The woman introduced herself as Sally Renfrew and claimed that the chalcedony vein below Andrew Jackson Prep—her son Stan’s school—finally “ored out.” Sally Renfrew said that she had run a fake arrowhead business for fifteen years; that she now understood Malthaus’s notion of supply and demand; that it wasn’t easy being a single mother anywhere on the planet but seemed particularly difficult off Scenic Highway 11, some twenty miles from at least an Auto Zone, Staples, public library, grocery store chain, GNC, or hardware store that specialized in durable chisels; that she couldn’t return what flat rocks she’d already slowly stolen (and I never noticed, seeing as I’d allowed the family river rock business to fail while I hopelessly worked on my low-residency master’s degree in Southern culture studies) over the past month; that she was worried miserably that her boy wasn’t going to follow through with college once he graduated from high school in the next year. She rattled on.
