“Sure, Mom. You need anything else? You can ride with me to town, if you want. Get in a little sunshine?” He doesn’t offer this option often enough, he knows. She needs to get out of the house. Out of her pajamas and into some real clothes.

“Well, that sounds nice, honey, but today is laundry day.”

Laundry day. Arden does his own laundry, and his dad’s uniforms are washed, starched, and pressed for him by the county. She might have a load of towels to tend to, at most. “You sure? We could have lunch at Doris’s. I’ll buy you a slice of pie.” He regrets it as soon as he says it. Amber used to love the coconut cream pie at Doris’s. He knows that’s what’s going through his mother’s head right now.

He listens for her reaction, but is met with several long seconds of vacant silence. Then he hears her sniffle. “No thanks, honey. I think I’ll stay in today.” She hangs up.

Dammit.

He considers ditching Cletus and going to get the meds now, so she can slip back into her emotionless chasm. It’s the right thing to do, he tells himself. But his hands won’t start the truck. Because Amber deserves to be grieved by her mother, even if it is in bits and pieces here and there, small moments of memories that can’t be stolen away by some powerful drug. And his mother deserves the healing power of grief.

He gets out of the truck, leaving his cell phone on the seat.

Arden lets himself in the back door to his uncle’s house, careful not to make too much noise while still doubting that any amount of clamor would wake a slumbering, hungover Cletus. Even from the Florida room in the back, he can hear his uncle’s snores resonate from the ballroom.

Arden finds the keys to the massive shed in the backyard and sets out to find a pair of trimmers. Of course, he finds them in the very back of the huge wood building, and has to dig them out of a pile of yard tools probably not used since the 1980s. The dust he stirs up reminds him of the smoke in his truck cabin last night after Carly took aim at the passenger door with the slingshot.

The corners of his mouth draw up in an involuntary smile. He remembers the sheer delight on her face when her first attempt at Mayor Busch’s house resulted in a dead-on shot of what Arden knows to be his bedroom window. The crack of the explosion was so loud that Carly let out a little surprised scream and Arden had to pull over to keep from wrecking them, he was laughing so hard.

“Crazy girl,” Arden says under his breath. He throws the trimmers over his shoulder and makes his way toward the front driveway. He’ll never get all of them done before he has to go back and get Carly, but he figures he can come here on the weekend while she’s at work and … He stops in his tracks.

Am I working around a girl’s schedule?

No, he decides adamantly. He’s working around a friend’s schedule. That’s completely different. Carly is a girl, sure, but she’s not that kind of girl. She’s not, like, date-able or anything. (Of course, he felt the exact opposite when he found her in his lap last night and her lips were this close to touching his.) No no no. She’s his accomplice. And he can tell he’s already got her hooked on raising Cain.

Hours come and go and Arden’s shirt is soaked through with sweat and dirt and whatever kind of powdery fungus is growing on the azalea bushes in the driveway. He was able to get the right side done; next weekend he’ll come back and do the left. Right now though, he has to run home and get a shower before he picks up Carly.

He scowls. What do I care if she sees me all gross and grimy? He wouldn’t care if Luke saw him like this. Hell, I’d probably pull him into a headlock so he could get the full sense of my noxious pits.

“I figured out it was you,” a voice comes from behind him as he’s lowering the trimmers.

Arden turns to face Cletus. The old man is wearing house slippers, faded jeans, and a wrinkled T-shirt; all look clean. His white hair is wet and combed back, as if he’d just showered. Arden tries to calculate the odds of that scenario. “Well, it’s not like I was hiding out here. What are you doing awake, anyway?”

Cletus scowls. “I’m talking about the store, boy. It was you. Wasn’t it?”

Arden wastes no time on regret. His uncle might be humiliated, but at least he’s not in the morgue—and at least no one else is as a result of that night, either. “It was me.”

Cletus nods, tucking his thumbs into his jeans pocket. “That rifle was your dad’s from three Christmases ago. He never uses it.”

This is true. Arden thought it a pretty good idea to use his dad’s own rifle in case any shots were fired—not that there were going to be shots fired, it wouldn’t have come to that—then the casings would match a gun registered to the one and only Sheriff Moss. “It was his.”

This confirms what Cletus already knows. He seems relieved to have gotten a confession so easily. “I got up today to come pay you a visit. To have a little chat about … about what happened.”

Arden understands perfectly. His uncle is embarrassed. Wants to keep it between them. He shrugs. “Nothing happened.”

Cletus nods again, rocking back on his slippered heels. He clears his throat. “Well. Now that we got that all settled … You want some breakfast? I can cook up some eggs and bacon real fast.”

Arden positions the trimmers between his legs to keep them steady, then peels off his drenched T-shirt. Wringing it out in the sand beside him, he says, “I would, but I’ve got to pick up Carly from work.”