It was not the sort of story that could stay hidden in a small town. People in Florence paid attention to everyone else’s details: a car missing from a driveway in the early morning hours, a skipped shift at work, one less body tucked into the pew on Sunday morning. This was how the people of Florence governed themselves: with the understanding that there was no such thing as a secret.

A line of police cars had shown up in front of the house a little after midnight—not just the local patrol cars that drove lazy circles around the surrounding farmland each day, but a county fleet—and by late morning the rumors had branched into the loose shape of a story. One neighbor had heard the gunshots; a man who’d been walking home from the bar, drunk and fuzzy on the details, swore he saw a body being rolled out of the house and down the walk. Several people noted that the unfamiliar car parked out front had been there all night. And no one who lived in the house had answered when the neighbors came by the next morning, one by one, to ring the bell and peer through the slender gap in the living room curtains.

Over the following week the details began to emerge in fragments, first as whispered approximations of the truth and then, finally, as solid facts about what had happened. But by then a separate mythology had grown around the house, digging in roots that couldn’t be unearthed, snaking their way over the doors and across the windows, blotting out the light and choking the lives inside.

*

Before that night—the night of the Chestnut Street Murder, as it came to be known—Edith’s life had been small and quiet. The child of gregarious parents whose sociability seemed to blunt any glimmer of her own, it often bewildered her that she could be the product of two people so different from herself. They were wild, raging fires; she was a delicate ribbon of smoke rising up between them, barely there at all.

The night had resembled one like any other at first: the house had hummed with the muted energy of everyday life as Edith and her parents had moved through the motions of their nighttime routine. Dinner plates were cleared and dishes were scrubbed and the radio clicked on in the kitchen. The dog was taken for his evening walk; the television sprang to life in the corner of the living room. Outside, the sun slipped behind the trees and the wind picked up, scattering leaves from a neatly raked pile in the front yard.

In the following days, Edith would return again and again to those simple details, to the dull everydayness of them. The mood in the house had changed slowly, as gradual as the rising sliver of moon in the sky and the sun’s sifting descent: a creeping darkness that settled and remained.

Edith had been upstairs with her mother when the man arrived at their house. She was lying back against the satin pillows of her parents’ bed, flipping absently through a magazine and watching her mother in the mirror as she untwirled curlers from her hair. Helen’s beauty regimen was elaborate and precise, a ritual so consistent that Edith sometimes wondered what her mother would look like were she ever to reverse the steps or forget to use one of the lotions that lined her dressing table.

Helen smiled at herself in the mirror as she rubbed a fingerful of cold cream into her cheeks and then blotted them with a thick tissue that smelled of baby powder. She lifted a glass of gin to her lips and took a long sip, then reached for a makeup pencil and began drawing thin wisps of blond where her eyebrows ought to be. Edith touched a finger to her own brows, thick but an invisible white blond like her hair, which hung long and pin-straight down her back. Helen forbade her to cut or dye it, not because of any strict motherly principles, but simply because it was important to her that Edith be beautiful.

Helen tugged at the metal clasps on her slip, lengthening the straps so the lace edging hung loose over her breasts and exposed the blush of her nipples. She made no move to cover herself, perhaps because the gin had begun to go her head, or perhaps because she enjoyed the image reflected back to her: a woman nearing forty whose body still unapologetically invited attention, whose breasts had somehow remained as round and pert as her teenage daughter’s.

She spritzed perfume onto each wrist and along the curve of her neck, then sprayed a puff into the air and leaned into it, eyes closed like she was coming in for a kiss. She uncapped a new lipstick, slightly darker than her usual pink and harsh against her bone-white skin, and the change felt unsettling to Edith. There was a comfort to the way Helen looked, a tidy predictability to Edith’s otherwise mercurial mother.

