“I don’t think Taylor loves me anymore,” Jax says. “I think she’s got her eye on Danny, our garbage man.”

“Oh, go on.”

“You haven’t seen this guy. He can lift four Glad Bags in each hand.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve got your good points too. Does she treat you decent?”

“She does.”

“You’re in good shape, then. Don’t worry, you’d know.

If Taylor don’t like somebody, she’ll paint the barn with it.”

Jax laughs. “She does wish you’d come visit,” he says.

“I will.” Alice has tears in her eyes.

“I do too,” he says, “I wish you would come. I need to meet this Alice. When Taylor says she wants you to live with us, I’m thinking to myself, this is ultra. Everybody else I know is in a twelve-step program to get over their dysfunc-tional childhoods.”

“Well, it’s my fault that she don’t give men the extra points. I think I turned her against men. Not on purpose.

It’s kind of a hex. My mama ran that hog farm by herself for fifty years, and that’s what started it.”

“You have a hog farm in your maternal line? I’m envious.

I wish I’d spent my childhood rocked in the bosom of swine.”

“Well, it wasn’t all that wonderful. My mother was a Stamper. She was too big and had too much on her mind to answer to ‘Mother,’ so I called her Minerva, just the same as the neighbors and the creditors and the traveling slaughter hands did. She’d always say, ‘Mister, if you ain’t brung it with you, you won’t find it here.’ And that was the truth. She had hogs by the score but nothing much to offer her fellow man, other than ham.”

“Well,” says Jax. “Ham is something.”

“No, but she’d never let a man get close enough to see the whites of her eyes. And look at me, just the same, chasing off husbands like that Elizabeth Taylor. I’ve been thinking I raised Taylor to stand too far on her own side of the plank.

She adopted the baby before she had a boyfriend of any kind, and it seemed like that just proved out the family trend. I think we could go on for thirteen generations without no men coming around to speak of. Just maybe to do some plumbing once in a while.”

“Is this the Surgeon General’s warning?”

“Oh, Jax, honey, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m a lonely old woman cleaning my kitchen cupboards to entertain myself. You kids are happy and I’m just full of beans.”

“No, you stand by your stories. Whatever gets you through.”

“I better let you go. Tell Taylor to send pictures of the baby. The last one I have is the one from Christmas and she’s looking at that Santa Claus like he’s Lee Harvey Oswald. I could live with something better than that setting on my TV.”

“Message registered. She’ll be back Sunday. I’ll tell her you called, Alice.”

“Okay, hon. Thanks.”

She’s sad when Jax hangs up, but relieved that Taylor and Turtle aren’t dead or in trouble. She hates television, and not just because her husband has left her for one; she hates it on principle. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, spreading crazy ideas faster than you can find out what’s really up. If people won’t talk to each other, they shouldn’t count on strangers in suits and makeup to give them the straight dope.

She crosses the kitchen, stepping high over boxes of spatulas and nested mixing bowls. It looks like an estate sale, and really Alice does feel as though someone has died. She just can’t think who. Out in the den, the voice of a perky young woman is talking up some kitchen gadget that will mix bread dough and slice onions and even make milk shakes. “Don’t lose this chance, call now,” the woman says meaningfully, and in her mind Alice dares Harland to go ahead and order it for their anniversary. She will make him an onion milk shake and hit the road.

4

LUCKY BUSTER LIVES

LUCKY AND TURTLE ARE ASLEEP in the backseat: Taylor can make out their separate snores, soprano and bass. She scrapes the dial of the car radio across miles of West Arizona static and clicks it off again. Suspended before her in the rearview mirror is an oblong view of Lucky’s head rolled back on the seat, and now that it’s safe to stare, she does. His long, clean hair falls like a girl’s across his face, but his pale throat shows sandpaper stubble and a big Adam’s apple. He’s thirty-eight years old; they are a woman, man, and child in this car, like any family on the highway headed out on an errand of hope or dread. But Taylor can’t see him as a man. The idea un-settles her.