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for all the money in the world.
    Bark veers left, toward the bench near the homestretch. “Shouldn’t we watch closer
     to the finish line?” James asks, but Bark keeps on. James stands still, knees locked,
     yakking about how what we’d see from that bench won’t matter. About how he wants to
     eyewitness the very end. About how, if all of us shout enough near the finish line,
     we could affect whether we win or lose.
    “Go ahead and shout,” Bark says. “I’m gonna watch from here.”
    James huffs off, leaving me to decide who to watch with. I don’t follow him since
     the last thing I need is the sound of his voice. I don’t sit beside Bark since I’m
     pissed he’s the reason I went upstate. I stand where I am, partway between Bark and
     the finish line—in front of the odds board beyond the dirt where they’ll run. It all
     of a sudden doesn’t mean shit that the three of us won state twice together, hung
     together on countless nights since, might end up together in Mississippi for the rest
     of our lives. We’re all strung out along that wire fence like cousins who never met,
     each of us as alone as the skinny drunk beside me, all of us as stuck inside ourselves
     as whoever’s rotting in that drum.
    And we stay like that until the horses are in the gate.

8
    JAN
    THE WAY THE CORCORANS had it set up then was the three upstairs bedrooms went one each to Tug and my mother
     and Tug’s parents, whereas I’d sleep on the first-floor summer porch, a long narrow
     room surrounded by three walls of windows, the widest facing the lake. During the
     day, this room was the best because all around were thick oak trunks and shiny rhododendrons
     and white blooming wisteria, and there was a family of chipmunks who spied on you
     and redheaded woodpeckers who charmed you by working upside down, and at any time
     a metallic green hummingbird with a scarlet throat might zing past as fast as a falling
     star, sip from a purple clematis, then dart to a lily the color of a conch shell’s
     throat, with the jade and aqua and shimmering lake behind everything.
    But at night, if you couldn’t sleep, you’d hear creaks in the narrow ceiling overhead,
     let alone voices up there, sometimes hissed wordsif not clearly angry phrases, always between Tom and Colleen, often about money. And
     on my first night beneath such creaks and those voices, I lay under a lent comforter
     on the cot alongside that porch’s only privacy-assuring wall, and outdoors beyond
     that enchanted yard loomed that same body of water, waves on it throwing moonlight
     at me, reflected brightness lapping along plasterboard inches from me if even a meek
     breeze rose, telling me more directly than any voice above me that, yes, let’s not
     deny it, girl: You lay within a furlong of the lake that took your daddy twice—first
     when he drowned, again when your mother scattered his ashes from that pier.
    And the longer I got worked up about how much easier my life could have been if my
     father hadn’t drowned, the more I wanted to leave that porch, though doing so would
     risk running into a Corcoran, which I did
not
want to do. What I wanted was to get away from both the lake and the Corcorans, maybe
     go out in the yard between the house and the road, maybe, if I could muster the spine,
     follow the path through the woods south of the house to Tug’s horse farm. Horses had
     long, long been my means of escape; riding them helped me avoid people I didn’t like,
     and on a saddled horse you also had more power than anyone who stood on human feet.
     Naturally, then, in the middle of that first night I spent in the Corcorans’ house,
     I wanted to see a filly or a colt I might take a liking to. Gnawing at me still was
     Colleen’s caginess during dinner at the kitchen table that evening, when I’d addressed
     no Corcoran in particular to ask how many horses Tug had in his care; she’d grown
     all at once interested in whether Tom believed