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father?”
    â€œGrandfather. His father blew his own head off with a hunting rifle out in a field. Very moody, the Rochesters. Isn’t that right, Sherman?”
    â€œHead was all over the place,” Sherman said gleefully. His ankles had shrunk to sticks.
    â€œLike in Jane Eyre ?”
    â€œNever heard of it. That in Iowa?” Her badge identified her as Mary Lou Hogoboom. Her butt wouldn’t fit in coach either.
    â€œCiga-riga-roooo?”
    â€œOff to see the wizaaard.” A large-screen TV hung from the ceiling in one corner. Only the busboy paid attention to
Judy Garland skipping down the yellow brick road with men dressed like animal, tin, and straw.
    â€œI was looking for my mother—Edwina.”
    â€œI know. She and Helen are around here somewhere. All the aides are busy getting the residents off their potty chairs and down for naps right now. I have to smoke Flo and Sherman and me. Come with us and I’ll show you where they might be. Or we’ll come across somebody who knows.”
    The smoker was a glassed-in porch at the back of the building, heated in winter, with screens all around to air it out. There were several windows along the hall here looking down on loading docks and employee parking. There must be a walkout basement below at least this section of the building. Edwina, Cousin Helen, Marshal Del, and Kenny Cowper stood watching a gurney with a covered figure on it get its legs folded so it could slide into a Floyd County Sheriff’s Department van. Great-aunt Annabel, no doubt.

CHAPTER 9

    C OUSIN HELEN, CHARLIE, and Edwina stood in the hall gazing into the smoker, mostly at Kenny Cowper, who squatted next to a woman in a wheelchair. She puffed on a cigarette in one hand and patted him on the head with the other. Even squatting, he was taller than she was in her wheelchair and she had to reach up to pat him.
    â€œThat his mother?” Charlie asked.
    â€œGrandmother,” Helen said with a sniff. “Mother remarried when his dad got run over by a combine. She moved off to Florida. Can you imagine?”
    â€œYes, absolutely,” Charlie’s mom answered. “Definitely absolutely.”
    The residents may have been shuffled off of potty chairs to their beds for naps, but it seemed that televisions were tuned to blasting in every room up and down the hall. Helen explained that it helped the inmates feel less alone. “They don’t really hear it, and it helps the staff with a pretty dreary job, too.”
    Something tugged at Charlie’s jacket sleeve and she looked down to see Gladys and her extended leg and wheelchair. “He’s one of my five boyfriends.” She pointed to Kenny, who turned to look at them all standing there admiring him. He winked at Gladys and turned back to his grandmother. “See? Told you, didn’t I? We talk dirty together. How many boyfriends do you have?”
    â€œNot a one, Gladys. I stand in awe of you.”
    â€œLeast you can stand.”

    â€œEdwina, I keep telling you, Iowa’s not so bad—just your memory of it. Our memories do not improve with age, you know. And you look wonderful, but we both know you aren’t getting any younger.”
    â€œIf Iowa is so wonderful, why do you and Buz go to Tucson for three months during the winter?”
    â€œBecause I have to get away from this and you-know-who or go nuts. It’s not Iowa. And we’ve raised four children. It’s time for us now.”
    There was a growling behind them and everybody but Gladys turned when a pretty young aide in tears shouted, “Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex are at it again. I quit.”
    â€œDisgusting old geezers,” Gladys pronounced the two grinning, skeletal men racing after the young aide in their wheelchairs by paddling with their feet on the floor rather than rolling the wheels with their hands. “I don’t know what they see in her, do you?”

    â€œYour mom