Книга - The Used World

The Used World
Haven Kimmel


Narrated with warmth and intelligence, ‘The Used World’ is the third novel from the bestselling author of ‘The Solace of Leaving Early’ and explores the interconnected lives of three women who work in an antiques emporium in IndianaHazel Hunnicutt is the proprietor of The Used World Emporium, a cavernous antiques store filled with the cast-offs of countless lives in the town of Jonah, Indiana. Knowing, witty and often infuriatingly stubborn, Hazel has lived in the town her whole life, daughter of the local doctor, and is keeper of many of its secrets. Working with her in the store are Claudia, a solitary soul since the death of her beloved parents and, at over 6 feet, an oddity to all who see her; and Rebekah, a young woman forced to leave the suffocating Christian sect she was born into, but adrift in the outside world.It is shortly before Christmas and the lives of these three women are about to change irrevocably: for Claudia, who has hidden away from life since the death of her mother, a new arrival – which comes to her in the most unexpected of ways – will give her a second chance at happiness and a family to replace the one she has lost. Meanwhile Rebekah, abandoned by her feckless first boyfriend, must face up to an unplanned pregnancy and exile from her family home. Watching over Claudia and Rebekah is Hazel, whose own story of lost love is revealed in flashbacks. As their lives intertwine in ways they could never have imagined, and a dark chapter of history is revealed, the three women are forced to confront their pasts and face up to the future as this gripping and heart-warming novel reaches its dramatic climax.Peopled with a delightfully idiosynchratic cast of characters and with a love story at its centre, ‘The Used World’ is a beautifully written and brilliantly told story, in the tradition of Fannie Flagg, Garrison Keillor and Ann Patchett.









The Used World

Haven Kimmel












FOR JOHN

I borrow these words from Martin Buber:



The abyss and the light of the world,

Time’s need and the craving for eternity,

Vision, event, and poetry:

Was and is dialogue with you.




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ue94ee685-a6e3-5def-ab5a-a794764edb6c)

Title Page (#uc0c445d6-2654-552d-b6f8-42ac229a106a)

Part One (#ua1635be0-bfa0-5f17-813d-a249b012c2ff)

Preface (#u27ca7592-c1e4-5a98-8795-9f420e14a948)

Chapter 1 (#u721901d9-c7fb-5a0e-81cf-9bdd5d35cffb)

Chapter 2 (#u1f1a595b-b10d-5924-9b7f-6688c5ac89c6)

Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Six Months Later (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Haven Kimmel (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Part One (#ulink_b4b5e318-6625-5aea-b24e-b5031248a190)


We come upon permanence: the rock that abides and the word: the city upraised like a cup in our fingers, all hands together, the quick and the dead and the quiet.

—PABLO NERUDA, “THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU”

The virgins are all trimming their wicks.

—JOHNNY CASH, “THE MAN COMES AROUND”




Preface (#ulink_9cdd33a1-8d63-5456-90a5-6f48956c3d4a)


CLAUDIA MODJESKI stood before a full-length mirror in the bedroom she’d inherited from her mother, pointing the gun in her right hand—a Colt .44 Single Action Army with a nickel finish and a walnut grip—at her reflected image. The mirror showed nothing above Claudia’s shoulders, because the designation ‘full-length’turned out to be as arbitrary as ‘one-size.’ It may have fit plenty, but it didn’t fit her. The .44 was a collector’s gun, a cowboy’s gun purchased at a weapons show she’d attended with Hazel Hunnicutt last Christmas, without bothering to explain to Hazel (or to herself ) why she thought she needed it.

She sat down heavily on the end of her mother’s bed. Ludie Modjeski’s bed, in Ludie’s room. The gun rested in Claudia’s slack hand. She had put it away the night before because eliminating the specificity that was Claudia meant erasing all that remained of her mother in this world, what was ambered in Claudia’s memory: Christmas, for instance, and the hard candies Ludie used to make each year. There were peppermint ribbons, pink with white stripes. There were spearmint trees and horehound drops covered with sugar crystals. The recipes, the choreography of her mother’s steps across the kitchen, an infinity of moments remembered only by her daughter, those too would die.

But tonight she would put the gun back in its case because of the headless cowboy she’d seen in the mirror. Her pajama bottoms had come from the estate of an old man; the top snap had broken, so they were being held closed with a safety pin. The cuffs fell a good two inches above her shins, and when she sat down the washed-thin flannel rode up so vigorously, her revealed legs looked as shocked and naked as refugees from a flash flood. In place of a pajama top, she wore a blue chenille sweater so large that had it been unraveled, there would have been enough yarn to fashion into a yurt. Claudia had looked in her mirror and heard Ludie say, a high, hidden laugh in her voice, Poor old thing, and wasn’t it the truth, which didn’t make living any easier.

The Colt had no safety mechanism, other than the traditional way it was loaded: a bullet in the first chamber, second chamber empty, four more bullets. Always five, never six. She put the gun away, listened to the radiators throughout the house click and sigh and generally give up their heat with reluctance. But give up they did, and so did Claudia, at least for one more night, this December 15.

Rebekah Shook lay uneasy in the house of her father, Vernon, in an old part of town, the place farmers moved after the banks had foreclosed and the factories were still hiring. She slept like a foreign traveler in a room too small for the giants of her past: the songs, the language, the native dress. Awake, she rarely understood where she was or what she was doing or if she passed for normal, and in dreams she traversed a featureless, pastel landscape that undulated beneath her feet. She looked for her mother, Ruth, who (like Ludie) was dead and gone and could not be conjured; she searched for her family, the triangle of herself and her parents. There were tones that never rang clear, distant lights that were never fully lit and never entirely extinguished. She remembered she had taken a lover, but had not seen him in twenty-eight…no, thirty-one days. Thirty-one days was either no time at all or quite long indeed, and to try to determine which she woke herself up and began counting, then drifted off again and lost her place. Once she had been thought dear, a treasure, the little red-haired Holiness girl whose laughter sparkled like light on a lake; now she stood outside the gates of her father’s Prophecy, asleep inside his house. Her hair tumbled across her pillow and over the edge of the bed: a flame.

Only Hazel Hunnicutt slept soundly, cats claiming space all around her. The proprietor of Hazel Hunnicutt’s Used World Emporium—the station at the end of the line for objects that sometimes appeared tricked into visiting there—often dreamed of the stars, although she never counted them. Her nighttime ephemera included Mercury in retrograde; Saturn in the trine position (a fork in the hand of an old man whose dinner is, in the end, all of us); the Lion, the Virgin, the Scorpion; and figures of the cardinal, the banal, the venal. Hazel was the oldest of the three women by twenty years; she was their patron, and the pause in their conversation. Only she still had a mother (although Hazel would have argued it is mothers who have us); only she could predict the coming weather, having noticed the spill of a white afghan in booth #43 and the billowing of a man’s white shirt as he stepped from the front of her store into the heat of the back. White white white. The color of purity and wedding gowns and rooms in the underworld where girls will not eat, but also just whiteness for its own sake. If Hazel were awake she would argue for logic’s razor and say that the absence of color is what it is, or what it isn’t. But she slept. Her hand twitched slightly, a gesture that would raise the instruments in an orchestra, and her cat Mao could not help but leap at the hand, but he did not bite.

In the Used World Emporium itself, nothing lived, nothing moved, but the air was thick with expectancy nonetheless. It was a cavernous space, filled with the castoffs of countless lives, as much a grave in its way as any ruin. The black eyes of the rocking horses glittered like the eyes of a carp; the ivory keys of an old piano were once the tusks of an African elephant. The racks of period clothing hung motionless, wineskins to be filled with a new vintage. The bottles, the bellows, the genuine horse-drawn sleigh now bedecked with bells and garlands: these were not stories. They were not ideas. They were just objects, consistent so far from moment to moment, waiting for daybreak like everything else.

It was mid-December in Jonah, Indiana, a place where Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead.





Chapter 1 (#ulink_d6542528-14b8-5597-bfa1-c4b1bf3bfccc)


AT NINE O’CLOCK that morning, Claudia sat in the office of Amos Townsend, the minister of the Haddington Church of the Brethren. Haddington, a town of three or four thousand people, sat only eleven miles from the much larger college town of Jonah. The two places shared so little they might have been in different states, or in different states of being. Jonah had public housing, a strip of chain stores three miles long, a campus with eighteen thousand students and a clutch of Ph.D.’s. Haddington still held a harvest carnival, and ponies grazed in the field bordering the east end. It had been a charming place when Claudia was growing up, but one of them had changed. Now the cars and trucks parked along the sides of the main street were decorated with NASCAR bumper stickers and Dixie flags. There were more hunters, and fewer deer. And one by one the beautiful farmhouses (now just houses) had been stripped of every pleasing element, slapped with vinyl siding and plastic windows. Eventually even these shells would come down, and then Haddington would be a rural trailer park, and who knew if a man like Amos Townsend or a woman Claudia’s size would be allowed in at all.

Amos tapped his fingers on his desk, smiled at her. She smiled back but didn’t speak. The crease in her blue jeans was sharp between her fingers. She left it, and began instead to spin the rose gold signet ring on her pinkie. It had been her father’s, but his interlocking cursive initials, BLM, were indecipherable now, florid to begin with and worn away with time.

“Can I say something?” Amos asked, startling Claudia.

“Please do.”

“I talk to people like this every day. I spend far more time in pastoral care than in delivering sermons. That—podium time—is the least of my job. So I’m happy to hear anything you have to say. Except maybe about the weather, since I get that everywhere I go.”

Claudia nodded. “It’s going to snow.”

“Sure looks like it.”

What did she have to say? She could tell him that she spent every morning sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the English gardening cottage her father had built for her mother, Ludie—stared at it through every season, and also at the clothesline traversing the scene, unused since her mother’s death. She could say that the line itself, the black underscoring of horizontality, had become a burden to her for reasons she could not explain. The sight of the yard in spring and summer, when the fruit was on Ludie’s pawpaw tree, was no longer manageable. Or she could say that looking at the gardening shed, she had realized that the world is divided—perhaps not equally or neatly—into two sorts: those who would watch the shed fall down and those who would shore it up. In addition, there were those who, after the fall of the shed, would raze the site and install a prefabricated something or other, and those who would grow increasingly attached to the pile of rubble. Claudia was, she was just beginning to understand, the sort who might let it fall, love it as she did, as attached to it as she was. She would let it fall and stay there as she surveyed—each morning and with a bland sort of interest—the ivy creeping up over the lacy wrought-iron fence on either side of the front door, a family of house sparrows nesting under the collapsed roofline.

“I suppose I have a problem,” she said, twirling her father’s ring.

“Yes?”

“It has to do with the death of my mother.”

Amos waited. “Three years ago?”

“That’s right.” Claudia nodded. “I can’t say more than that.”

Amos aligned a pen on his blotter. Even in a white T-shirt and gray sweater he appeared to Claudia a timeless man; he might have been a circuit rider or a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, with his salt-and-pepper hair, his small round glasses hooked with mechanical grace around his ears. “I met your mother once,” he said.

“I—you did?”

“Yes, it was just after I moved here to Haddington. She and Beulah Baker showed up at my door just before noon one day and asked if they could take me to MCL Cafeteria for lunch. They were very welcoming.”

“I had no idea.” It had happened a few times in the past few years that Claudia would find a note in her mother’s secretary, or the sound of Ludie’s voice on an unlabeled cassette tape, and it felt like discovering in an attic the lost chapter of a favorite novel, one she thought she knew.

“Salt of the earth. I liked her very much.”

“She and Beulah were friends for a long time. Though I didn’t see much of Beulah after my mother died, of course.” She didn’t need to say because Beulah’s daughter and son-in-law died, and there were the orphaned daughters; Amos knew all too well. “I started coming to your church because of her, because she had spoken highly of you from the beginning.”

“Are you close to her again?”

“No—I—I find her unreachable.” What she meant was I am unreachable. “She’s friendly to me, but so frail she seems to be, I don’t know. In another country.” That was correct, that was what she meant: the country before, or after. There was Beulah in Ludie’s kitchen twenty-five years ago, baking Apple Brown Betty in old soup cans, then wrapping the loaves in foil and tying them with ribbons, fifty loaves at a time, to go in the Christmas boxes left on the steps of the poor. Beulah now, pushing her wheeled walker down the aisle at church, nothing and no one of interest to her but the remains of her family: her grandchildren; Amos and his wife, Langston. Nothing else.

“There is something missing in my life,” Claudia said, more urgently than she meant to. “I wake up every day and it’s the first thing I notice. I wake up in the middle of the night, actually. Sometimes the hole in the day is big, it seems to cover everything, and sometimes it’s like a series of pinpricks.”

Amos leaned forward, listening.

“I’m not depressed, though. I’m really quite well.”

“Are you”—Amos hesitated—“are you lonely?”

Claudia nearly laughed aloud. Loneliness, she suspected, was a category of experience that existed solely in relation to its opposite. Given that she never felt the latter, she could hardly be afflicted with the former.

“Loneliness is fascinating,” Amos said. “I see people all the time who say they are lonely but it’s a code word for something else. They can’t recover from their childhood damage, or they’ve decided they hate their wives. I don’t know, I had lunch with a man once who kept complaining about his soup. It was too hot, it was too salty. I remember him putting his spoon down next to the bowl with a practiced…like a slow, theatrical gesture of disgust. The soup was a personal affront to him. I knew on another day it would be something else—he would have been slighted by a clerk somewhere, or the rain would fall just on him, at just the wrong time.”

“Wait, go back—code for what?”

“Excuse me?”

“Loneliness is a code word for what?”

Amos shrugged. “That’s for you to decide, I guess.”

They sat in silence a few more minutes, Claudia now fully aware of all the reasons she had never sought counseling before. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind Amos’s desk and realized she needed to get to work. “I need to go,” she said, standing up. Amos stood, too, and for Claudia it was one of those rare occasions when she could look another person in the eye.

They shook hands and Amos said, smiling as if they were old friends, “It was a pleasure. Come see me again anytime.”

Salt of the earth. All through the day Claudia considered the phrase as it applied to Ludie, and to her father, Bertram. She didn’t know the provenance, but assumed the words had something to do with Lot’s wife, who could not help but turn and look back at the home she was losing, the friends, the family, the—who knew what all?—button collection, and so was struck down by the same avenging angels who had torched Sodom and Gomorrah. Ludie would not have looked back, of that Claudia was certain. They were plain country people, her parents, upheld all the conservative values that marked the Midwest like a scar. But they had been canny, too—they had played the game by the rules as they understood them. They were insured to the heavens, and when they died they left Claudia a mortgage-free house, and a payout on their individual policies that meant she would never want for anything. For her whole, long life, they seemed to be saying, Claudia would never have to leave the safety of the nest.

Ten days before Christmas and the Used World Emporium was busy, as it had been the whole month of December. Claudia thought about her mother and Beulah Baker showing up on Amos Townsend’s doorstep and wished, as she wished every day, that she could witness, or better yet, inhabit, any given moment when Ludie was alive. Claudia didn’t need to speak to her, didn’t need to stand in her mother’s attention; she would take anything, any day or hour, just to see Ludie’s hands again, or to watch her tie behind her back (so quickly) the pale blue apron with the red pocket and crooked hem. She thought of these things as she moved a walnut breakfront from booth #37 into the waiting, borrowed truck of a professor and his much-too-young wife, probably a second or third spouse for the distinguished man, and not the last. She carried out boxes of Blue Willow dishes (it multiplied in a frightful way, Blue Willow; 90 percent of what they sold was counterfeit, but in the Used World the sacred rule was Buyer beware). Over the course of the day she wrapped and moved framed Maxfield Parrish advertisements; an oak pie safe with doors of tin pierced into patterns of snowflakes; a spinning wheel Hazel had thought would never sell. She watched the clientele come and go, and they were a specific lot: the faculty and staff from across the river filtered in all day, those who knew nothing about antiques except the surface and the cache. The gay couples who were gentrifying the historic district, well-groomed men who walked apart from each other, their gimlet eyes trained to see exactly the right shade of maroon on a velvet love seat, a pattern of lilies on a cup and saucer that matched their heirloom hand towels. And behind them the crusty, retired farm folk who knew the age and value of every butter churn and cast iron garden table, who silently perused the goods and would not pay the ticket price for anything. Claudia watched them all, this self-selected group of shoppers, aware that just half a mile down James Whitcomb Riley Avenue, the Kmart was doing a bustling business in every other sort of gift, to every other kind of person, and she was grateful to work where she worked, at least this Christmas season. She moved furniture, took off and put on her coat a dozen times, thought about Ludie and Beulah, and she thought about loneliness, a code for something. Everyone she encountered stared at her at least a beat too long, then talked about the weather to disguise it. She nodded in agreement, as the sky grew dense and pearl-gray.

