“He won’t never make a man,” Dede said of Nolan. She had a way of saying what other people hesitated to say, but once they heard her, they knew they had been thinking the same thing. About Nolan she was deadly accurate. He remained baby-faced and boyish even as he grew to a man’s height. But what bothered Dede was not only that he was more than a year younger than her, but that his idea of courting was to make moon eyes and gape at her in public. There was also the fact that Nolan was a fairly pudgy boy when he started following Dede around, and for all that he grew to be wide-shouldered, he stayed soft. The only nice thing anyone ever said about Nolan was that he was a good boy to his mama and daddy. Not much of a recommendation to the very particular Dede—good boys were not what caught her eye.

“He’s too good,” Dede said. “An’t he got any wild in him?” No, Cissy thought. He did not. What was wild in Nolan was his passion for Dede Windsor. From that first run-in on the steps, when Dede called him “mama’s little precious,” Nolan was captured. Another boy would have taken offense. Nolan took fire, and never got over it. For him, there was simply no other female but Dede Windsor.

Nolan looked carefully into his daddy’s pale face and immediately developed his own notions about putting their house in order. Like the good son he was, he quietly reorganized his days so that he could spend three hours every morning helping his daddy out before making the second bell for school. He’d come into homeroom smelling of baking powder, butter, and salt, steam rising off a little bag of sausage biscuits clutched in his hand. Before long, Nolan’s eyes—his best feature, everyone agreed—had sunk into his biscuit-swollen cheeks, and he had to turn sideways to get through the door. From Cissy’s viewpoint, the worst of it was that Nolan could no longer climb down the entrance to Paula’s Lost.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have time,” Nolan kept telling Cissy, and it was true. Between Biscuit World and practicing the clarinet, the boy did not have a minute to spare.

The clarinet was Nadine’s idea. She had pushed Nolan to join the school band, hoping it would draw him out of his bookish ways, and she had suggested the clarinet because she imagined it to be a proper instrument, not so heavy and ponderous as a tuba or as sexually suspect as a piccolo. And while she liked the sound of the euphonium, she was not sure how Nolan would look holding it close to his chest. He had his daddy’s build and was going to be big and awkward. No, she decided, her boy could manage the clarinet and look good playing it.

Nadine had been sure that the clarinet would be a temporary hobby. Nolan lost interest in everything eventually. Music would be a useful but transient distraction from adolescent self-consciousness. She bought an inexpensive Vito Leblanc, a decent beginner’s model made of plastic, with nickel-plated keys. “Resonite, Nolan, Resonite. That’s what the dealer said,” she kept repeating. What Nadine could not guess was that her shy boy would find his life’s design writ in sixteenth notes, for once Nolan got his chops working, he discovered he could breathe through that clarinet. He could soar through and out of it into a world no one knew, a world suffused with the drunken glory his talent stirred within him.

Nolan practiced whenever he could, mostly after school, when his daddy was home. Biscuit World closed at one every afternoon, earlier on the busiest days. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” Mr. Reitower would laugh, already thinking about climbing into his bed as he wiped down the counter. Nolan’s daddy slept every afternoon from the time he got home until dinner. He worried about Nolan getting up so early to help out, never managing a nap until after school and band practice. “Growing boys need food, sure, but they need sleep too,” he would tell the oblivious Nolan every few days. “Dream time,” he complained to Nadine. “The boy is getting no dream time, no easy, unbooked, lay-around-and-think time. That’s what a boy needs to make a man. Time to imagine himself what he is going to be.”

Most days Nolan got no nap at all, just went drowsy through the hours until the moment when he could put a reed in his mouth and come fully awake and full of joy. What his father did not understand was that his music was dream time for Nolan. He did not take up the clarinet to pretend he was Benny Goodman, or even to hide behind black plastic and shiny keys. Nolan had always liked music well enough. Nadine set the radio dial dutifully on the classical channel in the early evening, and every morning his daddy would put on the jazz station from Atlanta while they cut biscuits. But that bland appreciation had nothing to do with what Nolan felt after the first six months with the clarinet.

Nolan’s music teacher, Mr. Clausen, worried about him as much as his daddy did. Nadine had found the man after the school-band director told her to “get somebody knows what he’s doing.” Mr. Clausen taught at the community college and directed a little wind ensemble that practiced a lot but rarely played for the public. Cayro was not a place where people would turn out to hear a wind ensemble. He had been almost rude to Nadine when she first called him, but became remarkably polite after a few sessions with her son.

