And he looked at me, my sweet boy who used to get the hiccups laughing, and he said it flat as anything. “Mind your business, Mom.” Then he went back in the garage and shut the door.

I should’ve left, maybe. I keep going back and forth on it even now.

But I didn’t leave. I went to put the milk in the fridge, because I think my hands just needed something to do, and that’s when I saw Mason. My grandbaby. Three years old. He was sitting on the kitchen floor by the table, playing with a plastic spoon, and he had no shoes on. No socks. Just sitting there.

“Hey, baby,” I said, and I bent down and scooped him up. He was light as a feather. And when I shifted him onto my hip, his little feet swung up and I saw the bottoms of them.

Red. Raw. Two angry patches on the soles, the skin gone shiny and wrong. Chemical burns. On a three-year-old’s feet. Because he’d been walking around barefoot somewhere he never should’ve been, near the very thing his daddy told me to mind my own business about.

And here’s where I have to tell you something, because if I don’t, none of the rest of it will make any sense, and you’ll think the same thing my sister thinks of me.

My brother Ray died in 2004. Same poison. He was cooking it in a little rented house out past the county line, and one day the whole thing went up. People always stop the story there when they tell it. “Oh, poor Ray, he passed in a fire.” Like it was just him. Like it was just bad luck and a dropped cigarette.

But Ray had a little girl. My niece. Katie. She was four years old, and she had the fattest cheeks you ever saw and she called me Aunt Bee because she couldn’t say my name right.

And I’m going to get to her. I promise I’m going to get to her. But I need you to understand that when I was standing in Danny’s kitchen holding Mason’s burned little feet up to the light, I wasn’t only seeing Mason. I was seeing 2004. I was seeing all of it.

So I’ll be honest with you about what kind of grandmother I am. I didn’t talk it over with anybody. I didn’t pray on it for a week. I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel and I sat at my own kitchen table and I called the police that same night. I gave them the address. I told them there were two babies sleeping twenty feet from whatever he was cooking. The five-year-old, Ellie, and Mason. Twenty feet. A wall and twenty feet between those babies and the same thing that took Ray and took Katie.

They arrested him that night. He got eight years.