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“Did the girl die?”

“No.”

“She got all right?”

“After a while, yes. She’s all right now.”

Willy digested this silently. Faint music came from an anchored sailboat.

Graham could leave things out for Willy, but he couldn’t help seeing them again himself.

He left out Mrs. Hobbs on the landing clutching at him, stabbed so many times. Seeing she was gone, hearing the screaming from the apartment, prying the slick red fingers off and cracking his shoulder before the door gave in. Hobbs holding his own daughter, busy cutting her neck when he could get to it, her struggling with her chin tucked down, the .38 knocking chunks out of him and he still cutting and he wouldn’t go down. Hobbs sitting on the floor crying and the girl rasping. Holding her down and seeing Hobbs had gotten through the windpipe, but not the arteries. The daughter looked at him with wide glazed eyes and at her father sitting on the floor crying “See? See?” until he fell over dead.

That was where Graham lost his faith in .38’s.

“Willy, the business with Hobbs, it bothered me a lot. You know, I kept it on my mind and I saw it over and over. I got so I couldn’t think about much else. I kept thinking there must be some way I could have handled it better. And then I quit feeling anything. I couldn’t eat and I stopped talking to anybody. I got really depressed. So a doctor asked me to go into the hospital, and I did. After a while I got some distance on it. The girl that got hurt in Hobbs’s apartment came to see me. She was okay and we talked a lot. Finally I put it aside and went back to work.”

“Killing somebody, even if you have to do it, it feels that bad?”

“Willy, it’s one of the ugliest things in the world.”

“Say, I’m going in the kitchen for a minute. You want something, a Coke?” Willy liked to bring Graham things, but he always made it a casual adjunct to something he was going to do anyway. No special trip or anything.

“Sure, a Coke.”

“Mom ought to come out and look at the lights.”

Late in the night Graham and Molly sat in the back-porch swing. Light rain fell and the boat lights cast grainy halos on the mist. The breeze off the bay raised goose bumps on their arms.

“This could take a while, couldn’t it?” Molly said.

“I hope it won’t, but it might.”

“Will, Evelyn said she could keep the shop for this week and four days next week. But I’ve got to go back to Marathon, at least for a day or two when my buyers come. I could stay with Evelyn and Sam. I should go to market in Atlanta myself. I need to be ready for September.”

“Does Evelyn know where you are?”

“I just told her Washington.”

“Good.”

“It’s hard to have anything, isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”

“Slick as hell.”

“We’ll be back in Sugarloaf, won’t we?”

“Yes we will.”

“Don’t get in a hurry and hang it out too far. You won’t do that?”

“No.”

“Are you going back early?”

He had talked to Crawford half an hour on the phone.

“A little before lunch. If you’re going to Marathon at all, there’s something we need to tend to in the morning. Willy can fish.”