ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Document: TERMINUS AND OTHER STORIES 
  
 Alison Emilia Hennessee,  
Master of Fine Arts, 2013 
  
Directed By: Associate Professor Maud Casey 
Creative Writing, Department of English 
 
 
This collection of short fiction includes four stories. Though the situations and 
characters in each are unrelated, the collection as a whole treats recurring thematic 
interests: individual and shared origins; tension between loving one?s home and 
needing to leave it; childhood and parenthood; and the American South. The stories 
are ordered to create a chronological arc from wild uncertainty of childhood to the 
measured acceptance of late middle age.  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
TERMINUS AND OTHER STORIES 
 
 
 
By 
 
 
Alison Emilia Hennessee 
 
 
 
 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Fine Arts 
2013 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor Maud Casey, Chair 
Professor Howard Norman 
Professor Emily Mitchell 
 
 
 
ii 
 
  
 
 
Dedication 
 
For James 
iii 
 
  
 
Acknowledgements 
I want to thank the University of Maryland for giving me the opportunity to pursue 
this work and engage with so many brilliant and kind members of a wonderful 
academic community. I especially want to thank Maud Casey, without whose 
guidance and wisdom and infinite patience, I would have abandoned this endeavor 
long ago. Thank you to my family: my brother Ian, who engaged a whole Senegalese 
village in supporting me; my brother Zachary, who let me know in no uncertain terms 
that his love is dependent only on my existence; to my father, who instilled such a 
firm sense of place in me that I can?t seem to stop writing about it; and to my mother, 
whom I will never stop thanking as long as I live. Finally, I want to thank my 
husband for, you know, everything in the whole wide world. 
iv 
 
  
 
Table of Contents 
 
 
Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii
  
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii
  
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iv
  
Smash Factory?????????????????????????.??...1 
 
Lowlands???...?......?????........??....??...?????..????....29 
 
Terminus......................................................................................................................58 
 
The Hour Hand............................................................................................................99 
 
 
1 
 
  
 
 
Smash Factory 
It started with a penny.  
We were walking along the railroad tracks down by the Dairy Queen, kicking 
gravel at one another and looking for hobo dens.  
Wayne had a hand in his pocket and was jingling the change from the Dilly 
Bar that was now all chocolate streaks down his school shirt.  
?Wayne, you got a penny??  
Kevin was always asking Wayne for money, and Wayne was always giving it 
to him.  
Wayne dredged up a handful of grubby coins and sifted through them. He 
handed Kevin a penny.  
?Minted 1972.?  
?That?s old,? said Shelva Ann and everybody laughed. That was always 
happening, too. Everybody laughed at Shelva Ann; if you didn?t, it was like you liked 
her, or at least thought she was all right, and Shelva Ann was too little and dumb to be 
all right. 
?Your mom?s old,? said Kevin, and everybody laughed again, but it was a 
different kind of laugh.  
?What you want a penny for, Kevin?? asked Weathers Bolt. Weathers Bolt 
had honey-colored hair and more money than the rest of us. I thought he was cute, but 
I wouldn?t say so. Kevin and them would have laughed my face off and never asked 
me to come tramping with them again.  
2 
 
  
 
Kevin just grinned, his braces gleaming. He flipped the penny up in the air, 
but missed it on the way down, and he scowled as he dug it out of the gravel.  
Then, watching us all the time, he laid the penny on the tracks.  
Shelva Ann?s eyes got wide and her mouth dropped open to a little pink ?O? 
and you could see all the gaps where her grown-up teeth still hadn?t grown in, even 
though she?d lost the last of them months ago.  
?You can?t do that!? Shelva Ann was pointing at the penny balancing on the 
steel rail. ?You?ll crash the train!?  
We laughed. 
?It?s true!? Shelva Ann said, her voice creeping into a whine. ?My daddy said 
that if you put a penny on the tracks you?ll derail the train!? 
?My daddy said!? whined Kevin, putting his hands to his face and screwing 
up his eyes like he was going to cry. He made loud bawling sounds and wiped 
imaginary snot off his nose.  
Weathers Bolt and Wayne started in on it, too. They were all prancing around, 
mincing on their tiptoes, shrieking, ?My daddy said, my daddy said!?  
Shelva Ann?s chin was beginning to tremble, and I could tell she was trying to 
squeeze back the tears. The boys always tried to make her cry. The only reason she 
was with us today was because Ms. Hamby was standing right there when Shelva 
asked if she could come with us. I felt bad for her and I thought about saying 
something to the boys, getting them to lay off her for a minute.  
Instead I pitched up my voice and made my chin quiver. ?My daddy said!? 
3 
 
