The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

but it didn’t seem to help. Then in April, she began bleeding a little. She spent hours lying on top of the bed when Arvin and Willard were gone, and the cramps eased considerably if she curled up on her side and stayed still. Worried about hospital bills and spending all the money they had saved for the house, she kept her pain a secret, foolishly hoping that whatever ailed her would go away, heal itself. After all, she was only thirty years old, too young for it to be anything serious. But by the middle of May, the spotty bleeding had become a steady trickle, and to dull the pain she’d taken to sneaking drinks from the gallon of Old Crow that Willard kept under the kitchen sink. Near the end of that month, right before school let out for the summer, Arvin found her passed out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of watery blood. A pan of biscuits was burning in the oven. They didn’t have a phone, so he propped her head up with a pillow and cleaned up the mess as best he could. Sitting down on the floor beside her, he listened to her shallow breathing and prayed it wouldn’t stop. She was still unconscious when his father came home from work that evening. As the doctor told Willard a couple of days later, it was too late by that time. Someone was always dying somewhere, and in the summer of 1958, the year that Arvin Eugene Russell counted himself ten years old, it was his mother’s turn.
    AFTER TWO WEEKS IN THE HOSPITAL , Charlotte raised up in her bed and said to Willard, “I think I had a dream.”
    “A good one?”
    “Yeah,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand a little. She glanced over at the white cloth partition that separated her from the woman in the next bed, then lowered her voice. “I know it sounds crazy, but I want to go home and pretend we own the house for a while.”
    “How you gonna do that?”
    “With this stuff they got me on,” she said, “they could tell me I was the Queen of Sheba and I wouldn’t know any different. Besides, you heard what the doctor said. I sure as hell don’t want to spend what’s left of my time in this place.”
    “Is that what the dream was about?”
    She gave him a puzzled look. “What dream?” she said.
    Two hours later, they were pulling out of the hospital parking lot. As they headed out Route 50 toward home, Willard stopped and bought her a milk shake, but she couldn’t keep it down. He carried her into the back bedroom and made her comfortable, then gave her some morphine. Her eyes glazed over and she went to sleep within a minute or so. “You stay here with your mother,” he told Arvin. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” He walked across the field, a cool breeze against his face. He knelt down at the prayer log and listened to the small, peaceful sounds of the evening woods. Several hours passed while he stared at the cross. He viewed their misfortune from every conceivable angle, searching for a solution, but always ended up with the same answer. As far as the doctors were concerned, Charlotte’s case was hopeless. They had given her five, maybe six weeks at the most. There were no other options left. It was up to him and God now.
    By the time he returned to the house, it was turning dark. Charlotte was still sleeping and Arvin was sitting beside her bed in a straight-backed chair. He could tell the boy had been crying. “Did she ever wake up?” Willard asked, in a low voice.
    “Yeah,” Arvin said, “but, Dad, why don’t she know who I am?”
    “It’s just the medicine they got her on. She’s gonna be fine in a few days.”
    The boy looked over at Charlotte. Just a couple of months ago,she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen, but most of the pretty was gone now. He wondered what she would look like by the time she got well.
    “Maybe we better eat something,” Willard said.
    He fixed egg sandwiches for him and Arvin, then heated up a can of broth for Charlotte. She threw it up, and Willard cleaned up the mess and held her