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“What happened back there?”

“Nothing.” I shake my head, look away, swallow, tremble. “The gun went off by accident. It's done. Let me drive.”

“No,” he says. “Something went wrong. You totally freaked out. I could see your neck go red. Are you okay?”

“I just killed somebody. My fourth murder today. Of course I'm not okay!” I shout.

He wants to say something, but he doesn't. He just stares at me like he's interrogating me with his eyes, but also like he's hugging me with his eyes. It reminds me of when I was six and I tried to steal a flying monkey figurine from the drugstore and my mom made me take it back in. She wasn't mad at me, but the disappointment and tragic love in her eyes was heavier than the house that landed on the Wicked Witch. Now Wyatt's eyes are squeezing me like that too.

I lick my lips and reach back to tug my hair out from its ratty half ponytail. I don't want him watching my neck so closely.

“He knew my name,” I say quietly. “He said he knew me.”

“Did you ask him how?”

“He knew my dad's name too. I haven't seen my dad since I was four.” I can't help sniffling. “He . . . Ashley Cannon has my eyes. Or I have his. And the same dimple.”

“And you just shot him and ran off? Without asking him about your dad or why he knew you?” Wyatt looks down, shakes his head. “You don't seem like a coward.”

Under my hair, my neck goes from red to maroon. I can feel the rage creeping up, itching. I hold up the gun, ignoring the way it quivers in my hand.

“I'm not a coward. I'm a shitty assassin with slippery hands. And you don't want to be calling me names right now,” I say, reedy and desperate.

Wyatt looks at me, looks at the gun, and then turns back to look at Ashley Cannon, who's strewn out in his own doorway. A big, bear-shaped black Lab is nuzzling his side, and the dog's upset whining carries across the still space of the yard. This is the longest I've stayed behind after an assignment, and I'm a little surprised that none of the neighbors have come outside to see what all the fuss is about.

It's the dog that finally changes my mind. The way that big, thick tail slowly waves back and forth and the way those floppy black ears are laid back against its square head. When the dog falls to its belly and crawls forward to lick the dead man's face, I mutter, “Shit,” and get out of the truck. That damn dog's devotion cuts me to the
heart more sharply than Eloise Framingham's son with his stupid gun and stupider girlfriend.

Wyatt hops out without a word and follows me back up the sidewalk, bare feet dodging around a broken beer bottle. It seems like a longer walk than it did when I was on my way to kill a stranger, like I'm crossing continents or tectonic plates as they heave and sway. My tummy feels a bit like that too, like it's falling apart into bits and pieces. Wyatt suddenly spins around and jogs back to the truck, and I have one moment of heart-wrenching terror as I think he's going to abandon me here. Instead, he just pulls the keys out and hurries back to my side, and I feel small and fragile in his shadow. And I realize I'm glad that he's there.

The dog looks up at us, whining. It's a girl—
she's
a girl. Her tail thumps against the door frame, her eyes trusting and the color of Hershey's syrup. She belly-crawls to me and licks my hand like she's asking for help, and my heart wrenches in my chest.

“Good girl,” I say. I pull her frayed camo collar around and see that her name is Matilda.

“He's gone.” Wyatt stands up from where he was squatting by Ashley Cannon.

“I know,” I say. “He was gone pretty quick.”

I leave out the part about how I watched the second Ashley Cannon's eyes went dull, drawn in by the fact that they're the same cloudy blue as my own.

“Hello?” Wyatt calls, careful not to stick his head too far in the door. He might be rich, but I guess he knows that trespassers around here don't get prosecuted. They get shot.

No one answers. Matilda whines. I realize that I've been stroking her head as my unfocused eyes linger on the red splotch on Ashley's NASCAR shirt. I clear my throat and pull my hand away, but when she whines again, I put my hand right back where it was. Her head is like a cross between a seal and a shoe box, and I don't want to stop stroking her between her silky ears until the world goes right again.

“I don't think anyone's home,” Wyatt says. “Do you want to go in? Look around? Maybe y'all are related or something.”

I put a numb foot through the door and smell barbecue potato chips. Somewhere farther back, Garth Brooks is playing.