  
 
Then Weathers was looking at me and thinking I was funny, too, and we were 
all laughing, except for Shelva Ann, who was still trying not to cry and who would 
never leave us, because she didn?t have any other friends.  
 We left the penny on the tracks and kept on walking. Weathers and Kevin 
turned off first, on Euclid, except they weren?t going to the same place. Kevin was 
going up to Elizabeth Street, where he lived because his daddy worked at the water 
plant, which was just a few streets further out of town. But Weathers Bolt, he had a 
long way to walk to Finley Park, where the houses had porches all the way around 
and nobody cut their own lawn. I waved to Weathers Bolt, trying to put something 
extra in the wave, something only Weathers would see, but Kevin looked at me 
funny, then flipped me the bird. Shelva Ann turned herself right around, because she 
didn?t even live over this way, she lived in a split-level on F Street, but she just 
wanted to walk with us so bad. Wayne and I split up at Hinshaw Baptist. He kept on 
walking along River Road to go out to the shotgun house where his family raised 
rabbits and chickens. And I turned on Beech and then home onto Orange. 
 I let the back door slam, because my mother was working the day shift at the 
hospital, so she couldn?t yell at me to hold it and let it close soft.  
 Opa was sleeping in his chair that had the stuffing pilling out of the arms 
because his old cat, Ormaloo, always used to scratch it. Ormaloo?s dead now, and so 
is Jake, who was Opa?s dog when Opa was young. Opa says the chair?s not ?quality,? 
but he only says that because my daddy made it, or at least, he ran the machines that 
made it. He used to work at American Drew Furniture, and then that became La-Z-
 Boy. But now the plant?s closed, and Daddy lives with a new family in Charlotte. 
4 
 
  
 
 As I was grabbing a fistful of Vienna Fingers from the cookie jar, I heard Opa 
snort grunt himself awake.  
 ?Laney, that you?? Opa called, his voice soggy-sounding from sleep. 
 ?Yeah, it?s me.? 
 ?Well, get in here, boy.? 
 Opa did sometimes get confused about things, but he knew I wasn?t a boy. He 
said he called me that because I kept my hair short and got dirty and wore pants. I 
told him that it wasn?t the olden days, all girls wore pants now, but he just said, 
?Hush up, boy.? Momma said it was because he didn?t have any sons or grandsons.  
 Opa?s hair was all flying up off his head when I went into the den, and he had 
two different colored socks on. I guessed my momma had helped him dress before 
she left for work, when it was still dark.  
 ?Where you been?? Opa asked, rubbing at his eyes with his fists. 
 ?Walking the rails,? I said, sitting Indian-style on the floor in front of him. 
 ?Walking? I used to ride them rails,? Opa crowed. ?Me and Jeff Tippins 
would?ve got all the way to Mexico if we hadn?t run into Preacher Chalmers in 
Chattanooga. We?d a been Mexican cowboys!? 
 Even though I had heard this story before, I laughed at the thought of Opa 
with one of those tall hats and a big shiny moustache. 
?What're you eating?? 
 ?Cookies,? I said and opened my mouth to show him. 
 ?Boy, I know you have better manners than that,? Opa said and frowned. Then 
he grabbed my ear. ?Gonna have to pull this thing right off if you don?t act better.? 
5 
 
  
 
