Somehow it always comes back to that.There I was again, indebted to him for pulling my ass out of the sling I’d custom-made to hold it. He wouldn’t tell me how much he was out on my account, but I figured it was close to a thousand bucks.Henry wasn’t the only one I owed. Thanks to me, Laura didn’t get her house in town, her indoor toilet and grass lawn. Instead she got another year of stink and muck. She never reproached me for it, though, never even raised an eyebrow at me. She welcomed me home as sweetly as if I were returning from church and not the county jail. A lot of women act sweet, but with most of them that’s all it is, an act they learn young and hone to perfection by the time they’re twenty-one. My sisters were both masters of the craft, but Laura was something else altogether. She was sweet to the core.Then there was Dottie Tipton. I snuck into Greenville to see her a week after the accident. (That’s how everybody except my father referred to it—“the accident.”
