The Boy in the Back Seat

Chapter One: Thirty-One a Year

There were nine people at Vernon Sladek's graveside, and two of them worked for Wendell Vickery.

Dell counted anyway. He always counted. It was a habit he'd picked up from his father, who used to say a man could read a whole life in the turnout, and Dell had come to believe it was truer than most things Buck Vickery ever said. Nine. Vernon had been ninety-one and had outlived his wife, both his brothers, his only son, and the town he was born in. The nine were the neighbor who plowed his drive, the neighbor's wife, three women from the Lutheran altar guild, Pastor Dwight Prohaska, a great-niece who had driven up from Hastings and kept checking her phone, and then Dell and Wesley Hoyt.

Wesley stood back by the pickup with his ball cap in his hands, seventeen years of sun on his forearms and a smear of grass on the knee of his jeans. He'd mowed the cemetery that morning, which in the third summer of the drought meant he'd driven the mower over gray stubble and raised a dust cloud you could see from the highway.

Pastor Prohaska read the committal. The wind out of the southwest took most of it away east. When it was done, the altar guild women each touched the casket the way you'd touch a sleeping baby, and the great-niece said, "He was a sweet old guy," and got in her car.

Dell waited until every vehicle had cleared the gate before he nodded at Wesley, and Wesley went and got the shovel out of the truck bed.

"You don't have to do that part," Dell said. "Hutchins is coming with the skid loader at four."

"I know." Wesley put the blade in anyway and turned over a little of the pile. "Feels wrong to leave him open."

That was Wesley Hoyt exactly. Sweet and adrift and always half a step from doing something decent for no reason. Dell watched him work for a minute, then walked out to the east fence where the one elm stood, and he emptied the two five-gallon buckets he kept in the back of the van around its roots. It was the only living thing in Sumner Flats that Dell watered. He'd told himself it was because the tree had been planted the year the cemetery was platted, 1889, and it was the last of nine. Nine again. The real reason was that watering it took four minutes and during those four minutes there was nothing else he was supposed to be doing.

"Mr. Vickery." Wesley had come up behind him. "Charlie says you got her a name tag."

"I got her a name tag."

"She's gonna be a college kid." He said it with real wonder, like Dell had reported a change in the weather of the planet. "You think she'll come back?"

Dell put the empty buckets in the van. "I think she should go first and worry about the rest later."

"Yeah," Wesley said, and looked out at the cracked white bowl of Cottonwood Lake, a mile off, shimmering with heat where there ought to have been water. "Yeah, that's what I figure too."

---

The Vickery place stood at the corner of Nye and Third, brick, built in 1911 as a doctor's house and converted in 1946 by Dell's grandfather, who had come home from the Pacific with a taste for order and a distrust of banks. The bank part hadn't held. Everything else about the building had: the wide oak stairs, the double front doors that a casket could go through without turning, the black canopy over the side drive that had said VICKERY in gold since before Dell was born, and which he repainted every four years himself because a sign company wanted eleven hundred dollars to do it.

He pulled the van under the canopy at three-forty and went in through the side.

The front room, which had been the visitation parlor when there were enough people to fill it, was full of flowers. Not real ones, mostly—silk arrangements in five-gallon buckets, ribbon spools, foam wreath forms, and a cooler along the north wall humming hard enough to be heard through the wall in Dell's office. Vickery Flowers had been Marlene's for eleven years, ever since she'd come back from Grand Island after her second divorce and told Dell she'd take the front room and he could take it out of her half of nothing.

Marlene was at the worktable wiring carnations onto a standing spray.

"You went out there with the good tie," she said, without looking up.

"It was Vernon Sladek."

"Nine people?"

"Nine."

"Huh." She snipped a wire. "His sister-in-law ordered the spray and then called back to ask if she could pay half now. I said yes because I'm an idiot." She held the spray out at arm's length, tipped her head. Marlene was forty-one, two years older than Dell, and had their mother's hands and their father's chin and a mouth that only ever seemed to rest in one shape. "Arlen Dowd came by looking for you."

Dell stopped in the doorway. "Came by, or called."

"Came by. In person. Wearing that jacket." She looked at him then. "When a banker walks two blocks in ninety-nine degrees, Dell, that's a message."

"I know what it is."

"Do you."

"Marlene."

She went back to the carnations. "There's a third letter on your desk from those Omaha people. I didn't open it. I wanted to."

---

He opened it standing up, which was how he opened everything.

Heartland Memorial Group. A man named Doug Ternes, Director of Acquisitions, who wrote the way people write when they've had a paragraph workshopped by a lawyer. They admired the Vickery legacy. They wished to preserve the Vickery name in the community. They were prepared to discuss a purchase of the real property, the equipment, the goodwill, and the pre-need trust accounts, and to offer Mr. Vickery a salaried position as managing director.

Salaried. Dell read that word twice.

He put the letter in the drawer with the other two, and got out the ledger instead.