 I squealed and squirmed, pleading with him. I knew Opa wouldn?t pull off my 
ear, though, and I knew he wasn?t really mad about the manners. 
 ?Those them Vienna Fingers your momma?s always buying?? Opa asked after 
he let me go. I nodded. ?Damn. Those things ain?t any good.? He paused. ?Get me a 
few, boy.? 
 ?But you said they weren?t any good.? 
 ?Yeah, but I?m hungry.? 
 I brought the cookie jar into the den. Opa took one and I watched his liver-
 spotted hand with the skin loose like it was going to fall off. He opened up the cookie, 
and scraped out the filling with his bottom teeth, which still looked good. When Oma, 
my grandma, died a few years back, she didn?t have any teeth at all.  
Opa stacked the scraped-out cookies on the end table, and said, ?We?ll feed 
these to Jake later.?  
I didn?t say anything about that, because sometimes Opa?s brain lives 
somewhere else.  
?I got something for your walker, today, Opa.? I was brushing the last of the 
cookie crumbs from my tee shirt.  
?Well, don?t just sit there, boy. Go get it.? 
I fetched my backpack and pulled out a strip of stickers. Each one was printed 
with a dog wearing a trench coat. 
?McGruff came to our school today, and I got these.? 
?Who?s McGruff?? 
?He?s a crime-fighting dog.? 
6 
 
  
 
?Is he a hound dog? Hound dogs?re the only dogs any good at police work. 
German shepherds, Dobermans, stupid Labradors?ten of them ain?t worth one good 
hound.? Opa gave a cookie a long scrape with his teeth. ?What?d you learn from 
McGruff?? 
I shrugged. ?I don?t know. I didn?t really listen. But I like the stickers. Do 
you?? 
Opa studied the sheet. ?He?s a hound dog, all right. Kind of short ears for a 
bloodhound, though. Probably has some bull dog in him.? He squinted. ?Yeah, I like 
them pretty good. Go ahead and put them on.? 
I peeled off the stickers one by one and placed them all over the walker, which 
was sitting in the corner by the ficus. Momma had gotten the walker last year for Opa, 
because both his hips were real bad with arthritis, even if he wouldn?t admit it. One 
day, he walked to the Chevron to buy a pack of Lucky Strikes and a blue raspberry 
Icee, but he fell right in front of the post office. Mrs. Marshall called Momma at the 
hospital, and Momma had to leave work early to take Opa home. Later, while 
Momma and I were playing checkers, I saw Opa sitting in his chair and crying. He 
wasn?t making any noise; tears were just falling down his face. I looked at Momma, 
but she gave me the look that meant I?d better not say anything.  
The next week, Momma came home with the walker. She brought it to him in 
the living room, turning it around, showing it off like she was a car salesman and it 
was a Mustang. 
Opa was eating pistachios and spitting the shells on the floor, because he 
knew it made Momma angry.  
7 
 
  
 
?What in the hell?s that damn thing?? he said squinting at the walker.  
?It?s a walker, Daddy,? Momma said. I could see her clenching her jaw, trying 
not to say anything about the shells on the floor. 
?Huh,? said Opa, and turned up the Braves game.  
The next day, while Momma was at work, Opa heaved up out of his chair and 
pulled the walker out from the corner. I watched him from the picture window in the 
living room as he stumped around the yard, practicing. We didn?t have a real lawn, 
just a scrubby little patch of jimson weed and crabgrass next to the carport. The 
ground was all rumpled from tree roots and molehills, and the walker?s feet kept 
catching on the bumps. Every time the walker caught, Opa wobbled, and he had to 
hold on tight to the crossbar to keep from falling. His face got tighter as he walked, 
and he stuck out his jaw the way he did when he was mad. After a while, Opa turned 
the walker out the yard and went down the street toward the Chevron.  
By the time, he got back, it was starting to get dark. When he came in the 
house, I was lying on my stomach on the floor by Opa?s chair, drawing in my 
sketchbook and trying to look like I hadn?t been worried or lonely. He dropped into 
his chair and used his foot to kick the walker back toward the corner. I didn?t see any 
cigarettes and his lips weren?t blue from an Icee; I wondered if he had made it to the 
Chevron or had just got too tired or too angry to keep going. I waited for him to say 
something, but he didn?t, and his face still looked so hard and his eyes had the foggy, 
other place look that I didn?t want to say anything either. I finished drawing the 
pterodactyl I?d been working on. Later, I made us both tuna sandwiches and we ate 
them, and then we went to bed. 
8 
 
  
 
