Mangrove announced that Hadley Crump was going to die, Lucinda walked into the bedroom stirring a cup of chamomile with her finger and smiling as though it was Christmas. Mama had rushed off to the kitchen to fix up a pair of healing socks for his feet, leaving Hadley all alone. Lucinda bumped the door shut with her hip and poked that tea-stirring finger in his mouth as though she meant to feed him the whole cup one lick at a time. “I brought you something,” she said, and she wasn’t talking about tea. Hadley followed her gaze to the little strip of violet paper on the rim of the saucer. He didn’t let himself look at it until her daddy called her off to work on funeral plans. I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck . . . About the time Hadley got to the hot breath part, his fingers let loose, and the words loop-the-looped away with all the devilish momentum of a broken promise. Had he not been dying at that particular moment, Mama would have spotted the purple scrap on the floor and wondered why Lucinda Browning was writing notes to her seventeen-year-old son.
