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who I hadn’t met before.
    “And I don’t want to talk to Mr. Sanders and have him ask me how it’s going with you, then have to tell him this .” She tapped the resignation ball.
    I slinked around in the chair.
    She passed me a teal-blue canvas duffel with caramel leather trim. “Take the weekend, Davis, and be back here Monday morning at eight. Your assignment won’t be in the casino.”
    I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but opened my mouth and spoke anyway. Mostly vowels.
    “That’ll be all, Davis.”
      
    *    *    *
      
    Welcome to Pine Apple, Alabama. Population 447.
    We thought of ourselves as larger, counting all the populace and some of the livestock just past the city limits signs as city-dwellers too, but the fact remains: Pine Apple is too small for me to sneak home and my mother not know. There are twenty miles of AL-10 to cover between I-65 (civilization) and Pine Apple (back, back woods), and I promise you, my mother’s phone rang every other mile marker. “Davis just zipped by here, Caroline.”
    At every family gathering a story is referenced. Somehow, someway, at some point, someone sneaks it in. My mother, a maverick of her day, went to college. She swapped her mortarboard for a white veil and married my father the afternoon of the same day she graduated. Here’s where the bottom dropped out for Caroline Annette Davis Way: She immediately became pregnant with me.
    The obstetrician asked her if she wanted to hold her baby. “No,” she said. “Give her to her father.”
    Daddy and I have been inseparable ever since. I worship the ground he walks on, meanwhile my hair stands on end at the very thought of Mother.
    One lazy Alabama afternoon when my sister Meredith was pregnant with her daughter, Riley, I sat at one end of the porch swing with Meredith, propped on pillows and stretched across, resting her swollen feet in my lap. We were drinking the kind of lemonade that’s nine parts sugar and one part lemon, swatting flies and praying for her labor to begin. Meredith was tracing beach-ball circles on her distorted abdomen. “What if we’re like you and Mother, Davis? What if the baby and I just don’t like each other?”
      
    *    *    *
      
    I drove straight to the police station.
    “There’s my girl!”
    I collapsed into my safe place without speaking. My safe place wrapped his arms around me.
    “Where the heck have you been, Sweet Pea?”
    “Daddy,” I took the perp seat beside his desk, “I got a job.” I think.
    “It’s a good thing, too, because your landlord’s threatening to evict you.”
    “Mother’s so full of hot air,” I said, dropping my purse to the concrete floor.

    “Oh, now,” my father said.
    “If she evicts me, she’ll have to move all my stuff back home.”
    “She claims she’s going to have the Goodwill pick it up.”
    “Isn’t the property in your name too, Daddy? Can’t you control your own wife?”
    “I’m much better at controlling her than I am you.”
    “Oh, Daddy.” I took a swat at him. “Hey, has anyone been nosing around about me?”
    “Let me get us a cup of coffee,” he said, “then we’ll talk.”
    It made the back of my knees cave in to see my father aging. When I was ten, there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. I walked to the station after school every day. “I can’t run this place without you, Deputy.” My part-time job responsibilities included making yards of paper-clip necklaces, Wanted Dead or Alive posters, and snack duty—graham crackers and milk or Fritos and Dr. Pepper. One day, something catching his eye, he turned to me, “I’ll be right back, Punkin. Stay put.” He’d spotted elusive Old Man Brinkley slinking out of the hardware store. Daddy hollered for him; Old Man Brinkley made a run for it; my father took chase, running up and over a parked car in a single leap, as if it he’d jumped a fire hydrant.
    When I was seven years old, I watched him cut down, chop, and stack the logs