Opa used the walker pretty regular after that, but we didn?t talk about it. It was 
like a secret, the kind that everybody knows but tries to pretend they don?t. When he 
wasn?t using the it, it lived in the dusty corner of the living room, where the canister 
vacuum couldn?t reach. I thought the walker might be better if it looked handsome, 
more like something you?d want to be friendly with, so I?d started decorating it. Now 
the walker was mostly covered with stickers from school and the Dollar Tree and 
with drawings I?d done in Sharpie of animals and happy trees and a bunch of wooly 
worms wearing ugly hats.  
When I was done putting on the McGruff stickers, I tried to get Opa to look it 
over, make sure I didn?t put McGruff next to any cats, but he just said ?Huh,? and ate 
the middle of another Vienna Finger. 
I turned on the television and we watched Family Feud and Who Wants to Be 
a Millionaire and The Price is Right until we heard Momma?s key in the front door 
and we had to turn off the TV and shove the cleaned-out cookies under Opa?s chair. 
?What are y?all smiling about?? Momma asked when she came in with a 
bucket of chicken. 
I smashed a giggle down into my belly, and Opa said, ?Never you mind, little 
miss, never you mind.? 
 
At recess the next day, Kevin, Wayne, and Weathers Bolt were hunched down 
by the big poplar stump.  
Weathers Bolt looked up and waved to me. My face got hot. 
9 
 
  
 
?Laney, you gotta see this,? he called, and I came running, my untied laces 
whipping around my ankles. 
The penny was on the stump and it was twice the size of a normal penny, sort 
of like those pennies you run through machines at amusement parks. But it wasn?t 
shiny like those pennies, and you could still see Abe Lincoln?s head, except now his 
head was all stretched.  
Kevin flipped it over. The back looked polished, and I could just barely see 
the outlines of the Lincoln Memorial.  
?When he found it, it was still hot,? Wayne said. ?He had to look in the 
bushes and all around. The train threw it off the tracks!? 
Kevin glared at him, and snatched the penny off the stump. ?You let me tell 
my own stories, Wayne Jenkins. Whose penny is this, anyway??  
Wayne?s, I thought, but didn?t say. 
?You can hold it, if you want,? Kevin said, and tipped the penny into my 
outstretched palm. 
The penny was warm. I wanted to think that was the train?s heat, all its noise 
and speed and power shrunk down to one little penny. But I guessed it was probably 
from the sun. I rubbed the back of the penny with my thumb, and it was smooth and 
neat, no hard edges anymore.  
?What?re you gonna do with it?? I asked, flipping the penny back to Kevin 
like I didn?t care who had it. 
Kevin shrugged. ?Dunno.? He rubbed the penny, too, then looked up at us.  
?Y?all got any more change?? 
10 
 
  
 
Weathers Bolt only had dollars, and Wayne had put his coins from yesterday 
in his bank, which was really a mason jar. I?d spent all the money I had on hologram 
stickers with birds that flapped their wings when you turned the sticker. 
?Why you want more change, Kev?? Wayne asked.  
Kevin groaned. Weathers Bolt punched Wayne in the right arm and I punched 
him in the left. Wayne rubbed the spots like he was cold. 
?Because, Wayne,? Kevin explained, stretching the words way out. ?I want to 
smash it.? 
?But you already have a penny.? 
?Yeah, and I want a nickel, a dime, a quarter, and everything else.? He 
frowned. ?Is there anything else?? 
?You could smash one of them Sacagawea dollars,? I suggested.  
Kevin?s eyes got big, and he flashed a shiny smile. ?Yeah. We need one of 
them, too.? He looked hopefully at Weathers Bolt, but Weathers Bolt shook his head.  
Then Kevin looked at Wayne. 
 ?I don?t have one,? Wayne said and looked down at his shoes. 
?Me neither,? I said, but I wished I did.  
Kevin scanned the yard, his eyes ticking right and left. Shelva Ann was on the 
playground, swinging by herself. When he called her name, she looked up quick. and 
when he motioned for her to come over, I could see her face light up, like he was 
driving the ice cream truck. She ran over to us, her arms flailing like rubber hoses. 
?Jesus, she looks like a retard when she runs,? Kevin snorted. We all laughed.  
11 
 
  
 
