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wrong with her? “You sure you should be here, sis?”
    “I’m sick of being at home. I want to have some fun and dance.”
    A hairy head the size of a moose popped between us. “Did someone say dance?” Tubby Tidwell wrapped a flabby arm around each of our shoulders. “You’re in luck tonight, ladies, because ‘Tubby the Texas Two-Step Master’ is here. Who’s first?”
    Hope giggled and leaned into him.
    I resisted pulling out my flask right then.
    Without warning the lights dimmed and the band launched into “Whiskey River.”
    “Mind if I steal this gorgeous young thing for a while, Mercy?” Tubby yelled over the music.
    I glanced at Hope. Her eyes pleaded with me. I smiled tightly. “She’s all yours, Tubby.”
    He whooped and dragged her to the crowded dance floor.
    Hope’s defection spurred mine. No such luck I’d get away easy.
    Our neighbor Iris Newsome cornered me. “Mercy. I’m surprised to see you here, although I am glad I ran into you. I’ve been meaning to come by. How are you holding up?”
    I’m drinking more than usual and my career is toast, but besides that, I’m peachy keen.
    Nah. Not a good response. “I’m taking it day by day.”
    “I know how that goes.” She smiled sadly and turned to focus on Hope and Tubby twirling around on the dance floor.
    Dealing with Iris always set my teeth on edge, mostly because I didn’t know how to deal with her.
    When Hope was five, she was playing cowboys and Indians in the shelterbelt behind our oldest barn with her best friend, Jenny, Iris’s daughter. Somehow Jenny had managed to sneak her father’s eight-inch Bowie knife into her Barbie backpack.
    Hope’s jealousy that Jenny had the real thing, while she had to make do with a plastic toy gun, spurred Hope to sneak inside and grab Dad’s snub-nosed Ruger revolver from his nightstand drawer.
    After Hope captured Jenny, she’d tied her up and interrogated her. Just like on TV. When Jenny’s answers weren’t to her liking, Hope placed the gun barrel to Jenny’s forehead. Just like on TV. But unlike on TV, when Hope pulled the trigger and fired, she blew Jenny’s brains all over the barn and all over herself.
    When Jenny didn’t hop up and laugh, just like on TV, Hope started to scream. She screamed until her voice gave out and she went into a catatonic state.
    Dad literally picked up the pieces.
    Even through their grief, Jenny’s parents hadn’t blamed Hope. They knew everyone in our part of the world kept their guns loaded; the circumstances could’ve easily gone the other way and we’d have been buying a pine box and planning a funeral.
    The incident became another turning point in our lives. Dad burned the barn to the ground and purchased a gun safe. Within two months he quit wallowing in the grief and whiskey that’d followed my mother’s death and signed on with the sheriff’s department as a deputy. Hope still suffers from random periods of depression. Rather than medicating her, we all tread lightly during these episodes and use our family strength to shield her from others and herself.
    The catastrophe hadn’t dimmed my love of firearms; it merely increased my respect for the deadly consequences of misuse. Killing, even accidentally, will make some people delicate, like my sister. But killing is the one thing I’m good at, even if the payoff is some sleepless nights.
    Iris faced me. “I’m calling a meeting next week with Bob Peterson about some of the changes those LifeLite people who bought the old Jackson place have made.” Her eyes narrowed. “Have you been by there yet?”
    “Ah. No.” It was hard to imagine the kind of changes that could require the attention of our county commissioner.
    “It’s an abomination. Eight-foot-high electric fences and manned gates twenty-four hours a day? They’ve got to be doing something illegal, especially with so many new outbuildings popping up practically overnight… heaven only knows what for.”
    “What can Bob