“It’s a miracle. That boy, the way he plays, no one knows what he can do. I listen to him and I think I’ve gone crazy. I listen to him and I start to believe there is a God.”

“Mr. Clausen!” Nadine was horrified. “Do not tell me you do not believe in God.” Nadine was willing to ignore a lot for the sake of getting her boy a good teacher, but not blasphemy. She knew musicians were dangerous that way. Freethinkers, hippies, atheists, queers, intellectuals—all were of a type, and not a type she wanted Nolan to know too much about. She loved him and knew how much he loved his music, but she also knew how easily boys could be led astray. She had already lost one son, after all. If Clausen was a danger to Nolan, she would make sure he never got near him again.

“Yes. Oh, yes, I believe in God. Absolutely.” A vision of losing his prize pupil lent sincerity to Mr. Clausen’s profession of faith. “Who else would have sent me this prodigy right when I was ready to give up? You have no idea how many youngsters are sent to me as punishment. Mostly mine. But your boy could be a virtuoso if he got a little more sleep.” Mr. Clausen hesitated, not wanting to offend Nolan’s mother. “I just think we have to make sure he gets the kind of encouragement he needs.” His words prompted a deeper frown from Nadine. She too worried about her child. She had erred with his older brother, Stephen, and she didn’t want Nolan leaving home in a huff, only calling once or twice a year.

Nolan was the only one who did not worry. Except for his continual despair over Dede, he was a boy full of patient confidence. He slept when he could, daydreamed when he could not, and came alive to play the clarinet, first in the high school band, then in the orchestra, and eventually in Mr. Clausen’s wind groups. Nolan saw no need for dream time because he lived in a dream. He had only two waking states, the one in which he drew pure and astonishing music out of the clarinet, and the other when he was watching Dede Windsor with his dark puppy eyes. Nolan had no ambition but to play his instrument in such a way that other people could feel the exhilaration it produced in him, and to win Dede’s love.

Mr. Reitower died of a massive heart attack two weeks before Nolan’s high school graduation, not sweating over his biscuit trays but lying in his own bed in a deep and easy sleep. His death ended any chance Nolan had to go off and study music. A scholarship might pay all of Nolan’s expenses, but it would not take care of his mother. And what people had always said about Nolan was true. He was a good son. With Mr. Reitower gone, Nadine needed a good son.

From the moment of her husband’s death, Nolan’s mama fell into a stunned and furious silence. Like a sunstruck puppy, she could not seem to understand what had happened to her or what had to be done now. Her good husband, that reliable man, had the smallest insurance policy ever issued. They were not destitute, but damn close, and Nadine could not accept that.

“How could he?” she snapped, glaring at Nolan and the neighbors who came in to help. She might have meant his dying, or perhaps his buying that pitiful policy that did not cover the cost of the cheapest burial she could arrange. She might have been speaking of Stephen, who called but did not come, and sent a check so small as to be no help at all. Or she might have been accusing God. Nolan thought she was close to it, an outright complaint to a divinity she had never questioned before. But what he really believed was that she was accusing him. It was his fault, his failure.

Within a few weeks of the funeral, Nadine stormed out the front door, angrily shoving the screen door, which snapped back and whacked her on the forehead. She staggered once and fell down the steps, breaking her left arm and, worse, her left hip.

“The weak link in old women,” the doctor said. That hip was the evidence that finally proved just how fragile Nadine had become. The doctor also suggested there might have been a mild stroke, but there was no evidence of that except for the rage, towering and unpredictable, that now burned in Nadine. Nolan did not hesitate. He had already taken over full-time at Biscuit World. He knew how, and no one was going to refuse him the job or that high school diploma everyone knew he deserved. He was determined and uncompromising. He would manage. He would support Nadine, take his time deciding what to do, and meanwhile play his clarinet all afternoon out on the porch, where he could look down Terrill Road to the convenience store. Dede was working there now, and if he got up the nerve, he could savor a cold drink that she would have to put in his hand.

When Nolan started to feel like he was going crazy, there were afternoon classes out at the junior college, and clarinet auditions for visiting band directors, who would stare at him in awe. None could believe that he could play like that and then ignore their advice about his professional future.