?Hey y?all,? Shelva Ann said when she got over to us. Her towhead hair was 
flying up from her forehead like a halo, and she was panting. She didn?t seem to 
notice that we were still snickering. ?What?s up?? 
?Shelva, you still got that coin collection?? Kevin said, talking sweet like she 
was a real little kid, which she kind of was because she was more than six months 
younger than all of us.  
Shelva Ann?s face got bright and happy. Last year at her birthday party she 
had shown us a big book filled with wheat pennies and half dollars that her 
grandmother had helped her collect. 
?Yeah, I got it, Kevin,? she said, rocking onto her tiptoes. 
?Well, Shelva, I am just so fascinated by your coin collection. I would love to 
see it again.? Kevin smiled at her. It was a sticky-sweet smile, and anybody with any 
at all brains would know that Kevin didn?t smile like that unless he was after 
something he didn?t really deserve.  
Shelva beamed. ?You could come over today after school!? 
?I don?t know. How about you bring the book to school tomorrow? Or 
maybe...? Kevin looked at us. ?We?re all going down to the tracks today after school. 
Why don?t you go home and get the coins and then meet us there. We can hang out.? 
?Okay,? Shelva said, real breathy and high. 
?Be sure to bring your coin collection. We all want to see it.? 
?I will!? 
?Now go back to the swings,? Kevin said. He patted Shelva Ann on the back 
and she went running off, arms flapping. 
12 
 
  
 
Kevin grinned.  
 
We were sitting on the rails seeing who could spit the farthest when Shelva 
Ann showed up, panting and sweating. I could tell she?d run all the way here from F 
Street lugging that big, heavy book of money.  
?Do y?all want to look at the coins right here? It?s awful hot,? said Shelva 
Ann, plopping down next to me.  
?Just give me some real shiny ones,? said Kevin. He leaned toward her and 
stuck out his hand.  
All the sweaty redness went out of Shelva?s face, and she hugged the book of 
coins to her chest.  
?Why?? 
Kevin sighed just like my mom does when I ask the same question too many 
times.  
?Don?t ask why, Shelva Ann. Just give them to me!? 
Shelva picked out three nickels, two dimes, two quarters, and a penny.  
Kevin looked at the coins in his palm. ?Gimme one of them Sacagawea 
dollars.? 
?And a half-dollar,? added Wayne, pointing at Shelva Ann. 
Shelva didn?t say anything, just opened her book, pulled out the coins, and 
handed them over. Then she got up and started walking west along the tracks. 
?Where?re you going?? I called after her. 
?Home,? she said and didn?t turn around. 
13 
 
  
 
I looked at Weathers Bolt, but he was looking at the ground, scuffing his feet 
in the dirt.   
The next afternoon, we ran to the tracks and scrambled up the embankment to 
find our loot. One of the nickels had fallen off the rail, but all the rest of the coins 
were flat and oblong from being pounded with tons and tons of zooming freight. I felt 
proud, like I?d made something new and special, even though I knew I hadn?t really, 
I?d just put the coins on the tracks and waited for the train. Kevin kept the half-dollar, 
quarters and the dimes, but he let Wayne and Weathers Bolt each have a nickel, and 
he gave me the penny, because I was a girl.  
I didn?t care too much that I got the smallest coin; it wasn?t like I could spend 
it. I decided it was my lucky penny. I wasn?t sure if you were allowed to just decide 
something was lucky?seemed like most of the lucky things I?d heard of were lucky 
because they were magic or had around been around when something good 
happened?but I didn?t have any other special charms, so I figured I might as well 
make my own. I put it in my pocket every morning before school and rubbed it when 
I needed luck?when we had our spelling test, when Ms. Hamby picked class 
monitor, when we learned square dancing and I was hoping the gym teacher would 
assign Weathers Bolt as my partner.  
It sort of worked sometimes, though we didn?t win any money on the scratch-
 off ticket I asked Momma to buy. But I knew it wasn?t the penny, anyhow, that made 
things happen. Momma said it was God, and Ms. Hamby said it was stick-to-
 itiveness, and Opa said it was piss and vinegar. I guessed that rubbing on a penny was 
like wishing, and whenever I said I wished something, Momma would always say, ?If 
14 
 
