Chapter One (2009) Mom eased off the gas, and her Buick sank down the hills I knew by heart. We had to make two stops, she said, before I asked any questions. First we''d go to my grandma''s house in West Monroe, then we''d drive to the Delhi police station. "Just go meet Rufus," she said, pulling off the interstate. "Tell him you''re a young journalist back in town to document the real South." I rolled down the window. Christmas was only three days away, but thick, North Louisiana heat rushed in. I stuck my hand out to feel it.

This, I thought, is what weather is supposed to feel like. My mom''s SUV lurched forward, and the town I''d tried to forget suddenly surrounded me. We passed Walmart and a Chick-­Fil-­A, two Waffle Houses, and the Captain D''s where we used to eat free kids meals every Thursday night. The car slowed, and everything I''d once loved seemed small--­my school, a park, the empty lot where I''d spent hours talking about boys with my best friend Ashley. Mom reached across the console and held my hand. "You haven''t been home in so long. Does it look different?" She turned left in front of the drive-­through daiquiri shop, past the Blockbuster Video where I''d last tried to be straight. Our old church, I knew, was only a mile away.

"No," I said. "It hasn''t changed at all." It was 2009, and I was twenty-­six. I hadn''t been home in six or seven years, not since college, not since I''d promised my grandmother I''d find out about Roy. I had wanted to learn about him, but something unnameable had stopped me. At the end of the summer of 2002, I''d gone back to college in Mississippi, then I''d gotten a newspaper job in Portland, Oregon, a scrappy, liberal city twenty-­three hundred miles away from home. The Oregonian was a good paper with a big circulation and seven Pulitzers, and I was a staff reporter, a position I knew my mother bragged about to her sisters. No one else in the family had the kind of job one might call a career.

My mom thought I was on my way to becoming some kind of writing superstar, but the reality was less exciting than I''d let her believe. A few months earlier, the managing editor had demoted me to a night shift where all I did was listen to police scanners and write the occasional brief. I''d done so poorly at that beat, the editor had moved me again--­to a low-­level reporting job in the suburbs. I didn''t tell my mom I mostly wrote about the suburban planning commission, a wonky board that approved developments and debated the urban growth boundary. I didn''t tell her that my latest article was about something called an intermodal transit facility, the most boring topic I could imagine. I''d only returned to Louisiana because I believed that a good Southern tale might turn my work life around. I''d decided, after my second demotion, that I wanted to work for This American Life. I had no audio reporting skills, but I thought if I produced one great podcast, This American Life ''s editors would recognize my talent.

I''d bought a seven-­hundred-­dollar recorder, watched a spate of YouTube how-­to videos, then started brainstorming ideas. I''d considered other family stories--­one about the years my mother spent trying to get on Oprah to meet the Bee Gees, another about the aunt whose husband bought a thirty-­year supply of salt just because it was on sale--­but then I''d remembered Roy, and I knew his was the story that would get me a new job. My mother drove, and I looked out the window and understood, for the first time, that my hometown was ugly. All the stores were chain stores, and every tree looked scrawny and bare. I told my mother that the West Coast had spoiled me. "In Oregon, some trees stay green all year." I told her she should come see the evergreens, but she nodded without saying anything. I''d lived in Portland three years already, and my mom had never once offered to visit.

I squirmed in my seat, and she turned up the radio, a country station, then we careened along the curves toward my grandma''s house. When we arrived, my mom parked crooked, half on the street, half on the grass, and I stared out for a moment before unbuckling my seatbelt. My grandma''s two-­bedroom brick house looked as pristine as it had when I was in college. Her lawn was edged and mowed, the shrubs trimmed straight. She''d left the garage door half-­open, and with my window down, I could hear her yelling from the carport. "Rhonda Jean? Casey? Is that y''all?" The garage door rose. My grandma surged into the yard with a half-­smoked, unlit Virginia Slims in her right hand. She''d turned seventy that year, but she looked exactly as she always had.

