for leaving had the feeling of a much larger event. Early
that morning, she checked and triple-checked things
up at the barn, made long lists for Charlie on the backs
of envelopes. She put makeup on.
Charlie followed her around, nodding as she
ticked o= instructions, biting his tongue and
reminding himself that for twenty-four blessed
hours, he would have the place to himself. Lucy was
like he’d never seen her, giddy with excitement.
Finally, satis>ed with everything, she went up to
her truck and threw her bag in the back. Charlie
stood a few feet away, shaded his eyes, and lit a cigarette, watching.
One foot on the running board, she turned. “Let
me have two of those.”
He raised his eyebrows and shook two cigarettes
out of the pack, stepping forward. She plucked them
out of his hand and then pointed them at him. She
narrowed her eyes, but her voice was playful. “I don’t
want to hear one word out of you. Not one word. I’m
entitled to two cigarettes every once in a while.” She
held them up in front of her nose. “One to get me to
Georgia. And one to get me back.” She tucked one
behind each ear and smiled at him.
Charlie smiled back. He held up his hands. “I
ain’t saying nothing.”
She got in the truck and pulled the door shut.
“Listen,” she said, rolling down the window and smiling again. “Try not to burn the place down, all right?”
Charlie raised his hand again to shade his eyes,
squinting into the morning sun. He felt >fty pounds
lighter, celebratory. He grinned. “Can’t be making
no guarantees.”
As the hours wore on, his freedom turned into
a burden, and Charlie was overwhelmed by the
mounting pressure to make the most of his time.
After morning chores, he ended up sleeping most of
the day, sweating, the blanket over his face to keep
o= the ?ies. In the afternoon he went down to the
house to watch television, but the only thing he
could >nd was the local news. A church full of men,
clasping hands and swaying, was praying for rain. A
ticker at the bottom of the screen reported over and
over that there had been three heat-related deaths in
a town just twenty or so miles away. Charlie stared
blankly at the screen. He could not draw the connection between the world of those men in the church
and the world of the farm, between the heat that
beat down on the barn and the >elds and the heat
that was killing people—killing people—right down
the road.
He switched the TV o=. Why bother praying, anyway? What good was that going to do? What you had
to do was take things in your own hands. Write your
own story. God or anybody wasn’t going to just give it
to you.
He got up and walked around. Creaking under his
feet, the ?oorboards were hot, as if embers were
smoldering beneath them. He had a strange sensation that the place itself was judging him. Even the
furniture seemed to watch him with critical eyes.
He made a sudden turn and, feeling bold, walked
down the hall to Lucy’s bedroom. He had never been
inside, but he had seen, from the yard, the air conditioning unit in her window, and had envied the sound
night’s sleep he imagined she got in the cool air.
When he opened the door, an orange and white
?ash of fur sprang out at him, and he wheeled around
as if he had sprung a booby trap, expecting to see her
in the hall behind him. Go on, he told himself, his
heart pounding. She’s miles and miles away.
The bed—unmade, a nest of green and yellow
daisy-print sheets, an old tattered quilt, one pillow—
was just a mattress on the ?oor, not much thicker
than his own foam pad in the barn. He sat down on
it. A sheet of plywood half covered a broken ?
oor-board. Another cat slit its eyes at him from a pile of
clothes in the corner. The air conditioner was
unplugged, sagging, covered with dust, and obviously hadn’t worked in years. The afternoon sun
streamed in through the window. It was hot in there.
Though it shocked him to realize, it was somehow
sexy, too, in the way that the few girls’ rooms he’d
been in were all sexy—the bra tossed carelessly on
the chair, the mysterious jars and bottles on the
nightstand. Mostly, it made him sad—the vase of
withered wild?owers that should have been thrown
out weeks ago, fruit ?ies hovering over it, the stack
of well-leafed magazines on the ?oor—and the sad-