  
 
wishes were horses?? in this little ho-hum singing voice. Even though she never said 
what came after that, never told me what we?d do with wish-horses or what wish-
 horses were, I guessed I knew what she meant. She meant it wasn?t worth going 
around wanting things you couldn?t have and all that stuff about thankfulness and not 
being greedy. It made sense, but I didn?t know how to stop wishing, and I didn?t think 
Momma did either, because even though Daddy left a long time ago, Momma still 
wore her ring, and when he called at Christmas, she talked to him in her pretty voice.  
So I kept the penny with me. Even when we went to church and I had to wear dresses 
with no pockets, I put the penny in my shoe. I wanted to have it around, all the time, 
just in case, because sometimes, unluck can sneak up on you 
 
?Laney, you gotta eat something green. Have some salad.? 
We were at Ryan?s and I was on my third bowl of macaroni and cheese. 
 I shook my head. ?I don?t want any salad. It?s too damn crunchy.? 
 Momma raised her eyebrows high on her forehead. She didn?t do that so much 
before Daddy left, or maybe she did, and I was just too little to remember.  
 ?What was that, young lady?? 
 I looked down at my plate and stabbed a macaroni hard.  
?Nothing.? 
?That?s what I thought,? Momma said, and handed me a plate of salad. ?Now 
eat some of this. It?s good for you.? 
15 
 
  
 
?Leave her alone, Jeanie,? Opa said through a mouthful of creamed corn. ?She 
doesn?t want to eat salad, she don?t have to eat salad. She oughtta have meat! Meat 
makes you strong! You want to be strong, don?t you, boy?? 
I nodded, my cheeks full of macaroni, then gave my salad the hairy eyeball. 
?When I was her age I was riding the rails out to California to dig up gold!? 
Momma sighed, ?You were not her age. And this railroad doesn?t go near as 
far as California.? She forked a Brussels sprout. ?Children need green things.? But 
she wasn?t looking Opa in the eye. ?Besides, she wasn?t eating meat, anyway.? 
Opa winked at me. 
?I saw that,? said Momma.  
Opa winked again. 
When we were done eating, Momma left to get the car and bring it around 
front. Opa tried to tell her it didn?t matter, that he could make it across the parking lot, 
but Momma went anyway. I didn?t want Opa to feel bad, but I was glad she was 
getting the car; sometimes it got boring waiting for him to get somewhere. 
I stayed with Opa and walked real slow with him to the door, one hand on the 
side of his walker, covering up a little drawing of a penguin wearing tennis shoes. We 
had to go even slower than usual because the floor at Ryan?s was carpeted and the 
tennis balls on the bottom of the walker couldn?t slide over it. Instead, Opa had to 
kind of jerk it up and plop it down when he wanted to take a step, and each time he 
plopped it down, the back feet went thunk first and then the front feet went thunk and 
then the whole thing kind of rattled, because it was held together with screws that you 
could undo when you want to take it apart.  
16 
 
  
 
I could see Opa?s forehead scrunching up and his eyes getting far away. I 
started humming, just because I was nervous and it felt like people were watching us 
and the carpet seemed like a wide, rough ocean. After a second, I realized I was 
humming in time with the walker?s thunks. Opa smiled a little bit, and he even 
hummed a few bars of ?Shady Grove,? his favorite song. We made it out the front 
door, and Momma helped Opa into the car.  She chatted while we drove. Opa was 
quiet, but I couldn?t tell from the backseat what kind of quiet it was. When we got 
home, I saw his face in the carport?s floodlight. His forehead had smoothed out, but 
his eyes were gone. Momma shooed us in the house, and I finished my homework, 
and Opa went to the back door to let Jake in four times before I went to bed. I put my 
penny on the pillow next to me and rubbed it until I fell asleep. 
 
