you were thinking about it. I thought you had to work.”
“I’ll be done by noon. I told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Carter stalked into the kitchen. He heard her running water into the pot for pasta, probably twice as much as she needed. It would take forever to boil. He stayed on the computer, looking for a new doctor. There was one over in Toledo Bend he hadn’t heard of so he wrote down the phone number. He was only forty-one; he felt like his body was moving toward ruin.
Across the highway from Bostic’s store, high on a grassy knoll in Horace Chadwick’s weedy pasture, a clump of rocks poked out where the members of Spring Creek Baptist Church liked to gather for Easter sunrise service. Pastor Will Simpson would take his place on the granite and face west toward Truman Wally’s dilapidated barn, grateful he could skip a hot sanctuary blotted by twice-a-year comers. A mile behind him, as the choir sang the sun into the sky, light would break through the trees into the brown waters of the Atoka River, nothing left of its Ayish past but Indian legend and white man’s guilt. To the pastor’s left, seventeen miles away, was Yellowpine Reservoir, a man-made flooding that sixty years before had covered twenty-odd buildings, scores of junk cars and the unmarked graves of six black families. A sprinkle of boaters would be there at sunrise on Easter, trading Jesus for sport. Pastor Simpson, acknowledging so much of the Lord’s work still to be done, would raise his arms to the sky and declare that the Maker had blessed them all with a front row seat to the miracle of resurrection.
On a different Sunday morning, also at sunrise but weeks before Easter, Air Force Col. Charles Bradley had climbed the grassy knoll and looked out over the torn bits of a splendid, gargantuan, trouble-prone spacecraft. It had been his privilege to fly this particular dream of man, a collection of high hopes and low bids. Now a scatter of tiles from its skin lay in the weeds. He thought he could make out something gray that might be the arm of a flight deck chair. He could not remember, at this startling moment, whether the flight deck chairs were gray, or if those were blue. The white box he saw, that he knew. It was part of a cabinet for keeping clothes. Perhaps it had once held his, the golf shirts and shorts he favored in zero gravity. Half a mile from where he stood, though he did not yet know it, was the secluded sanctuary of Spring Creek Baptist, so out of the way that one of its downspouts held a dime bag in transit. In the woods beside the church lay another small bundle, this one much more troubling. It was a handful of flesh that would soon be identified as most of the heart of Mission Specialist Brian Goodwin.
The astronaut walked back to his car, which he’d parked by the gas pumps in front of a low-slung store. He would spend a week in Kiser, driving north to Eno late each night, where a bad mattress in a third-rate motel was his weary haven. He would autograph a ball cap for a friendly woman in the Porta-Chow line, and take it around to the other astronauts, his fellow survivors. It was the least he could do. The people of Kiser had spread their arms around his disaster and accepted the great burden of its grief.
As soon as Carter opened the store the next morning, she called Jerome. “I’ll be there Monday,” she told him. “I can stay the week.” Reba had agreed to sub for her and pull double shifts. That would take more than half of Carter’s earnings, but she didn’t care. Roy would blow his stack.
Jerome asked if she could stay longer. “I wish,” she said. She told him about the baby, and he didn’t give her any of the granny business about getting old. Jerome was a professional. But he hadn’t minded that she had thanked the searchers, every one of them, every night. “You have a good heart,” he told her once, smiling in a way she hadn’t seen before. “I try,” she said. She’d wished then she could kiss his cheek, because of how hard everyone had worked, because of all they’d been through. Later, when they were cleaning up for the last time, she took off her astronaut cap and put it on Jerome’s head. “You’re really something,” she said.
After Carter hung up, the store was quiet until Roy’s friend, Phil, showed up with two men she didn’t know. The one they called Mick went in the back where the horse supplies were, brought out a bottle of iodine and handed it to Phil. Phil Lockwood didn’t have any animals. He’d bought another bottle only last month. She’d said that night to Roy, “We should take out the iodine. Just not sell it. People can go to town if they need it.”
“It’s not up to us to police what people do,” Roy told her.
“We don’t need to make it easier. Phil’s your friend. What’s he up to? I know he’s hard up, but come on.”
“If Phil needs money that bad, how else is he going to get it?”
For a while, Carter had kept a list of who bought iodine, figuring maybe the sheriff would want to know. One day a friend of her father’s came in. Arthur Kenny, a man she’d looked up to all her life, bought a six-ounce bottle that day and came back for another in two weeks. She gave up the list then.
Now she was ringing up Phil’s iodine and two bags of chips, and he wouldn’t even look at her. “Jenny doing all right?” she said. His wife was sweet, the quiet type, who had her hands full with three boys.
“She’s good,” Phil said. “I’ll tell her you said hello.” The other two were halfway out the door.
After they left, Carter made a list for Baton Rouge: hair net, the new stretch jersey top with the sweetheart neckline, her good jeans. She added the astronaut cap, for old time’s sake. Mostly it had sat on her dresser where she could see it every morning, but today she had put it on and stuffed her hair in a pony tail through the back opening. If she was going to sell it soon, she might as well be wearing it. She’d looked again at Col. Bradley’s signature—more like printing than cursive. At the one-week remembrance of the disaster at the VFW, Carter had watched his eyes brim with tears he wouldn’t let fall. Jenny Lockwood’s youngest boy had walked right up to him and handed him a rabbit’s foot. “In case you go back up there,” Richie said. The colonel thanked him, stroked it once or twice and gave it back. “I might not go again,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get there.”
When Grady came in around ten, Carter couldn’t help complaining about Roy. “I’m going to Baton Rouge,” she said. “He can’t stop me.”
“That’s no way to be. He thinks it’s for your own good.”
Carter had gone to the front window to pull the lever on the gas pump. “I’m leaving Monday. I swear.” Newland Sparks was outside, just sitting in his truck, looking in. She felt the whole bulky mess of his family. “I hate it here. This store, this job, this town.”
“Roy loves you. It counts for something.”
“I know.” She thought of the rumor that Grady’s wife had booted him out. Not everyone lived with someone who loved them. “It’s just that Roy is so backward about some things.”
“Might be he’s afraid.” Grady had come over to the window, and now he could see what she was watching. Newland Sparks had gotten out of his truck and was leaning against it, talking on his phone. Six months ago, he wouldn’t have had cell coverage this far from town. Then Sprint came, and Pizza Hut didn’t. This place never got what it needed most.
Grady put his arm around Carter’s shoulder. She could smell the Tide on his fresh shirt. He was chief of the volunteer fire squad, and when the shuttle came down, he’d become a local hero. He was a good guy, and some other woman was going to make him happy. In high school, though he ran with the college-bound crowd, he’d never let on there was any difference between the two of them. Maybe back then, there wasn’t. Maybe she’d had more possibilities than she thought.
Carter’s