Helen stood then, reaching for the silk robe that hung on a hook beside her dressing table. She wrapped it around herself and studied her reflection, pulling at the sash around her waist so that the fabric gaped open to reveal the lace neckline of her slip. Then she parted the robe at her thighs, offering a flash of her slender legs, white as the creamy silk of her robe, and pulled a cigarette from a pack on the dressing table.

“Okay, Edie,” she said, lighting the cigarette and blowing a thin line of smoke toward the mirror, her eyes still on her own reflection as she spoke. “Time to split.”

Edith watched her mother posing, fussing with the hem of her robe, fingering the pearl pendant at her chest. “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” Edith asked.

Helen’s eyes flashed to Edith in the mirror. “Aren’t you?” she responded, nonsensically, since Edith was still wearing her school uniform from earlier in the day. Helen took another sip of her drink, draining what was left of it, and ran her fingers through the limp waves of her hair. She had the same straight, cornsilk hair as Edith, though she used an arsenal of sprays and tools to coerce it into the loose curls she admired in the magazines beside her bed. “I told you to scoot,” she said. Her words were beginning to bleed into each other and she seemed unsteady as she slipped her feet into a pair of high heels. “We’re having a friend over for drinks.”

As if on cue, Edith heard the sound of voices downstairs, low and muffled, and the creak of the floorboards in the front hall. Earlier that afternoon Helen had tried without subtlety to get rid of Edith for the evening, offering her money to see a movie, to take her friends out for milkshakes, to play the arcade. But Edith had already seen the movie playing at the Odeon and her friendships were flimsy, conditional—she rarely saw her friends outside of school. And she hated the arcade, her left hand stubbornly dominant despite her teachers’ insistence that she rely on her right; the result seemed to be that neither hand worked properly anymore. Whenever she went to the arcade, she’d lose every game in under a minute, releasing the flippers on the pinball machine at all the wrong moments, knocking Skee balls against the sides of the track and sending them bouncing across the floor.

She preferred to retreat to the attic room on these nights, the only space in the house where her parents allowed her to stay when they entertained their friends. She rarely got to see the friends her parents had over, and when she did, they were never people she knew. Florence was a small town where lives overlapped: Edith’s piano teacher also played organ at the church and waited tables at the diner; her dentist coached the school’s baseball team and played poker with her father on Wednesdays. When Edith went with her mother to the supermarket, the woman ringing up their groceries would hand Helen a list of her latest Mary Kay products and later come over to the house so Helen could sample them. There were very few strangers in Florence, but the friends who came to visit her parents were not people who Edith later spotted in the seats behind her at church or cheering on their kids at a high school football game. They appeared and then disappeared, leaving behind empty glasses coated in the grainy dregs of red wine, cigarette stubs stamped with lipstick, stale air thick with unfamiliar cologne.

After everything happened, a police officer had asked Edith questions about the man who’d come over that night—how had her parents met him, why had he been at the house—but Edith could only stare at the officer blankly, her eyes drifting to the scalloped edges of a gold pendant on his lapel, the starched angles of his shirt cuffs, the way the white buttons of his uniform glinted like opals under the harsh lights of the precinct.

She knew nothing about the man who’d come to their house, nothing about how he’d met her parents or how her parents knew any of the other people they invited over on the weekends. She understood in a distant, shapeless way what happened on these late nights—nights when her parents stood at the stove together, her mother cooking rushed meals with a wine glass in hand, her father tracing his fingers down Helen’s spine like he was playing an instrument, the air tight and charged between them until the doorbell rang and they shooed Edith upstairs. Edith filed these nights away with all the other puzzles of adulthood, wondering only vaguely if other high school parents spent their weekends this way. She’d never witnessed anything beyond a handful of strange moments—her parents slow dancing in the living room paired with other people, her father standing in front of his record collection with a man she’d never seen before, the cigarette between his fingers held to the other man’s lips.

