“Hey, here’s one for you,” Dovey said. “I saw it on the way over here. ‘Lukewarm Now, Burn Later!’ ”

“The thing about you and church, Dovey, is you think everything is about hell.”

“Hell yeah!”

Dellarobia found it hard to resist the idea of her parents together in some other sphere, maybe rocking the grandbaby that never got loved in this one. But she had no heart for a system that would punish Dovey and reward the likes of herself, solely on the basis of attendance. “I don’t think I believe in hell,” she said. “It’s kind of going out of style, like spanking kids in school. Pastor Ogle never even mentions it.”

“Wait a sec, they canceled hell? Man, will my mom be pissed off.”

“I’m serious, Dovey. Who do you know that’s inspired by the idea of burning flesh? People our age, I mean.”

“Mmm-hm,” she said, holding the comb in her teeth for a two-handed maneuver. “Too campy. Like some Halloween drive-in movie.”

Dellarobia realized this was true, exactly. The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment. “I’ve heard people say Bobby Ogle is a no-hell preacher,” she said. “Like that’s some official denomination.”

Dovey took the comb out of her teeth and pointed it at the mirror. “You know what? I think Ralph Stanley is one of them. Now that you mention it. I read this interview with him in a magazine.”

“Wow.” Dellarobia could not quite imagine the magazine that would probe country legends for gossip about their spiritual lives. But Dovey was a wellspring of weird facts that turned out to be true.

“So you’re saying this famous Bobby Ogle is like a new-millennium preacher? I pictured him kind of played out. Way older.” Dovey lifted a strand at Dellarobia’s nape, making her shudder.

“No. Early thirties, I’d guess. Don’t you remember his picture in the hallway, in high school? He was part of the football team that went to state.”

“Whoa, that was recent history.”

“Well, not anymore it isn’t, Dovey. But it was when we were in high school. I guess he just seems more ahead of us in spirit. His parents were old—maybe that’s part of it. They were sixty or something when they adopted him.”

“He’s adopted?”

“Like Moses. A basket case.”

Suddenly Cub was at the back door, calling out from the kitchen. “Hon, do you know where my truck keys are at?”

Dellarobia bugged her eyes at the mirror. “No more sex till he quits ending every g-d sentence with a preposition.”

Dovey crooned, “Do you know where my truck keys are at, bitch?”

“What’s funny?” he asked from the bedroom doorway. His face was unreadable, backlit as he was from the bright living room, but Dellarobia could see in his posture the reluctance to enter their zone. Cub was a little afraid of Dovey and herself in tandem, a fact she felt bad about but would never change. Their communal disloyalties were like medicine: bitter and measured, life-prolonging.

“You going over to Bear and Hester’s?” she asked. His key ring was on the dresser. She reached to toss them and he caught them out of the air one-handed, chank. He was surprisingly coordinated, for someone who moved through the world as if underwater.

“Yeah. I think Mother wants to worm the pregnant ewes today.”

“On New Year’s Day, how festive.” It hadn’t been much of a holiday. Cub had spent his days off with Bear repairing the High Road after the floods. He’d brought in two truckloads of gravel on the employee discount. Hester would be able to resume her tour business, and Bear was keen to get the road in shape for the logging trucks, though technically that was the company’s job. Bear felt they would make a mess of it.

“She’s been after me to help drench them,” Cub said. “It’s been so warm. I don’t know if this cold snap changed her mind, we’ll see.”

“Okay. See you at supper.” She kissed her fingertips and waved them. Cub pointed his finger like a pistol, winked, and was gone.

As habitually as a prayer, Dellarobia wished she were a different wife, for whom Cub’s good heart outweighed his bad grammar. Some sickness made her deride his simplicity. Really the infection was everywhere. On television, deriding people was hip. The elderly, the naive—it shocked her sometimes how the rules had changed. A night or two ago they’d seen comedians mocking some old guy in camo coveralls who could have been anybody, a neighbor. Not an actor, this was a real man, standing near his barn someplace with a plug of tobacco in his lip, discussing the weather and his coonhounds. Billy Ray Hatch: she and Cub repeated the name aloud, as though he might be some kin. It was one of the late-night shows that archly twisted comedy with news. Somehow they’d found this fellow and traveled to his home to ask ridiculous questions. After each reply the interviewer nodded in a stagy way, creasing his eyebrows in fake fascination. So the whole world could see Billy Ray Hatch made into a monkey. Cub changed the channel.

“What does that mean, drench the ewes?” Dovey asked, lifting her chin, inspecting herself in the vanity mirror. “I always picture you all running the sheep through a car wash.”

“Nowhere near that exciting. It means shooting drugs down their throat with a squirt-gun thing. Leave it to Hester to celebrate a national holiday with deworming meds.”

Dovey patted both Dellarobia’s shoulders with her hands. “Okay, you’re rolled up. Swap.” Dellarobia gave up her seat and took up the new flatiron Dovey had brought for a test run. The thing was so hot it scared her a little. It could have set things ablaze while heating up on the dresser. She divided Dovey’s massive mane into reasonable paddocks and went to work.

“So,” Dovey said, “back to his hotness Dr. Butterfly. He’s coming when?”

“Tuesday. And b-t-w, there’s probably a Mrs. Butterfly. He wears a ring.”

“You never know. Widower, maybe. Or she split, and he’s in denial.”

“I don’t think the man’s in mourning. Oh, and Pete’s coming back too. Speaking of men with wives.”

“How do you know all this?”

“He called, day before yesterday. Ovid.” Speaking his name aloud altered Dellarobia’s pulse. His voice coming through the phone had connected her with an unexpected longing, as if she’d been on hold for a time, and then there he was. “He and Pete are driving from New Mexico with a van load of equipment. They’re setting up some kind of lab out there in the sheep shed, believe it or not.”