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about heaven and death and funerals, but none came. How much did they understand? Their mother had left them less than a year ago. But did James and Dan really understand that Miss Ada wasn’t coming back?
    The car slipped and slid down the muddy road. I gripped the edge of the seat with one hand and Janie with the other. Finally, we passed the train depot and turned onto the main street. Had it been just over a day since I’d arrived in this place? The girl who stepped off the train that evening seemed far away from me now.
    I noticed more than when I had arrived, albeit through a curtain of rain. One large sign over a storefront read Crenshaw’s Dry Goods. Other businesses flanked our silent driver’s establishment, but I didn’t take the time to read the name of each one. A few houses straggled within sight of the meager storefronts. Then the town gave way to empty space, to pristine land broken by a white-steepled church, its stone-dotted cemetery huddled to one side.
    Mr. Crenshaw parked close to the white pickets edging holy ground and silenced the engine. He handed me an umbrella and took one himself. The drizzle picked up its pace, as if it dared us to race it to the newly dug grave. Dan and James tried to oblige the challenge. Ollie and I held them by their shirt collars in an attempt to keep them beneath the umbrellas.
    A man stood beside the hole in the ground. His face reminded me of Daddy’s droopy-jowled hound dog. He held a black book I assumed to be a Bible. Beside him, the fresh-cut boards of the coffin were already smeared brown. I tried to imagine Aunt Adabelle resting peacefully inside—clean and dry. Not the Aunt Adabelle I’d seen on her deathbed. The one I remembered from my childhood. The one with soft curves and laughing eyes.
    Ollie must have been thinking the same thing. She slipped her hand into mine. “My mama always said rainy days were the best ones for sleeping.”
    I squeezed her hand and managed to give her a tight smile, but from the edge of my vision I noticed James at the lip of the hole, peering downward. Dan inched forward to join his brother. Both of them stood out of my umbrella’s reach now, hair plastered to their faces, clothes clinging to their small frames. I plopped the baby into Ollie’s arms and stepped toward the boys. Black mud captured my boot, oozing over the ankle-high top. I managed to yank it loose as I reached for Dan’s hand and led it to my skirt. He grasped the fabric in his chubby fingers, as I’d intended. Then I rested my hand on James’s shoulder, keeping him near me, both boys half under the shelter of my umbrella.
    I didn’t hear the preacher’s words. Instead, my eyes wandered to the little ones now in my charge. I thought of their soldier father. Missing his daughter’s birth and his wife’s final breath. And now the trusted friend who cared for his children had left them in my inexperienced hands. And me a perfect stranger to them all. I would write to him. Set him at ease over the state of his family and his home.
    The church bell pealed. My head turned toward the sound, scraping a gaze across three other muddied mounds. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. In a town this small, with many of its men off at war, four deaths this close together would be a devastating thing.
    James whipped around, his small fingers cupped beneath his freckled nose. Liquid red dripped through his pale fingers. It took me a moment to register it as blood.
    Blood.
    Bile rose in my throat as I pulled a handkerchief from my sleeve and tried to mop up the mess. But it kept coming.
    Ollie thrust Janie into my arms. I juggled the baby and the umbrella as I pushed down into an awkward squat, cringing over the remaining soreness in my ankle. Dan pulled on my skirt, his weight almost knocking me backward onto the soggy ground.
    “It’s okay, James.” Ollie calmly lifted the skirt of her white dress and pinched the tip of his nose.
    “He ain’t sick, is he?”
    My