Then the officer had asked for her account of the night’s events, though surely, he knew from the report that Edith had been found in the attic crawlspace, nearly catatonic, her body folded into the impossibly small pocket of darkness behind the stairs. It had been a favorite hiding spot during childhood: an instant victory in games of hide and seek, a respite when the fragile alchemy of her parents’ marriage started to turn poisonous. That night, she’d hidden in the crawlspace for what felt like hours before the police finally found her there, her hands sealed tight over her ears to drown out whatever horrors she’d heard bellowing up from below.

It had been her mother’s screams she’d heard first. She’d been stretched out across the threadbare couch tucked under the eaves in the attic, a book spread across her lap. She’d just begun to drift off—she often slept there on weekend nights, not bothering to sneak back down to her bedroom when she heard the front door slam shut or a car pull away from their house. The sound of her mother screaming had ripped up through the floor, rising above the deep thump of music playing downstairs, pulling Edith from her half-sleep. Then, the sickening crack of gunfire: three bangs in rapid succession followed by a final shot so loud it seemed to thread through her and settle in her bones. She’d dropped to the ground and pried open the door to the crawl space, the gunshots ringing in her ears and arrowing through her like a vein of electricity long after the house had turned still and quiet.

*

Whenever something bad happened in Florence, there was a ritual that people followed, a formalized response to tragedy: weeks of meals that kept well, packaged to stack neatly in a freezer, labeled with simple instructions requiring no thought and no labor; assistance offered wordlessly and invisibly so that trashcans somehow found their way to the curb each week and lawns managed to never creep above two inches.

But when Edith and Helen returned home after everything happened, finally allowed back into their house by police after more than a week spent in a cheap motel two towns over,  people in town kept their distance. They regarded the mother and daughter with a hesitant curiosity, as if the women were wild animals who hadn’t yet revealed whether they were tame or feral. Because theirs wasn’t the sort of tragedy people understood. Helen hadn’t lost her husband to sickness or an accident. Edith’s father hadn’t been killed heroically overseas. They were not bereaved, shadowed instead by a different kind of creature.

At first, Edith tried going back to school, hoping to exist on the social fringes the way she always had. She was shy and pretty and bookish, a combination that had allowed her to fly under the radar with a small circle of similarly unobjectionable girls, not popular but also not targeted. They weren’t the girls who got invited to parties and asked to dances, but they weren’t the ones getting cruel notes shoved into their lockers and rumors written about them in bathroom stalls either.

But back at school, she found that she'd lost the power to disappear: the hum of whispers hung in the air around her like radio static, eyes boring into her with unveiled disdain. Hardly anyone talked to her but they all talked around her, muttering versions of the truth; the most brazen among them announced their accusations loud enough for her to hear, saying that her father was a homo and her mother was a whore, that her parents threw sex parties, that her house was actually a brothel. Even the few friends she had at school ignored her, placing stacks of textbooks on the extra seats at their lunch table on her first day back, staring wordlessly down at their food as Edith stood, confused, waiting for them to make room for her. After a week of sitting alone at lunch, of studiously ignoring the sneers and whispers, Edith arrived at school to find the word SLUT scraped deep into the metal of her locker. She stopped using her locker after that and carried her books from class to class instead, but by then she’d already been branded, as if the ragged edge of a key had scraped the word into her skin as well. In her English class a few days later, Edith found a note folded into a tight square and placed on her desk. When she opened it, she immediately recognized the romantic sweep of her friend Betsy’s penmanship beneath a drawing of a stick figure holding a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. My name is Edie! I live in a whorehouse and you’ll probably get murdered, but want to come for a slumber party? Laughter erupted from the back of the room, and Edith decided she was done with school.

“Good riddance to that place,” Helen said flatly when Edith came home and told her mother that she’d decided to quit and take the high school equivalency exam. At barely fifteen years old, Edith had no idea if this was even allowed—usually the dropouts were older, either pregnant or leaving school to work for their families. She’d never known someone to simply quit.