The ledger was a green cloth-bound book, the eighth in a series that went back to 1946, and in it Dell recorded, in pencil, every service the firm performed: the name, the date, the age, and in a narrow column at the right, what had actually been collected. Thirty-one a year, on average, over the last five years. It was a strange number to know about yourself. Thirty-one names a year, and about a third of them paid in full, and about a third paid something, and about a third were people like Vernon Sladek's sister-in-law who would send forty dollars a month for two years and then stop sending it and cross the street when they saw him at the pancake feed.

He wrote SLADEK, VERNON J. — 91 — 6/14, and in the right-hand column he wrote a question mark.

Down the hall the crematory hummed. Hector Salas came in from the prep room drying his hands on a paper towel, sixty-eight years old, small, gray at the temples, in the white shirt he wore buttoned to the throat no matter the weather.

"Nine?" Hector said.

"Nine."

"When my father died in Scottsbluff, there were two hundred people. He ran a tire shop." Hector shrugged. "Tires, you see everybody twice a year."

"You want a coffee?"

"It's ninety-nine degrees."

"That's not what I asked."

Hector smiled a little and got two cups.

They drank it standing in the hallway between the office and the prep room, which was where the two of them had had ten thousand conversations over sixteen years, because sitting down in each other's rooms had never occurred to either of them. Hector had come to work for Buck Vickery in 1981 as a twenty-five-year-old with a mortuary science certificate from Kansas City and no other offers in three states, and he had washed the cars and mowed the graves and learned the rest, and now he was the best embalmer within a hundred and forty miles and everyone from Ogallala to Broken Bow knew it, and he made forty-one thousand dollars a year.

"Your father wants the fan turned," Hector said.

"Turned which way?"

"He didn't say which way. He said turned."

Dell went up.

---

The upstairs apartment was five rooms and a bath, and it smelled the way it had smelled for five years: laundry soap, ointment, the plastic of the hospital bed, and under all of it the faint sweetness of the peppermints Buck sucked on because his mouth was always dry.

Buck Vickery sat in the wheelchair by the window with the blanket over his knees despite the heat, because the right side of him didn't hold temperature the way the left did. Seventy-four. Half his face slack from the stroke, the left eye bright as a bird's and the right one lower and wetter. His hair was still thick, still combed, because Dell combed it.

"Hey," Dell said. "You want the fan the other way?"

Buck's good hand came up off the armrest and turned over, palm up, which meant yes, or meant go on, or meant one of the seven or eight things it meant.

Dell turned the fan.

"Guh," Buck said. It was a soft sound, the one that came closest to please or thank you. His speech had come back partway in the first year and then stopped coming back. Whole sentences lived in him and arrived at the door of his mouth in pieces.

"Sladek today," Dell said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Nine people. Prohaska went long."

Buck made a noise in his chest that was almost a laugh.

"Charlie's got her name tag for orientation. She's going to Lincoln the second week of August, and I don't know how I'm paying the rest of it, and Arlen walked over here in the heat today, which means he's going to call the crematory note." Dell said it all in the same flat, easy tone he'd have used to report the score of a ball game, because this was the one room in the world where he could say true things out loud. The stroke had taken his father's speech and given Dell a confessional. He was aware of the arithmetic of that and did not like himself much for it.

Buck watched him with the bright eye.

"I'm going to have to talk to the Omaha people," Dell said.

The good hand closed on the blanket. Buck's jaw worked. "Nuh," he said. "Nuh. Nuh."

"I know."

"Nuh."

"I know, Dad." Dell stood up and smoothed the blanket where his father had knotted it. "I've got to go pull the van in."

---

Charlotte Vickery was on the back steps in a tank top with a library book on hydrogeology open on her knees and a bottle of pop sweating beside her. Seventeen, brown-armed, her hair up in a knot with a pencil through it, the same long straight back her aunt had and, though nobody living would have said so out loud, her grandmother's exact way of sitting.

"Nine people," she said.

"Does the whole town know before I get home?"

"Wesley texted me." She turned a page. "Dad. Ask me the recharge rate of the Ogallala Aquifer."

"What's the recharge rate of the Ogallala Aquifer?"

"Basically nothing. Half an inch a year in most of the state. We're pumping it at fifty times that." She looked out over the yard, the dead grass, the horizon that went nowhere. "Everybody around here talks about the drought like it's weather. It's not weather. Weather comes back."

"You going to tell them that in Lincoln?"

"I'm going to tell everybody that everywhere, forever," she said. "Fifty-eight days."

Dell sat down on the step below her. She smelled like sunscreen. He thought about the number twenty-two thousand, which was what the university's own estimate said a year of living was going to cost above her scholarship, and about the number in the account, which was four hundred and ten dollars, and about the number Arlen Dowd would say tomorrow.

"Fifty-eight days," he said. "Okay."

His phone went off in his shirt pocket at eight minutes after five. He knew before he looked at it that it was the sheriff, because the sheriff was the only person in the county who called instead of texting, and because it was that kind of day.

"Vickery," he said.

Yvonne Rasco's voice came at him flat and strange, like she was reading something she didn't understand.

"Dell," she said, "I need the van out at the lake."