- A blue pickup truck drives toward a house in the middle of nowhere. Bell enters a house that's filthy and completely overrun with cats.
- A man shouts out "In back" and Bell goes to meet him. Bell greets the man as Ellis and asks him how many cats he has now. Who knows? There's always some new kitty wandering around.
- Bell asks Ellis how he's doing. Ellis says, "You're looking at it" from his wheelchair.
- Ellis mentions that he gets regular letters from Sheriff Bell's wife. He hears that Bell plans on quitting the sheriff's department.
- Bell goes to the kitchen counter to pour coffee, then takes one look at the liquid and asks how fresh it is. Ellis proudly answers that he tends to make a fresh pot … every week. Ew.
- Bell turns to the subject of the man who shot Ellis back in the day and put him in his wheelchair. The man died in prison, but Bell wants to know what Ellis would have done if the man had ever been released. Nothing—there'd be no point.
- Bell is surprised to hear him say this. Ellis says that you can't spend your life trying to get back what's been taken from you because there's always more stuff going out the door while you're doing it.
- Ellis asks why Bell is quitting as a sheriff. Bell answers that he feels overmatched by all the badness in the world. Bell says that he always thought that God would come into his life as he got older. But He didn't. And Bell doesn't think that God thinks very highly of him. Ellis waves this comment away and says Bell has no clue what God is thinking. (Probably true.)
- Ellis says that he sent over his uncle Mac's badge to the sheriff's department to put in the museum. He then tells Bell the story of how Uncle Mac was shot dead on his own front porch. Seven or eight men came up to his house wanting a bunch of different things.
- Uncle Mac turned to go inside for his shotgun but the men shot him. The men just sat on their horses and watched the man die.
- After a while, one of the men "said something in Indian" and the men turned to ride out.
- Ellis is telling this story because he wants Bell to know that the stuff he's dealing with (like thieves and psycho killers) isn't anything new. These people have always been around and always will be. It's not as if society is somehow going downhill. People are just more realistic about what's out there now.
- Ellis closes by saying that it's vain of Bell to think that everything is riding on his ability to make sense of the universe. There is only one way to move forward: with acceptance.