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jamming the last bit of toast in her mouth, leaned around the frail old wino trembling between us and with crumbs clinging to her lips, said, “Why the fuck does it always take you so goddamned long to eat?”
    So maybe Miss Mo knew what she was talking about, but maybe she didn’t because she was murdered that night, ambushed in the carport right outside her house, punched, kicked, and stabbed in the stomach with a bone-handled skinning knife, then left on the dirt to die by her daughter’s psycho ex-boyfriend Harlow Maltese, who was off his meds, blind, raging drunk, and blaming her for their breakup.
    He was arrested staggering down the side of Route 40 with the knife in his belt and her blood under his fingernails. He spent the next five years up at the county mental hospital, and then went on to a local halfway house because the Maltese clan, trouble though they were, had lived in Dug County since the Civil War, and around here deep roots, no matter how diseased, still counted for something.
    When he got out he started working construction and drinking again, got laid off, and claimed a bar stool down at the Colonial Pub, where he met my mother. The town of Sullivan had twenty-eight hundred residents in it then, too big to know everyone but still small enough for word of Harlow’s return to get around, and most people crossed the street when they saw him coming. My mother had never spoken to Harlow before but she knew him by sight, knew exactly what he’d done, and still she smiled, sat down next to him, and said that first hello. Still she took him back to Candy’s cabin to party, the hard gleam in her eyes daring me to protest, to make a scene over the side she’d chosen, but I was almost sixteen by then, my face trained to the shape of an indifferent mask, and so all I said when my mother introduced him, while my stomach roiled and cold sweat broke out along my hairline was, “Well, if it wasn’t for him, you never would have met Beale.”
    That twisted truth had haunted me for years but I hadn’t known I was going to say it until it came out. The shock was mutual but the instantaneous rage at my speaking that forbidden name was hers, so the slap I got across the face, then her whirling and dragging him back out into the night was not unexpected.
    “Could you be any fucking stupider?” Candy said, casting me a scornful look, grabbing her car keys, and following them.
    I didn’t care: I’d chosen my side, too. I’d loved Miss Mo, her kindness, her strong, safe hugs and generous smiles, and so the tears in my eyes were not from the lingering sting of the slap but instead, from the small triumph of the stand.

Chapter 5
    I WAIT UNTIL DOZER’S BARKING FADES and the quad’s taillights disappear into the trees, then bury my gloved hands in my pockets and start walking along the main road carved into the base of the mountain. There are no streetlights or sidewalks, only woods; a craggy, stone wall of mountain rising up on one side; and sporadic guardrails and plunging banks covered with pine trees and mounds of briars on the other.
    The wind is at my back, pushing me forward into a long, two-lane tunnel of darkness. The snow crunches under my feet. The strap on the canvas bag digs into me. There’s a blind curve up ahead and I don’t want to get caught in the middle of it, so I glance over my shoulder, see a pair of headlights cresting the hill a ways back, and walk faster.
    Candy says my mother wants to see me, but that’s a lie. My mother has never been able to stand the sight of me, hates that she was stupid and careless and got caught, that my father was just some anonymous out-of-state guy staying at a friend-of-a-friend’s hunting cabin for the weekend with a bunch of other guys who came up to party and maybe kill something. Well, he didn’t get the deer he’d been hoping for but he did get the party, and I’m a daily reminder that he left one tipsy, fifteen-year-old local girl named Dianne with