Alice feels her secret swelling against her diaphragm from underneath, the way pregnancy felt toward the end. She is even starting to get the same acid indigestion. “Sugar, you’re a good friend to me,” she says. “I appreciate that you never have asked why I came here.”

“Oh, I figured a bad marriage, whatever. Then when you asked after Fourkillers I thought you must be looking for Ledger, for some kind of cure.” Sugar holds Alice steady in her gaze, and puts a hand on her forearm. “Everybody’s got their troubles, and their reasons for getting a clean start.

People’s always curious for the details, but seem like that’s just because we’re hoping somebody else’s life is a worst mess than ours.”

Alice feels a pure ache to break down right there on the roll books and tell all. But she’s so afraid. Sugar might withdraw that hand on her forearm and all the childhood hugs that stand behind it. A month ago, Alice wouldn’t have thought any person alive would argue that Turtle belonged to anyone but Taylor. Now she sees there are plenty who would.

“My reasons for coming are different from anybody’s you ever heard of,” she tells Sugar. “I want to tell you, but I can’t right yet. But what I’m thinking is that it could help my cause to sign up here and be Cherokee.”

Sugar cocks her head, looking at Alice. “Well, then, you ought to do it. I don’t reckon you have to say you’re sorry for coming along and picking a apple off a tree.”

Alice knows she has to pick the apple. But in her heart, or deeper, in her pinched stomach, she knows it will hurt the tree.

The afternoon is humid and buggy. Alice waves her hand around as she walks, to chase off the gnats that seem to spring right out of the air itself. She wishes she’d worn her shorts. Though when she pictures an old lady in baggy shorts walking down a dirt road to the river, waving her hands wildly, she comes up with something close to Boma Mellowbug. It’s just as well she wore her double knits. She wants to make a good impression.

Alice asked Annawake if they could meet someplace besides the café in town; she’s not crazy about having every Tailbob in sight overhear what she wants to discuss.

Annawake suggested her Uncle Ledger’s houseboat. Now Alice is fairly confident she’s lost. Just when she arrives at the brink of serious worry, she sees the flat glare of the lake through the trees, and then the corrugated tin roof of what looks like a floating trailer home with a wooden veranda running all the way around. Thick ropes bind it to the shore, and thinner lines run from boat to treetops like the beginnings of spider webs, from which all kinds of things are hung: men’s jeans with their legs spread as though they mean to stand their ground up there; and buckets, too, and long-handled spoons. She spies Annawake sitting on the edge of the porch with her legs sunk into the water.

“Yoo hoo,” Alice calls, not wanting to startle Annawake, who looks at that moment like a child lost in the land of pretend. Annawake looks up and waves broadly, and Alice is struck by how pretty she is, in shorts and a velvety red T-shirt. Last time, in the café, Annawake showed sharp edges, a cross between a scared rabbit and the hound that hunts him, and her hair seemed deliberately shaggy. Between then and now she has had it trimmed into a glossy earlobe-length bob, and her maple-colored skin is beautiful.

Alice walks across the wobbly-planked bridge from bank to boat, hanging on to the coarse rope handrail to keep herself from falling in the water. The side of the boat is lined all around with old tires, like bumpers.

“You call this a lake?” Alice asks. “I could just about throw a rock to the other bank.”

“Well, I guess at this point you could call it a glorified river,” Annawake admits. “Did you have trouble finding us?”

“No.” She looks around to locate the “us,” but sees only Annawake and a lot of dragonflies. Annawake had said Ledger had to go bless a new truck in Locust Grove.

“Do you mind sitting out here? The mosquitoes will be here pretty soon, but the water feels great.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Alice sits beside Annawake and catches her breath, then takes off her tennis shoes and rolls her pants legs to her knees. When she plunges her feet into the cold, it feels like a new lease on life.

“That haircut looks real good,” she tells Annawake, feeling motherly in spite of herself.

Annawake runs a hand through it. “Thanks,” she says. “I kind of went crazy and cut it all off when I went to law school. I think I was in mourning, or something. Seems like it’s growing back now.”