Kevin was in charge of the smash factory, which was the name Weathers Bolt 
came up with for what we were doing on the tracks.  
?We gotta go to work at the factory today, kids,? Kevin would say while we 
waited in the play yard for the first bell to ring. Then we would know to meet him 
down by the tracks with something to smash.  
At first, it was just coins: anything we could find on the street, any pocket 
money our parents gave us. One afternoon we found a half a roll of new nickels, 
almost thirty of them, perfectly clean. We lined them up on the rail and admired them 
for a bit, because they looked so new and bright, and for just a second I thought about 
how that metal on the tracks was worth a dollar-fifty, and I thought about how many 
sour watermelon slices I could buy from the bulk candy section at Wal-Mart with that 
17 
 
  
 
money. But then we heard the whistle of the train speeding toward Elkin and 
Statesville and on to join the Southern Mainline and we ran to hide in the bushes. I 
was crouched next to Weathers Bolt and I could smell the laundry soap on his clothes, 
which smelled more like perfume and less like baking soda than the one my mother 
used. Like it was by accident, I scooched my foot so that it was almost touching his, 
and we stayed that way until the train was gone and we ran to look for the coins.  
We didn?t ask Shelva Ann for any more of her collection. I had been the one 
who found the Sacagawea dollar in the bushes, and I told Kevin it had gotten lost. 
Wayne and Weathers Bolt and I went to Shelva Ann?s house to give it back to her. 
She?d cried and cried, holding the smashed coin in her palm like a dead gerbil. We 
shuffled our feet on her porch and didn?t know what to say. On the way home, we 
didn?t look at each other.   
Sometimes Shelva Ann came to the tracks. She didn?t walk there with us, but 
I?d hear rustling leaves and snapping twigs, and if I looked carefully between the 
branches, I could see her pointy little chin and her gray eyes that always looked like 
they were about to overflow. She didn?t speak to us, and we didn?t speak to her, but 
once I waved, and she waved back. She always ran away before we went through the 
bushes to go home.  
Kevin hoarded the coins in the beginning. When he felt like it, he?d give one 
to Wayne and Weathers like they were good dogs getting biscuits, and skip me, 
because I was the girl and already had my penny. But once we?d smashed enough that 
Kevin couldn?t fit them all in his pockets, he wasn?t so stingy. He?d stand around and 
throw rocks at the mile marker while we gathered our loot from the tracks, shrugging 
18 
 
  
 
when we found the things we?d smashed. By the time Halloween came, he had let me 
keep six coins, because he said they were boring now. I didn?t think so. I liked how 
they felt familiar but not quite right, the size and shape and feel different than you 
expected. I?d carry a new coin for a day or two, but then I?d put it in the coffee can 
with my other treasures: some river rocks; Daddy?s cigarette lighter; a furry-capped 
bur oak acorn; a spiral seashell I found when me and Momma and Daddy went to 
Ocracoke Island; a mouse skull; the dull penknife Opa gave me last birthday and told 
me not to tell Momma about; and a packet of Fruit Stripe gum where every stick was 
the cotton candy flavor. These other coins were special, but they weren?t lucky. One 
lucky penny was as much luck as I thought I?d be allowed, probably more.  
Kevin was the boss?or so he said and no one else said any different?and 
one Friday morning while we waited for the bell to ring, he told us he had made an 
executive decision. We all had to bring something new to the factory on Monday, 
something bigger than a coin, something the train could pound the hell out of, he said. 
Each of us brought something different: Kevin brought an empty can of Bumble Bee 
tuna; Weathers Bolt brought a key that didn?t fit anything in his house; Wayne 
brought a bottle cap and Kevin socked him one good because a bottle cap isn?t really 
that much different than a coin; and I brought all the tokens from my Monopoly 
game, figuring that I could still use the pieces when they were flattened. Even though 
the tokens were small, the boys all agreed that they wanted to see what a flat 
battleship would look like, so I didn?t get a sock in the arm. 
The tuna can didn?t smash; we found it the next day in the snarls of pokeweed, 
just kind of beat-up looking, but not flat. We guessed the train knocked it off. The 
19 
 
