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ran, a guiding hand scraping the length of the neatly trimmed holly hedge. She entered the house through the kitchen door and collapsed onto the floor, out of sight of her aunt and the officer. She peered around the door frame and saw the officer handing her aunt a sheet of paper.
    â€œIn that case, ma’am, I’ll need you to sign here on this line.”
    Aunt Pearl signed the paper and the officer folded it into neat quarters, placed it in his shirt pocket, buttoned the flap, and patted his pocket.
    â€œI’m truly sorry, ma’am. Untimely, the way it was. There must’ve been a time when your sister was real pretty. It’s a shame when the pretty ones die young.”
    â€œOh my, yes, Jewel was the pretty one. Always had the boys she wanted.” She giggled in a strange way that didn’t seem right somehow, but her tone held no malice.
    They rose from their chairs. The sound of her rustling skirt, the cracking of her arthritic knees joints, and her slow footsteps as she ushered the officer to the door roared in Jodie’s ears like the sound of the diesel engines she once invited. She leaned back against the wall and clutched her stomach.
    Aunt Pearl came into the kitchen where Jodie had continued to hide. She put on a pot of coffee and took a seat at the kitchen table, her wet face cradled in her palms.
    Jodie stood.
    â€œOh God, Jodie, you heard?” Her face was drawn, white as a bleached bed sheet, and her eyes stretched in something akin to panic.
    â€œIt’s not true, you know. Law’s not the final word.”
    â€œYour mama was such a sweet child. But from the time she was your age, she sought the hard-eyed boys who only knew how to live on the edge of destruction.”
    Jodie needed no reminder of the kind of men Jewel had brought home, but she didn’t believe her mama had been fated to die among a truckload of hogs.
    â€œWhen’re we going to get her? Bring her here?”
    â€œJodie, your mama’s gone.”
    â€œYou don’t know that. I want to see the woman he claimed is Jewel. He never one time mentioned me. She’d have put my name next to yours.” Her voice had weakened with each denial, her last squeezed from her heart.
    â€œNo, child, it’s too late. I signed over her remains to the county. I don’t have the money for a cemetery plot.” She handed Jodie the brown package the officer had delivered and turned away, her thin body racked by spasms.
    Jodie stared at the package, traced its edges with her wet fingertip, and dared to tear away the blood-smeared wrapper. It held Jewel’s Bessie Smith record, broken into two perfectly matched halves. Jodie sat, cradling the broken remains to her heaving chest. She’d known all along her mama wouldn’t last without her to care for her. Still Jewel would have laughed at the irony in dying on the road, and in death she would have despised charity. Jodie wanted to blame her aunt for Jewel’s final shame, but she knew better. She knelt next to her.
    Her aunt embraced her for the first time since she arrived and whispered, “God knows I tried, but I couldn’t save your mama.” She released Jodie and said, “I can’t promise that you’ll end better.”
    Her voice had grown resolute, and Jodie understood that whatever she believed Jewel needed saving from, Aunt Pearl attributed the same to her.
    Long after her aunt had gone to bed, Jodie sat alone in the kitchen listening to late-night radio. She wanted to hear her mama’s voice. Have her say that she had a good girl back in Dothan, and that her next song went out to her. For the first time ever, Jodie prayed hard, although she didn’t believe God answered prayers for those like her and Jewel. If the officer was right and her mama was dead, it was up to her to mark her passing.
    J odie rose in pre-dawn darkness, dressed in clean jeans and shirt, and brushed the night tangles from her