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you.”
    “No.”
    “Then tell me the truth. Are you going to be sad when I leave?”
    “Tonight?”
    “I mean when I leave. Will you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you going to handle that okay?”
    “Hell, Sally. I’d never have expected you in the first place. I surely never expected you to stay. You’re young and you’re too good and too smart for this little town. You’ve got all sorts of places to go. I’m happy taking you day to day.”
    “Then you know what?”
    She shifted slightly away from him.
    “What.”
    She climbed over and straddled him, sunk him into her slowly and then deep and began to gently rock.
    “That’s what,” she said.

Chapter Seven
    Monday, August 4
Tim
     
    Tim crossed the Andover Post Office parking lot, opened the door and stepped into the blast of air conditioning and used his key on the box. The package from Sammy was there just as he’d said it would be along with a handful of junk mail. He took it all out and locked it again and walked out the door into the sun. Simple as that. Sammy worked the mailroom for the First National Bank of Irvington so the hash was packaged like a box of checks, which for a pound of the stuff was the perfect size.
    He dumped the junk mail in the basket at the curb and got into the car he’d borrowed from his boss at Center Hardware where his father had his shop. Gene was a pretty nice guy. Gave him an entire hour for lunch which was just what he needed to drive to Andover and back and still stop by his house for a few minutes in order to drop the hash. He put the box in the cluttered glove compartment and drove back to Sparta, careful to obey all the lights and traffic signs and stay within the speed limit.
    His father’s battered truck was parked in front of the hardware store exactly as he’d thought it would be. His father almost always brown-bagged his lunch and he’d done so today. His mother’s old Plymouth was parked in front of the A&P where she worked as cashier. He stopped at the light and went on.
    On his lawn the grass needed cutting. The shrubs were looking scraggly and needed watering. The pavement was cracked where the cement met the brick-and-mortar steps and there was a half-piece of brick missing out of the bottom one. You’d have thought his father, who was supposed to be so all-around handy, would have gotten around to both these things long ago.
    He used his key in the door and smelled last night’s ham and cabbage wafting toward him from the kitchen. He went upstairs to his room, sat down on the bed under the poster of John Lennon in his granny glasses—a photo Ray despised—and opened the package. He had plenty of time. He needed to check the weight. He got the scale out of his dresser and took the two layers of foil off the tarry brown brick of hash and placed the brick on the scale and saw that the weight was fine.
    He went to the bathroom and got one of his father’s double-edged Gillettes out of the medicine cabinet. This was the part that always got to him, always made him excited, the part that always scared him. Not the pickup and the drive but this. Getting the razor blade. Unwrapping it. Going back to his room.
    It was almost sexy.
    If Ray knew he’d absolutely shit. It was one thing to cut a dime bag or two out of a pound of grass for his own use. But hash was harder to come by these days and Ray’s personal favorite. So hash was another thing entirely.
    He sat down on the bed again, set an old dog-eared copy of National Geographic on his lap and began to shave the sides of the brick, just the thinnest of cuts on all four sides. Ray would never miss it. He never checked the weight. Either he trusted Tim as much as he said he did or figured that Tim would never dare to cross him.
    But he’d been shaving the stuff for months now. What was the point of muling for Ray, doing pickups of both grass and hash, handling the risky stuff, if you couldn’t take a bit off the top? His cut of the profits was good but it