Corrine felt the heat climbing up her neck and spreading across her face. Potter must have talked about Gloria a dozen times, usually late at night when the pain was so bad he got out of bed and went into the bathroom and she could hear him moaning. All the things he wished he’d done. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, she had told him. That’s all we needed, you picking a fight with a man half your age.

But Potter insisted that he had known right away something wasn’t right. He’d worked alongside young men like that for twenty-five years, and he knew. But they sat there and watched the girl climb into that truck, and then he and Corrine drove home. Two days later, when they saw the man’s mug shot in the American, Potter said that he was a coward and a sinner. A day after that, when the newspaper published Gloria Ramírez’s school picture, he sat in his recliner for a long time looking at her straight black hair and tilted chin, the gaze she directed at the camera, the little smile that might have been a smirk. Corrine said there ought to be a law against putting that girl’s name and picture in the local paper—a minor, for God’s sake. Potter said she looked like a girl who feared nothing and nobody, and that was probably all gone now.

While Karla eyed the tip jar, Corrine downed her drink in several long, throat-searing gulps. She signaled for another. Karla Sibley was barely seventeen, and she had a new baby at home with her mama. She was still trying to decide whether to cut Corrine off when the old woman pushed her barstool away from the bar, wobbled mightily and tugged at her shirt until it hung straight against her large chest and hips.

Never mind, Karla, she said. I’ve had enough. She turned to the men. That girl is fourteen years old, you sons of bitches. You gentlemen have a thing for children?

She drove herself home, keeping her eyes on the centerline and Potter’s truck ten miles under the speed limit, and it was after three when she finally lay down on the sofa. She pulled an afghan over her legs—she still couldn’t sleep in their bed, not without Potter—and though she would struggle to piece it together, at least until the first rush of nicotine hit her bloodstream the next morning, she had fallen asleep replaying what she said to the regulars and the last words she heard before she slammed the heavy door behind her, Karla whining at the men, It’s not my fault, I didn’t bring it up. You can’t tell that old lady anything.

Fourteen years old. As if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white. She carries her ashtray to the kitchen table and sits down at the table, where she fiddles with a loose puzzle piece and glares at the envelopes filled with money. Potter had worked on the puzzle for hours, his left hand sometimes shaking so hard he had to prop his elbow on the table and form a brace with his right. All those hours, all that effort, and still he had completed only the border and a couple of brown and gold cats.

When the stray wanders across the patio and sits outside the sliding-glass door, staring at her, Corrine picks up Potter’s cane and shakes it at him. She might give the little son of a bitch a pretty good knock on the head, if he doesn’t quit coming into her backyard and killing everything.

*

In late February, the cat caught a large male grackle and tore it to pieces, and Corrine nearly slipped on the shiny blue-black head when she took out the trash. The next morning they found a warbler—its head a tidy tuft of gray and black, the bright yellow breast a shock of color against the concrete. Potter paused and watched its feathers tremble in the wind. By then, he had begun to stammer sometimes. Cor—, Cor—, Cor—, he would say, and Corrine wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shout, No, no, no, this is a mistake. But it had been a good morning, no seizures, no falls, and when Potter spoke it was the same voice she had been hearing for thirty years.

Well, he said, if you got him fixed and set some food out, he might stop killing things. He might be pretty good company.

Hell, no, Corrine said. I need something else to take care of like Jesus needed another nail.

Wish you wouldn’t blaspheme like that, Potter said. But he laughed anyway and they looked out across the yard where the cat was lying under the pecan tree. His weird green eyes were fixed on a small lizard that was running along the cinder-block fence.

It was midmorning and sunlight had turned the fence the color of ash. A small wind ruffled the cat’s gold fur. On the other side of the dirt lot behind their house, an ambulance wailed down Eighth Street. Corrine and Potter listened as the sound moved downtown toward the hospital. What in the world are you going to do without me? Potter asked, and when Corrine told him, with no small amount of sorrow, that it had never occurred to her, not once in their marriage, that she would outlive him, Potter nodded gently. It don’t seem fair, he said.

Corrine started to correct her husband’s grammar—it doesn’t seem fair—same as she always did, but then she thought about his occasional mistakes, his tuneless whistling, his habit of giving a nickname to every goddamn creature that crossed his path, and she sighed deeply. She would miss the sound of his voice. Not fair, indeed! She nodded at him and turned away before he could see her starting to cry.

Potter touched her arm and hobbled over to the shovel that leaned against the house. You might surprise yourself, he said, after I’m gone.

I doubt that very seriously, she said.

In recent weeks, he had started to bury some of the animals they found in the backyard, when he felt up to it. This time, it took him nearly ten minutes to break through the hard-packed dirt and caliche. Corrine asked if he wanted a hand and he said no, no, he could do it. He dug a foot-deep hole next to the back fence, set the warbler in it, and covered it up. Buried it, Corrine still mutters when she thinks about that bird, like the damned thing mattered. Toward the end, her husband had become more sentimental than usual. Right up until the minute he wasn’t, the bastard.

A week later, Potter woke up early and rolled over to face Corrine. He felt good, he said. Like the tumor never happened, almost. He left his cane in the kitchen and went outside to sweep the back patio. He fetched his shears from the garage and trimmed the hedges next to the front porch. After he gathered up the skinny limbs and carried them to the dumpster, he admired his work and Corrine yelled at him for walking around without his cane. If she had been paying attention, she wouldn’t have allowed it for a minute. But Potter grabbed her around the waist and nuzzled her neck, saying, baby you smell so good, and she let him pull her into the bedroom for an hour or two.

After, Potter said he wanted a T-bone for supper. He would grill and they could have a couple of baked potatoes with all the fixins—and butter, not that margarine she had been pushing on him for the last decade. If they took a pecan pie out of the freezer now, he said, it would defrost in time for dessert. After supper, he put on a Ritchie Valens album and danced her around the living room, and so what if it had been years since they had thought to dance with each other? They could do it now, he said. Later, it would occur to Corrine that she should have known, right then and there, what he was up to.

*

On the table next to his chair in the living room, the newspaper from February 27, the day he died, is folded to the crossword. A single word is penciled in. Four letters, to walk or drive across a shallow place. Ford. On the table next to her chair sits a book of poetry that she has not touched in months, preferring instead to read articles on cancer and healthy eating, even one about a doctor down in Acapulco, an idea that Potter had immediately vetoed. She wanders back into the front hallway and lets her fingers drift across the walnut case of his AM/FM radio, twisting the knobs back and forth. On pretty nights, when the wind was blowing from the north, they would carry it out to the front porch and listen to the country station out of Lubbock. To the day he died, only Corrine, Potter, and the doctors knew about his illness. Any day, they kept promising each other, they would tell Alice and a few people from church, but then Potter went and jumped the gun. Goddamn him.

The doorbell is mounted on the wall directly above the radio, and when it rings, Corrine nearly comes out of her skin. She stands frozen in place, heart pounding, her right hand still on the radio’s dial. The bell rings again and then she hears Debra Ann Pierce’s peculiar knock, three evenly spaced raps in the center of the door, three staccato knocks on the left side, three on the right, then the child calling, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, as she does at least once every day.

Corrine opens the door, wedging her large body between the doorjamb and door. She squeezes her thighs together, as if given half a chance the child might try to dart between her legs, like a small dog.