By three o’clock Rebekah Shook had said, “What a lovely piece—someone will be happy to get it,” approximately twenty-four times, and had meant it on each occasion. She was always the saddest to see anything go. She had wrapped dishes and vases and collectible beer bottles in newspaper until her hands were stained black and her fingerprints were visible on everything she touched. No matter what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she was also remembering the number 31 (or maybe it was 32 now), rising up before her like an animate thing as she was falling asleep, something with power. The 3 was muscular, with hands sharpened to points, and the 1 was a cold marble column. She sat up straighter on the stool behind the counter, closed her eyes. Her lower back ached; the night before, she’d sat down on the edge of the bed, intending to brush her hair, but before she could lift her arms the room had swayed like a hammock. She was on her back, counting the days since she’d last seen Peter, the hairbrush next to her pillow. She didn’t remember anything else until morning, when she woke to the sound of her father’s heavy gait in the hallway outside her room and realized she’d been reliving, in a dream, the last conversation she’d had with her mother.

It isn’t life, Beckah.

I don’t understand.

Of course not, but your father does. I’m going to ride this horse home.

Which horse, what horse?

Can’t you see it? It has blue eyes. Turn that knob and see if it comes in any clearer.

“It’s almost completely dark outside,” Hazel said, coming around behind the counter with a box of miscellaneous Christmas cards.“Sell these for a quarter apiece. Some don’t have envelopes, so if anyone complains tell them that the glue becomes toxic over time anyway.”

“Does it?” Rebekah asked, flipping through the stack. There were plump little angel babies, snow-covered landscapes, faded Santas affecting listless twinkles.

“Oh who knows. There are a few in there that date back to the thirties, I’m pretty sure. Who the hell would want to lick something that old?” Hazel jingled as she walked. Today she was wearing, Rebekah noticed, one of her favorite outfits, an orange and yellow batik vest with matching pants. The vest sported big metal buttons designed to look like distressed Mediterranean coins. Under the vest she wore a lime-green turtleneck, on her swollen feet a pair of stretched white leather Keds. Her dangly earrings were miniature Christmas trees with lights that blinked red and green. Hazel had less a sense of style than an affinity for catastrophe, which was one of the things that had drawn Rebekah to her.

“I’m going in my office for a minute, listen to the weather report. I’ll call the mall, too. If they’re closing early, we’re closing early.” Hazel jangled down the left-hand aisle, past booths #14 and #15, toward the cramped little office. Rebekah noticed that Hazel favored her left hip, something she hadn’t done the day before, and she realized, too, that the Cronies, the three men who always sat at the front of the door drinking free RC Colas, were mysteriously absent. Rebekah stood. She glanced at the two grainy surveillance cameras trained on the back of the store; in one a man flipped through vintage comic books. In the other nothing happened. She looked out the large picture window, through the backward black letters painted in a Gothic banker’s script that spelled out hazel hunnicutt’s used world emporium, and saw the heavy sky, the absence of a single bird on the telephone line. She knew, as everyone from the Midwest knows, that if she stepped outside she would be struck by a far-reaching silence. In the springtime of her childhood it hadn’t been the green skies or the sudden stillness that would finally cause her mother to throw open doors and windows, grab Rebekah’s hand, and pull her down the stairs to the basement: it was the absence of birdsong, of crickets, of spring peepers that meant a twister was on the way. It’s not the temperature, it’s not the sky. It’s the countless unseen singing things that announce by the vacuum they leave that some momentous condition is on its way.

Rebekah rang up a lamb’s-wool stole and a breakfront from #37 for the professor’s young wife, forgot to charge the tax. She said to the customer, whose expression was cold, “This is lovely, this lamb’s wool—it’s one of my favorite pieces.” The woman smiled vaguely, as if made uncomfortable by the familiarity from the Help. The husband, his beard streaked with the marks of a small comb, rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder with a proprietary ease. “I shouldn’t be buying her gifts before Christmas, but how can I stop myself?” he said, glancing down at his wife.

“Merry Christmas,” Rebekah said to them both, and the man nodded, steered his sullen charge out the door.

She sat back down on the stool, felt dizzy just for a moment. Her vision righted itself, and she decided to begin organizing the day’s receipts in case Hazel closed early. She lifted the thick stack off the spindle—it had been a busy day—and could go no further. The receipt on top was nothing special, just a box of miscellaneous linens from #27. Rebekah let her hand rest on top of it, felt her pulse pound against her wrist. What had happened on that night thirty-one or thirty-two days before? She had read the events over and over, she had turned every word between them inside out, she had rebuilt from memory every square inch of Peter’s cabin, as if the truth were under a cushion or tucked between two books.

All evening he had been distracted, but polite to her as if she were a fond acquaintance. He’d eaten the dinner she had made (chili, a tossed salad), answered her questions about his day without any precision or energy; he’d declined to watch a movie. She had overfilled the woodstove and the cabin was hot. On any other night Peter would have complained, he would have said, “We’re not trying to melt ice caps here, Rebekah,” but on that evening, the last one, he couldn’t be moved even to irritation. He had taken off his gray wool sweater and wore just a faded red T-shirt and blue jeans. There were things he wanted to look up on the Internet, he told her, and because she understood very little about computers he left the description of what he was seeking opaque: something to do with chord charts, a lyrics bank, copyrights.

“It’s a doozy,” Hazel said, startling Rebekah out of the too-hot cabin.

“I’m sorry?” Rebekah blinked, patted her face as if trying to stay awake.

Hazel swayed in front of her, widened her narrow green eyes. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“None. What’s a doozy?”

“The snowstorm appears to be doozy-like, Rebekah. Let’s pull the gates down on this Popsicle stand.”

“Oh, the snowstorm.”

“If you’ll help me round up the customers and chain them in the basement, I’d much appreciate it. And also tell Miss Claudia I’d like us to be out of here by four. I’m going to call my mother, make sure she’s okay.”

Hazel headed back to her office and Rebekah stood, intending to do a number of things, but instead just stared out the large front window. That night, the last night, she’d gotten into bed without Peter. She’d been wearing a summery yellow nightgown with a lace ribbon that tied at the bodice, and he’d said good night in a normal if distracted way. She’d fallen asleep without waiting for him to come to bed and in the morning it appeared he never had, he hadn’t gotten into bed with her. He’d left a note that said he had some things to attend to early at his parents’ house, and that he’d talk to her later. That was it, I’ll talk to you later, xo, P. It was that simple. He didn’t call that night or the next day, and when she called him there was no answer. When she drove past the cabin he wasn’t there; when she tried his parents, they were also gone.

Peter had been her first in every category, and she had no idea what to do when he vanished. He should have come with an instruction guide, Rebekah thought, or a warning label, turning and heading out to round up customers.

“You’ll lock up?” Hazel asked, jingling her keys.

Rebekah nodded, continuing to stack receipts. The Clancys, in booth #68, seemed to be coming out ahead.

“You’ll lock up if I go ahead and go?”

Rebekah glanced at Hazel, who had her heavy bag over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. She’d made the bag herself, out of a needlepoint design intended as a couch cushion: a unicorn lying down inside a circle of fence, trees in delicate pink bloom, a black background.

“God knows traffic will be backed up all through Jonah, and my femurs ache like they did in seventy-eight.”

“I already nodded, Hazel, that was me nodding,” Rebekah said. “Claudia nodded, too.”

“I could stand here all night, waiting for you to nod. In seventy-eight, maybe I’ve already told you this, after the snow stopped falling, the people who lived in town went out to check the damage and didn’t realize they were walking on top of the cars. There were drifts eighteen, twenty feet high in some places.”

“I remember,” Claudia said, changing the roll of paper on the adding machine.

“How on earth could you remember?”

“Let’s see, I was…nearly eighteen. That’s about the time we start to remember things, I guess,” Claudia said, without looking up.

Rebekah laughed, put a paper clip on the Clancys’ receipts.

“My cats could starve to death, waiting for an answer from you two,” Hazel said, jingling.

“Have mercy,” Rebekah said, dropping the paperwork and giving Hazel her full attention. Hazel’s purple, puffy coat, fashioned of some shiny microfiber, hung almost to the floor and resembled nothing so much as a giant, slick sleeping bag. The hem had collected a fringe of white cat fur. Beside Rebekah, Claudia was sorting her groups of receipts by vendor. She took the largest stacks from her pile and the largest from Rebekah’s to add up and enter in the ledger book. Rebekah hardly knew Claudia after working with her for more than a year. She knew only this gesture from Claudia, the taking on of the heaviest moving, the staying later if necessary, the silent appropriation of the less appealing task.

“I could wait if you want me to. We could go get some White Castles and then go back to my house,” Hazel said.

“No, thanks,” Rebekah said, thinking of the coming storm, the drive home, how perhaps she’d just drive past Peter’s house, only the once. “I should get straight home if life as we know it is about to end.”

“How’s about you, Claude?” Hazel asked, and continued without waiting for an answer, “Mmmmm, White Castles. Hazel Hunnicutt and a bag of little hamburgers. Many a young buck would have given his eyeteeth for such a treat back in the day.”

“There’s plenty who’d trade their eyeteeth for you now,” Claudia said, running figures through the adding machine.

“If they had teeth. This town is nothing but carcasses, and you are sorely trying my patience and that of my cats by making me wait for your answer, Rebekah. I’m adding an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to sweeten the pot, right here at the end.”

“I can’t, Hazel. If I got stranded at your house Daddy would kill me.”

“Of course,” Hazel said, crossing her arms in front of her chest, her purse hanging from her forearm in a way that made her seem, to Rebekah, old. “Vernon.” She spoke his name with the familiar acid. But in the next moment she turned toward the door, swinging her bag with a jauntiness that wasn’t reminiscent of either 1978 or aching femurs. “All right, children. Remember the words of the Savior: ‘There is no bad weather; there are only the wrong clothes.’”

“You’re wearing tennis shoes,” Claudia said.

“Exactly.” Hazel opened the heavy front door, and a gust of wind blew it closed behind her.

Rebekah took a deep breath, sighed. She was never able to mention her father’s name to Hazel, nor hers to him. She didn’t know, really, would never know what it felt like to be the child of a rancorous divorce, but surely it was something like this: the nervous straddling of two worlds, the feeling that one was an ambassador to two camps, and in both the primary activity was hatred for the other.




1950


Hazel had not dressed warmly enough, and so she draped a lap blanket over her legs. It was red wool with a broad plaid pattern and so scratchy she could feel it through her clothes. Snow had been predicted but there was no chance of it now that the clouds had broken open and the moon was bright against the sky, a circle of bone on a blue china plate.

The car was nearly a year old but still smelled new, which was to say it smelled wholly of itself and not of her or them or of something defeated by its human inhabitants. Hazel leaned against the door, let her head touch the window glass. She was penetrated by the sense of…she had no word for it. There was the cold glass, solid, and there was her head against it. Where they met, a line of warmth from her scalp was leached or stolen. Where they met. Where her hand ended and space began, or where her foot was pressed flat inside her shoe, but her foot was one thing and the shoe another. She breathed deeply, tried not to follow the thought to the place where her vision shimmered and she felt herself falling as if down the well in the backyard. Her body in air; the house in sky; the planet in space and then dark, dark forever.

“Ah,” her mother said, adjusting the radio dial. “A nice version of this song, don’t you think?”

“It is. Better than most of what’s on the radio these days.” Her father drew on his pipe with a slight whistle, and a cloud of cherry tobacco drifted from the front seat to the back, where Hazel continued to lean against the window. She was colder now and stuck staring at the moon. She tried to pull her eyes away but couldn’t.

“True enough.” Caroline Hunnicutt reached up and touched the nape of her neck, checking the French twist that never fell, never strayed. Hazel had seen her mother make this gesture a thousand, a hundred thousand times. Two fingers, a delicate touch just on the hairline; the gesture was a word in another language that had a dozen different meanings. “But it’s a sign that we are old, Albert, when we dislike everything new.” Les Brown and the Ames Brothers sang “Sentimental Journey” and her mother was right, it was a very nice version of the song. Caroline hummed and Hazel hummed. Albert laid his pipe in the hollow of the ashtray, reached across the wide front seat with his free hand, and rubbed his wife’s shoulder, once up toward her neck, once back toward her arm. He returned that hand to the wheel, and Hazel’s hand tingled as if she’d made the motion herself. Her mother’s mink stole was worrisome—the rodent faces and fringe of tails—but so soft it felt like a new kind of liquid. Time was when Hazel used to sneak the stole into her room at naptime, rubbing the little tails between her fingers until she fell asleep. That had been so long ago.

Countin’ every mile of railroad track that takes me back, Caroline sang aloud, the moon sailing along now behind them. Hazel’s head lifted free of the window, and as soon as she was able to think straight, she felt the car—the rolling, private space—fill up and crowd her. There was the baby hidden under her mother’s red, bell-shaped coat, hidden but there and going nowhere until she had decided it was time. There was Uncle Elmer, Caroline’s older brother, a yo-yo master and record holder in free throws for the Jonah Cougars, drowned in the Rhine as the Allies pushed across toward Remagen in 1945. Hazel did not really remember him but she kept his photograph on her dresser anyway, his homemade hickory yo-yo in front of the picture like an offering to a god.

There was Italy in the car, where her father had served as a field surgeon. He had brought home with him a leather valise, a reliquary urn, and a collection of photographs that revealed a sky as bright as snow over rolling hills in Umbria, a greenhouse in Tuscany. These items belonged to Albert alone and marked him as a stranger. Here was the edge of Hazel, here the surface of her father. And because of Albert’s past, Albert’s private history, the valise that was his and his alone, something else was in the car with them, a patient and velvet presence that vanished as soon as Hazel dared glance its way. It was the war years themselves, a house without men, a world without men. She tried, as she had tried so many times before, to touch a certain something that she had once thought was called I Got to Sleep With Mother in the Big Bed. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t the sweet disorder her mother had allowed to rule each day; it wasn’t that Caroline had kept the clinic up and running alone. It was somewhere in the kitchen light, yellowed with memory, and tea brewed late at night. Women sat around the table in their make-do dresses, hair tied back in kerchiefs. There was a whisper of conversation like a slip of sea rushing into a jar and kept like a souvenir, and Hazel didn’t know what they had said. But she knew for certain that women free of fathers speak one way and they make a world that tastes of summer every day, and when the men come home after winning the war—or even if they don’t come home—the shutters close, the lipstick goes on, and it is winter, again.

“It won’t snow now, will it?” Caroline said, lit with the night’s cold delicacy.

“Not now.” Albert tapped out the ashes of his pipe, and made the turn into the lane that would lead to his family’s home.

The quarter-mile drive was pitted already from this winter’s weather. Hazel studied, on either side of the car, the rows of giant old honey locusts, bare and beseeching against the sky. She could see the automobile as if hovering above it, the sleek black Ford whose doors opened like the wingspan of that other kind of locust, and whose grill beamed like a face. The car seemed friendly enough from a distance, but up close the nose was like an ice cream cone stuck into the metal framework, the sweet part devoured and just the tip of the cone remaining. The headlights lit up were Albert’s eyes behind his glasses, and what he and the car were angry about, no one bothered to explain.

