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in and around the house during his last four years in Sequoyah that he’d finally come to think of it nearly as fondly as his grandmother’s place on the mountain.
    As a house, it wasn’t much—small, wood-framed, with two tiny bedrooms and a living room not much larger But it was as close as the Tindalls had ever gotten to an ancestral home, and because of that, Ray had given Lois just about everything else he had, all his savings, am much of the farmland he’d accumulated over the past fifteen years, in order to keep it in his family’s name. Since the divorce, he’d lived there alone, wandering down it short, dimly lit corridors, or burrowing into the small of fice he’d fixed up for himself in what had once been Se rena’s bedroom.
    Serena, herself, opened the door. She was now twenty with Ray’s red hair and penetrating green eyes. Even from behind the rusty screen, her skin gave off a soft whit light.
    “It’s good to see you,” she said quietly, as she swung open the screen door, stepped back and let him walk inside. “I’m glad you could come. You were the closest thing Daddy had to a brother.”
    Kinley drew her into his arms. She stood silently within them, her posture determinedly erect, unbending, a woman who’d fully inherited her father’s rock-ribbed sense of dignity and self-containment.
    He released her, and she stepped from his arms. “He’s in here,” she said as she directed him out of the small square foyer and into the living room. Sprays of flowers stood on green metal legs throughout the room, their sweet aroma almost suffocating in the enclosed space. The casket rested in front of the tiny brick fireplace, a massive metal vault which seemed to shrink the room around it.
    “I decided to keep it closed,” Serena said. “I think Daddy would have wanted it that way.”
    “Yes, I think so, too.”
    “Around here, people open them, but …”
    “No, you’re right,” Kinley told her. “I did the same thing with my grandmother,” He fixed his eyes on the casket. It was hard to imagine Ray inside, alone in the dark.
    “I was here only a month ago,” Kinley said. “We had a nice talk.”
    “When your grandmother died.”
    “Yes.”
    Serena kept her eyes fixed on the casket, but with a look that appeared slightly puzzled, as if she were trying to figure out exactly what lay inside.
    Kinley looked at her solemnly. “You were the daughter he wanted, Serena,” he told her softly. “He always felt that way about you. You know, that you were independent, ready to go it alone, the daughter he wanted.”
    Serena turned toward him. “We were always close. Very close. Except for the last few weeks. Something changed between us.” She shook her head. “No, something changed in
him.”
    Kinley shrugged lightly. “Well, a divorce, something like that, it always …”
    “It wasn’t just the divorce,” Serena insisted. “It was Daddy. Something about him.”
    “He was always a little unusual, Serena.”
    “Something happened to him,” Serena said firmly. “He didn’t talk about it. But something definitely happened.”
    “Maybe just the middle-aged blues.”
    She shook her head determinedly. “No.” She glanced about, as if looking for a more private place. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
    “About what?”
    “Daddy. I want to know what drove him away from me.”
    “Look, Serena, sometimes you just have to …”
    She shook her head adamantly. “It’s better to know, don’t you think? Better to know what happened?”
    Kinley felt as if he’d been shot back in time, and he was once again in Jefferson’s Drug Store, facing her father as he had the afternoon Ray had asked him the same question in the same determined voice. He thought of all the times since then that he’d actually found out “what happened,” but had felt no better off for all he’d learned.
    “I don’t know, Serena, maybe it’s not better,” he said, an answer that he knew would