Free The Devil You Know by Jo Goodman

the trousers rested low on his hips, but he had no cause for complaint.
    â€œThe knee’s better than it was yesterday,” he told her.
    â€œWhat about your head?”
    â€œLet’s say that I know it’s there and leave it at that.”
    â€œAll right. I’m supposed to get you to walk outside. Not far, Willa says, just enough for you to stretch. She says you’ll seize up otherwise.”
    â€œWilla says a lot, doesn’t she?”
    â€œNot really.” Her mien turned thoughtful. “Not as much as me.”
    â€œI think that’s probably true.” He finished off the tea and set the cup back on the tray. “I didn’t thank you yesterday. So thank you.”
    She snorted. “You told me to go away yesterday.”
    â€œI did, and you didn’t listen.”
    â€œThat’s right, and here you are.” She waggled her pursed lips back and forth as if she were swishing water in her mouth. When she stopped, she asked, “What should I call you? Mr. McKenna? Israel? Augustus Horatio Roundbottom?”
    â€œDon’t you dare, brat. Call me Israel.”
    She grinned at him and dropped her hands away from her face. She folded her forearms on the table. “You can call me Annalea. I should probably address you as Mr. McKenna when Willa is around. She is one for manners, mostly because our mama’s gone and she thinks it’s her duty to raise me not to be a heathen. Plus, she went to an academy in Saint Louis for young women when she wasn’t much older than I am, so she learned some things that she feels compelled to pass on. I have to take it all in or she says she’ll send me there.”
    â€œYou believe her?”
    â€œI do.”
    He nodded solemnly. “Then you better call me Mr. McKenna, though I can’t promise that I’ll always answer to it. Now about that mirror? I bet Cutter or Zach have one in their shaving kits.”
    Annalea went to Cutter’s bunk because it was the closest. She rummaged around the small trunk at the foot of his bed and found a framed mirror about the size of man’s palm. She held it behind her back while she gave him the benefit of her thinking. “You should sit back on the bunk in case you faint. I won’t be able to get you up off the floor on my own.”
    â€œNoted.” He scooted back a few inches and held out his hand. She presented the mirror to him with the kind of gravity usually reserved for conferring a diploma or a knighthood. He took it and held it up to his face, and then he blanched. Or at least he thought he did. It was difficult to see any change in his pallor given the artist’s palette of color that was now his complexion. “You did warn me.”
    â€œI did.”
    His features were so distorted by swelling that he was unrecognizable to himself. It was not only that the left eye was closed, but also that it resembled a pig’s bladder—if the pig had drunk from a trough of port wine and absinthe. He gave his head a quarter turn and surveyed the line of his nose. It appeared to be unbroken with the familiar bump on the bridge exactly where he remembered it and not slanted to one side the way the rest of his face seemed to be.
    His mouth was dominated by an upper lip that rested like an overstuffed bolster pillow on the lower one. He tried to smile. The effect was grotesque. He should be living under a bridge in a child’s fairy tale, collecting tolls from billy goats. He thrust his chin forward and examined it from all sides. It was scraped so raw that he might as well have plowed the lower forty with it, and then again, that was a fair description of what had happened. There were also abrasions on both cheeks and across his brow and quite possibly more silver threads at his temples. The short version of what he saw was that he was a mess.
    He turned the mirror over, set it down on the table, and pushed it toward Annalea. “You can put