Do it again, I’ll say. Again. Again! You must be able to hit your target on the first shot.

I will make her daddy drive into town when he wants to see her, and it will be twenty years before I again walk across that spare, beautiful land out at the ranch, before I sit on my old front porch and watch the sun go down, nothing but a dirt road standing between me and the sky, the only noise coming from cows and birds, the occasional coyote. And in a few years, when I catch Aimee sneaking out of the house at night and driving out to the oil patch with her friends, I will slap her so hard the red mark will still be there when she wakes up the next morning. I will not apologize for years, and by the time I’m ready to say I’m sorry, every word between us will be a bullet in the chamber.

The sky is black now and the backyard is dark, except for our two cigarettes and the diffuse light from the kitchen hovering at the edge of the concrete.

You going to answer that? Corrine asks when the phone rings.

Hell no, I say. I bought a machine that does it for me. It cost me nearly two hundred dollars and I had to order it from Dallas.

We listen as the machine switches on and my voice drifts across the yard.