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The preacher paused for dramatic effect. “He told me so himself. He told me about the sins he committed and the people he hurt. He told me about the drugs and then the drinking. He told me about his regrets.”
    Matt looked around. All the seats were filled now, and there were a few people standing at the back of the room. He saw Adam over by the doorway.
    The sermon continued. “And he told me how thankful he was to have God slap him in the face about ten years ago. That slap landed him in a hospital bed surrounded by tubes and machines rather than family and friends.”
    The woman with the skull on her thigh was sitting in Matt’s row. She sat at the aisle, legs crossed. She was facing forward, but her chin was tilted slightly toward Matt. He caught her smirking and watching him out of the corner of her eye. Something spun around between her fingers. It looked like . . . a bullet?
    “He saw both God’s wrath and God’s love, and it changed him. These past ten years he devoted himself to running a business that makes people feel good about themselves, and to treating his employees like family. We can’t say he started living without sin, but we can say that at least he sinned in the right direction.”
    Matt felt uncomfortable for the rest of the sermon. Thankfully it was short. He was probably Uncle Quent’s only blood relative at the service, but he felt like an outsider. The preacher didn’t offer any prayers, and he didn’t ask anybody to come up and speak. Instead, he placed a quarter over each of Uncle Quent’s eyes and ended with, “All right, that’s enough out of me. Let’s go get drunk and let Uncle Quent dine in Valhalla.”
    Everybody else continued to dine on hors d’oeuvres. As Matt grabbed a plate, he saw Christy head to the bar. He tried his hardest not to look like a stalker as he caught up to her.
    “Uncle Quent sure has a lot of friends here.” Matt thought that was a safe opening line. He was wrong.
    “You sound surprised.” Christy’s tears were gone now, and she was rehydrating with a beer. “Like you never visited.”
    “Well, Uncle Quent and I both shared a desire to be far removed from our family. But obviously that didn’t bring us any closer.”
    “Obviously.”
    Matt set down his plate on the bar and wiped his mouth with a napkin. The napkin was decorated with a silhouette of a naked woman eating an apple. It would look right at home on a trucker’s mud flap. Matt fished out his letter again.
    “Maybe you can tell me why he would have sent me this letter?”
    Christy took a long drink, set down her bottle, and then finally took the letter. “He was a good man. And a good man to work for.”
    “What did he do?” he asked.
    She was frowning at the letter and eyeing it suspiciously. “He ran this place.”
    “What is it? Is it like a funeral home or something?”
    She was reading the letter and didn’t respond.
    “Crappy part of town for a funeral home.” Matt looked around. He saw the preacher sitting on a red plush couch talking to the woman with the skull on her thigh. She was laughing and touching his knee. Another woman stood behind the preacher. Her hand reached around and stroked his chest underneath his jean jacket.
    Matt had another aha moment. He turned back to Christy. “Wait, what did you do for Uncle Quent?”

 
     
     
    6
     
     
    Foster was trying to remember the words to the song. Everybody knew the tune. Any time a TV show or movie needed an old-timey barbershop quartet, that song would play. But it usually only went on for a couple of lines before the scene changed and the story continued.
    Foster whispered to himself, unsure if he was getting it right. “All ’round the little farm I wandered.” He hesitated, then nodded and continued. “When I was young.”
    Then the music box stopped, and he had to wind the key. It was an antique, or maybe it was made to look like an antique. Foster couldn’t tell. With the lid up, you could see the