When you don’t know who to blame, you blame yourself for not being there to see it coming.

It’s 2005: you’re new-twenty and too late. Bobbi calls you to break the news, her voice muddy with gravity, and she tells you the man responsible is out of reach before she can correct and tell you what’s happened. You race the clock toward the only home you’ve ever known so you can sit and pray and absorb well-meaning shoulder touches while she holds on for another half day. It’s early afternoon and the hottest day of the year when she passes, and nobody ever told you it could be this way, that people can be taken away from you in the safety of the light and the heat.

You don’t remember what comes next.

What you do remember is driving out of town with Deana and Bobbi crammed onto the bench seat of your old beater Chevy sometime after sundown. What you remember is the way you didn’t know what to say, so you didn’t say anything, just listened to an old Randy Travis cassette that’d been in the tape deck since before you knew how to drive. You remember pulling off the county road where Kyle Lawson’s daddy has lived on almost a thousand acres since Way Back When and the same truck you saw last Christmas parked crooked on the grass. What you remember is the way you didn’t hesitate when your truck lurched into Park, and the way the humidity wound through the hair on your arms like window breath.

The windows in the house are dark, and you half-remember Bobbi telling you that Mr. Lawson left for Louisville to be with his sister after hearing about Kyle’s arrest. You doubt his being home would have mattered to you much either way. You try each of the doors, while Bobbi climbs into the bed of the Chevy. When none of them are unlocked, you wrap your arm in the sleeve of the hoodie and throw your weight at the driver’s side window. The first hit nearly doubles you, sends you home a half-cocked vigilante with a busted shoulder, but you try again, hit the window with all your force, and the sound of the window shattering echoes across the open sky.

Flashlight clutched in your fist, you search the car for mementos she’d left behind and tuck them into your pockets. Where he’s going, he doesn’t need them anyway, wouldn’t deserve them even if he did. A faded picture of her smiling face hangs from a chain on the rearview mirror, entombed in cheap Lucite with “Joy” engraved into the bottom corner. An old grocery list, half-finished (Steel wool. ¾ in. nails. Birthday card for SJ…20!!!) pokes out from an ash tray filled with nickels and dimes, sticky from a soda spill, and you tuck it away like something fragile. But overall, the traces of her are scarce, and soon they’re gone from the truck altogether. You turn around, ready to give the signal to your sisters that you’re ready to proceed, but they’re not about to wait for your permission. Bobbi stands protectively over Deana, leans on a sledgehammer and coaches the younger St. James on where to thrust the hunting knife in her fist into the back tire.

Nah, not the top. Too much reinforcement. Get the sidewall, bring it down hard and fast. Careful now, don’t point that thing anywhere you don’t plan to stick it.

You watch as the air leaks and the tire sags like a slumped shoulder. Bobbi claps Deana on the shoulder and takes the hammer in her hands. Lithely, she pads around to the passenger’s side of the truck, winds up, and blows out the window in a single swing. She dents the body, haphazard morse code of grunt and breath and metal on metal. Hand over hand, she climbs into the truck bed, windmills her arms when the other back tire’s sudden deflation throws her off balance, and shatters the back window with the same brutal force. Her hands are shaking when she takes yours to steady herself jumping back onto the grass, and she hands you the hammer.

You don’t remember what comes next.

What you do remember is Bobbi and Deana pulling you from the hood of the truck, blistered glass bowed and ruined in the cab. What you remember is going back a second time for the headlights. What you remember is the sting of the sweat in your eyes, wrapping your bloodied knuckles in your sweatshirt and a voice—your voice, it must have been—echoed in the grass and dark like a wounded animal. What you remember is burn in hell, you son of a bitch, but you don’t remember whether you said it out loud that time, or kept it in like you will in the days to come. What you remember is a driving back toward town with your sisters in silence and seeing something glowing in the rearview. Tomorrow, someone in town will tell you that Kyle Lawson’s truck was found destroyed, the cab burned out, but you don’t remember that either. No one asks questions and the truck is towed from the yard without another word said about it.

Tomorrow, Los Angeles will find out what’s happened and won’t wait long enough to ask whether you need to take some time off. Tomorrow, you’ll tell them no, but mean yes, and keep pushing forward. Tomorrow, you, your family, your entire community will begin mourning on a global stage when reporters who have never heard of this place show up and mark it tragedy.

Tomorrow, you’ll be one day closer to spending the next year so high you can’t feel your face, so angry you hate to look at it anyway.

But none of that matters. It’s not about you, not really.

The next morning, you and your sisters heat up meals the neighbors brought to the house in the night. You say your prayers in front of plates of reheated biscuits and sausage gravy, and you clean your plates even though you’re not hungry. You help your mama before she can ask, but mostly what is left of your family drifts from room to room like ghosts.

Waiting.