Helen was stretched out across her bed, still in her nightgown even though it was nearly four in the afternoon. She’d moved the television into her bedroom a few days earlier, and detritus had begun piling up on the unused side of the bed: dirty plates and silverware, empty cartons of cigarettes, unopened mail, a collection of miniature gin bottles that clinked accusingly every time she moved. She pulled a lighter from the pocket of her nightgown and patted the crumpled sheets around her until she found a loose cigarette. Lighting it, she said, “Tommy was the one who cared about all that school stuff anyway.” She exhaled a thread of smoke and turned her attention back to the television.

Helen had begun referring to Edith’s father in the past tense—Tommy handled the finances, Tommy always made sure there was gas in the car, Tommy loved that song—and it made something ache inside Edith, a fist of sadness that squeezed and held on. She’d always felt a little uneasy around her father; Tommy was a big personality, the loudest person in every room, and he and Edith never knew quite what to make of each other. When they were alone together, they lapsed into exaggerated versions of themselves, Edith shrinking mutely away from her father, Tommy as chatty and energetic as a performer in a one-man show. But without him, the house felt hollowed out, sapped of something vital. His absence was itself a presence; the loss was a beast that descended on them, gnawed away at Edith and picked Helen clean.

Helen looked up at Edith, her eyes shadowy and vacant. “You can drive, right?”

Edith blinked. “I...”

“Tommy taught you, didn’t he? Enough to get around?” She seemed suddenly impatient, as if they’d been having a conversation about this and Edith was being uncooperative.

Edith shrugged. “He let me practice in the church parking lot a couple times. I can’t... I haven’t driven on the road or anything.”

Helen tapped her cigarette against the lip of a glass. The water inside had turned a murky gray, thick with ash from the day’s cigarettes. “I just need you to take his car to the lot in town. See what you can get for it.”

Edith hesitated. “Like... try to sell it?”

Helen’s face darkened and she turned her gaze away from Edith. “It’s not like he’s going to need it.” Eyes fixed on the television and her skin bathed in the flickering glow of the screen, she said, “He’s going to rot in that place, Edie. He isn’t ever getting out.”

The words were a knife twisting in Edith’s gut, slicing cleanly through all the whispered reassurances, the empty comforts that had gotten her and Helen through the past few weeks—the lawyers will get him out, the police will realize they’ve got it wrong, he’ll prove it was self-defense, he’s innocent, he’s innocent, he has to be innocent. The words tore through fragile tissue, splintered through Edith’s bones to the bloody truth of it: her father had killed a man and dismantled his own family with four pulls of a trigger. He’d chosen this—chosen it four times—and left them to survive in the wreckage.

*

Nat’s was about a mile down the road, a two-car repair shop shouldered by parking lots full of old cars that shimmered like scales in the sunlight. Banners announcing low prices and cash for parts flapped along the perimeter, and an old marquee sat at the entrance to the lot, faded letters set at odd angles like crooked teeth: WE BUY SED CAR. A sun-bleached sign boasting an Independence Day sale fluttered on a flagpole all year long.

Even though the lot was a straight shot from the house, Edith drove her father’s car at a crawl, afraid to shift into second gear without Tommy there to wrap her small hand in his and gently guide the gearshift into place like a doctor setting a bone. By the time Edith arrived at the used car lot, the steering wheel was slick with sweat, and she could feel the flicker of her heartbeat in her palms as if she were cupping a living thing between them. She had never quite mastered the delicate footwork of driving her father’s car, never learned the graceful maneuver of shifting from one gear to the next.

You just gotta feel it, Edie, her father would say whenever the car stalled out and she asked him to explain to her precisely what it was her feet were supposed to do. It was as if the car were revolting against her, shuddering its resistance—a wild horse bucking under weakness, refusing to be broken by a fearful rider.

Each pedal needs something a little different, same as people, her father had said.