“My God, boy, you could do something.”

“I’m doing something.” He would smile then, pack up his case, and walk away. That tight smile told Cissy everything. Several times she had gone over to Atlanta with Nolan. Mostly she would hang out south of Peachtree and haunt the record stores looking for bootleg tapes of Mud Dog, but once or twice she sat in the back of some darkened hall and watched Nolan perform what seemed to be his only sin. It had to be sin, the awful satisfaction he took in those auditions, smiling that way throughout, playing like a wicked angel until the rest of the clarinet section turned sour and pale. It was as if he harbored a rage bigger than the one buffeting his mama and it came out in runs of staccato-tongued sixteenth notes alternated with pure, piercing tones. Maybe that was the way music really worked, Cissy thought. Maybe talent was a blade cutting hard through those who had less. Watching Nolan, Cissy saw him as a deeply hurt boy, made rich through an accident of fate and hoarding his wealth. It made her slightly dizzy, the way. he smiled through the despair of everyone else at his auditions.

Afterward, though, Nolan would be himself again, shy and eager to hear what Cissy thought. He would take her out for a big rich meal and laugh gently at the frustration of the orchestra leader. This Nolan was her friend, and a genuinely kind soul. It was hard then for Cissy to remember how he was in the audition. Only when he talked about the other musicians did the nature of his resentment become apparent.

“Oh, they always think they’re something until I show them what I can do. Humility, that’s what these boys lack. It’s what I give them.” He smiled wide, and chewed with a satisfaction that scared Cissy, startled her into speaking.

“You should get out,” she said, her expression stern.

Nolan took a sip of water and looked at her inquisitively. Cissy truly cared about him, he knew, had from the first time Dede snubbed him. But Cissy was no musician. She did not know what he felt when he sat down with those little groups of overly ambitious horn players. Nor could he tell her. He tried to smile and wave her words away, but she caught his hand and spoke fiercely.

“I’m telling you right now. You should go to Atlanta or New York City or Boston or anywhere you can. Go somewhere. Do something. Audition for an orchestra for real. Take a position or get a music degree. You got to stop this and get out of here.”

When Nolan just smiled again and shrugged, the weight of her own resentment almost crushed Cissy. Anytime Nolan decided to leave Cayro, there would be people waiting to welcome him. Anytime he could face what was happening to him and walk away from his mother, he could have a career that would vindicate every bad choice he had ever made. But no one anywhere was waiting for Cissy. Sometimes Nolan’s smile would make her feel more debased than those sweating clarinet players he had just skunked so completely.

Who was she? Delia Byrd’s daughter. No talent, not special. She was like those bugs caught in amber, stuck in time. She’d never been in love, never dated. No boyfriend, no friends except Nolan and Dede, and Dede didn’t count. What did Cissy have? Nothing. Nothing but the caves.

Cissy had been out to Paula’s Lost half a dozen times with Nolan before he stopped going, and a couple of times with Charlie, though she gave that up when Charlie got drunk and tried to wrestle her down in the first passage past the entrance. Cissy could not explain how she felt about the caves. Nolan was too busy, Charlie wanted to get her naked, and Dede thought the whole idea was silly. Cissy had managed to talk three members of the swim team into going caving with her that spring. They went out to Little Mouth with a park ranger as a guide, and he was impressed with Cissy. What she told no one, because people would have thought her frankly crazy if they knew, was that she seized every chance that came her way for a ride out to one of the caves and went down on her own. Mostly she hitchhiked out to the Lost and climbed just far enough down into the first passage to sit in the welcome dark, sometimes humming to herself happily, more often falling asleep. There was no sleep like the one she surrendered to while wrapped in an old blanket in the sand bed of the first chamber at Brewster’s old party site. But sleeping wasn’t a career, a future, a purpose, any more than caving was.

Faced with Nolan’s bland smile, Cissy would find herself picking on him, being mean just to spite him. “Eat something doesn’t come with gravy,” she would say. Or, “Dede’s going to marry that Tucker boy, just you wait.” Nolan’s smile would evaporate, and he would look at Cissy as if he could see down to where she hid her sins.