Hawk’s Knoll was sixty acres on a floodplain leading back to the Planck River; a four-story barn; a metal silo once used for target practice; and a hulking house completed just two months before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. Albert Hunnicutt’s Queen Anne boasted a wraparound front porch with both formal and service entries. The doors and windows sparkled with leaded glass, and the fish-scale trim was painted every other year. The three rooflines were so steep and the slate shingles so treacherous that replacing one required a visit by two Norwegian brothers, who set up elaborate scaffolding, tied themselves to each other, and still spent a fair amount of time cursing in their native tongue. The front portion of the house and all of the upstairs were private, but the maid’s wing at the back had been converted to her father’s surgery. All day long patients came and went, sometimes stopping for a cup of coffee in the Hunnicutts’ kitchen. But at night the house and lanes were deserted.

The family stepped into the foyer of the formal entrance, where they hung up their coats and scarves; an inner door was closed against the parlor, the gas fire, and the flawless late-Victorian tableaux her parents had created. “On up to bed,” her father said, glancing at his watch. “It’s late.” They had stayed too long at the Chamber of Commerce Christmas party, her father unable to tear himself away from the town men. Albert came alive under their gaze, stroking the mantle of the European Theater he wore like the hide of an animal.

“Brush your teeth first.” Caroline kissed the top of Hazel’s head, cupped her palm around the back of her daughter’s thin neck, as if passing a secret on to another generation.

“Good night,” Hazel told both her parents, without a thought toward argument. She was not merely—then—obedient and dutiful, but anxious for the solitude of the nursery, regardless of whether the skin of the room, as she’d come to think of it, had grown onerous. She climbed the wide, formal front staircase, holding on to the banister against the slick, polished steps. Portraits of her ancestors, thin-lipped and metallic, watched her pass, up, up.

At the top of the stairs she paused in the gloom; the gaslights were now wired with small amber bulbs, three on each side of the hallway. To the right was the closed door of her father’s study, and to the left, door after door—bedrooms, bathrooms, the attic, closets, the dumbwaiter. Hazel walked silently down the Oriental runner and stopped in the prescribed place. She centered her feet on the pattern, closed her eyes, and wished—even this close to her tenth birthday she was not above wishing—and lifted her arms until they formed a straight angle; she could tell before she looked that she hadn’t done it, couldn’t yet or maybe ever. There was still nearly a foot of space between the walls and her fingertips. To touch both sides at once: that was what she had wanted for as long as she could remember, and it was an accident of birth and wealth that had left her stranded in a house too large, a hallway far too wide, for her to ever accomplish it.

The nursery was unchanged, unchanging. In one corner were her toys, preserved and arranged by Nanny to suggest that a little girl (who was not Hazel) had just abandoned her blocks, her paper dolls. The tail of the rocking horse was brushed once a week, though Hazel did nothing to disturb it. The dolls were arranged in their hats and carriages. At the round table the teddy bears and the rabbit were about to take tea out of Beatrix Potter porcelain, silver rims polished bright.

The walls of the nursery were painted gray; the floor a muted red. A teacher at the college had been employed to paint a scene a few feet from the ceiling, and traveling all around the room: a circus train with animals and acrobats and clowns. Trailing the caboose were six elephants of various sizes, joined trunk to tail. Hazel’s white iron bed frame was interwoven with real ivy—Nanny tended to that as well. Hazel did not love the bed, did not love the down comforter with feminine eyelet trim. What was hers, what was of her, were the small school desk and chair, and the white bookcase where she kept the E. Nesbit books her mother had given her over the years.

She slipped out of her shoes and party dress and hung them in the closet, then claimed the flannel nightgown from where it warmed over the back of the rocking chair near the radiator. Her bed was under a mullioned casement window, and each night Hazel moved her pillows from the headboard to the feet so she could lie awake and look at the sky. Such behavior was baffling to Nanny, who would exclaim each morning, finding the pillows at the wrong end of the bed, that Hazel was a silly girl.

Standing on the bed, she opened the window and leaned over the sill. The air was cold enough to cast the ground below her into sharp distinction; each tree branch looked knifelike and black. There were fifteen acres between the house and the road. From what Hazel could see, nothing and everything moved in the mid-December wind. A swirl of leaves tumbled down the lane, a barn cat leapt out of the shadows and back again. Hazel got out of bed and turned off the light, then settled against her pillows with the window still open. The moon was high, so she could see its light but not its face. Her best friend, Finney, had a favorite game called What If? What if a robber broke into your house? What if you were stranded on a mountaintop and had to eat human flesh? What if you were charged by a lion? Lying in the moonlight, Hazel thought the real question should have been What if…without anything following. Because that was what scared Hazel most.

What if the Rhine were freezing? What if her mother did not live? What if there were no difference between the surface of a German fighter jet and Hazel’s mind? It was that question that startled her awake, and even after she opened her eyes she didn’t understand what she was seeing, because outside her window, in the light of the dipping moon, a plane was gliding silent between two trees. Hazel held her breath, waited for a flash of light more awful for its lack of sound, the vacuum they prepared for during drills at school. Nothing came. The plane disappeared, passed once again, finally lowered its landing gear, and, wings tilted up, it alighted in her window.

The owl was backlit, enormous. Hazel knew she should not be able to see his eyes, but saw them. The stare of the bird felt colder than the air outside. He did not speak or move, and the way he didn’t move was so deliberate Hazel couldn’t move either, as if she had become one of the toys at the tea table. Her hands lay useless at her sides, and her shallow breaths didn’t lift her coverlet. The owl held her gaze so long Hazel feared she might yet return to dreaming, until, without warning, he was off the window ledge, sailing in one revolution around her room, counter to the circus train and the impotent, fading animals, and back out the window. There had never been the slightest sound.

Hazel broke free of the trance, scrambling out of bed and grabbing her brown leather play shoes, which she slipped on her bare feet. Her thick white robe was hanging on the back of her door; she tied it with an unsteady haste. She had to stop and catch her breath before she stepped out into the hallway. You weigh nothing, she told herself, closing her eyes and picturing herself levitating past the door to her parents’ bedroom. You weigh nothing. The brass doorknob felt resistant in her hand, but turned with the polished ease that came with a full-time handyman.

She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her with a slight tick. Two wall lamps were always kept lit, one on each end, and Hazel stood still a moment, as her vision adjusted to the pale yellow light. The pattern of the Oriental was, she saw now, a thousand eyes. If she moved to the left they opened. If she moved to the right they closed.

The floorboards closest to the walls were least likely to complain. Hazel slid along the mahogany paneling, the fabric of her robe whispering. At the top of the formal staircase she looked down into the thick darkness of the parlor, unsure of what she was about to do. What if you let the owl decide? She straddled the banister, a game she had never imagined would have a useful purpose, and slid noiselessly down to the thick newel post, which stopped her like a pommel on a cowboy’s saddle.

Her hand grazed the red settee embroidered with gold peacocks, the floor lamp with the milk-glass shade. She was afraid to go out the front door for all the locks, so she slipped around the heavy columns and into the library, where she could make her way to the service door. Here there was just a simple deadbolt, and on the outside screen a hook and eye. The doors closed behind her with such grace she wondered if she had opened them at all.

She made no noise crossing the porch, even though her leather brogans were awkward and half a size too big, as her mother tended to buy things ahead of the season they were in. Down the steps, the metal rail burned her hand. Jefferson Leander, who built the house, realized after moving in that he was too close to the county road. He had the original road closed and moved fifteen acres forward. The Hunnicutts called the remnant the Old Road, and even after ninety years it was clear, and circled their sixty acres. Hazel ran down to the driveway and turned right, following the Old Road past the apple orchard, past the fire ring, the cemetery where no one had been buried since 1888. She ran past the four-story barn where her pony, Poppy, was sleeping, probably dreaming of delivering a hard bite. Hazel ran away from the house and her parents, away from the teacups and the stained glass doors in the library bookcases, the track on which those doors opened with a sound like a metronome. She ran away from the deep dining room with the red carpet and captain’s bell; away from the butler’s pantry where her parents’ wedding crystal flashed, sharp and bright as stars. She tried to forget the ball of gray fur on the barn’s unused fourth floor, fur that Hazel had found a year ago and was keeping there as evidence of some unseen but powerful crime. She ran past the farm truck abandoned since the 1930s, a bullet hole in the windshield and a small tree sprouting through the floorboard—ran past it and it might as well have not been there. She ran on ruts, on rocks, on frozen shards of Kentucky bluegrass, until she reached the apex of the Old Road. From here the downward grade was steep enough to give Poppy pause when they cantered toward the first meadow. Hazel stopped because she wasn’t sure where she should go. The meadows were mown clear, the line of forest between her and the river too black to consider. She heard herself breathing, felt a fist in her chest. Afraid, she studied the forest at the bottom of the hill. Virgin timber—a wealth of sycamore and birch and oak, trees so tall they seemed more alive than Hazel herself, more real than the words in any history book or any photograph, even of Uncle Elmer. Drowned. These trees had outlived him.

Nanny had told her that if she held her hands against a birch tree in the light of the full moon, the bark would peel away on its own, would roll down the trunk like old wallpaper in steam. Hazel saw the birch then, its silver flesh a streak of frozen lightning; her eyes traveled from the roots up to the lower branches, the scars where someone the size of a giant had rested his hands and relieved the tree of its armor. She studied the tree’s dark heart, where anything could be nesting. Her eyes skated up and up until she saw, at the very top, so close to the stars he could wear them like a crown, a man in black, squatting, his legs tucked under him. She thought it was a man, a midget black as coal, the sort of creature who should have been painted on her circus train but wasn’t. He will never get down from there, she thought, and before the thought was whole, the man had stretched his legs and was leaping like a diver into a pool of winter darkness. With arms outstretched, he fell, and then with a single downward closing of his wings, he flew. Hazel didn’t move, even as she saw that where he meant to land was where she stood. She didn’t move until he was so close she could see his claws lower and engage.

The stones of the Old Road cut through Hazel’s nightgown and bloodied her knees as the bird’s claws caught her on the forehead and dragged backward into her hair. She made a rabbity sound—half newborn, half terror—and tried to cover her head with her arms. There was a split second in which she felt the downdraft of his wings like the heat of a bonfire, and then she was on her elbows and knees and everything around her was quiet. The owl was gone. Hazel stood and looked around her but there was no sign of him. She reached up and touched her forehead, her scalp. Her hand came away covered with blood, and there was blood on her nightgown and robe.

In the morning she would carry this wound to her mother, who would stitch it up tight. The gown and robe would be bleached, mended. Much of the night would be forgotten, in the way that what is unspoken is often unremembered. What would remain, barely visible under Hazel’s hair, would be the two scars, tracks left like art on the wall of a cave. That primitive, and that familiar.

Sitting beside Claudia, Rebekah continued to run the receipts, each stack twice. She ran two adding machine tapes, attaching them both to the stack with the stapler that said public hardware on the top. Nothing in this building was new—nothing was specific to it. Here groups of furniture that had lived together for fifty years were separated, sold, sometimes destroyed. The place had a powerful effect on Rebekah, even though she’d worked for Hazel for nearly five years. The fluorescent lights flickered and whined, an everyday menace. And in bad weather, like today, the metal walls of the back half of the building seemed to bow inward, growling against their joinings like a chain saw.

Once finished, Rebekah stood, told Claudia she was going to shut down the lights in the back, check the doors. Before her stretched the whole construction, 117 yards long. Rebekah couldn’t see the end from where she stood. The front half was cinder block, rectangular—it had been a tractor tire store thirty-five years earlier—and the back half, which Hazel had added, was a tacked-on pole barn, ugly as sin. The floor was poured concrete, rough finished and unpainted, and the cold radiated up through it and right into Rebekah’s shoes. The walls were corrugated metal. The ceiling soared, making it difficult to heat, so Hazel had installed two twelve-foot industrial fans originally designed for the corporate-owned pig operations out in the county.

She started in the far left aisle, wandering as if she were checking the stock. Hazel and Claudia didn’t seem troubled by what bothered Rebekah the most: these were objects—yes—but they were also lost lives, whole families. They weren’t the dead but they stood for the dead, somehow. Here, in the very first booth, #14, was a four-poster bed made of beautiful aged maple, and right in the center of one of the posts was a shiny, hand-shaped groove, as if a woman had held the post right there as she swung around the footboard and into bed, night after night for decades. Rebekah hurried by booth #15, with its cherry dining room table, its chandelier and vintage landscapes, because #15, rented by the Merrills, also contained a collection of leather suitcases. Inside one she’d found an old rain hat and a note on yellowed paper that reminded: January 7 11:00 mother to Doctor. Now she could hardly look at #15, the suitcases especially. Everything stung her, everything Peter had touched, everything that bore the slightest mark of him.

Toward the middle of the building, the displays became more manly: #16 was primarily unmarked, narrow-necked bottles caked with dirt, and #17 was preserved wrought iron—tools and frying pans, with some cracked butter churns on the floor. The two parts of the building were connected by a short hallway (Hazel called it a breezeway), lined with cheap landscapes tacked up on fake-wood paneling. As far as Rebekah could tell, none of these paintings or prints had ever sold—even the frames weren’t worth anything. The hallway was narrow, then opened up into the massiveness of the back. How had it happened, Rebekah wondered, that a structure so displeasing, so prefabricated and out of scale, could feel so wonderful? It was wonderful. The slight breeze from the industrial fans, even the deep thrum of their motors—a sound so insistent Rebekah could feel it in her stomach—daily pulled Rebekah in. There, stretched before her, more than fifty yards of individual rooms established by Peg-Board walls six feet tall, each room filled with treasure impossible to predict. One booth, the Childless Nursery, contained nothing but wooden toys and rocking horses, the kind covered with real horsehide, with horses’ tails and cold glass eyes cracked and cloudy with age. Sometimes when she looked in this booth she imagined not the children who’d owned the toys, but further back: the horses themselves, whose hides now covered the wood frames and stuffing. She couldn’t see them whole, just the chuffing of breath on a winter morning, a flank, the shuddering of a muscle under skin.

There was a booth with a baby crib, a carriage, threadbare quilts, an old print of the Tunnel Angel, the guardian who presses her finger against the lips of the unborn and whispers, Don’t tell what you know. It was the very end of the building that Rebekah loved best. From the breezeway to the back were two long aisles—Rebekah thought of them as vertical—and against the back wall Hazel had set up a horizontal display. Everything here belonged to Hazel. It began against the west wall with Your Grandmother’s Parlor: an oval rag rug, its colors dimmed, surrounded by a plunky Baldwin piano, a Victrola, a radio in a mahogany cabinet, a nubbly red sofa with wooden arms and feet. On a low table was a green metal address book with the alphabet on the front—you pulled a metal tab to the letter you needed and pushed a bar at the bottom and the book sprang open—and a heavy black telephone from the 1940s, a number still visible on the dial: LS624.

Rebekah dusted the Victrola with the sleeve of her white cotton shirt, adjusted the dial of the radio, picked a piece of string off the sofa. At the telephone table she scrolled to the letter S but didn’t push the bar, rested her hand on the receiver of the phone. It was cold like metal, made of Bakelite, a heavy, nearly indestructible thing. She knew the phone worked, because Hazel had tried it with an adapter. The ringer was broken, but the phone worked. Rebekah had been circling it for three years now, waiting for someone to buy it, hoping they never would, because she believed that someday she’d pick up this phone and call the past. She’d call her own childhood, ask to speak to Rebekah, the bright-haired girl in Pentecostal dresses. She’d issue warnings, some mundane (Don’t turn your back on the Hoopers’ yellow dog), some of grave importance (Don’t ever get in a car with Wiley Crocker). Was there a way to call her mother, back when her mother was young? Or someone even farther away, a boy who’d just enlisted against his parents’ wishes, a young housewife confiding in her sister?

