"If you're making it."

"Now I am."

"That kimono reminds me of the one I brought your mother from Korea," he said. "Pure silk."

He p.r.o.nounced the word as if it were spelled k-i-m-o-n-a.

"This is satin," I said.

"Same difference." Then my dad said, "That's your friend living out there with those Sparrow boys, isn't it? That Keel girl"

"June?"

"That's her name. I couldn't remember. Well, she was on-they all were on-the police scanner last night."

He told me what he knew. As soon as he said the words, I could see it happening. I'd been out to the house. I knew where the bedrooms were, and I knew where the gun was.

I guess something showed on my face, because my dad said, "Did you know something about it?"

I shook my head. "Some of it," I said.

"The younger boy was the one they flew out of there. He was pretty bad off," my dad said. "Do you want to drive out?"

"Just let me put real clothes on," I said.

Upstairs I pulled on jeans and a shirt, boots but no socks. I could feel ridges of leather under my toes. My mouth was dry. I left Del sleeping in the bed.

My dad and I drove all the hilly roads of Mennonite Town without seeing one car, but when we got close to the house, there were other people on the road. No one could see anything, though: two cruisers were there, and they had the place blocked off. All we could do was drive on by.

"She's over to the hospital, I'm sure," my dad said. "She's all right, Vangie."

When I still didn't say anything, he went, "Come out to the house and give a listen on the scanner. I'm sure someone will be talking."

On the way to my dad's house my mind was working a hundred details and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking about the .38 Special and the night I didn't want to sleep beside it. I wanted to tell my dad something about the gun, but I didn't know what to say. I was worried that once I told one story, I'd have to tell another. Some I could tell and it would be all right, and others I could never tell. All the stories bled together in my mind.

My dad seemed to understand what I was going through, because he didn't make me talk. We watched the road and the houses beside it, and the truck itself was like a moving room, filled with my dad's thoughts and my own. The whole way to his place, neither of us said a thing. Or if we did, I don't remember.

27.

MY dad was right when he told me Ray was the one airlifted out. It didn't make any difference-he died on the way to Deer Run. His problems started before he ever got in the air, though, before he was ever put on that helicopter. People said he pretty much bled to death at the house. Gunshot wound to the stomach. I learned that a few hours after it happened. It took a couple of days to hear the rest.

Ray must have known what he was looking for that night, because he parked his car up on the road and walked down to the house. He was already carrying the shotgun when he walked down-he left the open box of sh.e.l.ls on his car seat. He walked down to the house carrying the loaded shotgun, and the dogs didn't bark because they knew him. He walked in on June and Luke. Saw them. That was the moment I kept imagining. June's stomach must have caught fire when the door opened and light from the hallway poured into the room. Or maybe June and Luke made love with the lights on, and Ray stood watching for a while.

Ray shot Luke in the chest, and then he went after June. He dragged her into the hall, kicked her until her arm and cheekbone broke. She must have had her arm up in front of her face. He almost took her eye out, and then I guess he had enough, because he kicked her down the stairs. She had to lie there at the bottom of the stairwell and listen while he went after Luke a second time. By then, though, Luke had gotten to the pistol.

The whole thing probably lasted three or four minutes. It probably seemed like a long time to the three of them.

It took sixty-two st.i.tches to close June's eye and cheek and scalp. They had to wire her cheekbone together. No one blamed Ray-he was dead, and he was the wronged one anyway. Luke took the brunt of the gossip. I heard it. He was the blood relative, and no one could forgive him for that.

I heard that when the ambulance came, Luke and June were lying at the bottom of the stairs, just a blanket over them. I could believe that. But then someone tried to tell me that when the paramedics went to lift June onto the gurney, they saw come running down her leg, and I stopped listening.

Neither June nor Luke mentioned me at the grand jury. Neither of them placed me at the house that night. I don't know why. Maybe they didn't want to mention the weed. Maybe June wanted to protect me. Maybe it just didn't make any difference that I was there.

At the hearing the attorney made a fuss about the Jim Beam and how all three had been drinking that night-June and Luke at home, and Ray out at the Ruby. I could have told them that whatever happened that night didn't happen because of whiskey. It might have been helped along by whiskey, but it was something that started a long time ago-when Luke and Ray were kids, or when June was still at home with her brothers. Who knew. But even if someone had asked me, I guess I wouldn't have told them what I thought anyway. It wasn't mine to tell.

The grand jury determined that Luke fired only after being fired upon, and only in self-defense. There was no premeditation. Some people thought it was a fair ruling because of all the loss already involved for the family, and others, like Del, thought it was no ruling at all. I thought it was as fair as anything that wasn't going to bring Ray back.

I didn't tell Del anything about the night Ray was killed. I didn't tell him that I'd been out to the house, or that I'd smoked with June. None of it. All I told him was that I knew June loved Ray. I told him the story she told me that last night. I didn't say when I heard it, just that I had.

"And that's why she loved him, because he put his tongue on her eye?" Del said when I was done talking. "That's the only reason why?"

"I don't think it's the only reason. It's just what she picked to tell me."

"f.u.c.king-A, Vangie, that's the f.u.c.king stupidest thing I ever heard. He cared for her. He wanted to marry her."

"I know he did."

"How could you be friends with her? Couldn't you see what a piece of s.h.i.t she was?"

"She wasn't that," I said. "You didn't know her."

"I don't have to know her to see what she is. A worthless piece of s.h.i.t."

I didn't blame him. It was his friend who bled to death in that upstairs room.