Cissy was stilled then, overwhelmed by the power she had to hurt Nolan. It was awful, knowing each other’s weaknesses so precisely. Nolan was unfailingly gentle with her, no matter how frustrated and resentful she became. Maybe he had grown calluses dealing with his mama’s rages, or maybe the dark angel she had seen in the rehearsal hall was not so sinful as she had imagined.

“At least you’re good at something,” Cissy told Nolan.

“I’m not that good,” he would tell her carefully, waiting for the cruelty to turn to embarrassment, waiting for his friend to come back. “Not yet. I’m not near as good as I’m going to be.” Then he would laugh, a deprecating little laugh, and shake his head. “When I’m good enough to pull your sister up Terrill Road to my porch, then we’ll see. We’ll see.”

The music in which Nolan found so much grace was a mystery to Cissy, the clarinet an instrument as imperial and strange as the concept of a wind ensemble or a jazz combo. The daughter of Delia Byrd and Randall Pritchard understood guitars and drums and rock and roll. Lyrics. Words and music. Mr. Clausen had found a Buffet at an estate sale and bought it for Nolan with the help of the other members of the wind ensemble, a gesture Nolan had almost, but not quite, refused. What he played on that gleaming ebony and silver creation was of another order, a language Cissy had never learned to speak and did not even know if she heard accurately. When Nolan played for her, Cissy felt like a Baptist child at a Catholic mass—intimidated, awed, and suspicious. It was gorgeous and scary. The melodies, almost recognizable or fully familiar but extraordinary at the same time, sometimes sent shocks through her nervous system. More extraordinary was the fact that this music was coming out of Nolan, with his flushed full cheeks and puffy eyes. Baking-powder memories rose with the cascading trills of notes. Cissy’s mouth would fall open, and she would feel suddenly small and stupid and completely Cayro, Georgia, while Nolan would enlarge and assume the guise of Bacchus or Orpheus, some mystical god of high, far places as remote from Cayro as Paris or New York. If she closed her eyes when Nolan played, Cissy imagined the lithe figures of ballet dancers against a diamond and velvet sky. With each trill they leaped and Cissy’s heart sank within her.

Maybe Delia knew what that was like—the great, dark power of a melody that could catch your pulse, speed it or slow it, lift you right out of your natural state. She had lived in that outer world. There was magic there, magic that only musicians knew, magic that remade everything and might have remade Cissy. But it was a magic denied to her. Like Dede, she had a pleasant voice, pedestrian, ordinary. Sitting next to Nolan, knowing she had neither her mother’s gift nor his, was torture of a high order. When Cissy got that small, only one thing pulled her out of it: the knowledge that Nolan too had something in life that he wanted desperately and could not have. It should have been the subject they avoided, but it was not. Dede was the one subject Nolan would invariably turn to, the one reference point for both of them.

“Who’s Dede seeing?” he asked when Cissy came by during his afternoon session on the porch the day after their latest trip to Atlanta. His whole body communicated frustration and nervous energy that he could not dissipate. The reed was barely inches from Nolan’s lower lip, his desire plain on his face. “She’s not still chasing that Tucker boy, is she?” He put his tongue out, deliberately threading the reed’s moistened fibers. He was trying to be casual.

“Oh, Nolan.” The tune he had been playing was still sounding in Cissy’s head. Gratefully she shook herself back into the moment, the mundane world of thwarted desire and sexual obsession. Even musicians were subject to the laws of heartbreak. “Give it up. Christ, Dede an’t never gonna go out with you. Even if she wasn’t seeing Billy Tucker, she wouldn’t see you.”

Nolan rubbed his lower lip with his right thumb. “I know, I know.” His eyes were unfocused, distant, his face without the hope of a smile. “I’m just asking.” He tilted the clarinet and looked down its length as if insight lay in the finish.

It was no game. He was not pretending. His misery never abated. Every time Dede broke up with another boyfriend, Nolan’s heart caught fire again. He plied Cissy with questions, ran errands for Delia, and searched out gifts that he took by the convenience store—small things like fabric-covered hair ties or padded fingerless bicycle gloves that would protect Dede’s hands when she opened cases of eggs and butter or slit the tops of cartons of jerky.