Hazel’s things were really more beautiful than anyone else’s, but she never made much of it, didn’t carry around catalogs or talk much business with the Cronies. She just went to auctions, answered ads in the paper, came to work with treasure she’d paid almost nothing for. Her trick was to choose the stormy Saturdays—rain or sleet will drive a crowd away—and stay at the auction until the end, when the prize pieces had been saved back but there was no one there to bid on them. Hazel was a businesswoman, Rebekah knew, but still this pained her, the way Hazel moved around Hopwood County like a shark. It didn’t take going to many auctions to see what the truth was: each one was an occasion of sorrow. Either a parent had died, or a spouse who left no insurance. One way or another a life had been foreclosed on, and whatever was earned at the auction would go toward a debt that would never be paid. And there was Hazel, circling somebody’s heirloom china and linens, or a handheld drill with a man’s thumbprint permanently engraved, trying to figure out how to get it cheap and sell it high.

After the Parlor was Rebekah’s favorite place of all and her domain: the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Of all the things Rebekah had hidden in her years in the Prophetic Mission Church—the doubt at which she didn’t dare glance; the sense that the church was a screen between herself and everything she wanted to experience unmediated—there had been no secret as potent as what she kept in her closet. Forced to wear, every day, long denim skirts with white tennis shoes, white blouses or sweaters, and in full knowledge that the slightest violation of the dress code was a sin against God Himself, Rebekah had assembled—slowly, over the years—her own line of clothing. She had begun with items left in the lost-and-found at church, and then, when she could drive, by combing rummage sales for certain fabrics and rare buttons. Her first dress violated every precept of Pentecostalism’s radical edge: the top of the dress was a girl’s old blue jean jacket, darted beneath the breasts. Rebekah had removed the collar and the sleeves at the three-quarters length, replacing them with rabbit fur from another, moth-eaten jacket. The skirt was yards and yards of pale peach parachute silk lined with white organza, calf-length, 1950s style. Although she had modeled it on herself, Rebekah didn’t want to wear the dress. She wanted to make it, and to know it existed; that was all.

Other dresses followed, and men’s suits, baby clothes. Once she had purchased a box of Ball jars, and had taken it home, rolled up the smaller things and tucked them in the jars as if putting up tomatoes for the winter. Afterward she sat on the floor of her bedroom studying the gold lids of the jars, each in its own cubicle of waxed cardboard. In that week she had told her father she was leaving the church. She had endured brutal hours with him following the news, days of brutal hours, and yet there she was, still in her bedroom, still hiding things from him. The next week she saw a Help Wanted advertisement in the paper, run by Hazel, that read, Looking for a woman who believes there is a wardrobe beyond this wardrobe, and so she had come to the Used World Costume Shop and Fantasy Dressing Room.

Here a U shape of wooden rails held hundreds of vintage dresses, countless old coats, men’s suits, sprung leather shoes, which Rebekah found on weekend trips in the spring and summer to the county’s yard and estate sales, sometimes filling her car, sometimes arriving back at the store with nothing but a single item. There was a hat tree that looked more like a wildly exotic bush—hats with feathers, hats with fruit, men’s fedoras, Russian caps of Persian lamb. Hazel had found a dressing room mirror on a stand that was bigger than a bathtub, and a Chinese screen for changing. Tucked away under the dresses was a traveling trunk, barely visible, on its side and open, the drawers pulled out in graduating degrees, lingerie spilling out as if a sexy woman had left in a hurry. It was in the Dressing Room that Rebekah felt most acutely the presence of lives stopped, or abandoned, and here, too, was the place she most expected someone to return. Who could leave forever the narrow, creamy satin nightgown with the lace straps, or a bespoke suit tailored to a man nearly as big around as he was tall? Rebekah would never understand how some people came to have such style and then died anyway, but she could hold the satin nightgown, let it flow over the palm of her hand like cool water, and sense a breath of animation.

In the Dressing Room was the stereo where all day Hazel’s favorite songs played: Big Band Hits 1936–;38, The Anthology of Swing, The Greatest Hits of Glenn Miller, Sinatra and Dorsey. At least once every day Rebekah stood among the clothes, singing along with “These Foolish Things,” “Moonlight and Shadows,” “Make Believe Ballroom”—these were her new hymns. She stood back here just before opening and closing, when the cool, cavernous space was all hers, taking stock of everything—from the sad, shapeless housedresses every girl with a mother or grandmother recognizes with guilt and longing, to an evening dress made of cheap chain mail—Hazel’s costume collection covered the spectrum of the human drama.

Rebekah swayed to Rudy Vallee’s “Vieni, Vieni,” her favorite song on the tape. Vieni vieni vieni vieni vieni / Tu sei bella bella bella bella bella…

She knelt down and turned off the stereo, with reluctance. The vast space rushed in where the music had been, a tomblike echo belied only by the bass notes of the fan. She stood too quickly, looking over her shoulder at the two aisles leading directly to her. From the perspective opposite her, more than half a football field away, she was the vanishing point. The next thing she knew, she was on her knees, her face in a wine-colored silk dressing gown that smelled of age and cigarettes. No harm done; her knees weren’t scraped, she hadn’t hit her head. And there had been nothing there, no one in the aisle, no one just emerging either from the booth set up to resemble a one-room schoolhouse or from #32, the Abandoned Pews. No one was coming for her, and yet Rebekah wasn’t alone where she stood, and she knew it.

By the time Rebekah returned to the front counter, Claudia had checked the totals against the day’s receipts and prepared the deposit. The green zippered bag was closed and locked, the top and front of the glass estate jewelry case was wiped clean, the lights in the office were off. Claudia was looking at a Life magazine from 1954, waiting, Rebekah assumed, for her return, even though the wind outside was picking up and Claudia had farther to drive.

“You didn’t have to stay, Claudia.”

“That’s okay,” Claudia said, standing up and pushing her stool in, and it happened again as it happened every day that Claudia just kept rising. First there was the complicated gesture of getting her legs underneath her, and then the slow straightening up. Sometimes she stretched or pressed a fist against her back as if her body constantly came as a shock to her. Sitting on the stools behind the counter, Claudia was the same height as Rebekah standing. At her full height she was five or six inches taller than Peter, who stood at six feet even. All day Rebekah marveled at the basic facts of Claudia, the way her hands were twice the size of Rebekah’s. She watched openly as Claudia walked around the counter to the coat rack, removing her blue parka with the orange lining; watched the way Claudia covered the distance in two long steps. No matter what she wore—jeans, slacks, the plain dress shirts she favored, sweaters—it was impossible to tell at first glance that she was a woman. Rebekah didn’t think she looked like a man, either, which was a puzzle. Claudia’s black hair, just going gray at the temples, was cut short, but it wasn’t exactly a man’s haircut, and besides, a lot of women had short hair. Her face was both broad and well defined; she had high, pronounced cheekbones, gray eyes, dusky skin. What Rebekah really felt was that when Claudia stood up, it wasn’t Claudia who was revealed as too tall; rather, the rest of them were obviously too short. Red and Slim, for instance, the Main Cronies, sat all day on the cracked Naugahyde sofas at the front of the store smoking cigarettes, yammering away about nothing, both of them weak-backed and heading for emphysema, while Claudia lifted heavy furniture with one hand, opened the back door with the other.

Rebekah herself—the china doll of the Prophetic Mission Church, of the church school; the backyard, twilit games—was treasured for being smaller than other girls, more frail. Famous among her friends and cousins for her tipply laugh, a laugh so quick and impossible to repress, Rebekah was the embodiment of Girl. Her mother said she had Bird Bones, her uncles called her No Bigger’n a Minute. She had felt pride when other girls became coltish and awkward and she was still so neat and childish. Even after she’d reached a normal height, had grown unexpectedly so curvy that her father wouldn’t look at her, she continued to think of herself as that princess child, the one girl small enough to sit on Jesus’ knee as He Suffered the Children to Come Unto Him, while the others, the tall angry girls and the pimply boys, sat at His feet.

“Bekah, you coming?” Claudia stood next to the heavy front doors, her hand at the keypad for the alarm system.

Someone should have pointed out to Rebekah that it’s the summit of foolishness to feel pride for what you lack. Someone might have mentioned that there comes a day, and not long into life, when you’ll need all the strength you can get; when the woman who makes it across the prairie and saves her children turns out to be taller than Jesus by a foot and a half.

“Do you want me to follow you, make sure you get home all right?”

Rebekah smiled, shook her head, accepted her coat from Claudia. “That’s okay. Thank you, though—I have an errand to run.”

The snow wasn’t falling yet. Rebekah steered the old Buick Electra, wide and heavy as a ship, down the streets of the east side of Jonah, out to the bypass that would take her to Peter’s rural road. She was thinking it had been a Friday that she’d met Peter, a Friday because that used to be Claudia’s day off and she was nowhere in the memory. It was Friday now. An anniversary of sorts, but how many weeks? More than seven months of weeks; she was too tired to count.

Before her twenty-third birthday, when she left the church and took up with Hazel, Rebekah had never worn pants or cut her hair, not even into bangs, although lots of girls got by with that one. Rebecca’s hair had hung to the middle of her thighs, dark red at the roots and gradually lightening at the ends, until the last three inches were blond, fine as silk. Her baby hair. Her crowning glory. Vernon wouldn’t allow her mother to braid the blond hair, or put a rubber band around it. Once a week she had to use a VO5 Hot Oil Hair Treatment to protect it. Every year that passed was like the ring in a tree: blond as a baby; here you can see it starting to darken. Light, then strawberry, then more like a cherry, then like aged cherrywood—her life, her father’s life. By the time she cut it, that baby hair was a raggedy mess, most of it broken off and split in two; she pulled a comb through it hatefully, and her head hurt all the time from the weight of it on her scalp.

Until that day five years ago when Rebekah left the church, she’d never seen a movie or watched television or danced or been in the same room with alcohol. She’d never gone swimming or even taken a long bath, as it was considered immoral for girls to do so. She’d never been on a boat, an airplane, a train. She had been on a bus, in cars, trucks, tractors, and hay wagons. Garlic had been exotic to her, as were any spices beyond those in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner: sage, thyme, nutmeg. Salt. Her father ate onions as if they were apples, but didn’t hold with spicing food. She hadn’t learned the details of any world war, only the barest facts, and she didn’t know where on a map the great cities of Europe could be found. If she’d located the cities, she wouldn’t have known their currencies. She had never played a sport, had not run since she was a child, and her tendency to take long, brisk walks was frowned upon. At eighteen, twenty, she knew nothing about sex, only what she had heard whispered or otherwise referred to by her friends who’d married young, had children young.

But for all this naïveté, what was forced and what was natural to her, Rebekah had seen many dead bodies. The Prophetic Mission denied her the knowledge of sex and reproduction, but found death to be, in general, quite wholesome. She’d attended the calling hours and funerals of more people than she could recall. Though there were plenty she remembered: profiles—first just a nose, a temple, the back of the head meeting the silk pillow—who became her aunt Lovey; her grandparents; her mother; Sister Parson, who died old, and Sister Lynton, who was only twenty-nine; and children, too, and babies. Martin Peacock, who owned Peacock’s Mortuary, was Prophetic, and his funeral home was as familiar to her as any place in the world. The members of her church stood at the wake of every member who died, the extended families of every member, near strangers. They attended funerals when it was politic to do so, or when the service would be interesting, perhaps because a daughter from home who sang beautifully—a daughter who had since gone on to Olivet or Bob Jones University—would be there, singing.

INDIANA: CORN AND DEATH. She’d like a bumper sticker that said that. Ooh, that would vex her daddy, wouldn’t it? she thought, then realized she’d already gone about as far as she could where vexing was concerned, and was about to go the distance. The sky seemed somehow too close to the car—what was the problem here? The snow hadn’t started and yet the tires on the road sounded muffled, the color of a truck in the distance was dulled. She couldn’t tell where she was—somewhere on the County Line Road, but how far to go? Hadn’t it been a Wednesday? She would remember if Claudia had been there, she remembered everything else.

She had been wearing green, her best color, according to Hazel. A green cardigan because it was a cool morning in early May. She’d been sitting with Hazel at the counter when Peter came in alone. He nodded at the Cronies, gave a little salute to Hazel. Rebekah glanced at him, back down at her book. She had been reading Other Voices, Other Rooms, one of Hazel’s favorite novels. The mule had not yet hung himself from the mezzanine, but that scene was coming. Peter was average height, thin, wearing baggy blue jeans, a blue nylon jacket, a red knit cap, and later she would have a simple, bright memory of his face as she saw it for the first time, as he looked at Hazel and before he looked away. His cheeks were flushed from the spring wind, and his lips were red. The hair she could see at the edge of the cap was black, curly. Red cap, black hair, pink cheeks, red lips, his wide blue eyes fringed with black lashes. The blue was a surprise, the eyes themselves so round they were almost feminine, and the eyelashes, too.

He was not Vernon’s idea of what a young man should be. Rebekah watched him stroll into #14, pull out a drawer in a china cabinet, slide it back in slowly. He was wearing running shoes, something her father would never have tolerated in a son, if he’d had a son. Peter straightened a frame against the wall, tipped a floor-length mirror, rubbed the satin edge of a quilt; this was not how men behaved in her world. They stood still and kept a silent watch as their women committed such shenanigans; it was the province of the female to study objects and engage the earthly. She watched as he picked up an alligator travel case in #15 and carried it a few feet down the aisle, as if he were running late for a train. Rebekah laughed out loud before she could stop herself; the Cronies looked up a moment, and then went back to talking.

She wondered, in the months that followed and certainly now, what the human eye sees in that first moment. Do we know something, or do we decide it in an instant and only later rewrite the scene to imply that something decided on us? Because now, if she were asked, she’d say that he looked smart and funny, whimsical, sophisticated, gifted. She might even say that she saw something in his hands she loved, a certain eloquence, but in truth she didn’t, on that Wednesday, notice his hands at all. His eyes, that blue, told nothing about what he turned out to be. There were jokers in the church, men who could do imitations, who could tell jokes, even a few with a droll wit that was lost on nearly everyone. But no man in her life would have run like a girl with a travel case and make her see the train, and do it for the benefit of no one.

Rebekah had laughed, and the laugh hung in the air a moment the way a bell will after it’s stopped ringing. Peter turned, offered her a slight bow. Hazel glanced at her, went back to her magazine. The Cronies were silent a moment, then Red had said, “I told him I’d rather tow a Chevy than drive a Ford.”

“Yep, that’s right.”

“I don’t care if it’s a V-8 or a V-80, don’t be asking me should you buy a Ford truck.”

“That’s the way to say it,” Slim agreed.

“And then he sets over to the house night after night, watching grown men wrestle on the TV. His mom carries his food in to him like he’s a shut-in. I said I sure didn’t raise him to set like that.”

“His get-up-and-go got up and went, sounds like.”

“Hand me another cola, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Rebekah turned left onto Peter’s road, which had a number but everyone called it One Oak. The snow had just begun to fall and now she wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake, maybe, coming out this way before the storm. Before she could really regret it, there was his cabin. His mailbox, the short lane, three steps up, the broad porch, the screen door, his storm door, his windows. He was there—the porch light was on, and there was his little red truck. She’d intended to drive by, just drive by the once, but now all she could do was stop and wait for a sign, not from God, but from Peter. She no longer fit in her life and it was his fault and there was no sense going on until something was resolved. A silver strip of smoke curled up from the chimney, away. Snow began to settle in the upward curving arms of the trees, and Peter, if he was really home, gave nothing to go on. A note, a letter, should she leave something behind? But what should she say? That right there, as close as her own breath, she could see the faint scar on his palm where he’d been bitten by a cat? That the shirt of his she slept with was losing his scent, and when it was gone she would see no light in her life? She could say: The way you shake hands with strangers, play the guitar, know songs about umbrellas—these things have destroyed me. You gave me red wine, venison, you lifted the hair off the back of my neck, which no one has done since my mother died. Every person wore the look that spoke of this loss, it had happened to everyone, and they could all say these things: his smell, her voice, her body in sleep. What had happened to Rebekah? What has happened to me? she said aloud, and watched the door Peter didn’t open. What would she really say to him, if there were world enough and time, a letter like a book he would have to read but never get to finish?

