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Rose had heard enough of the news to know that Stannie was missing. Driving South on Wednesday morning, she listened to Senator Jim Colfax's comments on National Public Radio.

"Young Stan has been a full and beloved member of the Colfax clan, and all I have to say about him is that I wish he were home. Right now. As do his mama and daddy and sisters and cousins, and all others who love him. Now I have to admit I don't know whether this article he's written in this magazine about his birth mother is based on truth: I don't know all the circumstances of Stannie's adoption. And you know what? I don't care. If Stannie's birth mother has been in contact with him, or if she chose to terminate a pregnancy, that's none of my business, none of the American people's business. That's the main point. It's a private thing. And Stanley Colfax supports a woman's right to choose and he doesn't mind saying it. Not to capitalize on a thing like this—I would never want to do that—but you know it says something about the whole Colfax clan. We don't pussyfoot around. We tell it like it is, even if it ain't pretty. The Republicans think they have a corner on the hard truth, and they don't. But this is not political, this is about my nephew. And I won't rest till he's home."

Ordinarily Rose didn't read Stannie's columns. Today was a different kind of day: she bought herself a new copy of Tops in a grocery store in Montgomery, Alabama and read it while sitting in a hot car on a hamburger strip off I–65, not too far from Ernetta's hometown. The column appeared under the subheading, "Come Home Soon, Stan. All Your Friends Are Praying for a Safe Return." Rose read and re–read the part about herself (how she hadn't returned his phone calls and the joke about him threatening to cut off his ear: very funny). She sat still in the car for a few minutes afterwards. Evidently she hadn't known Stannie any better than he'd known her. She'd slept with him, she'd argued with him, she'd flirted with him and resented him—all in the same day—but she'd never thought she could hurt him. They'd remained strangers.

Not—NOT!—that she felt guilty about it. He hadn't deserved any better than he got. She was crazy not to have dumped him the day that whore answered his phone in a Texas hotel. But once he'd hurt her, she'd settled down and made herself just so very comfortable.

"You're cold," she growled to herself. "You're detached and cold, and you don't give a damn if Stannie Colfax ever shows up in the world again." Which maybe proved the whole point of his column, that his life hadn't meant much to anybody, and that maybe, if you judged people by the standard Stannie assumed—by how much they meant to those around them—a lot of people (maybe including me, Rose thought) really would have been better off not getting born at all. The world might have done better without them.

Something about this bothered her immediately, but she was in a strange mood. She felt dreamy and drizzy from the heat: the asphalt in front ofher curled and bent like a curtain of snakes. She was afraid to start driving again for fear of falling asleep. She took a piece of paper from her purse and wrote down everybody who had ever seemed important in her life, really indispensable:

My mother and father
My sister
My high school boyfriend
My niece and nephew
My two best friends from UNICEF
My best college art professor

She stared at the list for a long time, wondering if she'd been honest, wondering if she should scratch out the professor (he'd groped her once in a darkroom). Really, she could have done without any of them except the original two, her mother and father, and she hadn't actually seen her father in years. Why should her opinion count, anyway? The opinion of another person who hadn't contributed that much, hadn't loved anyone that much, hadn't sacrificed for anyone? How could anybody's feelings be the measure of another person's importance? She got back on the road again, sweating and wondering how she could possibly argue with Stannie, tell him that he was wrong and that his life was worth something even if he didn't believe it and she, his former lover, didn't want anything to do with him.

By the time she got to Le Crane, she was drunk with the heat. Her air conditioner had stopped working, but she hadn't thought to roll down the windows. Salty sweat ran down her cheeks like tears. Now she knew what else had been bothering her. It was the idea that Ernetta Duckworth—ERNETTA DUCKWORTH!—had once been given the chance to pass judgment on STANNIE COLFAX, someone so utterly remote from her (whatever their biological relation), with a life and a mind of his own. One particular woman had lifted the gavel over one particular man's life at his moment of greatest vulnerability, had held the imaginary gun to his head and decided whether or not the world would ever know him. So what if the world really might have been better off without Stannie? How could people be allowed to exercise such power over each other? How could lives be so intertwined and yet so individually vulnerable?(If in fact this story about Stannie's birth wasn't all a mistake, and Rose was still pretty sure that it was.)