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trying to hide behind their mothers.
    â€œGo on, I ain’t a-going to hurt you,” he said roughly, and he finally got them to take three each of the silver coins. Then, without speaking again, he was gone.
    It was almost dark when Sam and Nancy left, promising everyone they’d come visit soon, Nancy hoping it would be Easter at least. As they walked to their car, Nancy’s eyes burned from the slow, constant smoke of the sawdust pile, which had already smoldered three years and would smolder almost three more. They were even with the mobile home when they heard the trailer door slam. It was Lot, coming out with two cans of dog food, headed for the tree behind the house where he kept Granger tied up.
    â€œYou all leaving already?” he asked them. “The fun’s just beginning.”
    â€œI reckon we better,” Sam told him, and Nancy noticed again how his speech patterns seemed to change. He spoke in a more clipped style, all the g’s enunciated, when he was in the city, but out here with his family, he fell into the softer cadence of the country.
    â€œWell, come on in for a minute,” he said with such urgency that Sam looked at Nancy, who shrugged, miffed that he was putting her in the position of snubbing someone in his family.
    He set the dog food down at the edge of the cinder-block steps leading up to the trailer door, and they followed him in.
    The air inside had the indefinable quality that Nancy always associated with Sam’s family, some aroma of stale-bread turkey stuffing or buttermilk biscuits in it. A TV was carrying a pro football playoff game in the background, sitting on an older TV that apparently didn’t work any more. The furniture seemed to have come with the trailer.
    They sat down on the couch, barely wide enough for two, and he took the only chair in the cramped living room.
    â€œI’m glad to see you all populating the earth,” Lot said. “Be fruitful and multiply. I never did get married. Never found the right girl, I reckon.”
    There wasn’t much to say to that, Nancy thought.
    He didn’t offer anything to drink, and after a while he started watching TV. Sam was genuinely interested in the game, but after about five minutes, Lot started snoring.
    â€œCome on,” Sam whispered. Nancy followed him, wondering what the old man would think when he woke up and found his trailer empty.
    â€œHe won’t remember a thing,” Sam said, reading her mind as they stepped off the bottom step to the ground and she resisted the urge to sneeze as the smell of burning sawdust hit her again.
    â€œWhat about his dog?” Nancy asked, looking over at the opened cans.
    â€œScrew the dog,” Sam said. “He’s tried to bite me two times. Let’s go.”
    She didn’t think until later to ask Sam where Lot had gone, when he came back with all the silver dollars. She’d noticed at the time that his red truck didn’t move from the front of the house.
    â€œNobody knows where Uncle Lot goes, or what he does,” Sam said. “I don’t think anybody wants to know.”
    Now it’s two weeks after Sam told Nancy they were moving to Monacan. Living with Sam’s parents while they decide whether to rent or buy has meant sacrificing a lot of privacy, but he keeps telling her that it won’t be much longer. They’ve looked at several homes for sale around Monacan, although it is becoming obvious to Nancy that what Sam really wants to do is build on the vacant lot one street back from the one where he was raised. They agree to rent a house on the same street until they, meaning he, Nancy thinks, can decide.
    Nancy still can’t understand why she didn’t just refuse to budge from their brick home on the North Side, just, as Suzanne suggested, “clear out a place on the floor and throw a shit-fit.” Her family is more than a little hurt, although she alternately tells them it