falling-down mobile home or trailer. Half of them were meth heads, the rest were drunks, and girls Shelby’s age walked around dead-eyed with babies slung up on their skinny hips. At Christmas, Laurel went with Thalia and Daddy and Mother to deliver a ham dinner and a pair of shoes and some toys to every child in DeLop who had a shred of blood in common with Mother. Three years ago, Shelby began agitating to go along. She wanted to help deliver the toys. She’d picked most of them out, she argued. She’d kicked in part of her allowance every week to help buy them. Why should she be left at home with her dad?
The very idea of Shelby in DeLop chilled Laurel to her marrow. Guns or meth labs inside every other house, drunk men laid out bare-chested on their porches, Dixie plates of soft white food left moldering on the floors, every yard adrift in dog crap and broken glass and needles and Taco Bell wrappers and used condoms. Once, at Uncle Poot’s house, Laurel had seen a dead animal lying in the middle of the driveway. It was about the size of a possum or a small raccoon. There was no telling, since the thing had been left there so long it had rotted down to bones lying in a nest of its own dark hairs. Shelby had no idea what she was asking.
Bet Clemmens was a compromise. She’d started as a pen pal whom Laurel had selected from the herd of vaguely related DeLop kids near Shelby’s age.
“How touching. It’s like you’re bringing a tiny piece of shit mountain back to Mohammed,” Thalia had said when she found out. “I assume you’ll read the letters first and black out the bad words before Shelby’s little eyes get tainted?”
But Laurel had chosen well. Bet was one of the few DeLop kids who hadn’t dropped out before middle school. Even so, her handwriting looked like an eight-year-old’s, and she wasn’t literate enough to write much beyond “Hi, I’m Bet. I got me a dog name Mitchl. Do you got a dog?” The letters had tabled the discussion of DeLop until last summer, when Shelby, in a pen-pal coup, invited Bet to come visit her.
That first year had been a qualified success. Shelby and her friends treated Bet Clemmens with elaborate courtesy. At twelve, they’d been more impressed by their own kindness to The Poor Girl than they were interested in Bet herself. Bet Clemmens stood it the way she stood everything, phlegmatic and unsurprised, plunking herself down on the fringes of Shelby’s gang. Laurel kept a careful watch, but Bet didn’t instigate liquor-cabinet raids or bring the drugs she certainly had access to or relieve the gangly boys in Shelby’s circle of their innocence.
Laurel had a cautious hope that the visits might do Bet some good. After all, Mother had gotten out. Sometimes it happened. Maybe Bet would finish high school, let Laurel and David help her get through college. Laurel had driven over to get Bet again this summer. She hadn’t regretted her decision until now, as she watched Bet Clemmens stand rooted to the patio, practically dozing in the middle of the ugliest night Laurel had ever witnessed.
The young fireman finished questioning David and walked back toward the other firemen. Laurel, who had kept her profile to the pool as long as possible, found herself tracking him. The other firemen had stopped CPR. The group shifted, and Laurel caught a glimpse of Molly’s face framed by black boots.
Laurel said to David, “Molly looks like herself, only she’s not there. It’s the hatefulest thing I’ve ever seen.”
No one spoke for half a minute, and then Bet Clemmens said, “I seen my one uncle who got drowned.” Shelby turned to look at Bet. They all did. “He laid out drunk in the crick. It was only five inches deep.”
“Thank you, Bet,” said Laurel, meaning “Stop talking.”
“He was out there dead all night afore I found him,” Bet offered. “The crawdaddies et his face.”
“I don’t think that story’s helping right now,” Laurel said much too loudly.
Shelby was looking at Bet with rounded eyes, as if her summer charity had shifted from a project to a person. “You’re the one who found him?” she asked. “You saw his face?”
Bet Clemmens bobbed her head. “Et,” she repeated, and Shelby took a step closer to her.
A flood of people, paramedics and policemen, poured through the glass doors, streaming around the four of