“You can’t help who you love,” Nolan told Cissy. He was talking about Brewster but thinking about himself. “Some people are lucky. They find the one for them the first time out. Some never find the right one. Daddy always said Brewster should have stayed married to Aunt Maudy, even if it was like he swore—that she wasn’t his true love. He said true love is rare and a good home life is as much as most can hope for. And then anyway, Aunt Maudy could have kept Brewster a little better focused. He developed sugar diabetes, you know, made it worse drinking. Screwed up his circulation, Daddy said. Almost suicide, if you think about it. Kind of thing didn’t have to happen. Just stupidity, really, and paying yourself no mind. Runs in the family, kind of.” His head dropped.

“Evolution in action?” Cissy joked, but Nolan glared at her. You could never predict when he was going to get his feelings hurt, she thought. She looked at his fingers on the clarinet, poised delicately and with unfailing precision. Infinitely fragile, immensely strong, a force of nature in his profoundly human body.

“The pay an’t that good anyway,” Dede complained. “Once you buy enough grass to keep yourself stoned while you’re working that line, you can’t be taking no nice vacations or buying a good car. And hell, I’d rather do my drugs for fun, not just to get myself through God’s own boring workday.” Delia nodded and hid a smile. God’s own boring workday was all most people could expect, after all.

For a while Dede helped out at Benny Davis’s Cayro Dog Shop, grooming poodles and shih tzus and giving flea and tick treatments to dogs so big Benny no longer had the nerve to face them. It was irregular work and didn’t pay very well, but Benny let her come in when she wanted and didn’t care how she dressed.

When a group of women brought a case against the Atlanta police department, Dede took an immediate interest in their struggle. The state announced open exams for deputy and traffic-control positions, and Dede tried to sign on for deputy sheriff. When she came in for the application forms, Emmet Tyler sat down on the edge of his desk and stared at her.

“You want to be a deputy?” He was astonished. “As many times as you’ve almost wound up in jail?”

Emmet Tyler had taken partial disability after he rolled his cruiser chasing a couple of drunk teenagers on the road to Little Mouth. His left arm was stiff, but he refused to let the doctors mess with him. Since the accident, he’d been working at the courthouse escorting prisoners and filing papers for the traffic judge. On the weekends he was supposed to rest and do his physical therapy, but mostly Emmet hung out near the courthouse or over at the café down from the Bee’s Bonnet.

“Almost don’t count,” Dede said, “and traffic an’t no never mind. I’m as street-legal as anyone. I got a high school diploma. I got the right attitude.”

“Girl, you an’t got the right attitude,” Emmet said quietly. He had learned to like Dede the hard way, tangling with her repeatedly since she was fourteen. He knew her temper and admired it, though he prayed never to run full into it in this lifetime. “What would you do if you had to arrest a friend, some boy you dated? Huh? How would you feel then?”

“Some boys I’ve dated should be arrested.” Dede laughed at the idea. “Others, well, it would be like Judge Winkler when he excused himself from sitting at his cousin’s trial. Can’t everybody have some cases where they excuse themselves?” She was thoughtful, a little frown deepening the line between her eyebrows.

Emmet pushed his hair back and took a deep breath. “Dede, honey, that number of cases might be more than you could handle.” He raised his palm when her face stiffened, as if to block the protest that was sure to come.

“You’re smart,” Emmet said. “You are simply one of the sharpest girls I’ve ever known, and you have to see how hard it could get, walking friends of yours from court to jail, putting handcuffs on people you’ve known all your life.” His look held her, open to her anger but firm. “I’ve done it. I know.” His eyes flicked away. “I’ve lost people because of it. Lost people I’ve loved. I wouldn’t want to see that happen to you.”

Dede gritted her teeth. She knew Emmet was thinking about Delia, who was friendly enough but now refused all his invitations to dinner or a movie. She never mentioned that Emmet had twice arrested Dede—once for speeding and once for possession of a tiny quantity of marijuana—but both of them knew that was why she stopped going out with him. “I can’t date a man put handcuffs on my child,” Delia told M.T. “I don’t care if she was drunk in the middle of the street.”

Dede frowned again and scowled at Emmet, but when she left she did not take the application forms.

