This morning, when I took a swivel-seat across the plastic table from Linda Lyle’s easy smile — which is anything but plastic, itself — at the McDonald’s on the outer loop highway outside Tyler, she reached for my hand and gave it a familiar, grandmotherly squeeze. Her warm welcome belied the dark impetus for our meeting: The worried, rambling voicemail she left me about Carron Nielsberg “screwing with” her neighbors at the Treetops Trailer Community. “They’re running some kind of tests on our people out here,” she said in her message. “And it don’t look legitimate to me.”

Fine, I said — happy to have her only daughter back home, especially since it means she’s got someone to share a pot of real coffee with after my stepdad switched to decaf last year.

But first: the small-town pleasantries.