But Edith understood people about as well as she understood cars, stamping down on the pedals and shifting at random and hoping she’d end up in the right gear, say the right thing, laugh at the right moment. Her father did these things without thought or effort; when he entered a room, the space grew around him, lungs expanding to breathe him in. When he slipped back into the driver’s seat to take Edith home after a driving lesson, the car would relax under his touch, suddenly a smooth and elegant thing, a different animal altogether.

Nat was standing out front when Edith arrived, shielding his eyes with the back of his arm and watching, bemused, as the car quaked to a stop between two painted parking spaces. He was the reason Edith was there, a year shy of a driver’s license, with her father’s paperwork in a tidy pile on the passenger’s seat. According to Helen, Nat wouldn’t think twice about buying a jailed man’s car off a fifteen-year-old girl. Nathaniel Evans would steal a ten-dollar watch from a corpse, she’d said, handing Edith Tommy’s key ring. Just keep your distance. He loves a pretty little thing almost as much as he loves easy money. 

Nat was handsome in a dirty, sun-roughened way, his large hands black with grease, fingernails edged in grime. As Edith climbed out of the car, he took her in with a half-smile that felt to her like an appraisal of its own. She tucked her hair behind her ears and clutched the car’s paperwork to her chest.

“Well, would you look at the sunflower that just sprouted up in my parking lot,” he said, clapping his hands together. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He gave her a wide smile and she noticed that his front teeth slanted inward, overlapping like crossed legs, and it made him look playful somehow, boyish. The effect was disarming, and she felt herself smiling back at him.

She tilted her head toward the car. “This is my dad’s car. He’s...” she trailed off, unsure how to explain the tangle of events that had brought her there.

But Nat just nodded, reaching for the pile of papers in her hands. “Got it. Say no more.” He looked over at the car, then squinted down at the papers. “Just tell me if we’re fixing it or selling it or both.”

Edith felt a rush of relief at not having to explain herself or the situation, at not having to make a case for why he should buy a car from a teenager. “It runs fine, I think,” she told him. “We just don’t need it anymore.”

Nat looked up from the paperwork. “Edie, right?” he asked. “Your daddy always talked about you like you were a little kid but look at you all grown.”

“It’s actually Edith now,” she said quickly. She hated the nickname, so cute and peppy, so guileless. Edie felt to her like a pat on the head.

“Roger that. Edith. Guess I haven’t talked to Tommy in a while.” Then something shifted in Nat’s face, a cloud passing briefly in front of the sun. “Look, I...” He hesitated. “I’m real sorry about everything. All that ugliness that’s going on right now with your dad. I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

Edith cleared her throat, unsure what to say. She looked down at the cracked pavement at their feet, at the stubbled weeds pushing their way between the cement seams, incongruous and hopeful.

“Tommy was a real good guy,” Nat continued. “That much I know. Just a good, honest guy.” He winked at her. “And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t compliment anybody who ain’t pretty and single.”

Edith smiled uncertainly. He loves a pretty little thing almost as much as he loves easy money.

“Anyway,” he said, turning back to the car as if suddenly remembering why she was there. He walked over to the passenger’s side and tucked the stack of papers under the windshield wipers. “Why don’t you leave her here so I can take a look and then come by tomorrow after school and we’ll square up.”

Edith paused. “I don’t go to school,” she told him, trying out the words for the first time. She liked the feel of them, crisp and definitive—not the soft, round sounds of a child asking permission.

Nat pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his back pocket. “That so?” he asked, shaking a cigarette loose. “How’d that come to be?” A lighter hissed between his fingers as he lit the cigarette and exhaled a clean line of smoke.

“I want to get a job now that my dad’s gone.” It was only a half-formed thought, an idea that had just begun to edge its way in, but saying it to Nat made it feel real, factual.