As he watched her go, Emmet sighed heavily. He had tried not to take Delia’s rejection too hard, and to keep himself busy, but every time he thought about her his heart thudded so hard his throat seemed to close. He would, he knew, have given his soul to lie once more on Delia’s body, to thrust once more as hard as he could and then lie spent on her shoulder—even if it were the last act he was ever allowed. But she was miles away from him, too far to reach in this life. The friendship she gave him was all he would ever get, and he clung to it. He hadn’t asked her out in a long time, just found excuses to stop by and eat his lunch with her when he could. He worked all the hours he was allowed, went to Panama City when he needed a woman. Now and then he helped the park service boys out, posting a sign or two and telling stories the rangers hadn’t heard yet. Some blamed his skills as a storyteller for the fools who kept getting lost at Paula’s.

“Sometimes you go down into the dark, and sometimes you don’t come back,” Emmet told the youngsters who asked him about the old parties. His tone of voice was bleak, and he nodded, as if his warning should settle the matter for any sane man. He never seemed to see how those boys grinned at each other. He had lost the memory of being young and crazy and eager to jump directly into the dark.

Cissy smiled at the notion. At her peak Dede got up to 117 pounds. Mostly she stayed well under that. Bad times, like those months she was alternating uppers and B₁₂, she dropped below 100.

“Skeletal,” Amanda told Delia. “The girl is skeletal.”

Cissy agreed but did not say so. There was no use talking about. Dede to Amanda. Maybe Delia, but not Amanda, who spent a solid year hounding Delia to put Dede in the Christian Rehabilitation Center over near Savannah. There was a bad patch when it looked as if Delia was going to do it, but Dede must have caught scent of that. She shifted over to what she called her wholeness regimen, dropping Xanax, ginseng from Siberia, and chelated calcium, and bingeing on a diet of complex carbohydrates and fresh leafy vegetables. She pumped up fast and talked loudly about how satisfying it was to be clean for a change.

Dede believed in matching her drugs with vitamins, as if good intentions neutralized wild ones, and sometimes Cissy convinced herself that she knew what she was doing. Except for smoking a little grass with Nolan and drinking a few beers after a cave trip, Cissy had no experience with drugs. She knew she couldn’t judge the effects.

But Cissy did understand what Dede was talking about when she complained about the lack of job opportunity in Cayro. If you didn’t want to style hair with Delia or get line work out at Frito-Lay or the missile-wiring plant, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice, not for a girl with no family money. The last new businesses to be established in Cayro were the motorcycle repair shop near the Marietta highway and the Crafts & Stuff at the Stop ’n’ Go Mall. Both had failed.

Dede’s abiding desire to steer a big truck around on narrow streets had been a constant since before she got her learner’s permit. Sexy, Dede thought being a driver was sexy—right down to the uniform shirts and pocket patches. Maybe she could deliver something like paper products or baked goods, she told Cissy.

“Maybe. Angel food cake?” Cissy teased.

Dede lost her temper when she found out that no paper products came in any truck she could drive. That kind of thing came into the Piggly Wiggly via huge semis, along with canned goods and giant bags of pet food. Even the baked goods came in on a big truck whose driver just laughed at Dede when she tried to talk to him.

It was a bad summer. Dede holed up in her room doing Dilaudid and megadoses of vitamin C. Cissy found her stretched out on her bed one afternoon, where she talked for an hour about the beneficial effects of vitamin C, how regular it was keeping her. “Better than beer.” She lifted her head and giggled softly. “Thought you were Dan,” she whispered, naming the boy she had been dating the previous month, whom Cissy had not seen in weeks. “Thought you were Dan. That’s a boy needs some C.” Then she closed her eyes and drifted away. Cissy sat and watched her for a while, worrying over whether it was time to get Delia involved. In the end she decided to wait.

For a while Dede was excited about long-haul driving and dated a couple of short-haul drivers as a way of sneaking up on the notion. One of them had his own truck, and Dede saw immediately that that was the way to go, though, as she told Cissy, it wasn’t likely she could borrow enough to get a truck. And who would trust her with their goods? She did locate a few women drivers, but most were part of a team, married to their partners or doing runs now and then just to keep things running smoothly.

“Son of a bitch,” Dede cursed as her dreams of driving receded.

One night she ran a long, complicated fantasy on Cissy. She was going to go down to Atlanta and find work driving a taxi, sleep with somebody or rent a tuxedo and get herself one of those modified hansom rigs at Underground Atlanta. She could cluck to a horse if she couldn’t baby an engine. Her eyes were glassy, and the skin around her nose looked pinched and gray. Cissy watched and worried.

