"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. You leave it. He buried Verlie that same winter. You remember that. You stood at the back of that funeral home in your coat with your hat in your hand. He lost his too."
"Not like we did."
"No," she said. "Not like we did. But you leave it lie anyhow. I don't want you carrying that up and down the road after I'm gone. I don't want that to be what you do."
He had promised. It was not the kind of promise he would have made to anyone else.
Now he dressed in the bedroom, in the clean work pants and the flannel shirt with the snaps, and over it the brown canvas coat with the corduroy collar that said GENTRY RURAL ELECTRIC on the back in letters that had faded to the color of weak tea. He took his wallet off the dresser and checked that the license was in it. He took the oxycodone bottle out of the cash box, with its rubber band and its strip of masking tape, and he stood in the kitchen holding it, and then he went to the drawer by the sink and got a quart freezer bag and put the bottle in the bag and pressed the air out and zipped it shut, the way you'd bag a thing you found on the side of the road. He put the bag in the inside pocket of the coat. He put the green notebook and the pencil in the left breast pocket of the flannel shirt, where they always went, and buttoned the flap.
His sister-in-law Wilma came up the hill at nine in her Ford Escape to sit with Ivah. Wilma was seventy and had a hip of her own and drove like a woman being chased, and she came in the kitchen door without knocking and set a casserole dish on the counter and said, "Don't look at it, it's for later," and went straight through to the front room. Ancil heard her say, "Well, look at you, laying up here like the Queen of Sheba," and he heard Ivah say something back that made Wilma bark out a laugh.
He stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in his hands.
"Go on," Ivah said. Her eyes were open but she was a long way down in the medicine. "Go see Mattie. Tell her I said she owes me a pan of brownies from the cake walk. She knows what I mean."
"I'll tell her."