Her gray hair shot out as if she''d stuck her finger in an electrical socket, and her mouth seemed to be resisting a smile. "Look at you," she said, surveying my outfit with a grimace as I stepped out of the car. I wore a red plaid shirt and a G-Star Raw jacket I''d spent half my paycheck buying in New York. My mother dug a pack of Capri menthols out of her purse, and my grandma shooed us toward the carport. The yard was too perfect, and her house too pressure-­washed clean to stand in front of it smoking. My grandma grabbed my hand and held it as we walked up the driveway past her ancient Crown Victoria. "Are you going to tell Rufus you''re here, Casey?" I rolled my eyes, hoping I seemed like a badass brave journalist, but the truth was I''d looked in the hotel mirror that morning and realized I was scared to interview anyone in Louisiana. My haircut was boyish, I still didn''t wear makeup, and the four flannel shirts I''d brought all looked hopelessly gay.

On the way into town, my mother and I had stopped at a gas station to use the bathroom, and an attendant had directed me toward the men''s facilities. I''d whispered a correction--­"I''m a girl"--­then, on my way to the women''s bathroom, I''d realized just how foolish this reporting trip might turn out to be. Who was going to talk to a woman who looked like me about a person who lived like Roy? I wasn''t even sure yet what I wanted to know. All I had to go on was my grandma''s fifty-­year-­old story and a bleak obituary I''d found on the Monroe News-­Star''s website a few weeks earlier: DELHI--­Roy Delois Hudgins, a yard maintenance worker, died Wednesday. Graveside services are 2 p.m. Sunday at Delhi Masonic Cemetery. The obituary was dated March 9, 2006.

Roy had been alive when my grandmother first told me about him, but I''d waited too long to keep my promise. Now he was dead, and I''d have to find strangers willing to talk about him. But how could I find those strangers? Obituaries are supposed to list the names of the people a person leaves behind. They''re supposed to be long and loving chronicles, with paragraphs that describe everything memorable about a person''s life. Roy had no survivors, the obit suggested. He hadn''t even had a real funeral in a church. The only thing worth remembering about him, the obit seemed to say, was his job, a blue-­collar gig someone had gussied up with a fancy title. My grandma ignored my forced bravado, then motioned toward the house.

"Are you hungry?" she asked. She disappeared into the kitchen before I could answer. I looked at my mom and followed her into the carport, a cement square filled with canned Cokes, rusted tools, and the kind of fold-­up plastic chairs we used to sit on at church potlucks. My mom''s older sister Cindy stood in the middle of it all, menthol held up like a conductor''s baton waiting to start the show. I hated that my family smoked. I hated the smell, and I hated that my mom spent money on cigarettes when she and my dad owed thousands of dollars in medical bills. My mom and aunt flicked their lighters in unison, then they plopped down in front of two space heaters, their skinny cigarettes mirroring the heaters'' electric red glow. My aunt picked up a remote, and the garage door eased down.

She pointed her cigarette at my face. "You favor me." I shook my head in protest. I loved the colloquialism, the funny Southern phrase that meant I resembled her, but I felt sure I didn''t look like anyone in our family. Both my aunt and mother were big women with big hair they molded stiff into styles more Paula Deen than Dolly Parton. They kept their locks cut short but used curling irons and three kinds of spray to spike and arch their hair into poofy, wavy helmets. Their eyes were so dark and deep that they looked like circles of coal nestled under smoky lids. My hair fell and curled without purpose.

My eyes were a shallower brown. I was five foot four and so skinny everyone in my family called me "runt." Cindy had been the prettiest of my grandma''s four daughters, and perhaps because of that, she''d been married three or four times. I watched her smoke, and I tried to remember the uncles I''d had and lost, but I could only conjure Stanley and Monty. They''d both been old, gregarious men who drank a lot and made the kinds of jokes that always seemed sexual, even if the words were clean. Cindy and Stanley had two kids, Jennifer and Joey, both of whom were just a few years older than I was, but I hadn''t talked to my cousins in years. Jennifer had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen. Joey had gone to prison soon after.

"So," I said. "What did Roy look like?" "I can tell you exactly," Aunt Cindy said. "Roy was short. Very fair-­complected. Blond. Had a butch haircut." "It was a crew cut," my mom said. Her voice seemed both louder and more Southern than her usual twang, and I couldn''t tell if she was correcting my aunt or just adding detail.

She loved to interrupt people. "Butch haircut," Cindy said again. She puffed her menthol, then cleared her throat. "Don''t take this the wrong way. Roy looked like if he were, if she was, a.