One early Thursday evening Amanda called the Bonnet to tell Delia there had been a shooting at the convenience store down from Nolan’s house. Two women were sitting under the dryers, big pink and blue curlers steaming under plastic covers.

“What was it?” MT sounded frightened. “What was it?”

“Somebody stupid said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a robbery. It was a boyfriend/ girlfriend thing, and there were drugs involved. Some boy too tanked to take the time to think, some girl too high to care what that boy thought, another boy too glazed to pay attention. Then there was a gun and some craziness no one was too sure about. Nobody could say how it got started, but the boy died and the girl was messed up, blood everywhere and half a finger gone. In the confusion someone went back and rifled the cash register—not, as far as the police could determine, any of the people involved in the shooting.

Dede was sitting in Steph’s chair examining a newspaper in hopes of finding a company or an idea she hadn’t tried already. “I could have seen that coming,” she said, and got up and walked out the door. There was a new temporary manager putting shelves back up when Dede arrived at the store. The regular manager had quit as soon as the cops drove up. “I an’t working blood,” he had said. “No blood for me.”

“I got an eye for trouble,” Dede told the new guy. He was holding a split box of ice cream toppings in his hands, small cans of butter-scotch and chocolate. He looked up at her blankly.

“Very little people can do that I wouldn’t know how to figure,” Dede went on.

The guy just stared.

“I could be good.”

“Good?”

“This place, this job. This is something I know a little about.”

“What? You used to hang out at a 7-Eleven till all hours?” He laughed and shoved a few more cans onto the shelf.

“Well, yeah.” Dede was not belligerent. She was telling the honest truth. Her eyes swept the shelves, the glass storefront, the stand of newspapers and magazines with half the covers obscured by brown paper wrappers.

“I could handle this.”

The man put down the box and turned to her. “Girl,” he said, “you are tiny.” He seemed to want to be patient, but his tone was dismissive. “And don’t you know that somebody died here tonight? Somebody got shot.”

“I an’t gonna get shot.” Dede looked him right in the eye. “I know how to handle myself, and there’s not too much that can stop me when I make up my mind. So, no, I an’t no two-hundred-pound stupid jock, but I can get things done. I could run this place like you cannot imagine.”

The man was intrigued in spite of himself, but he didn’t know what to say. He tried to wave Dede away, but there was already a sign on the window and a stack of application forms behind the counter. When Dede insisted, he pulled out his manager’s book to see if he could say no. Nothing there helped him. There was no requirement for height or weight. There was an age requirement, but Dede met it—barely.

She filled out the form and checked back twice to make sure he sent it in to the central office. Nothing would come of it, Delia warned, but all Dede said was “I can handle that job.”

They put her on days to start, split days, the worst possible schedule. Early morning and early evening were the peak hours. The man who trained Dede didn’t think she would last a week.

“We get some rude types in here,” he said.

Dede smiled. “Uh-huh.”

Delia worried, but Amanda was outraged. “Counter help! That what you want to be? Counter help?”

“I can do this,” Dede told them both, refusing to be drawn into an argument. Her eyes were bright and clear. She was drinking black coffee and swallowing big iron pills.

Rude boys, teenagers, almost legal twenty-year-olds with smudged identification cards and bad attitudes. Winos of both sexes. Angry mothers running in from carloads of shrieking toddlers. No one scared Dede. She could size them up with a glance and predict what they were after. Beer and cigarettes, milk and white bread, peanut butter cookies or gallon containers of Rocky Road. False IDs or fast hands, Dede spotted them before they could become a problem.

She knew the tricks because she had done more than her share of them. She knew what was possible and how to handle tired, hopeful children. She had a quip or a joke to deflect anger, or a ruthless glare when the little shits needed one. She even stopped the girl who had been palming quarters off the cardboard Cerebral Palsy poster by the ice cream freezer.

“You don’t want to do that,” she said, and that was the end of it.

Dede knew the game and she liked it. Maybe steering a big rig would have been better, but this was all right for the time being, she told Delia and Cissy. This was her place now, and it was going to be run right.

It was six months before her superiors admitted what Cissy knew already. This little spit of a girl had talent, she had control. “She knows her stuff,” the supervisor told Delia. “She’s the best I’ve ever had, and who would have guessed, huh?”

“I can do this,” Dede said. Her eyes shone with conviction, vitamin E, and beta-carotene.

She could.