Alice remembers Sugar’s counseling, that Cash is a big talker, and she hurries to get some kind of conversation going. “You had this truck long?”

Cash starts it up. “All my life, near about. I keep putting new engines in her, and she keeps a-going. Wish I could do the same for myself.” He pats his chest gently with his right hand, then reaches down to shift gears, which makes a sound like slamming the spoon drawer.

“They do that, now. Put new hearts and livers and stuff in people,” Alice points out.

“I know. But that don’t seem right, trading parts with dead folks just to keep yourself around, pestering the younguns.

When you’re wore out, I’d say that’s a sure sign it’s time to go.”

“I agree,” Alice says. She takes notice of some flower growing in the ditch that looks like a dandelion gone crazy, as big as a child’s head.

“Ask me in ten year, though, and I might sing a different tune,” Cash says, laughing.

“I know. It’s hard to admit to being old, isn’t it? I keep thinking, How’d this happen? Sixty-one! When I was young I looked at people this age and thought they must feel different inside. As different from me as a dog might feel, or a horse. I thought they would just naturally feel like they were wrinkled up and bent and way far along.”

“It don’t feel that way, though, does it?”

“No,” Alice says, running a hand through her short hair.

“It feels regular.”

The trees crowd up against the road, each one a different shade of green. The oaks are the darkest. Their leaves angle downward and seem to absorb more light. Cash’s truck rolls across a little bridge, and below them Alice can see a creek banked by a world of ferns, their spears all pointed straight up.

“You’re kin to Sugar some way, is it?”

“We’re cousins,” Alice replies. “We grew up together, but we lost touch after I married.”

“Well, it had to be Sugar’s side you was related on, and not Roscoe’s. If it was Roscoe’s I’d of knowed you, because my sister Letty’s the widowed wife of Roscoe’s brother. Did you and your husband have a big family?”

“No, just my daughter. He didn’t even quite stick around long enough to drive her home from the hospital.”

Alice laughs. “I had to get a nurse to drive us home. She was a great big woman with a Chevrolet as big as a barn. She said, ‘I can drive home all the babies you want, Miz Greer.’

I never will forget that. She made me wish I’d had twelve more, while I was at it.”

“I wished that too. That we’d had more. We had the two girls, but then the doctor told my wife no more. Her blood was the wrong way, somehow. She had negative blood, is what he said. She always run to being peaked.”

Alice feels embarrassed and amazed that within ten minutes of meeting one another they’ve gotten onto Cash Stillwater’s dead wife’s female problems. He doesn’t seem bothered, though, only sad. She can feel sadness rising off him in waves, the way you feel heat from a child with a fever.

“Sugar tells me you’ve just moved back from someplace.”

“Wyoming,” he says.

They pass an old cemetery whose stone walls are covered with rose brambles, and then a white clapboard church set back in the woods. On a tree, a washed-out sign has been attached by a nail through its center, and rotated a quarter-turn clockwise. It crookedly advises: FLESTER DREADFUL

WATER FOR TRIBAL COUNCIL.

“Flester Dreadfulwater!” Alice says, hoping it’s not impolite to laugh at someone’s name who is no doubt some relative of someone related to Cash.

Apparently it isn’t. “He lost the election,” Cash says, smiling.

“Why’d you move to Wyoming?”

Cash stretches a little behind the wheel, though he never takes his eyes off the road. “I got restless after my wife died. I had this idea you can get ahead by being in a place where everbody’s rich. That being close to good times is like having good times.”

“My second husband was like that. He thought if he’d watched some loving on TV, he’d done had it.” Alice instantly covers her eyes, feeling she has surely gone too far, but Cash only laughs.

“How long were you up there?” she asks, recovering.

Riding through the woods with a talkative man is making her giddy.

“About two year,” he says. “I despised it. Everbody rich, treating you like you was a backdoor dog. And not even happy with what they had. I did beadwork for a Indian jewelry store, and the owner one day up and took pills and killed himself clean dead. They say he was worth a million.”