Jesse

Mama had a shotgun in the closet, a single-shot break-action that had been Pearl's.

I'd never fired it, but I'd grown up around guns, and I knew how it worked.

I installed the floodlight on the front of the house, aimed at the yard.

I installed the deadbolt.

I loaded the shotgun and leaned it against the wall by the front door.

Mama watched me do all of this without comment.

When I was done, she said, you're your great-grandmother's child.

I didn't know if that was a compliment or a warning, maybe both.

Saturday night, I salted the thresholds.

Mama opened the Bible.

We sat together in the living room until 9.30, and then she went to bed, and I lay on the couch in the dark with the shotgun on the floor beside me.

I want to say that I was brave.

I want to say that the anger from the night before was still burning and I was ready.

But the truth is, I was terrified.

The anger had been real, but it had been adrenaline, and adrenaline fades.

What was left was a 23-year-old woman lying on a couch in a hollow in West Virginia with a shotgun she'd never fired, waiting for something she couldn't explain to come back to a house.

She couldn't leave because her grandmother was asleep in the next room.

It came at 1045.

Earlier than the previous nights, the floodlight tripped first.

The yard went from dark to bright white in an instant.