“I guess we have to,” I say.

I am terrified to set foot in the dead man's house, but I don't want Wyatt to think I'm a coward, either. I don't want him to think any less of me than he already does. Underneath that false bravado, the sullen, bruised child in me wants to know why the hell this guy knew my name and my dad's name. I need to know if he still knows my dad. Most of all, I need to know if we're related, because he's as familiar as a dream I've forgotten, as a face smudged in a mirror.

I remember my daddy like some kids remember meeting Mickey Mouse on vacation—larger than life, magical, perfect. My mom never talked about him, but I imagined him in Vegas, or out
in Arizona. Someplace wild, like he'd just gone into the jungle and become a vagrant or a wizard or a crazy shaman.

I never let myself think about the fact that even crazy shamans can send letters or e-mails, every now and then.

Shaking, I step over Ashley Cannon onto carpet the color of nicotine-stained fingers. Matilda doesn't budge from my heels, her tail wagging side to side lazily and her head held low. Wyatt dodges the fruit basket and bends down to pull the body inside, grunting as he settles it against the wall. I close the door and turn the dead bolt. Already I am aware that Wyatt is doing the hard work for me, but I can't think of a way to thank him that doesn't sound monstrous.

Scanning the room, I take in the faded paintings of landscapes, the plaid couch with a distinctly butt-shaped dent in the middle, the huge flat-screen TV that doesn't fit with the other, older, broken-­down furnishings. A football game is on but muted, a bag of barbecue chips open on the dinged-up Goodwill coffee table. Garth continues his sad bastard wailing from a back room. A row of dusty pictures staggers across the mantel in cheap plastic frames, and they draw me over like a bass on the line.

The first two are old, two boys and a girl eating Popsicles in threadbare bathing suits and then posing by a lake with a wolfish older man a few years later, sometime in the seventies, maybe. The girl looks a little like me—rangy, with crooked bangs hacked into
dark hair and a ponytail. At first I think the next picture actually is her, but then I notice that it's much more recent.

And it's me.

Ashley Cannon has my ninth-grade school photograph on his mantel, horrible sweater, braces, and all.

I lurch forward to pull that picture down. My fingertips leave streaks through the dust, and the frame feels heavier than it should. With Wyatt standing over my shoulder, I turn it over and pry the metal lever open. Photos burst out, five more school pictures hiding behind this one. They're not from every year, more like every three years since kindergarten. On the back of each one, unfamiliar handwriting in blue ballpoint pen spells out my nickname and the year.

Patsy. Patsy. Patsy.

My mom named me Patricia. My dad nicknamed me Patsy, and I wouldn't answer to anything else, even after he left.

“You were cute when you were little,” Wyatt says quietly, and I am suddenly overcome with shyness about the differently flawed, younger versions of me laid out for him to see. I force them all back into the frame and twist the lever shut. When I put the frame back in the dust-marked place where it lives, I see the one on the other side of it, and my hands stop, fists clenched, inches away from it.

It shows three men in camo and neon-orange hats. They're smiling, arms around one another's shoulders, behind an ­impressive
buck. One is Ashley Cannon, maybe five years younger than he is today. One is the older guy from the photo with the kids, gray and grizzled but broad as a bear. The third is a face I only remember from dreams. My heart lurches and the world goes sideways as I realize that I'm looking at my dad for the first time in thirteen years. My mom didn't save a single picture of him after he walked out on us. In the photo, my dad is smiling, older than I remember him and with a dark beard that matches the men who must be his brother and father. When I wrench the smooth photo paper out of the frame, the date tells me it was taken six months ago.

My mom used to call him Jack when they were together, but I've always wondered what my dad's last name was. Now I know.
Cannon
.

I didn't think about it at all for the longest time, that my mom and I shared the same last name as her parents and sister. Not until I filled out my driver's license forms last year did it become a problem, a puzzle. My mom turned her face to the rain-streaked window of the DMV and told me to put “deceased” for my dad's name. At the time, I was more interested in getting my license than driving my mom to tears before my exam. I guess that means they were never married, or maybe she kept her name. And it shouldn't matter, but it does.