She would say, Peter, there was a sinking-down comfort in my life, as if I knew I was trapped in the belly of a whale, and so I built my little fires and was content to ride the waves out. All my life I’d looked around at the hangar of ribs, the slick walls, and thought, This is the size of the world. But what if the Leviathan opened his mouth? What if the greatest darkest biggest beast in the deepest sea imaginable, my God, the land that was my God and the Mission and the fear that were the swallowing that had swallowed me; what if that very beast opened wide and there above the sky I had always thought was the sky, the hard black whale palate dotted with whale stars; what if that sky opened to the sky above the sea, and I could see the wild spread of it above me, the real stars for once, for the first time? What if I suddenly saw the teeth, the tongue, the cervical curve of the whale’s mouth? What then?

Well, she thought, taking a deep breath, I would run for it.

She gave him thirty seconds more, but she knew he wasn’t coming. Peter didn’t pull her from the sea. He wasn’t the shore, the sky, the stars. He was just standing there, agreeable at the time, and while she hadn’t even begun to grieve for him, hadn’t begun to reckon up what the cost would be to her in the end, she also knew women never really die from love. Hazel had told her so.

Rebekah put the car in gear, and headed home.

Claudia stopped at Parker’s Supermarket on her way out of town, joining half of Jonah in the joy of the looming crisis. She took what milk was left, the orphaned loaves of wheat bread. Not knowing whether the storm would even come, and if it did what she would need, made her forget what she’d come for. The store was vast, too bright, and both her knees and her will felt porous. Again and again and again, the car door, the parking lot, the groceries, the stares. In the produce section she stood a few moments unmoving, thinking how odd the fact of consciousness in beings who spent their lives like hamsters on a wheel.

She ended up buying more fruit than she could ever eat, and a few things she’d never purchased before in her life: buttermilk bath salts, smoked cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate. On a whim, she went back and bought two of everything, thinking she might leave a bag on her sister’s porch with no note, as if Millie had been the object of a visitation; Millie, who had no need of help from anyone, and didn’t care much for food. Everyone in the store gave Claudia at least a long look; and one elderly woman stopped in her tracks and pointed directly at Claudia’s chest, while saying to her stooped husband, “Look-a there!” Claudia walked on, never meeting an eye or giving an indication she’d heard their comments, as if she weren’t merely too tall, too broad, but deaf and blind as well. It wasn’t that she was resigned to her status, although that was part of it. And she hadn’t precisely taken inside herself the years of scorn, although for a while she had. Now she relied on something she’d heard Amos Townsend say in church a few months earlier.

He had welcomed them and they’d sung something, Claudia couldn’t remember the song, and then he read from Scripture and she didn’t remember what that was either—something from the book of Mark, she suspected—and then Amos began to talk about the character of Jesus. He’d quoted a Quaker theologian named D. Elton Trueblood: “Jesus Christ can be accepted; He can be rejected; He cannot reasonably be ignored.” Claudia wrote the words in the little notebook she had taken to bringing with her to church. She could see how Trueblood’s claim might be true intellectually, and yet ignoring Jesus was as easy as ignoring anyone else in the realm of the dead, as far as she was concerned. He could have easily said that the Civil War cannot reasonably be ignored, or the mechanics of evolution, or the missile silos in the American West. Of course they can’t, she had thought, and yet it’s in our nature to ignore everything except our survival, and indeed, our survival probably depended upon a narrowness of focus that began in the morning with the hunt and ended at night with shelter. She was thinking of this when Amos said that he’d thought about Jesus his whole life—he agreed with Trueblood—and as an adult his contemplation felt like a combination of what young girls feel for rock stars and what young boys feel for abusive fathers. Claudia had blinked, taken a breath. He imagined, Amos said, a girl lying on a sofa, studying pictures and biographies of the object of her affection, imagining she knew Him in a way no one else did, and also hoping to get closer, to establish greater intimacy and to get to the bottom, finally, of her passion. Or a boy, walking through the house after dinner and hearing his father come up the steps—the wariness, the quick prayer, Please don’t let him notice me. Jesus, Amos continued, had always struck him as a man filled with rage. Think of Jesus’ impatience with His mother, with the Apostles, His chilly distance from the people on whom He performed miracles, how He was so irritated with everyone who simply didn’t get it. Think of Him with the fig tree. What a world to be born into! How grotesque and cruel to be made manifest by the Divine just to suffer and be killed for a senseless metaphorical principle. Amos shook his head in disbelief, mentioned Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard, how the message sent was understood by the Son, but not by the messenger. He paraphrased a passage from a book about cosmic child abuse. Claudia was lost a moment, then Amos said he thought the great message of Jesus might be there, in His anger, in the abuse He had suffered not at the hands of the Romans, but at the hands of His Father, because that’s what we really share with Him. We are called upon to love a God who either didn’t see fit to protect us from disaster and death, or was helpless to prevent it. What sort of a God was that? And Jesus, in response, created for Himself a sort of daily compassion (not empathy, of which He seemed to have little, at least to Amos), but a cobbled-together will-to-patience that was born not of His divinity, but of His humility. Amos said he’d imagined Jesus so many times repeating under His breath, “Don’t smite them, don’t smite them, they’re really just a bunch of morons and are in enough trouble already,” repeating it as He healed the hemorrhaging woman, the blind man, the soldier, people He did not love but took mercy upon anyway. If Jesus hadn’t seen His lot as the same as humanity’s, He could not have been human. And if He hadn’t felt compassion for the people around Him, He could not have been Divine. “Or maybe I’m just mad at my Father,” Amos had said near the end of the sermon, with his rueful smile. He ended by saying it was possible to consider Jesus an entire lifetime and find nothing but projections of our own futility, our own fear of death; He was a wild, blank, imaginal screen on which we had cast our looming cultural shadow.

The Haddington Church of the Brethren was completely silent when Amos stopped speaking. Claudia didn’t dare look around, but she wondered what the other parishioners were thinking as they listened. At the time she didn’t even know what Brethren meant, except that she never thought about her clothes when she was there, and no one and nothing but Amos Townsend and this church really interested her.

After that Sunday, Claudia thought often of the phrase ‘He created for Himself a kind of daily compassion,’ and she tried to do the same, even though she lacked power, divinity, wisdom, grace. She walked through the grocery store, or stepped into a gas station, and when the toothless women in sweatshirts, their bodies and hair reeking of cigarette smoke and fast food, stared at her cruelly or even went so far as to make a comment, she no longer thought, They hate me. Now she tried to remind herself that if we don’t feel the weight of the human condition, we must not be fully human. She thought instead, They hate themselves. They hate being alive. They hate their Fathers.

As she walked to the car, the feeling in her chest was atmospheric, a pinching there not unlike excitement. The silence was so thick Claudia became aware of her own breathing, and of the sensation that she was actually in the sky. The sky was no longer above her, or the clouds at a safe distance. As she loaded her groceries the snow began to fall, heavy flakes at first, but by the time she started the car and turned on the lights, the wind had picked up and the six miles ahead of her seemed too long. She had the second bag of food, the things she’d thought she might leave for Millie, but knew she’d never get to her sister’s house and back home before the storm struck. As she made her way through the north end of Jonah, she decided to leave them at Rebekah’s; the old house where Rebekah lived with her father was on the way.

The porch light burned at the Shooks’, but Rebekah’s car wasn’t there, and there was no sign of Vernon. Claudia trudged up the sidewalk, the heavy bag obscuring her vision. Rebekah’s neighborhood felt abandoned—there were no dogs barking, no movement. She left the bag in front of the wooden screen door, under the porch light, as she would have at Millie’s, with just these words written on the outside of the bag: For Rebekah, a cold night.

By the time Claudia reached Old 73, heading east toward home, hers was the only car on the road, or the only one she could see. There was a little visibility to the south, but almost none in the north; she could make out the houses, the convenience store, the used car lot to the right of the road, but nothing on the left. She knew her right turn was coming up, and began to look for the mailbox that signaled the V of the additional lane—just a little turn lane a quarter of a mile long. She was too familiar with the road, had driven it too many times, and tended to sail into the turn lane at top speed, then slow down quickly in order to make the turn. Indiana country roads have that effect on most people, Claudia thought; they breed a false security, because the world seems so flat and manageable, the sight line so clean. She didn’t see the mailbox and then she saw just the outline of it, and some part of her body led into the swerve to the right, but something else, a voice, cautioned her to flash her high beams into the lane, just in case. There in the lane was a man, dressed in a black coat and walking shoulder-hunched against the blowing snow. Claudia jerked the wheel of the old Cherokee too hard to the left; too late realized her error. The back fishtailed with a skating, liquid ease, and Claudia took her hands off the wheel. She spun in a full circle, then half of another, and when the tires found some purchase, she gently turned the wheel into the spin and felt the truck shudder in her hands.

She could no longer see anything. Her headlights were pointing west, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The walking man was gone, had vanished as if into smoke, or a high tide. She had to get off the highway—whoever she couldn’t see wouldn’t see her, so she drove a few feet, then recognized the iron gate of the old nursing home, empty for the past three years. Bear Creek, her road, was due south—so she turned and drove tentatively over what she hoped was the road. By now there was nothing, no shoulder, no fencerow, nothing to indicate if she was still on pavement or heading toward the culvert. Two miles yet from home, and she’d left earlier that day without either boots or gloves, another bit of typical Hoosier folly.

Sometimes the snow blew horizontally across her headlights, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. She’d gone nearly half a mile when she saw something off to her right, at the edge of the headlight beam. She angled the Cherokee toward the shape just slightly, just enough to cast light upon it, and got out of the truck. The wind and snow hit her face like an open hand, rocketing into her coat, and for a moment she thought of how silly this was, a woman like Claudia undone by a winter storm. She’d lived on this road her whole life; how could she possibly fail to get home? The wind sang in her ears, rising and falling, and a stand of trees outside her sight moaned along in time.

“Hello?” Her voice seemed to stop in her mouth. The wind had blown it back at her.

There, then: a set of eyes caught green in the halogen light. Claudia took a step backward, saw another set, a third, the vague impression of fur. Three dogs, she thought, long-muzzled, gray. She imagined more than she saw. Three dogs lying on the frozen ground, snow blown up against their sides, the brutal wind. Before she could decide what to do, all three animals rose and ran away from her, deep into the pounding whiteness, the black ground of the field on which they could run all night.

The snow was blinding by the time Rebekah drove home, leaning close to the steering wheel, as if that would help. When she finally reached her house, she parked the car in the general vicinity of other car-shaped, snow-covered mounds, hoping she wasn’t actually on the sidewalk, or in somebody’s yard. She’d left the porch light on by accident that morning, and now it was the only guide to her door—the too bright bulb her father insisted on and that she usually found distressing.

It was Friday, so Vernon would be at the Governance Council Meeting until it was over, snowstorm or not. Rebekah didn’t worry about him driving or becoming stranded; to do so would have been a betrayal of who he was to her, and who he believed himself to be. He had, Rebekah knew, thrived in storms far worse than this, once traveling seven miles on horseback in a blizzard because he’d intended to propose to her mother and would not wait.

Constance Ruth Harrison, called Ruthie, had been seventeen years old in 1958, had known nothing of the world when Vernon set his cap for her. They’d met when Vernon responded to a call from the pulpit to help get a neighbor’s crops in; Ruthie’s father, Elder Harrison, had fallen to pneumonia, and his family was in trouble. They weren’t Prophetic, the Harrisons, but belonged to a radical Holiness sect that had broken away from the larger body and set up worship in a barn on Elder Harrison’s land. At first they called themselves Children of the Blood of the Lamb, and then Children of the Blood, and finally, just The Blood. That was where the truth lay, they believed, in the old story. For some groups it was in Christ’s miracles, for some it was the Resurrection. (The Mission preached that demonic sects like the Catholics worshiped only Mary and a group of Mafia-connected cardinals in Italy who carried submachine guns under their red robes, and who communicated with the Underworld through a code involving sunglasses.) But the Harrisons and their little ragtag army, which had remained isolated as long as Elder Harrison lived, believed that the divine message of Jesus was in His Blood, the blood He shared with the Master Creator Father God, and the blood He spilled on the cross to redeem humanity. In them, the Blood rose up and spoke; it told them of the End Times, it said there would be a worldwide slaughter of the unconverted Jews. As the Children of the Blood married and mingled with the Prophetic Mission, and as the secular world slouched toward them, they realized there would need to be a worldwide slaughter of other groups as well. No hope of conversion would be offered to Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindoos, the Godless Buddhists. A special trampling under the hooves of the Four Horsemen was reserved for Unitarians, and a spectacle of Holy Execution for the mortal enemies of The Blood, the Mormons. The old peace churches, the Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Brethren, would be mown down, but gently, like wheat, as the members of The Blood respected their work ethic. Jesus would smite the proclaimers of the Pentecost with a special vengeance, including the Nazarenes, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God, because their worldliness was evidence of a silent affiliation with Satan. Any branch of the crooked tree that called itself Pentecostalism, then built its ministry around cavorting with prostitutes and self-glorification, had not merely gone astray. It had become a carrier of the Disease.

Until five years ago Rebekah had thought it all perfectly normal, what went on in that barn with her Granddad Elder, her child mother, the members of the fugitive group. It was Worship as they Worshiped. Of course there would be no Children of the Blood without blood, there would be no life, there would be no eternity. The barn was their Temple, and its altar was stained, as had been all the altars of the seven tribes of Israel. And her father riding his great horse Michael over miles of snow-blanketed fields to claim Ruthie as his own—that had sounded normal, too. Ruth had had no say in the matter, wouldn’t have dreamed of making any claim to her life or liberty. She’d told Rebekah at the end, lying in the hospital bed the Mission had rented and set up in her bedroom, that although she couldn’t say she’d loved Vernon at seventeen, there had been something in the cruel set of his jaw that had thrilled her and made her want to go away with him. So she’d been willing, in her way, then he took her and married her, and it hadn’t been her family or her childhood she’d mourned, it had been her girlfriends in the church, whom Ruthie had taken for granted, considered permanent. They’d never been together as a group again, never walked across a field or gathered around a porch swing, never spent the night in the same bed or talked for hours about nothing, chattering like magpies, as the men used to say. All those girls were married off eventually, scattered to the winds, kept behind closed doors.

Rebekah hadn’t worn boots to work, and so was forced to make her way down the sidewalk in mincing steps, reaching out for trees. She imagined someone watched her do this. Hazel’s voice suddenly entered her head, saying, Oh look, a little redheaded stepchild has escaped from under the porch. Rebekah laughed aloud, lost her footing, righted herself. She could just see, in front of the screen door, a bag from Parker’s Supermarket. When she reached it, she looked inside before picking it up, but it was just what it appeared to be. Who would have done such a thing? Who would have thought of her, now that she’d lost her cousins and all her extended family, the church she’d grown up in, and the love of her father?

The front door opened into a sitting room that contained a piano no one had played since her mother died, but which Vernon had tuned once a year because that’s what one did: tune the piano. The walls were painted pale green and decorated with the acceptable notions: family pictures, a print of Jesus knocking on the door—everyone knew the image of Him knocking on the door and awaiting admittance. Jesus knocks, was what the print was trying to say, He doesn’t just walk in and help Himself to your old mess. Above the piano was a counted-cross-stitch sampler Ruthie had made that read JESUS IS THE SONG IN MY HEART. The same could be said of everything in the parlor: the bench on which no one sat, the piano no one played, the two wing chairs gathered around the little table on which Ruth had placed her knickknacks and doilies—all of these things were somehow connected to Jesus. It was a wonder to consider, the experiment to make Jesus everything, the effort it contained.

