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What is it, Mama? What’s happening?”
    “ I don’t know, Iustitia. I just— I don’t feel
well. I need you to remember this and remember that I wanted you to
get an education, to leave here. Whatever you do, do not be
stupid like I was and let a man sucker you. You don’t belong
here. I don’t belong here. If I had listened to my father,
well . . . ”
    Upon looking at her mother in her casket two years
later, it occurred to Justice that she had never looked prettier or
younger: twenty-five and not a day older than that. Justice had
never seen her like that. The doctors said she had a heart attack,
but Justice didn’t believe that. Twenty-five-year-old mothers
didn’t have heart attacks.
    They do if they were born with a heart problem, one doctor told her bluntly when she had challenged him with an
eleven-year-old’s certainty of medicine.
    “ Come, child,” said an old man she had never met,
his hand heavy on her shoulder to steer her away from the rest of
the mourners. “I want to talk to you.”
    She wrested away from him. “Who are you?” she
whispered.
    “ Your grandfather. Libertas’s—er, your mother’s
father.”
    “ I don’t know you.”
    “ No, but you will. Perhaps I won’t fail you like
I failed your mother.”
    They sat together in a corner, talking. Well, not
conversing: Her grandfather speaking, Justice listening. Absorbing
the things he said, understanding more of what her mother had tried
to teach her, but had not fully understood herself because she
hadn’t had time to before Justice’s father had seduced her, gotten
her pregnant, and been forced to marry her or go to jail.
    Justice had known none of this until that
moment.
    And at that moment, her father chose to make a
scene, yelling and screaming about what her grandfather had done to
him, and how dare he attempt to glom onto Justice for his own evil
purposes.
    But Justice found comfort in her grandfather’s
teachings and so she did chores in the barn and waited until after
her father had gone to bed. Her grandfather would come to her in
the dead of night with books of histories and documents and
theories and fables. The hayloft became Justice’s classroom and her
grandfather her professor.
    Then he, too, died and left her with no one but her
father, who didn’t know what she did when he wasn’t looking and
didn’t care—as long as she wasn’t “messing around with books,
because books don’t do nothin’ but put ideas in your head. This is
your home and I’d just as soon you stay here and take care of it
with me.”
    “ Okay, Papa,” she whispered, seeing all her
mother’s and grandfather’s hopes burn off like an early-morning fog
in ten o’clock sunshine. “I will.” He was all she had in the world
now.
     
    *
     
    “That’s enough of you,” Justice muttered as she
killed the sad music before her mood tanked. But she had to push
the eject button on the tape deck several times before it would
obey, and her humor gradually worsened each time it refused. She
had very little patience with the thing, preferring instead to play
the mp3 files on her laptop, but the tape player was one of few
precious links to her mother.
    Her plan was simple: Fulfill her mother’s and
grandfather’s aspirations for her and still keep her promise to her
father. She juggled so much now that having only one regular job to
work around would be a respite.
    She’d wanted to be a prosecutor because her
grandfather thought it a noble profession, but in order to help
with the farm after she got a job, she only had two counties to
choose from: Chouteau and Buchanan. The Clay and Jackson County
seats were too far to drive every day. She had always figured this
reality into her plans and had known nothing about the Chouteau
County prosecutor until that day two months ago, when he had
defended her, validated her, touched her.
    Even had she been inclined to think about breaking
her promise to her father, leave the farm, go somewhere else,