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Joey.
     
    She couldn’t count on her nephew to discern fact from fiction. His slowness hampered him in the simplest of things. The first time he tried to get his driver’s license, a frightened state examiner aborted his road test, made him park the car on the street, and walked back to the state office. Teresa discovered he needed glasses, but it still took him three more tries to get his permit. She had to remind Joey to take a shower. She still had to coax him to brush his teeth. Not because he wanted to be dirty, he just forgot simple necessities like that. “My nephew wasn’t ready for marriage,” Teresa Boron would later say. “My nephew wasn’t ready for life.” Teresa believed she had two extreme options. She could ignore what appeared to be happening to Joey with Pixie. Or she could get him declared incompetent by the court. She’d be damned if she’d do that. That was not “taking care”
     
    of her sister’s son. Teresa tried to find middle ground. “You need to live your own life for a while,” she said. “Then, later, you can think about marriage and a family.” But he continued seeing her, spending more evenings at the house on Caroline Street. “He became head over heels with this girl,” she later recalled. “And there is just no reasoning with a teenager in love.” Then one day in September, Joey announced that he wanted to move to Montana. “Montana?” she asked.
    “With who?”
     
    “Pixie. And Mr. and Mrs. Sexton. The whole family is going to move out west.” He explained that the Sextons were buying a big ranch there. It was located on top of a mountain, a millionaire’s mansion with hundreds of acres. There were guest quarters and a guard house.
    Mr. Sexton had shown him a video of the spread. “They want me to work in the guard station,” Joey said. That evening, Teresa Boron drove to the house on Caroline, Joey tagging along. The man who introduced himself as Pixie’s father met her at the front door. Ed Sexton was a tall, thin man with a pronounced widow’s peak. She told Ed Sexton she needed to talk about Joey. Ed Sexton smiled, inviting her to sit on the deck. His wife Estella emerged, but Sexton turned to her and said, “Go inside and get some iced tea.” It was an order. The wife silently complied. As she settled into her chair, Teresa noticed a couple of girls and a young boy, ages maybe 8 to 12, quietly come outside. Soon eight or nine Sexton children came out, taking positions, all of them absolutely silent. They stood looking at her with their chins lowered, their dark eyes peering up at her, as if she were some new, strange species they’d never seen before. When Estella handed her the tea and returned inside, Joey took Dawn for a walk down by the pond, Pixie and several other of the children following. Ed Sexton looked as relaxed and cordial as a southern gentleman sipping a mint julep on a plantation porch. You know, Joey IS just terrific with little Dawn,”
    Sexton drawled. Sexton began asking the questions. He wanted to know the fate of Joey’s mother and dad. She gave him the brief version.
    His father died unexpectedly of a sudden heart attack three years before his mother, she said. Neither lived past the age of 35. “Did the parents have insurance?” he asked. “I mean, to take care of the boy?” She thought, That’s a nosey question, but answered anyway.
     
    “They didn’t have a lot of insurance. He gets Social Security.”
     
    “Do you invest the money?” Sexton asked. He got $450 a month, she thought.
     
    They gave him money for allowance and expenses. They put the balance in CDs and a savings account. But she didn’t tell Sexton that. She skirted the question. It’s none of your business, she thought.
    Already, Teresa Boron didn’t like this man. “Joey says you want him to move to Montana with you,” she began. “And I don’t think that’s good.”
    She pled his case. He had a younger brother who needed him. He needed to