Rebekah unloaded the groceries on the butcher block table in the kitchen as if compiling the clues to a mystery. Milk, eggs, bread, orange juice—that could be anyone. But this French cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate, buttermilk bath salts in what was supposed to look like an antique milk jug? And all this fruit: oranges, grapes, apples, as if it were a different season altogether. For a single fluttery moment she thought Peter must have left it, he must have been worried about her, and then she saw the note: For Rebekah, a cold night. Claudia’s handwriting.

The oranges looked so good she decided to eat one right away—she would puzzle over Claudia’s gesture later—but then saw again the bath salts, so she carried them both into the bathroom, ran hot water. She took off her clothes without looking in the mirror, as her mother had taught her, poured part of the milk container into the tub. The salt didn’t smell like buttermilk (thank goodness) but it was that color, and the water became creamy, slightly foamy. Rebekah climbed in, surprised by the silky feeling of the water, and leaned back. The water lapped over her, rose and fell as she breathed, leaving a sheen of sweet-smelling oil on her skin. Rebekah closed her eyes and thought of Peter; he had glanced at Hazel and she saw his face again, everything around and behind him gone dark in her memory. She focused on nothing but the color of his skin and the shape of his mouth and the length of his eyelashes. But she couldn’t hold on to the image; she kept seeing Claudia’s handwriting, the span of Claudia’s hand on the glass countertop of the Used World. Span. It was a biblical word for time, Rebekah thought. The smell of the orange rose up in the heat of the room. Water continued to pour from the tap as she claimed the orange from the countertop, thrust her thumb under the skin around the navel. She pulled off large sections of peel and dropped them in the water, where they floated, riding the crests of the small waves around her body. She hummed a bit of Artie Shaw’s “My Heart Stood Still” as she peeled the orange clean, then pulled it apart harder than she meant to, not bothering to divide it into neat sections, and ate the whole thing in quick, big bites.





Chapter 2 (#ulink_9af7e103-1e65-5a5b-bf7b-9b19baf9def8)


SNOWPLOWS HAD PARTED the streets of Jonah like a solid white sea. Claudia drove carefully after the scare with the man in the turn lane the night before. Each season in Indiana carried its own near miss, she concluded, remembering a moment last summer when she’d taken an exit ramp onto the highway. She had been holding tight to the inside curve, then decided—for no reason she could discern—to move toward the outside. At the very end of the curve, just before the ramp opened up onto four lanes, there was a beagle, trotting along happily, following a scent and wagging his tail. Claudia most certainly would have hit him, had she stayed her course.

Keeping her eyes on the street ahead, on the intrepid Midwestern holiday shoppers out in full force, Claudia reached over and lifted the front cover of the book Hazel had lent her, A Prayer for Owen Meany, making sure the photograph was still there. It was. She had checked four times since leaving the house, a gesture that now struck her as compulsive; although it was, she supposed, in the nature of a photograph to slip out of a book, in the same way it is somewhere in the nature of glass to shatter.

The prior evening, after surviving the snowstorm and the drive home, Claudia had taken the book to read in bed. The wind was slapping tree branches against her bedroom window, and in the silence of her old farmhouse she experienced the weather as another facet of her nightly dread. She was too tired to read. She closed the novel and reached up to turn off her reading light, and a photograph fluttered out of the middle of the book.

The picture seemed to have been taken sometime in the sixties—all the colors had been muted by the orange pall that marked that decade’s snapshots. Two young women were in the back of a pickup truck. One was sitting on the lowered tailgate, her bare legs crossed at the knee. She was wearing shorts and a halter top, white or pale yellow. Her hair was in a ponytail and her sunglasses were pushed up on her head. There was something familiar about her. The other was standing behind her friend, her legs about a foot apart, in a short-sleeved shirt with buttons. The shirttails had been tied around her midriff, showing off her small waist and tan. Her hair was loose and curly, chin length, streaked with light. Her arms were resting on her friend’s shoulders, her hands lightly clasped, and the sitting girl had reached up, her right arm across her chest, to lay her own hand over her friend’s.

Claudia was aware, again, of the wind, the ticking of the old radiators, absences. She felt her pulse in her throat, heard it in her ears. She turned the photograph over and read, Hazel and Finney on the way to the Fair, August 7, 1964. Hazel. Claudia studied the picture for another few minutes before turning off the light and not sleeping; she studied Hazel’s young face, her smile, her hand resting so lightly against that tanned, beautiful girl.

The store had only been open for ten minutes when Claudia arrived, but there were five cars in the lot already. She sighed, stepped out of the Jeep. The sky was blue above her, but there was a threatening haze in the east, and the temperature seemed to be dropping. The delivery door at the side of the building was unlocked, which meant that Rebekah had gotten there early.

There were four or five people milling about in the back half of the store, picking up various items, hoping that an ugly little statue of a dog would be marked OCCUPIED JAPAN (not just that the dog would be here and they would find it, but that the dog’s origin would have been missed by both its owners and Hazel). Rebekah was playing Frank Sinatra’s Christmas album on the stereo and someone had hung a strand of twinkly lights over the doorway to the breezeway. The music, the heat blown down by the industrial fans, all of it worked together to make Claudia feel as if she’d just returned from a war or an epic journey, in time for the holidays. The Used World was, after all, nothing but the past unfolding into an ideal home: enough bedrooms for everyone, a parlor, a chapel, a well-stocked kitchen. Hazel had more books here than the local library, more tools than the craftiest farmer. Claudia stopped in the breezeway, next to a muddy painting of a shipwreck, and felt something come over her, a blast of heat from her solar plexus, overwhelming her like a mortal embarrassment. She put her hand against the wall, fanned herself. Her coat slipped from her hand, landed on the floor, A Prayer for Owen Meany beside it. The collar of her shirt was too tight, and her wool sweater was suffocating her. She pulled it off in one swift gesture, took a deep breath. In less than a minute her entire body was drenched in sweat; she reached into her back pocket, pulled out a folded handkerchief, dried her face.

“Claudia?”

She turned, and coming up behind her was Rebekah. A light around Rebekah’s body shimmered. Claudia squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. The light was gone.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Claudia said, folding the handkerchief and putting it back in her pocket. “I think I got too hot.”

Rebekah stepped closer. She reached out to touch Claudia on the elbow, and just before she did, a crack of blue light passed between her hand and Claudia’s arm.

“Oh!” Rebekah flinched, pulling her hand back.

“You shocked me,” Claudia said, looking down at her elbow.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“That’s okay.”

“Want me to do it again?” Rebekah asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Want me to try?”

Claudia studied her, the red hair and pale skin, the pale green of her eyes. Whatever had held Claudia in its grip loosened. “Okay.”

Rebekah took ten steps backward, shuffling her feet on the grimy dark blue indoor-outdoor carpeting in the breezeway. She shuffled back toward Claudia, reached out slowly, and again, in the narrow space before Rebekah’s finger touched Claudia, there was a pop and a flash.

“Ow!”

“Ouch.” Claudia rubbed her arm. Her shirt was drying and she was suddenly cold.

Rebekah shook her fingers. “That was fun,” she said, smiling up at Claudia.

“In its way.” Claudia leaned over and picked up her coat, her book. She opened the front cover and the photograph was still there. Maybe it had been a hot flash, she thought, glancing again at the young Hazel. Or maybe it had been a barb on the shaft of nostalgia that had struck her, listening to Frank Sinatra sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

“I was looking for you, actually,” Rebekah said, still standing close. “Hazel needs you—somebody bought that gigantic ugly painting in number forty-two, and also the love seat with the yucky upholstery job.”

“The pink one?”

“The pink one.”

“Let me go put these things in the office,” Claudia said, turning.

“Oh, and also, Claudia? Thank you for the groceries.”

Claudia blushed, rubbed her hand over the top of her head, a gesture she’d made since childhood. “You’re welcome.”

The new owner of the ugly pink love seat fell into one of east-central Indiana’s most recognizable categories: the married woman with small children, the kind who might have been adorable or saucy or wild in high school, but who had long since cut her hair, stopped trying to lose weight, and who had donned her I Give Up Suit. In this case she had also plucked her eyebrows too thin, which struck Claudia as a peculiar trend. Everyone seemed to be doing it, creating a county full of startled women.

“Do you think this will fit in my Suburban?” the woman asked Claudia, who had tipped the love seat on its side and was wheeling it on a dolly toward the delivery door.

“Probably,” Claudia said.

“Because I could maybe borrow a truck from someone but I don’t know who—we aren’t really truck people. Well, my husband isn’t a truck person. There’s a long list of things my husband isn’t but I’m sure you don’t want to hear them.” The woman was wearing the holiday uniform of her class: a red turtleneck, an oversize cardigan sweater embroidered with a Christmas scene, blue jeans, tennis shoes.

Claudia said nothing.

“I’m Emmy, by the way. I just hate Christmas, I hate it,” Emmy said, drawing in and exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m buying this love seat for myself when I ought to be Christmas shopping but I’m not, I’m buying a piece of furniture that my husband is going to despise because it isn’t new and we didn’t get it at Sears.”

They passed the shelves of blue, ruby, and carnival glass. Claudia backed the dolly up, turned it until it was straight, started up the breezeway.

“I need a new one because one of my kids set the old one on fire. That’s what he’s doing these days, setting things on fire. I found hundreds of burnt matches in his closet a few days ago, taken from my husband’s matchbook collection. No one is saying he set the couch on fire, it’s just assumed and kept quiet. Do you hate Christmas? Don’t you?”

The answer, Claudia thought, might be: I have. I could. I can sure see how it’s possible.

Before she could speak, Emmy continued, “I say to my husband, ‘Brian, admit it, admit what you expect of me,’ but he won’t. He says I make my own choices and I should live with them. Does he think I want to spend two weeks decorating the house, leave those decorations up two weeks, then spend two weeks taking them down? Does he think I want to bake cookies and little cakes for the neighborhood association and the postman? And do all the shopping, all the wrapping, pick out every single goddamn gift, including for his parents who he won’t spend two seconds thinking about? And send out Christmas cards with a picture of the kids in it every year when I can’t hardly get them to sit still to take the picture, not to mention the furniture is on fire and one of the boys has decided he can’t live without a python?”

They turned the corner at NASCAR collectibles and Claudia said, “Could you open that door for me?”

Emmy leaned against the bar on the delivery door and it opened, letting in a blast of white light and cold. “Good God,” Emmy said, slipping on her red coat. She opened the back of the Suburban, lowered the tailgate. She’d left it running, and the parking lot was streaked with blue exhaust. Two or three loose napkins were picked up in a gust of wind and blown out toward Claudia. She caught one, green with white letters that read, SANTA, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!

Claudia lowered the dolly, took the ramp from the side of the building. The back of the Suburban was littered with the castoffs of family life: shoes, clothes, collectible trading cards, CD cases, crumpled grocery bags.

“Just,” Emmy said from behind Claudia, “just put it on top of all that shit, if you don’t mind. Flatten it all, I don’t care.”

The love seat was light; in addition to the unfortunate color and upholstery, it was shabbily constructed, and might not last the afternoon with the Arsonist and the Snake Handler. Claudia pushed it up the ramp and into the vehicle, where it laid waste to a comic book and a variety of plastic items. After she’d taken away the ramp and closed the tailgate, she turned to find Emmy leaning against the side of the building, her hands over her face.

“I’m done here,” Claudia said, wheeling the dolly back toward the door.

“Okay then,” Emmy said, standing up straight and clapping her palms together, as if declaring the case closed. “This is going to be great. Everything is going to be fine. I can do this, absolutely.” She opened the driver’s side door, climbed in. “Merry Christmas,” she said, looking back at Claudia.

“To you, too,” Claudia said, pushing the code into the keypad lock on the door. She wheeled the dolly inside and turned around. Emmy was still sitting there in the smoking Suburban. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t moving; she had slipped on a pair of sunglasses and was just looking out at the traffic as it sailed by.

“I sold the last of the Santa suits,” Rebekah said, placing the receipts on the spindle.

“The one with the cigarette burn in the crotch?” Hazel asked.

“That’s the one.”

Hazel hummed a bit of “I’m Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas.”

“Do you want me to see if there are any more out in the storage shed?”

“Please don’t.” Hazel closed the phone book, unable to find what she was looking for, and slipped it on a shelf under the counter. “Santa is too much with us as it is.”

“Hey, Becky,” Slim called from his perch near the RC Cola machine. “Want to come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?”

Rebekah blushed. Hazel didn’t look up but said, “Slim, remember D-day.”

Red wheezed out a laugh, put out his cigarette; Jim Hank wheezed out a laugh, lit a new one. D-day, Rebekah knew, referred not to World War II, but to Slim’s wife, Della, who had forgone any employment for the past forty years in the interest of maintaining her bitter anger at her husband.

The Cronies were three men in their early sixties who had taken an early buyout from the Chrysler plant. Their histories, ideologies, and fashion tastes were so similar that for the first six months Rebekah worked at the Emporium, she had no idea which Crony was which. Their sons were wastrels, their overweight daughters were married to ne’er-do-wells (if not outright criminals), and their wives disappointed them on a daily basis. Almost every day the Cronies sat on the three couches in a U shape with the soda machine in the corner. Hazel had bought the furniture at some auction; she swore she hadn’t been drinking, but without some mental impairment Rebekah didn’t understand how the couches could be justified.

One was tan, stained. This belonged to Red, the most knowledgeable, or at least the most opinionated, of the three. He was horse-faced, wore glasses, and the other two accepted his pronouncements as self-evident because he had, in the very distant past, held a county record in pole vaulting. Red rented space in the back corner of the front of the store (not prime real estate by any means), where he sold an assortment of things he swore to be valuable: carved historical figures, forged at the Franklin Mint; commemorative coins; a set of dish towels bearing the likeness of Spiro Agnew.

The second couch was green and missing a leg, which had been replaced with a set of coasters. This was Slim’s domain, which he claimed by spreading his belongings around him: cigarettes, lighter, wallet, and keys. Slim seemed to be persistently busy working on a political system at the center of which was advertising and sentimentality. He was in favor of any person, establishment, or event said to promote Family Values; thus he loved Republicans, chain restaurants, NASCAR, and military skirmishes. He choked up listening to Toby Keith, and saluted when he saw a flag, although Rebekah believed he, like his comrades, had sat out all military duty. Slim shared the corner booth with Red, where he sold what Della told him to. She tended toward old bedspreads and a variety of pastel-colored mixing bowls.

The third sofa was black and had been repaired with silver duct tape, not even electrical tape, which would have matched. Jim Hank, unmarried and the least of his brethren, sat on the edge of one of the sofa’s three cushions. He never sat back or settled in. Red claimed that a vicious rival for a woman’s hand had hit Jim Hank in the back of the head with a crowbar; Rebekah had no idea if it was true. Something had happened to him, maybe just a nick on the edge of a chromosome. From a distance he looked as if he’d been handsome and strong, but up close one side of his face dragged and his eyes were all but empty. He limped, couldn’t hold anything small in his left hand. When he lifted a can of soda it shook all the way to his mouth. He and Hazel rarely spoke, but there was a file in Hazel’s office filled with receipts for his rent, his prescriptions, his groceries. Jim Hank had a table in Red’s booth, where he arranged various articles taken from his home: a butter dish, a pocketknife, a wooden box designed to hold a family’s silver. Inside were a lone, tarnished butter knife and an ornate meat fork.

Hazel had gotten, in the same auction lot as the couches, two ashtray stands and a coffee table, plastic made to look like leather. She referred to the setup as a Conversational Grouping, and what she’d made at the front of the store was a combination of den (in the home of some poor and tasteless person) and a gas station as they’d been when Rebekah was small, a grimy place where she would sometimes see men gathered, smoking and waiting for an oil change. Her own father never joined in. Rebekah had once heard Claudia ask, aggrieved by something Slim had said, whether Hazel had known what she was doing when she built the Conversational Grouping. Hazel had waved her hand in the air as if Cronies were a fact of life, furniture or no.

“I knew them when they were young,” she had said.

“What were they like then?” Rebekah asked.

Hazel had glanced over at the three, all of whom were bent over, elbows on their knees. “Just the same. But younger.”