I believed June when she told me she loved Ray. It was a mistaken love, and a selfish one, but I believed her. I understood it the way I understood what June told me about the photograph of Luke and Ray: it took me a while to see the pattern and drift of June's thoughts, but in the end I understood her flawed actions as much as I understood my own.

Even though I wasn't the one who pulled a trigger, I felt I had a certain role in Ray's death. My lie-or my unwillingness to give up June's lie-had contributed to Ray's death. It was an awful thing, thinking that. Sometimes I let myself think it and sometimes I pushed it away. I'd seen June's way of looking at things and I saw Del's way. I had to live someplace in between.

FOR ALL their gossiping and supposing, no one in all of Mahanaqua saw the next piece coming. Maybe they thought ugliness and shame would end the affair, and maybe they thought that guilt-guilt and her own scarred and pinned face-would cripple June. But none of that happened. June stayed with Luke. She stayed with him, and they moved into a house, an old abandoned cabin out on the lake road. After a couple weeks of broken windows and paint being thrown on the house, people left the two of them alone. They were pariahs. They got their privacy.

It made sense to me. Why wouldn't she turn to the person who knew her worst failings? She had to go somewhere for her love.

Once when I drove by the house, she was out on the front stoop. I blew the horn and waved. She looked up and, when she saw it was me, waved back. Her face was not bad. Swollen, the one eye a little off. Hair still short, no doubt from the st.i.tches she had. That's all I could see as I drove by.

I should have pulled over and gotten out, but I didn't. Didn't call later. The number wasn't in the book. But the phone never rang at my place, either.

I think he is the only one who really sees her now.

28.

I came home from work one day all excited about this dog that had shown up at the farmers market. I didn't know what kind of dog he was and I didn't care. He had fur the color of vanilla cake batter and eyes like raisins. I fell in love with him from the moment I saw him. I got the guys at the butcher counter to give him a bone so he'd stick around. I wanted him, and I figured Del would be excited, too, since he'd been talking about getting a dog for some time. I did not want a baby, but I thought I could handle a dog.

"Guess what?" I said to Del when I came in the door. It took me only a second to see what was going on, though, and I didn't say anything about the dog after that.

Del was well into a case of Yuengling, and he had a full bottle of vodka on the coffee table as well.

"What?" he said. "What's the news?"

"Nothing, really. What's going on with you?"

"I'm having a couple drinks."

"I see. How come?"

"Should I open one for you?" he said, taking up one of the beers. It was his way of being polite: opening a bottle or can and then pa.s.sing it to me.

"Sure," I said. "How come you're drinking, though?" I asked the question in my careful, cheerful voice, the one I used when Del was drinking, so it would sound like I wasn't accusing but was just being his honest-to-G.o.d, why-don't-you-tell-me-the-truth friend.

"I needed a break."

"Did you go to work?"

"Called in. Told them I was sick."

"Well, that happens," I said. "What did you need a break from?"

He kind of rolled his head off to one side and said, "All this G.o.dd.a.m.n treatment s.h.i.t. I'm sick of it. And I'm sick of that G.o.dd.a.m.n church s.h.i.t. h.e.l.l, you might as well be in h.e.l.l, the way they want you to live."

He sat quiet after that, staring off into s.p.a.ce, and I didn't say anything. I also didn't say anything when he went for the vodka and cracked the seal on it. I didn't know what to say anyway. What was going to happen was going to happen.

After he pulled down three or four mouthfuls straight from the bottle, I said, "Hey, why don't you save some of that for me."

He stopped slugging and pa.s.sed the bottle over to me.

And I did take a swallow. Then I stood up and picked up the bottle to take into the kitchen with me. I said, "Want some dinner?"

"I want some p.u.s.s.y."

"Did you eat all day?"

"I'll eat you."

I put the vodka in the broom closet where he would not think to look for it. When I went back into the living room I sat beside Del and kissed him because it was easier than talking. I knew the routine.

"Take off your clothes," he said. "Get out those t.i.ts."

"Do you want to go upstairs and lie down?"

"I want to f.u.c.k your c.u.n.t right here."

While I was standing beside the sofa getting undressed, and while he was sitting on the sofa with his c.o.c.k in his hand, waiting for me, I kept thinking something would happen that would change everything. But nothing happened. I went on taking off my clothes, and he went on holding his erection.

"I stink," I said.

"I want to f.u.c.k you, not smell you."

"Okay," I said. "If you don't want to wait for me to shower."

"I don't want to wait."

I was just climbing onto him on the sofa when he said, "And I threw out your f.u.c.king pills."

I stopped for one second, then I just went on lowering myself onto him.

"So I guess you think you're going to knock me up," I said.

"I'm going to f.u.c.k you up right now."

I didn't bother to tell him that it would take a while before the pill got out of my system, that some women had to wait a couple months before their bodies got back to normal. If he didn't know that, it was his problem.

"If I waited for you to get rid of them, I'd be waiting forever."

He told me then that I wouldn't find them in the trash either, so there was no point in looking.

After we f.u.c.ked for a while, Del pulled out of me so he could put some spit on his c.o.c.k. I guess I was dry. Before he got back inside, he grabbed me between my legs and squeezed.

"I want you to shave your p.u.s.s.y, too," he said.

When I didn't say anything, he said, "I want you to shave your p.u.s.s.y bald for me."

I thought of saying no or getting up from the sofa or pushing him away, but it was easier to stay there.

"Sure," I said. "Tomorrow."

"I been wanting that awhile," he said. "I want to f.u.c.k a bald p.u.s.s.y."

"Are you going to f.u.c.k me now?" I asked.

"Do you want to get your p.u.s.s.y f.u.c.ked?"

"Sure," I said. "Go ahead."