the wall. “If you don’t mind, I don’t like letting them lie there intact.”
With a quick clip, he severed the tendons on each leg, then at each elbow. “There we go. Now we can put them in the incinerator without getting killed.”
I helped him load the first body into the crematorium, then shook his hand. “Thank you for helping me. If there’s ever anything I can do to return the favor, you call me.”
Mr. Parker wiped the sweat off his forehead. “There’s one thing. Explain to me exactly what went through your head that day.”
What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry I stole your backhoe? “I was a kid. I wasn’t thinking.”
He crossed his arms. “You were seventeen. Old enough to know what you were doing. You didn’t knock down a single stone with the hoe.”
“I didn’t disturb a body. That was the point.” Something I’d never been able to get across to Dad. Not while he wasn’t around. Not while he was.
“No, but you disturbed a grave.” His eyes gleamed as he spoke. “Something sacred. Special. You need to learn respect for the dead.”
What happened that day had more to do with the living than the dead, but I didn’t want to explain. “I’ll try, sir.” We shook again, and I let myself out.
I drove home. Home. A word I hadn’t used for nearly a decade, so it felt foreign to think it, let alone say it. Lost in thought, I found my way up the porch and through the screen door.
And found Grace, sitting at the kitchen table. In one hand, she held a glass of sun tea. She poured another from the pitcher, and pushed it across the table to me. “Your aunt is out shopping. Said she ran out of Spam, and there wouldn’t be any breakfast tomorrow without it. Sit.”
So tempting. The woman, not the tea, though I longed to drink deeply of both. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Then don’t. Please sit.” She brushed her hair back and looked at me with what I wished were “Come with me” eyes.
I sat.
“I made progress today, but your aunt is tired of answering questions about your life, and I’m tired of bothering her. Would it kill you to take a chair in there, sit with me, and relax?” Grace wouldn’t meet my gaze.
I took my offered drink, rubbing cold sweat from the cup. “No. I mean, I don’t think it would kill me. But can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
I couldn’t stop asking myself the question I had to ask her. “Do you like me?”
Her eyes went wide, her mouth open. But she recovered. “Sure. You’re a good field operative, and I suspect that you care about people more than you let on.”
“That’s not what I meant. Grace, do you like me? Forget money and journals and jobs, and just answer the question. Because the other day, I was thinking—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head. “I can’t. I won’t.”
Instincts honed from dozens of nights in hotel bars said she felt different. Why wouldn’t she just answer? “Is it because of the director? I don’t work for her anymore. ‘No work women’ doesn’t apply at the Hughes farm.” I glanced around. “Or the Homer house.”
“Just stop. It’s not the director, and it’s not you. It’s me.”
In my experience, “It’s not you, it’s me,” meant it was totally me. Just like “Nothing personal” usually involved something deeply personal.
She looked up at me. “I’m in a relationship.”
I kept the “Oh” in my mouth but not off my face. I was so certain I knew what her response would be. I’d never considered any other possibility. I nodded in acceptance. There was no reason to pine for someone I couldn’t have. Except that I wanted to pine. I wanted to pine a lot.
Grace sagged like a flat tire. “Is this the part where you storm out?”
“Will it change anything?”
“No.”
I’d done enough leaving. “Will it make you like me?”
She bit her lip, her eyes crinkled up, and then shook her head.
“Okay.” So this was rejection. I’d heard about it from Rory. But from the time my chest hairs turned curly, I’d found women the sweetest drug on earth, and usually so available. Except when they weren’t. Like now. “Can I ask who the lucky guy is?”
Grace looked like I’d just stabbed her in the hand. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She took her tea and left me there at the table, savoring the bitter taste of failure