"What's going on?"
"Your wife," I said, "gave away Grandma's quilt."
"June." Carla turned to him. "Wade, I put the star quilt in the church boxes. The old one off her bed. I told her I'll buy her a new one. A good one, handmade, from Berea, whatever she wants. That's all. It's a blanket, Wade. It was falling apart. And a new one—" She stopped, and I saw her decide to say it, the true thing under the rehearsed thing. "A new one will be different. It'll be hers. It won't be something she has to sleep under like a grave."
Dad set his lunch cooler down on the hood of the truck.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Behind him, across the road, a hawk went over the Hensleys' barn, low, and its shadow ran across the yard and up the side of the garage and was gone. I remember that. I remember everything about that minute, the way you remember the minutes right before a car wreck.
"Different how?" he said.
He said it quietly. It was not a dramatic voice. It was the voice he used on a job when a homeowner told him the wiring was fine, it had always been fine, there was no reason to open up that wall.
Carla blinked. "Clean," she said. "New. Not coming apart. Not—" She made a small helpless gesture. "Not her mother's mother's. Not a dead woman's."
"Uh-huh." Dad took his glasses down off his head and folded them and put them in his shirt pocket. "And can the new one tell anybody where their mama is?"
Neither of us said anything. I didn't understand the question. I could see Carla didn't either.
"Because that one can," Dad said. "That one's the only thing left in this world that can." He looked at me, and his face was very tired, and something else, something I had not seen in it since the week of the funeral. It was shame. "When did the van come?"
"Two," said Carla. "Two o'clock. Wade, what are you talking about?"
"Get in the truck," Dad said. "Both of you. I'll tell you on the way."
* * *
It is four miles from our house on Mulberry Street to Harlow Fork Methodist, and on a Thursday afternoon in October, behind a school bus and a man hauling round bales on a flatbed, it takes about eleven minutes. That's how long it took my father to tell us the thing he had been carrying for eight months. I sat in the middle of the bench seat with the gearshift against my knee. Carla sat by the window with her hands folded on her lanyard. Dad drove with