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hide the soul-killing atmosphere that pervades any room full of unhappiness and disease.
    The click-click-click sound of a recliner being kicked back to its maximum angle punctuated the silence. “This thing is so comfortable, you never want to get up,” DeWayne sighed. “A man could lose a crop sitting in one of these things.”
    Carmen roused herself into action. “As you know, I’m looking for stories from the early days of the Sujosa. Miss Dovey tells me that you come from some of the oldest Sujosa families she knows about, Mr. Montrose,” she said. “Most people in the settlement have at least one outsider on their family tree but we can’t find any on yours. So you must have heard a lot of stories in your day.”
    “You can’t believe everything Miss Dovey tells you,” he said. “Sometimes she lets on that she remembers things that happened before she was born.” He fussed with the lever controlling the chair’s pitch. “Women’s tales don’t usually have much to do with the truth. If something happened before I was born, it don’t mean nothing to me. I like to live in the right-now. I got my health. I got a roof over my head. I got no need to think about the past. Why don’t you go bother somebody who cares about long-ago times? I got other things on my mind. Irene, turn up that volume. My show’s on.”
    Irene glanced at Carmen, but did as her father asked. Then she returned to her mother’s side and pulled the blankets tighter around her neck. Kiki’s eyes slid closed and didn’t open again, not even when Carmen and Faye rose to leave.
    ***
    Carmen muttered, “Can you believe that man?” for the fifth time since leaving the Montrose house.
    “I thought a person in your profession would be used to the occasional snub,” said Faye as they walked along the long path that cut through the woods to the river. “Either that, or it’s me,” she added, thinking of the previous day’s adventure on the road. Maybe somebody had dropped a papier-mâché devil on her head on purpose, just because they knew they didn’t like her before they’d even met her.
    “Oh, I’m used to it—although two in one day is unusual. But I was thinking of Kiki.”
    “What’s wrong with her?” Faye asked. “AIDS?” Brent Harbison’s paper on disease resistance among the Sujosa had its roots in the AIDS epidemic, which had taken a heavy toll in the settlement during the 1990s. When Dr. Harbison recognized a pattern among the victims—people with mostly Sujosa ancestry were much less likely to contract AIDS than those with “outsider” blood—his future as a medical researcher was assured.
    “She’s got Hepatitis C, and the story is that Irene has nearly killed her young self taking care of her mama. She dropped out of high school and took over Kiki’s old job at the dry cleaners in Alcaskaki to help make ends meet. From the looks of things, Irene’s not going to be taking care of her mother too much longer. It’s very sad.”
    Faye, who had cared for both her grandmother and her mother in their final illnesses, again ached for Irene, but she was less certain than Carmen that the girl’s ordeal was nearly over. She knew that the human body could take a lot of punishment before it gave up its grasp on life. There had been no mistaking the shadow that fell on her loved ones’ faces in their final days. Kiki was a desperately ill woman, but she didn’t yet have the pinched features and sunken eyes of imminent death, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She and Irene could be heading for months or years of suffering. Faye walked in silence and tried not to think about that.
    Looking for a way to change the subject, Faye said, “Did you see DeWayne Montrose’s eyes? I’ve heard that some Sujosa have a distinctive eye color. Was that it?”
    “Yeah. It’s a really pretty color—I’d call it turquoise, I guess—except it’s not so pretty when it’s in the middle of a face as mean as DeWayne