I always wondered what my dad's side of the family was like. I knew my mom's parents, who lived thirty minutes away and gave
me Juicy Fruit gum and haunted their small house like they were already ghosts before they died. I knew my aunt Patty, the one I was named after, before she moved across the country to California and had a heart attack. All Kleins. But I'd never had a passel of cousins like most kids, and I'd always wondered if maybe somewhere my dad's family was getting together for a reunion picnic by a lake, maybe having three-legged races and spitting watermelon seeds together and generally being impossibly idyllic without me. Waiting for me.

Looks like at least three of them were getting together, and they were doing the same thing I'm doing right now.

Hunting.

“Jack Cannon,” I say to myself.

It's a manly, violent name. It sounds like he's the brother of G.I. Joe, like he walks around with a cigar clenched in shark teeth.

I fold the photo in half and stuff it in my back pocket before spinning around, hungrily eyeing the room as if there might be a trail of clues for me to find. Like at the end of the road, my dad's going to pop out of the closet with a bouquet of balloons and explain that he still loves me and wants to take me to a picnic to meet the cousins.

There's a pile of bills and letters and papers on the kitchen table. From ten feet away, I can tell that a lot of the bills are that familiar pink that means Uncle Ashley owed more money than he was worth. Just as I'm walking over to see if maybe there's a birthday card from
my daddy with a return address on it, someone knocks on the door.

My eyes jerk wide and meet Wyatt's. He points to the sliding glass door, and I quietly remove the antitheft bar and slide it open.

“Ash, man, you hear that? You shooting squirrels again? Cuz you know my mama don't like that,” a kid yells through the front door as we slip out the back. When I reach to slide the glass door closed, the dog squirms out behind us, her tail wagging hopefully.

Wyatt goes to jump the chain-link fence where it's a little short, but I shake my head and motion to the gate at the far end of the yard. As far as I figure, I'm the closest thing Matilda's got to family, and I'm not leaving her behind.

I jog to the gate with a tall boy and a fat dog loping beside me in the high, wet grass. Wyatt's bare feet squelch in the mud. We leave the gate open, and I run around the next two houses and try to compose myself to walk to the truck. I'm still wearing my Postal Service hat, if not my shirt, and I hope it looks like I'm just coming back from a delivery, or at the very worst, like I've been making out with my boyfriend in the woods between deliveries. I guess there's no explanation for the dog trotting at my heels like she's always been there.

As we come around in front of Ashley's house, the kid on his front porch turns to watch us. He looks like he's just out of high school, or maybe a dropout. Quite frankly, he doesn't look like the sharpest hammer in the drawer.

“What y'all doing with Matty?” he asks, scratching a thin and hairy neck.

“Is that her name?” I say, putting emphasis on the Southern accent I usually try to cover up. “That ol' dog's been following me all up and down the street. Get on, dog.”

My heart's not in it, and Matty knows it, but hopefully the kid's dumber than the dog. Wyatt gets in the passenger seat, and I roll up the back door and motion Matilda—Matty—inside just as the kid starts walking down the sidewalk toward us, his head to the side like he's thinking so hard he might overheat and blow a gasket.

“Did y'all hear a gunshot a few minutes ago?” he asks.

“Wanna go for a ride, girl?” I whisper.

At the word “ride,” Matty yips and jumps in the back of the truck, and I crawl in behind her and roll the door shut and lock it. Just as I hoped he would, Wyatt shifts into the seat behind the steering wheel and turns the key he's been holding all along.

“Naw, man. That was just the truck backfiring,” he says, whipping out his own accent.

“My friend Ash ain't answering his door,” the kid says. “Hey, where'd Matty go?”

“Dumbass dog,” Wyatt says. “Probably diggin' up somebody's yard.”

And I stroke Matty's head in the back of the truck and murmur, “He doesn't mean that, sugar.” She thumps her tail and licks my
wrist like she doesn't mind that I just killed her owner. My uncle. Like she was supposed to be with me all along.

Wyatt pulls away, the truck jerking as he gets used to the clunky steering.