There was a box of books on the counter, something Hazel had just purchased or brought in from the storage shed; Rebekah began looking through them. One thing that puzzled her was the way the men smoked, and drank sodas until their knees began to bounce, and then at some point every afternoon a signal sounded and they all stood up and left, in the way a flock of birds will suddenly depart a tree.

Hazel pulled her knitting out from under the counter and began counting stitches. “A ‘ramage,’ I think it’s called,” she said between rows.

“What’s called a ramage?”

“It’s also possible I invented that word.”

Rebekah looked at the table of contents in a 1954 memoir of a woman’s first year of housewifery, Boiled Water. “But what does it mean?”

“It refers to the phenomenon of a flock of birds suddenly leaving a tree.” Hazel’s knitting needles—wide, blue with a mother-of-pearl tint—clicked, slid against each other.

Rebekah looked up at Hazel. “Was I thinking out loud?”

“When?”

“Before ramage. Did I say something about the Cronies out loud?”

“I don’t know.” Hazel shrugged. “Did you?”

Rebekah had to turn only one page and there it was, the sentence I couldn’t boil water! She had tried many times to think it through, she had even tried to talk to Peter about Hazel, but he had been skeptical, had suggested that Rebekah, because of her history, was gullible. But as far as she could see, the opposite was true. The first twenty-three years of her life had been spent in thrall to prophecy, or at least those years had been spent with a community that valued nothing more. What was it? Pastor Lowell had once said in a sermon that the only test of a prophet was his accuracy. He said this while discussing a passage from Ezekiel. How could that be, though, Rebekah had wondered, if the prophet and everyone who heard him speak the words of his prophecy were dead and gone? Anyone can say the Temple will fall (because the Temple will fall) and be right eventually. And what does it suggest about the nature of time and space, if the future is given to some long in advance? If one thing is true, namely that the future can be known by the prophets, then the future has been predetermined and there is no such thing as free will and the damned are born damned, the saved likewise. The biblical seers and those members of the Mission who were given the fruits of the Spirit foresaw an arc into history, an apocalypse of change, natural disaster, and vengeance. Its ushering in was accompanied by the signs and symbols everywhere in evidence, so the world itself appeared to be in league with the conspiracy.

But what of Hazel? Rebekah flipped past the chapter in Boiled Water that dealt solely with Adventures in Ironing. The world was Hazel’s evidence, it was its own testimony. Rebekah had tried to say to Peter that she thought of the old men in the desert, the way their sight (such as it was) traveled like a bullet through time, puncturing everything in its wake, but Hazel just sat knitting or doing needlepoint, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the ephemeral world was right there beside her. All she had to do was reach out and pluck a strand and she knew your past, your greatest fear, and what you’d be trying to avoid the next day. These weren’t the words Rebekah had used with Peter and he’d been irritated anyway. He told her he thought Hazel was a just an old woman with a keen eye, a collection of astrology texts, and a bag of tricks. He thought this even as he courted Hazel, gave her his most level blue gaze. And it seemed that Peter had been right, because Hazel seemed to like him; she seemed unable to see his real feelings for her.

“I’ll tell ya what you’re gonna have to do,” Red suddenly said, pointing at Slim with his burning cigarette. “You’re gonna have to drill through the hardwood, the subfloor, right through that concrete, my friend, one them full-inch drill bits, then pump the poison dreckly in the ground, and do the same outside the house. Course you’ll have to wait fer spring.” He sat back, satisfied.

“Naw!” Slim said, slapping his forehead. “The wife’ll kill me, she’s gonna kill me!”

“You brung it on yourself, not putting in a basement or a crawl space. Where’d you get that idea, build a house on a concrete slab? You get your house plans with a set of Ginsu knives?”

Jim Hank wheezed his hardest laugh, fell to coughing.

“Lord but it is gettin’ cold outside.” Red shook his head. “What happens when your pipes burst in that slab, Slim?”

Rebekah glanced up at him, but Slim just shook a Doral out of his pack, lit it.

“Did you see him last night?” Hazel asked, adjusting the pale blue afghan that was lengthening by the minute in her lap.

“See who last night?” Rebekah pretended to be reading.

“Oh please.”

“No.” Rebekah turned past an illustration, classic 1950s style, of a woman tangled up in the cord of a vacuum, little stars above her head.

Hazel lifted the afghan, let it fall over her knees. “Will you try again?”

Would she try again? Rebekah thought about it. “I feel like,” she began, “like maybe he’s waiting on me to make a move? Some grand gesture, maybe?”

“You mean because the grand gesture of calling him repeatedly and leaving plaintive messages wasn’t sufficient?”

“I stopped leaving messages a long time ago.”

“Ah.”

“You know, part of the problem is that I miss him so much I want to tell someone every detail of it, the missing him, and the person I want to tell is Peter.”

“Why?” Hazel asked.

“Why what?”

“Why Peter?”

Rebekah sighed, rubbed her temples. She was very tired all of a sudden. “Because we were friends, I thought. He’s the only boy besides my cousins I ever knew. Men don’t—they don’t make much sense to me—”

“No.”

“—and I feel like if he’s still in my heart, I must still be in his.”

Hazel let her hands fall in her lap. “But Rebekah, feelings are not facts.”

The pages of the mildewy book blurred before her; Rebekah closed it. “Grief is a fact.”

“No, grief is a feeling.”

Rebekah swallowed hard, tossed the book back in the box. “Whew, I should get back to work. I thought I might put some New Years-y dresses on the mannequins, hats, things like that. Then I’ll help Claudia rearrange number forty-two. She wants to show you something, by the way,” she said, slipping out from behind the counter.

“All right, dear,” Hazel said. Rebekah heard the ticking of the knitting needles resume as she walked quickly past #14, #15, the suitcases, the dining room table at which no one ever sat.

It was four o’clock before Claudia found Hazel alone in the office, putting stamps on a stack of letters to vendors. Hazel glanced up at her, nodded toward the empty chair beside her desk. “Women are the pack mules of the world,” she said, pressing a stamp down with her thumb.

“You aren’t a pack mule,” Claudia replied, gingerly stretching out her left knee.

“True. But I bought my way out of it. Plus I’m too old.”

They sat a few moments without speaking. Claudia listened to the faint, tinny sound of the Andrews Sisters coming from the back of the store.

“They were lovely, the Andrews Sisters.” Hazel completed her task and dropped the stack of envelopes in her outgoing-mail tray.

“I found this in your book last night,” Claudia said, handing the photograph to Hazel.

“What’s this?” Hazel slipped off her glasses and held the picture at arm’s length. She squinted. “You found this in Owen Meany?”

Claudia nodded.

“Thank you for returning it to me.” She slipped the picture inside the book she was reading, The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & the Reality, and said, with a perfunctory clip, “Let’s get this store closed down and go home.”

Claudia allowed one beat to pass between them, one chance for Hazel to change her mind and speak. It passed, and Claudia stood up, Hazel following her. “Okay.” Claudia touched Hazel’s shoulder with just her index finger, attempting to make the gesture communicate something. But Hazel left the office without another word.




1961


“I can’t be late getting home.” Hazel looked at her watch for the fifth time, thrust her hands back into her coat pockets.

“You can’t be late.” Finney’s breath smelled like tea. Sometimes she smelled like sleep or cinnamon, but today it was bergamot and lemon.

“That’s what I said. If we don’t leave here in twenty-seven minutes, it’s all over for Miss Hazel.”

“Well, we don’t want that.” Finney leaned farther over the scrollwork railing of the mezzanine, let her body tip just slightly past the fulcrum of her own weight.

“Hey, how’s about you follow the rule about keeping your feet on the floor.” Hazel tried to sound casual as she grabbed Finney’s coat belt, which was untied and slipped free.

“What I want”—Finney turned and reclaimed her belt—“is to go up, up to the sixth, Women’s Lingerie. Then I want to come down, down, stopping on every floor. Last is the jewelry counter. If I have twenty-seven minutes I’m going to use them.”

Below the girls, the black-and-white-tiled ground floor of Sterling’s Department Store spiraled around the square jewelry counter, so that from Women’s Lingerie, looking over the railing, Hazel knew she would feel an urge to jump. “Women’s Lingerie it is,” she said, taking Finney’s arm and heading for the elevator.

The folding metal door of the elevator closed, cagelike, behind them. In the red velvet interior the air was warm and close. The elevator operator hummed along with Bing Crosby’s Hawaiian Christmas song, which both Hazel and Finney hated. Jerry Hamm, that was the name of the man sitting on a stool in front of the elevator’s controls, but Hazel didn’t acknowledge him, nor did he look at her. He was a patient of her father’s, and there were countless rules of conduct that applied to meeting a patient in public, or at his job. Finney knew him, too, of course, but she ignored him, leaning against the back wall to watch the numbers light up above the doors.

In Women’s Ready-to-Wear, in Household Goods, in Infants and Children, Finney had asked, “Do you want this? Is this on your list?” No, Hazel had answered, and no. Finally, walking toward the jewelry counter with only four minutes to spare, Finney asked, “What do you want for Christmas?”

“A book. I don’t know, something I can keep. Nothing frivolous.”

Finney took a deep breath, rolled her eyes. “I worry about you, Hazey.”

“Really.”

“Yes, I do. I worry that any day now you will tell me you want to write short stories or romances, and then you’ll turn to strong drink.”

“Will I abandon my Christian principles?”

Finney considered the possibility. “You will.”

“Will I die young and tragically?”

“That’s not funny.” Finney ran her fingers over a dozen strands of freshwater pearls, took one off the metal rack and held it to her throat.

Hazel fastened the necklace, gently lifting Finney’s hair. “This looks beautiful on you.”

Finney looked in the square mirror on the counter, turned her jaw to the right and the left in a way that would have never occurred to Hazel. Finney’s camel hair coat was down around her shoulders and her long neck looked more vulnerable than ever, with the pearls lying pale and imperfect against her skin. “I’m not a pearl person.”

“Hmmm. What kind of person are you?”

Finney took three steps away, didn’t answer.

“Anyway, what do you most want for Christmas?” Hazel asked, just as Finney stopped before a display of gold chains.

“Oh, look at this.”

In a blue velvet box were two chains, each chain holding half a heart. On the inside lid of the box were the words MAY GOD WATCH OVER US WHILE WE ARE APART, and carved on the heart itself, ME FROM THEE. Hazel lifted the left half and warmed it in her hand as Finney did the same with the right.

“Do you think,” Finney whispered, leaning close to Hazel, “that he will ever buy me one of these?” She whispered, it seemed to Hazel, because she had lost her voice, like a girl in a fairy tale. It was only a matter of time before a hunter came after Finney’s real, beating heart, or until her legs became the tail of a mermaid, and she vanished. No, the man in question would never, never buy Finney such a necklace; the possibility did not exist on planet Earth or within the bounds of time and space. “Maybe he will,” Hazel said, turning away from the display. “Your four minutes in jewelry are up, Miss Finnamore Cooper.” She used the old nickname as a distraction, but it failed.

“I will be blue until I die,” Finney said, sighing.

Hazel’s stomach knotted into a fist, and she could taste at the back of her throat the coffee they’d had at lunch. She reached into Finney’s bag and pulled out her muffler, wrapped it around Finney’s neck as they walked past the great Christmas tree beside Sterling’s revolving doors. “Bundle up,” she said, tucking the end of the scarf into Finney’s coat.

Finney smiled, said, “You do the same.”

They’d grown too mature for hats, so they walked close together, heads bent against the bitter December wind, across the street to the parking lot and Albert Hunnicutt’s late-model, sleek black Cadillac. Tomorrow Hazel would return for the necklace, she knew, and she would give it to Finney signed with her own name. Hazel would never pretend it had come from someone else. Finney would accept the gesture as she always had, for years and years now, as long as Hazel could remember. Finney would wear her half of the heart as if it mattered to her as it did to Hazel, and only someone who really knew her, only a best friend, would see the unease and disappointment on her face. It was just metal, after all, and probably hollow at that.

“Admit that you’re a brat.”

“Captain Brat.”

“General Brat.”

Hazel and Finney tormented little Edna until she was nearly in tears—this happened every time they baby-sat—then gave her what she’d asked for.

“I’ll tell Mama,” Edna said, sitting at the kitchen table, a TV dinner cooling in front of her.

“Tell her what?” Hazel asked. “Here’s your Bosco. Drink it fast or you can’t have it at all. It’s almost bathtime.”

“I’m not taking a bath.”

“Tell her what, Edie?” Finney stood behind Edna, combing the girl’s blond hair with her fingers.

“Tell her that a boy calls.”

“It’s not a crime for a boy to call and anyway he doesn’t call for me. So you’d be getting Finney in trouble and you love her. Think about that.”

Edna took a drink of her chocolate milk, pushed away the foil tray with her uneaten dinner. “I’m not taking a bath.”

“But you are. And what about that chicken leg?”

“I’ll tell Mama you smoke a cigarette once. When her and Daddy was gone.”

“Yeah? Is that right, Edie?” Hazel picked up the washcloth from the edge of the sink and threw it on the table. “How about if I tell Mother about the letter your teacher sent home last week, the one I signed so you wouldn’t get in trouble? How about if I tell Mother that you got caught stealing a cap gun from the Ben Franklin and I got you out of that one, too?”

Edna sat very still, one hand in her lap and the other around her Mickey Mouse Club cup. She was small for eight—almost nine—with the facial features of a much younger child. Staring at her, Hazel couldn’t see at all who her sister might turn out to be. Edie’s chin shook and her gray eyes filled with tears, but it was not to Hazel she apologized. “I’m sorry, Finney!” she said, jumping up and spilling her Bosco all over the table.

“Great. I’ll just clean this up for you,” Hazel said, using the washcloth she’d thrown at the child.

“Come here, Edie,” Finney said, holding out her arms. “Don’t cry, I’m not mad. You just don’t want to take a bath, right? It’s cold in the upstairs bathroom.” Finney held her on her lap, using her sweater to wipe Edie’s face. “Come on, we’ll go upstairs, I’ll wash behind your ears and brush your teeth and we’ll call it a night. Maybe mean old Hazel will bring you some more milk.”They stood and walked toward the back staircase.

“Nice,” Hazel said to the empty kitchen. She dropped Edna’s frozen dinner in the trash can, poured more milk in her cup. “Thanks a lot, Finney.”

The arm of the record player lifted the 45 and dropped it back in place, and the needle settled into the wide opening groove. “Theme from A Summer Place” began for the third or fourth time, the waltzing melody washing over Hazel as if it really were another season. She and Finney lay on their backs in Hazel’s bed, looking out the window at the bare winter branches, the clouds passing the moon.

“Don’t you love this song?” Finney’s arms were crossed behind her head and she wiggled her toes inside her white socks.

“I do.” Around the room the elephants marched and the circus train faded against the gray walls. Edna’s nursery had been painted pink, with dancing circus ponies in ribbons and flowers, as if Hazel had been invited to one kind of carnival and Edna to another.

“You don’t mean it.” Finney would be blue until she died.

“How do you know?”

Finney shrugged. Hazel turned her head on her pillow and watched Finney’s eyes trace the border of the casement window. “What do you love?” Finney asked, still looking ahead.

I love—Hazel thought—your parents’ farm and the tone of voice you use with animals. I love that you have stolen your father’s cardigan and made it look like the most feminine sweater in the world. I love the way your curls hang against your neck, and how you are the one true thing I’ve ever known, and how if I were captured by pirates and didn’t see you for a hundred years I’d still recognize any part of you, even an elbow. “I love Johnny Cash. I love the music from the war and from before the war. I love The Steve Allen Show and the smell of kid leather in my mother’s car. Oh, and toasted marshmallows.”

“That’s a lot.”

“The world is full of riches.” Hazel settled back into her pillow. “Have you seen him lately? I mean, actually seen him?”