He nodded, and Edith wondered what other realities she could speak into existence. She looked at the cigarette pinched between his fingers. “Can I have one of those?” she asked. She’d smoked a handful of times before and had never liked it much. It made her feel lightheaded and a little sick, her chest tight as a fist. But every part of her felt different now, as if over the past few weeks everything inside her had been rearranged: stretches of hollow bone set in places that used to be tender, nerves nested deep, heart replaced by another muscle, a lump of something harder.

“I quit school around your age,” Nat said, taking out the pack and shaking it against his palm. “My family was a fuckin’ mess, pardon my French. I just wanted to be out on my own the first chance I got.” He pulled out another cigarette, but instead of handing it to her, he put it into his own mouth and lit it with the one he’d been smoking. Then he held it out, the burning end pointed away from her, and she took it between her lips. The act felt intimate, as if they were sharing in some sacred ritual, and he held her gaze until she looked away.

“So,” Nat said. “You talk to your daddy since all this happened?”

The question startled Edith, and she took a hard pull on her cigarette. She’d once heard her father say that the best way to get to know someone was to have a smoke with them. People open up when they have something in common and something to do, he’d said. And it helps if they don’t even have to look at each other.

“I’ve seen him a few times,” she said. “I didn’t go the last time my mom visited though. I just couldn’t go back in there.” It was true that talking felt easier with something in her hand, the clouds of smoke between them a reason to look the other direction.

Nat studied her for a moment. “I know it must be hard seeing him like that. Probably feels like looking at a stranger.”

Edith nodded. “I can’t stand seeing him there.” The image of her father flashed through her mind, pale and diminished even though he’d been in for less than a month, his eyes dark, hollowed out. He’d seemed defeated, as if he already knew exactly how all of this was going to go. “I don’t think they’re gonna release him,” she said, her mother’s voice like a ringing in her ear, dull but persistent. He’s going to rot in that place, Edie.

“I’m real sorry to hear that, Edith.” Nat looked straight at her, and she noticed that in the fading sunlight his eyes were a loose, honeyed color, brown veined in gold. Kind and gentle, but with something else there too. Nathaniel Evans would steal a ten-dollar watch from a corpse. She didn’t respond, so he went on. “I know it’s complicated, figuring out how to feel about him after all this. Like mourning someone who’s still alive.” He shrugged. “Me, I just forced myself to forget all of them. My folks, my brothers. Everybody I knew before I left home.”

“How did you do that?” Edith asked. She imagined what it would be like to try and forget, to scrub clean the thought of her father, hands cuffed together as if in prayer. Her mother in bed, broken and unmoored. Nights when their house had swirled with smoke and music and she’d been warned not to come down from the attic. Sneers and rumors, SLUT carved into her locker. The quiet simmer of shame.

“I just pushed them out of my mind, I guess,” Nat said. “Pretended they weren’t out there in the world.” Nat dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot, then kicked it away. “God’s honest truth, it’s what I had to do with my wife and kid too.”

“You’re married?” Edith asked, surprised. Her memories of what she knew about Nat were blurry, the sort of shapeless knowledge that came from hearing slivers of other people’s conversations. She didn’t remember him having a family.

“I was. My wife left with our kid years ago, and that was that. She ran off, and six months later I got served with papers.” He shrugged, but his expression was dark. “I don’t even know how old my son would be. Can’t let myself do that math. Once they were gone, I... well, I had to sorta kill them in my mind. Sounds messed up, but it is what it is. Easier than knowing they’re out there somewhere, living their lives without me.”

Edith didn’t know how to respond. She’d never thought of absence as a kind of death before, forgetting as a way to kill an entire existence. It seemed both impossible and startlingly simple: that she could just refuse to see her father again and then grieve him as if he were gone, cut his life off at the root instead of watching it wither away. If she wanted to, she could drive his car in the opposite direction of her house and just keep driving. Leave her mother forever suspended in the dark of the bedroom, snuff out the lives of everyone she’d ever known. Light this town on fire by leaving it all behind.