I was still sitting there seven cigarettes later when the rain stopped. Two deer came to drink from the mud puddles around the hosta plants. One was a mutant, a third stubby antler in the center of his head like a stunted horn. This was common in the county since a decade before, when a holdup with hunting licenses caused a boom of overpopulation.  

Back when Hollis was a kid she loved the inbred deer. Snuck them rotting corn cobs to gnaw. Scratched her knobby arms senseless crawling through bramble, just to pluck black raspberries they could slurp from her palm. I never shot any of them in front of Hollis, though I knew Myra wanted me to. Myra thought they were creepy. And she liked venison.  

I stubbed my cigarette out and walked inside. I felt the shift in the room before I spotted it, a rectangle on the wooden wall to the left of the stove pipe, where Hollis’s snaggletooth grade school picture used to hang. Myra had wrenched out even the nail it rested on, leaving a gnarl in the meat of the wood. It looked like a navel, caved and protruding both. When I snipped the cord that connected my wife and daughter nineteen years ago, the doctor winked at Myra. Said, The husbands don’t always like to do that, you know.  

Around the time that picture was taken Hollis’s bedroom had smelled foul for a month. 

We’d thought there was a possum under the house before we finally found the egg behind her headboard, swaddled like a newborn in one of my bandanas smeared with auto fuel. Every morning it was her job to collect eggs from the coop. It was obvious why she’d wanted to keep this one. The beige mottling formed a wiggly five-point star.  

Myra threw it in the trash and handed Hollis white vinegar to scrub out the smell from the floor. In the garbage the shell broke in half, but the star part was intact. Later that day I took the piece, rinsed the coffee grounds and rancid yolk from it, and left it on the doily that floated like a lily pad on Hollis’s dresser.  

She never mentioned it so I don’t know if she lost it or broke it or forgot about it. Or if maybe she kept it all this time, brought it with her to that woman’s house, two hours West of here.  

Lena. That woman’s name is Lena.  

◆

That first night after Hollis left, we were quiet most of the meal. I was finding Myra’s stew strangely difficult. Slimy pearls of barley, still hard inside.

What did you do with the picture? I finally asked.  

Does it matter?  

If it didn’t matter I wouldn’t have asked you.  

A tiny red-brown dab of stew fat stuck in the crease of Myra’s mouth. What would it be like to taste it on her, to wedge my tongue through her tight teeth? Since the last time I’d done that, a year before at least, little white hairs had sprouted above the corners of her lips, like fishing line. In another life, before Hollis and before we took over the farm, Myra loved fly fishing. Could catch ten rainbow trout in half as many hours, even made her own bait with tufted chicken feathers and jute twine. 

I got up from the table, scraped the onions left in my bowl into the garbage. I looked carefully at the mess: shreds of browning cabbage, but no photo.  

I’d like to have that picture, I said.  

Myra scooted her chair closer to the table. Why poke a stick in a wound, Wayne? 

Lena might be a nice girl, I said. I had thought this, a few times. That she might love Hollis and be kind to her.  

I don’t see how that would make it less of a waste, said Myra. She sucked her empty spoon.  

◆

I only went to bed that night once I thought Myra was asleep, but as I shifted and turned her voice cut through the cicadas.  

The McCulloughs came by with a bucket of honey today, she said. Don’t know what we’ll do with it but I suppose it was nice of them to think of us. Kim said their bees are thriving. 

Oh? I said. 

They asked after Hollis. I said she got a job in Asheville. Administrative assistant.  

And they believed it? 

Course. People barely spend time thinking of things besides themselves.  

I wasn’t convinced. Hollis was more at home on the farm than just about anyone, practically born with dirt-rimmed nails. Her favorite day of the year was when we tilled before planting, the rusted blades of the Gilson my own father once owned turning up all the swollen wet worms and snapping through roots. She loved the loosening of the soil, once ran through it until her naked feet sunk down so far that her calves were half-buried.  It’s quicksand! She yelled. Help me, I’m sinking! 

I’d taken off my boots, sliding the bunched socks into them and pretended to be a swamp monster chasing her till the sun started sinking fast below the line of orange on the horizon. 

At one point she saw Myra in the kitchen window. Mom, she yelled, come out here! Myra didn’t, though. She was glazing the roast.  

It was the farm, too, that had brought Hollis to Lena, who worked at a stable that bought our share box. I’d seen Hollis toss butter-colored squash blossoms on the top of one of the boxes at the end of the season, wondered for who and why. 

◆

In bed the rain began again so I got up to shut the window.  

I wondered what would happen if I walked into the kitchen and dialed Hollis’s phone. 

Don’t you call me, she’d said, if you’re just going to expect me to keep pretending she doesn’t exist. Then, turning to Myra, Or if you’re going to keep talking about grandkids.  

I got back in bed, silent and careful to skirt the invisible line down the center of the mattress. After we’d given up on trying to give Hollis a brother or a sister, I still found the bottom of Myra’s nightdress, cinching it up with my hand, until the time she clasped my fingers and placed them back, arching her back away. No purpose to it, she said, and then she didn’t have to say it anymore. 

◆

I woke up without Myra’s weight in bed. The rain had stopped, a mocking white sunrise in its place. I padded to the kitchen where the screen door had been left open and spotted her in the yard. 

She was at the birch tree behind the tomato cages, kneeling right next to one of her hated deer, both of them still. Its extra leg was in the back, near its tail, as lean and strong as if it belonged. When I saw the early morning light catch Myra’s hand, I thought it had been burned or skinned at first, what with the way it shone, pink and slick like private skin. But then I saw her plunge the other into the red bucket of clover honey, touch her wrists to each other and hold them out to the doe, who licked at the sweet. Its wild eyes were dark and glassy. Myra’s were closed. She dipped her hands again, offered them up.