*

They were making plans for their retirement when Potter’s headaches started the previous spring. He was fully vested in his pension, and Corrine had been collecting hers since the school board forced her out a few years earlier, in the wake of some ill-advised comments she made in the teacher’s lounge. Maybe we can drive up to Alaska, Potter said, stop in California and see that redwood tree that’s big enough to drive a truck through.

But Corrine had her doubts. You can’t even get the sun up there for half the year, she told him, and what the hell is in Alaska? Moose?

Alice, said Potter. Alice is up there.

Corrine rolled her eyes, a habit she’d picked up from thirty years of working with teenagers. Right, she said, shacking up with whatshisname, the draft dodger.

Two days after they put down a deposit on a brand-new Winnebago thirty feet long and with its own shower, Potter had his first seizure. He was mowing the front yard when he fell to the ground, teeth clattering, arms and legs jerking madly. The lawn mower rolled slowly toward the street and came to a stop with its back wheels still on the sidewalk. Ginny Pierce’s kid was riding her bike in circles on the Shepards’ driveway, and Corrine heard her hollering all the way from the bedroom, where she’d been reading a book with the swamp cooler turned up high.

They drove five hundred miles to Houston and rode an elevator for fifteen stories to sit in two narrow chairs with vinyl cushions and listen while the oncologist spelled it out for them. Corrine sat hunched over a spiral notebook, her pen bearing down on the paper like she was trying to kill it. Glioblastoma multiforme, he said, GBM, for short. For short? Corrine looked up at him. It was so rare, the oncologist said, they might as well have found a trilobite lodged in Potter’s brain. If they started radiation therapy right away, they might buy him six months, maybe a year.

Six months? Corrine gazed at the doctor with her mouth hanging open, thinking, Oh no, no, no. You are mistaken, sir. She watched Potter stand up and walk over to the window where he looks out at Houston’s soupy brown air. His shoulders began to move gently up and down, but Corrine didn’t go to him. She was stuck to that chair as surely as if someone had driven a nail through one of her thighs.

It was too hot to drive home, so they went over to the Westwood Mall, where they sat on a bench near the food court, both of them clutching bottles of cold Dr Pepper as if they were hand grenades. At dusk, they walked to the parking lot. They drove with the windows down, the wind blowing hot against their faces and hands. By midnight the truck stank of them—the remnants of a cup of coffee Corrine had spilled on the seat the day before, her cigarettes and Chanel No. 5, Potter’s snuff and aftershave, their mutual sweat and fear. He drove. She turned the radio on and off, on and off, and on, pulled her hair into a clip, let it back down, and turned off the radio, turned it back on. After a while, Potter asked her to please stop.

City traffic made Corrine nervous, so Potter took the loop around San Antonio. I’m sorry, she told him, for adding time to our drive. He smiled wanly and reached across the seat for her hand. Woman, he said, are you apologizing to me? Well. I guess I really am dying. Corrine turned her face toward the passenger window, and cried so hard her nose clogged up and her eyes swelled nearly shut.

*

Not even nine o’clock, and it is already ninety degrees outside when Corrine looks out the living-room window and sees Potter’s truck parked on the front lawn. It was his pride and joy, a Chevy Stepside V8, with a scarlet leather interior. It has been a dry winter and the Bermuda grass is a pale brown scarf. When the breeze picks up, a few blades of grass that weren’t flattened beneath the truck’s wheel tremble under the sunlight. Every day for the past two weeks, the wind picks up in the late morning and blows steadily until dusk. Back when Corrine gave a shit, that would have meant dusting the house before she went to bed.

On Larkspur Lane, the neighbors stand in their front yards, water hoses in hand, staving off the drought. A large U-Haul turns the corner and stops in front of the Shepards’ house, then backs slowly into the driveway across the street. If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.

No one will ask, but they will sure talk if she doesn’t move Potter’s truck off the lawn, so Corrine swallows an aspirin and puts on a skirt suit from her teaching days, an olive-green number with brass buttons shaped like anchors. She puts on pantyhose, perfume, lipstick, and sunglasses then creeps outside wearing her house slippers, as if she has just returned from church and is settling in for a busy day at home, doing something.

The day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky. Across the street and down the block, Suzanne Ledbetter is watering her St. Augustine. When she sees Corrine, she switches off her hand sprayer and waves, but Corrine acts as if she doesn’t see. She also pretends not to see any of the neighbor kids who have spilled out of houses and across lawns like pecans from an overturned basket, and she barely registers the crew of men who have climbed out of the moving truck and are standing around the yard across the street.

When she opens the door to Potter’s truck and spots a cigarette lying on the bench seat, broken but repairable, Corrine gasps with gratitude. Quick, quick, she shifts the truck into reverse and pulls it squarely onto the driveway, then fetches up the cigarette and makes for the front door, pausing for just long enough to turn on the faucet. A water hose is stretched across the lawn like a dead snake, the rusty nozzle lying facedown in the dirt beneath the Chinese elm she and Potter planted twenty-six years earlier, the spring after they bought the house. Ugly and awkward, the elm reminds Corrine of dirty hair, but it has survived droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes. When it grew three feet in a single summer, Potter, who had a nickname for everything and everyone, started calling it Stretch. When Alice fell out of it and broke her right wrist, he started calling her Lefty. Every other damn thing in the backyard is dead, and Corrine couldn’t care less, but she can’t bear to let this tree die.

And even if she wanted to, Corrine knows, if she lets the tree go, or she makes a habit of parking Potter’s truck on the grass, or people see her in the front yard wearing the same clothes she wore to the Country Club last night, they might start feeling sorry for her. Pity. It makes her want to kick the shit out of someone—namely Potter, if he weren’t already dead. She thumps his funeral wreath and slams the front door behind her. In the kitchen, the phone rings and rings, but she is not picking up. No way, no how.

*

At three o’clock in the morning, they stopped to gas up at the Kerrville truck stop and wandered into the restaurant for coffee and an ice cream cone. After they ordered, he told her that radiation therapy was just a bunch of poison they pumped into your veins. It burned you from the inside out, made you even sicker, and what kind of months would those be?

I won’t do it, Corrine. I’m not having my wife wipe my ass, or run my steak through a blender.

Corrine sat across from her husband with her mouth hanging open. You always told Alice that getting hurt was no excuse to quit playing a game—her voice rose and fell like a kite in strong wind—and now you’re going to die on me? A couple sitting in the adjacent booth glanced their way then stared down at their table. Otherwise, the restaurant was empty. Why on earth had Potter chosen to sit here? Corrine wondered. Why must she share her grief with total strangers?

This is different, Potter said. He studied his ice cream for a few seconds. When he looked out the window, Corrine looked too. Between the diesel stations and eighteen-wheelers and a neon sign advertising hot showers, it was bright as high noon out there. A trucker pulled away from the diesel pump, honking twice as he merged onto the frontage road. A cowboy leaned against his tailgate and gulped down a hamburger, his belt buckle sparkling in the light. Two cars filled with teenage girls rolled slowly through the parking lot.