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Ernetta remembered that when you felt seasick, you were supposed to look right out at the ocean and concentrate on the waves. She'd been on plenty of motorboats, but never on an airplane. It felt a little the same—that tickle under you like a huge finger, that bounce you couldn't get used to. It hurt your knees, even if you were just sitting. The land below looked like an old yellow postcard. She spit between her thumbs and rubbed out a clean circle on the window.

"Gorgeous day," shouted Tom McLeesh over the roar of the engines. Besides the folks piloting, it was just the two of them here on the plane. Tom had kept busy for the last hour typing into some kind of skinny, fold-in-half computer set up on his lap.

"I never rode no jet plane before," said Ernetta. "Kindly shake you up."

Tom laughed. "It's bumpy today, especially on a small plane. There's your home state down there, Ernetta. Recognize anything?"

"That's Alabama?" She sat up and put her forehead against the frame of the window. "Well, good night, nurse!" A wide river coiled ahead of them like a long silver chain. The hills were feathered with spring gold as far as the eye could see—not a road, not a parking lot or a building in sight.

"Must be up north somewheres," she said. "Down where I live, it's just flat, and hardly no hills. Just farms. We raised peanuts and soybeans is what we did, until Arvin got called to march all the time."

"Arvin? That your husband?"

Tom tried not to sound too curious, but she stared at him for a second before she nodded. She'd slipped. Her mouth opened just slightly, so that the flesh of her lips was still stuck together in the front, shiny and pale pink. She stopped nodding and slowly turned away, toward the window. She leaned into it, as if she'd jump right now if she could. Tom closed up his laptop and sighed.

"Whoops," he said, waiting for something more. "Bad question."

She didn't answer.

"Listen, what do you think you'll say to Stannie when you see him? How will you broach the subject?"

"I don't know about that," she said softly. She was looking down at the hills. They reminded her of animals curled up to sleep. Underneath them there'd be all kinds of people and things hiding. Ernetta remembered a few years back when a criminal got loose near to where she lived and they couldn't find him for three weeks. Police and FBI sneaking around everybody's houses for days, jabbering into their radios and searching all the cars leaving town—a marshal came by and pointed a gun right at Ernetta's hedge, then laughed out loud when a cow came limping around the corner.

Turned out the criminal had been hunkered down in a swamp for all those days, keeping just his nostrils above the water while the sun was high, then creeping out at night to dry off and scratch his bites. It was the poison oak and chigger bites that finally drove him so mad he gave up and came out and stole a car from a Philips 66. He got arrested somewhere down around Orlando. You had to wonder what might have happened if he'd lasted in the swamp just a little longer—would the police have figured he'd escaped and given up? Would they have tried Agent Orange or something?

She looked at those hills, fat and green, and imagined them hiding Arvin, like a child in their belly. Arvin was as patient as a long, wasting sickness. He knew how to wait people out. They'd think he was dead and not coming back, but he'd grown up in the mountains; he'd been a sniper in the army, and he knew how to disappear. She didn't want Tom McLeesh or any of these other people, nice or not, to ask her questions about Arvin. If they figured out the first thing about him, they'd sooner or later figure out the whole thing. Then they'd have the National Guard out—they'd be putting his picture at the grocery counter and calling him a murderer. She owed Arvin better than that.

* * *

Walking up the steps to the balcony, Stannie thought of Brent with his sharp little bleached teeth sitting back there on the beach, nodding and saying, "Tyman Cole. I love his work. Very impressive dude."

Stannie let out a little bark of laughter.

Linda Kate stood at the top of the steps in a yellow sundress, looking down at him with a worried face. Her hair swirled around her cheeks. "I'm sorry to interrupt you, Stannie. But I think you might be interested in the surprise—"

"Oh, don't apologize. Anything to get away from the Rat Pack." He brushed past his sister, thinking that Rose had probably showed up after all. She'd felt guilty for disappointing him. Naturally. After a little consideration she'd changed her plans and flown down to the Gulf all compliant and chastened and ready to please, which is basically how he liked women—"Hey, should I apologize for not being perfect?"—and now this really incredibly disappointing vacation was about to turn around. Stannie already had an image of her fixed in his mind—Rose waiting around the corner by the kitchen fireplace, her hands in the pockets of her shorts, golden hair shining down her back; she'd be looking thoughtfully at the montage of baby pictures on the mantle, finding him among his sisters and cousins. "Look at little you on the pony!" she'd say. "The poor pony, you probably made fun of him later for having such a terrible job."