Finney gave Hazel a nervous glance, an unhappy smile. “My parents had gone to get some grain for the horses, and he found me skating on the pond. I was by myself, I looked ridiculous. I was wearing Dad’s overcoat with the raccoon collar, the one he had his only year at Purdue, and a white hat I knitted last winter, and a yellow and blue woolly scarf wrapped around and around my neck, all the way over my chin. My skates are even dingy. I’m sure my nose was bright red from the cold.”

“When was this?” Hazel couldn’t keep the blade off each word, the edge that told everything about how lost she was, how scared she was to think of Finney with no need of her, carving figure eights into her frozen cow pond, which in the summer was thick with algae and mosquito larvae. And also what was under the ice, and what would happen if Finney should go there.

“Three days ago? Maybe.”

Hazel said to herself, Don’t ask, don’t ask, then asked, “Where was I?” Not plaintive, not demanding. She tried to make the inquiry casual, to suggest a passing puzzlement over her own agenda, three days ago. But how could the question not contain the other times she’d asked it, when Finney had seen a movie without her, when Finney showed up at school with pale pink lips instead of coral, and where did the coral go? Where did she find the pale pink, who shopped with her? When Finney, for instance, suddenly loved “Theme from A Summer Place” and last week had loved “Only the Lonely”? Where was poor Roy Orbison now, with his ugly glasses and slow-dance opera?

“I don’t know.” Finney bit her thumbnail, seemed not to give Hazel’s whereabouts on ice-skating day a second thought. “He didn’t approve of me skating.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“He asked what would happen if I fell and got really hurt while my parents were gone.”

The arm of the record player lifted in hopeless repetition, and Hazel tried to keep her breathing steady. Time was he didn’t talk to Finney that way, didn’t suggest any tenderness. This was new, his fear, and it was akin to Hazel’s own.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’m indestructible. Then I skated backward around the pond twice and he stood completely still watching, right up until I skated into him and we both fell and he hurt his hip and I hurt my wrist.” She raised her eyebrows at Hazel, warm with irony and in full possession of the memory. She was resurrected, the now gone Finney of three days ago, and Hazel could see the coat and hat, the bright scarf, Finney’s long limbs and neck, how graceful she was for such a tall girl. There he was, too, standing on the ice, worried and angry and miserable (so much a part of his charm), watching Finney glide like a carved figure over the mirror of a music box. It would have been a moment outside of time for both of them, and then the sudden physical awakening of her body against his, the swift transport back into the rudeness of winter on an Indiana farm, the love he couldn’t have. Finney’s smell of sleep and tea.

“And then what happened?”

“We helped each other up. I brushed him off, he brushed me off, he kissed me once, so hard my teeth nearly went through my lips, then he walked fast away. I tried to follow him and he told me to go home.” Finney blinked, her eyelashes damp with tears, and Hazel could see Finney was happy to be so sad, because he had made her sad, he had sent her away. In turning his back to her, he had told her something intimate and they shared it now, and the most Hazel could wish for was to witness it. “Do you hear a car?” Finney asked, raising her head.

Hazel sat up, glanced at the clock. Her parents weren’t due home for three more hours. “We’ve got to clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry.” She hopped around, pulling her shoes on. Finney stood up, stretched, languid as a cat. Her parents were kind, permissive, sloppy. They let her bake cookies when she and Hazel were barely old enough to turn on the stove. Nobody cared about the mess. On Sundays in the winter, after the livestock were fed, Finney’s dad, Malcolm, came home and put his pajamas back on, drank hot chocolate, and listened to the radio, letting the sections of the newspaper pile up around him. Their house wasn’t a museum or a testament to anything. Just a house.

“Hazey, that isn’t your dad’s car.”

Headlights were more than halfway down the lane, and Finney was right—it wasn’t the Cadillac. Hazel bent over, tied her shoes. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and wrapped it with a rubber band from her wrist. Finney, too, sped up, tying her shoes and straightening her sweater. “You expecting someone?” she asked.

“No. Are you?” It would be unbearable if she’d invited him here.

“Hardly. He wouldn’t come if I invited him to a church social.”

The car pulled up in front of the house, and in the sodium light Hazel almost recognized it. It was someone who had been there before, and recently. Yesterday?

The brass doorknob of her bedroom door was cold; the pattern of the hallway rug was a thousand eyes. Hazel turned left and Finney was behind her, humming. They went down the front staircase, passing the silvery ancestors, through the front parlor, past the wide front door with the leaded glass panes, to the side entrance with the heavy lock and the screen. Neither thought to take a coat. They walked out into a bitterly cold, windless December night just as the car pulled into one of the clinic parking spaces and stopped. A man jumped from the driver’s side, shouting, “Miss Hunnicutt, where’s your mama?”

Hazel and Finney stopped on the porch, squinted into the dark to take him in. “Jerome? Is that you?”

“I need your mama, Miss Hazel. Lorraine isn’t doing good, she’s bleeding, where’s Mrs. Hunnicutt?” The young man covered the distance between his car and the porch in two long strides: Jerome Wilson, who played center for the Southside Wildcats, a local star, and Negro.

“She’s at a…” Jerome had been here yesterday with Lorraine, that much was true, and while her father was at his Jaycees meeting. Her mother had asked Hazel to take over at reception for an hour or so, and Hazel had taken three phone messages. Lorraine was pretty, a cheerleader at the all-Negro high school.

“She’s at a Christmas party at the Cannadays’,” Finney said, stepping around Hazel. “She won’t be home for quite a while.”

“Miss?” Jerome wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve got to help me.”

Hazel and Finney ran the length of the porch, took the stairs two at a time. The passenger door of the old Chrysler opened with a groan, and the overhead light didn’t work. Jerome reached for a flashlight on the floorboard and shined it on Lorraine. Her head was tipped back against the seat, her lips pale. Her coat was unbuttoned and her hands hung limp at her sides. She was wearing a black flannel skirt, pulled up around her thighs, and in between her legs was a stack of blood-soaked towels.

Hazel pulled her head back so hard and swiftly she smacked her scalp on the doorframe. “Finney, there are five hooks on a board next to the door leading to the clinic. On the second are the clinic keys. Unlock the inner door, then go through and unlock this door we’re facing. Jerome, can you lift her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He handed Lorraine the flashlight and reached into the car, his arms so long they slid under Lorraine’s knees and behind her back and came out the other side. Lorraine let out a tight breath, not quite a moan, and Jerome did the same. He straightened up to his full height, kissed her forehead, whispered something against her hair.

Lights came on in the clinic, and then the light outside the door was burning and Finney was holding the door open. Jerome walked quickly, trying not to jostle Lorraine, and Hazel ran ahead. She wasn’t thinking or praying or making note; only hoping in a vague way that Edna stayed asleep and that there would be room to get out of this, somehow.

“Take her in where you were yesterday, Jerome, and put her on the examining table. Finney, I need you to call Mother.”

“Do you know the number?” Finney’s face was pale, her eyes bright.

“Jesus Christ. Try the phone book.” A line of sweat ran down Hazel’s neck and into her sweater. Finney turned and headed for the outer office.

Lorraine was on the examination table, nearly panting, her eyes glassy and her lips chapped. Jerome leaned over her, running his thumb over her forehead and whispering the same thing he’d been saying walking in.

“Help me get her feet in these stirrups. Lorraine, cooperate with us, we’re going to elevate your legs.”

“I found a Cannaday on Riley Road, is that it?”

“Umm.” Hazel thought she might faint. She grasped the table and swallowed, waiting for her vision to clear. Lorraine was wearing polished saddle oxfords and rolled white socks flecked with blood. Her legs were as smooth and chilled as glass. “Yes, I think so. Tell Mother that I need her. You can say Edie’s got a fever or that I have a feminine problem, whichever will get her here without my father. Make sure she understands she needs to come alone.”

Finney left without another word, closing the examining room door quietly. Hazel turned the black handle that raised the stirrups and a trickle of blood dropped onto the floor. In the silence she could hear Jerome whispering, We’ll get married, we’ll get married, we’ll get married.

In bed that night Hazel knew she could buy the heart necklaces or not, it no longer mattered. There were gestures stronger than vows, secrets that contained more momentum than a tall girl skating backward, and she and Finney had such a secret. In part they all—Hazel and Finney and Caroline—had become bound by the shared labor, and by Caroline’s cool response (which both girls had tried to imitate), how she had unpacked the towels so calmly and given Lorraine injections of antibiotics and pain medication, then finished what she’d started the day before. No one suggested Finney leave, as if Caroline had taken Finney as a daughter in a dark hour. But they were also united by the honesty of the lawless—Finney might love any boy and never speak the words again: I understand, I will never tell, I will never.

Hazel slept, finally, and dreamed of a foreign place where many objects were stored. She wandered through alone, picking up things she didn’t recognize, and then there was an old man standing next to her, his hair gone white, his back bent like a crone’s. She remembered he had once been beautiful, and was sad for him. He handed her something—a candlestick, a broken bell, a hairbrush—and Hazel knew that it was hers to keep. She hated it, whatever it was, it felt like death itself in her hand, but she couldn’t give it back and she couldn’t put it down, and in the morning she was still holding it, in all the ways that matter.

By five o’clock the sky was fully dark and a light snow was falling; Claudia sat in her sister Millie’s kitchen and watched the wind swirl the flakes into white tunnels. The snow fell on the barn, the new garage, the empty chicken house—all were lit up and vivid in the yellow glow of the security light.

“You’re probably sitting there thinking about Mom,” Millie said, taking one container out of the microwave and putting another in.

“No, I’m not,” Claudia said, but she was.

“I bet you’re thinking how Mom would have been snapping beans or grinding corn or whatever for dinner.”

“You don’t snap beans in December.”

“You know what I mean.”

There, then, was Ludie, standing in the warm kitchen, listening to gospel music on the AM radio, and outside there was a snow falling like this one, and Millie was probably upstairs in her bedroom, on her way to becoming the person she was now but not yet there, and Claudia was in the kitchen, with her mother.

“It’s no crime to enjoy the time-saving devices of the modern world, Claude.”

“I never said.”

“I happen to like microwaved food, and I happen to like not having to do dishes.”

Millie happened also to like not eating, although she never said as much. She was tall (but not too tall) and thin, what Hazel called Warning Label Thin, or Sack of Hangers Thin. Hazel sometimes referred to Millie simply as Death’s-head, and it was true that in certain lights you could see Millie’s skull as surely as if she were being used in an anatomy class. At thirty-eight she was pinched and severe; the lack of body fat, combined with years of tanning, had left her with a web of fine lines on her face and neck. She wore her hair so short it stood up straight at the crown, and she did something to it she called ‘frosting’—which she would do to her head, but not a cake—so that the roots were black and the ends were a creamy orange.

Millie’s two children, Brandon and Tracy, came and went from the kitchen, speaking to neither their mother nor their aunt. Brandon, a junior in high school, took a soda from the refrigerator, then went back into the living room, where he slumped down on the couch to watch TV. A few minutes later he came back and got a bag of chips.

“We’re going to eat in about fifteen minutes, Bran,” his mother said.

Tracy, a year younger than her brother, ran into the kitchen, a cordless phone against her ear, and copied a phone number off the chalkboard, where she’d written TRACY + TIM 4EVER! Claudia had never heard of Tim, and doubted she’d ever make his acquaintance.

“We’re going to eat in fifteen minutes, Tracy,” her mother said.

“You are, maybe,” Tracy said, and slid across the linoleum in her socks, out of the room.

How could it be that everything had changed so much so quickly? There was no such world as had Ludie in it. She was the last mother to put up vegetables every year; the last fat mother who didn’t dye her hair or wear pants to church; the last to sing the old hymns and maintain a flourishing garden. Claudia couldn’t think of one other soul in the world who had a pawpaw tree in the yard, one that bore fruit, and that was because of Ludie. But Millie was the New Mother, no doubt about it, driving her SUV and buying everything in her life (her clothes, her furniture, her food, her pictures in frames) at the Wal-Mart. Sitting in Millie’s country kitchen with her seven thousand unnecessary pieces of plastic, Claudia sometimes expected to hear a voice call out for a manager in aisle nine. Ludie had worked all day, from the time she got up until she went to bed. She cooked and cleaned and visited the sick. In the summer she gardened and hung the washing on the line; in the autumn she raked leaves and baked; in the winter she shoveled snow and made candy. All spring she drummed her fingers on the windowsills, waiting for the time to put in annuals. She was never too sick or too tired for church or to take care of her own elderly parents. But it was Millie, who did none of those things and had no other job besides, who treasured time-saving devices like nacho cheese you could heat up right in the jar.

She put the jar of cheese down on the table, and a bag of corn chips. Beside the chips were refried beans, taken from a can and microwaved, and a jar of salsa. Millie had emptied a bag of shredded lettuce into a plastic bowl; another bowl held ground beef. The back door opened as Millie was putting paper napkins on the table and Larry came in, stamping his feet and blowing on his bare fingers.

“We caught three horses, but there’s two more still out there somewhere.” He pulled off his wool cap, shook the snow off his jacket. His muddy-blond hair was pushed up on his forehead.

“Sit down and eat something before you take the kids to the school,” Millie said, without looking at him.

“Temperature’s dropping. There’ll be a livestock alert by morning, I’ll bet, and tomorrow it’ll be too cold to snow.” Larry reminded Claudia of an actor in a western film. No particular actor—just a character with a squint, and an air of indifference to his clothes, his bunk, his companions.

“Sit down and eat something, Larry, before you take the kids to the school.”

“Take the kids to school? What for?”

“There’s a varsity game tonight.”

“So? If Brandon can’t drive them, they don’t need to go.”

Millie continued moving around the kitchen, opening the dishwasher, putting a dish in. She had a way of moving, Claudia had often noticed, that closed a door on a conversation. “Brandon isn’t driving with the roads the way they are, especially if two of Woodman’s horses are out.”

Larry looked at Claudia, sighed, pulled his cap back on.

“Sit down and eat something, I said. We’re having Mexican Hat Dance.”

“Well, I can’t, can I. I have to start the station wagon. I’ll eat something at the game.” The door closed behind Larry, and he left in his place a pocket of air so cold it surprised Claudia, even though she’d been sitting and studying the weather all evening.

Tracy came in now wearing makeup, and boots that wouldn’t keep the damp out. “Tell Dad it’s time to go,” she said to her mother.

“He’s starting the car, Trace.”

Brandon came in with his letter jacket on—a single varsity letter in golf, which Claudia would never see as a sport—and jingling the change in his pocket as if he were a man much pressed for time.

“That jacket’s not warm enough for this weather,” Millie said.

And right there it happened—a kind of disorientation that left her dizzy—it was December. High school basketball season in Indiana. The snow was falling, and Claudia was sitting at a kitchen table as teenagers got ready to head back to the school they couldn’t wait to leave earlier in the day. She was warm and safe, but there was a kind of voltage in the air, an excitement generated by having something, anything to do on a Saturday night, and it seemed to Claudia that nothing had changed. If she could just get home she’d find Ludie in the living room knitting in front of the television, and Bertram in his study. This was just what it felt like all her growing-up years: December, January, February, March.

“Kids, sit down and eat something before you go,” Millie said again, but Tracy was already putting on lip gloss and reaching for the door.

“We’ll eat at the game.” And then they were gone.

Millie watched the door for a moment, reached into the freezer where she had hidden a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and sat down across the table from her sister.

“You’re smoking again?” Claudia asked. She had grown accustomed to the idea that she might spend the rest of her short life inhaling other people’s fumes.

“Just this one,” Millie said, inhaling hard and blowing a thick cloud out over the table. “And don’t give me any crap about it.”

“I won’t.”

“I know Daddy would be horrified.” Millie dropped the cigarette into the jar of cheese and burst into tears. “Do you see? I do and do for them, look at this food on the table, and they don’t even notice, nobody cares.”

But what difference did it make, Claudia wondered, whether they ate nachos at home or nachos sold by the Band Boosters?

Millie wiped her face with a paper napkin. “You don’t know, Claudia, you can’t imagine what it’s like to watch your perfect babies who loved you so much grow into strangers who won’t even eat the food you offer them.”





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