  
 
bottle cap was too flimsy and we found parts of it melted to the rails. The key looked 
good, twisted like a dogwood branch. We couldn?t find the Monopoly tokens. I didn?t 
know how Opa and me were going to play anymore; I thought maybe we could use 
buttons, as long as we put them back in the sewing box when we were done. 
 ?I think we can do better, y?all,? said Kevin, as he picked at the smears of 
bottle cap on the rail. ?Next time, we all gotta bring bigger stuff. Better stuff. Stuff 
that will look cooler smashed than it does regular.? 
?I wish we could smash a car,? sighed Wayne, watching a jet stream fuzz out 
and disappear.  
?That would derail the train for sure,? Weathers Bolt said. He meant it like a 
warning, but it came out like he was excited.  
I imagined the train slamming into a car. In my mind, the train was a steam 
engine and the car looked like the Buick that had been up on blocks in Mr. Bramer?s 
yard ever since I could remember. The pointed cowcatcher wouldn?t do any good, it 
would just wedge right into the passenger door, sending wheels and gears and glass 
flying out for yards and yards. Then the train would rock side to side, and it would 
rock for a long time, long enough that you thought it might never fall, and then finally 
it would topple. But it wouldn?t just crash to the ground and lie there. The track ran 
along a ridge higher than the town, so when the train fell, the engine car would 
unhitch and head down Winston Street, tumbling over and over itself like I used to 
when I rolled down hills at the Community College park.  
First, it would crush the Dairy Queen, because that was right down the way 
from the track. All the teenagers who went there after the high school let out to smoke 
20 
 
  
 
and kiss and eat Blizzards would come running out, except the slow ones, who would 
get flattened. Next would come the ABC store. That was outside town, too, because 
of the undesirables it attracted, though every grown-up I knew went there. I knew 
they sold liquor, not toys like I used to think, and there would be a big smash-up 
there, all the bits of broken bottles shivering out onto the road and a dark river that 
smelled like my daddy running into the grass.  
The train wouldn?t stop there, though. It would keep crashing along until it 
came to West Main Street, where it would roll down the little line of stores we called 
the center of town, even though nobody except the old people really shopped there, 
most people went out to 421 because that?s where the Bi-Lo and the Wal-Mart 
Supercenter were.  Darlene?s Shoes ?n? Things would go first?it was on the corner 
and the awning was already halfway off. The train would crush the old-time diner and 
the drugstore at once, because they were small and they shared a building, and move 
on to the photography studio with all the faded pictures of proms and weddings and 
naked babies in the window. Then would come the one-screen theater and Griffin?s 
Sporting Goods and the real estate office, and last would be the Christian coffee shop, 
because a barreling train doesn?t care about godliness.  It would stop at the bottom of 
Main, stretched across the street, smoking and hissing. All the shops would be piles 
of bricks and two-by-fours and busted signs, and that would be it, the whole town 
ground down into the clay, smashed just like a penny, and I didn?t know if they would 
ever be able to build it up again.  
 
21 
 
  
 
Opa usually fell asleep in his chair. When Momma had to work early, or late, 
it was my job to get him to his bedroom. Tonight Momma?s shift started at midnight, 
and she had been in bed by the time I got home from school. 
Jeopardy! was blaring on the TV. I shook Opa?s shoulder.  
?Time for bed, Opa,? I said.  
Opa blinked his eyes a lot and looked around, then shook his head. It seemed 
like he thought he?d woken up somewhere different than where he?d fallen asleep. 
Then he noticed me, and he smiled, as if I was the only thing he recognized about this 
new place.  
?You sure are getting tall, boy.?  
He leaned on my arm, putting most of his weight on me as we walked to his 
bedroom. I could hold him, because Opa was getting lighter as he got older, even 
though he didn?t seem much smaller. It was like his insides were hollowing out. I led 
him to the bathroom and waited outside the door in case he fell or needed help with 
the electric toothbrush Momma had bought him for Christmas last year. I chose him 
some pajamas, red and blue striped flannel, and handed them to him when he opened 
the door a crack and stretched out his hand. I combed his soft white hair, even though 
Opa could do that himself; he just liked the way I made his part. Then we both got 
into his bed under the quilt that Opa?s mother had made for her marriage bed before 
she married Opa?s father, or had even met him. Opa told me a Brer Rabbit story, the 
one with Old Man Tarrypin, but he left out a lot of the parts, and some of the parts I 
think he just made up. 
?Now you tell me a story, boy,? Opa said when he was done. 
22 
 
  
 
I wiggled my toes under a big red satin star in the quilt. ?I don?t know any 
stories.? 
?Lies. You know stories. Just tell me something you know.? 
?We?re learning world capitals in social studies. London is the capital of 
England, Berlin is the capital of Germany, Moscow?? 
Opa blew a raspberry. ?Does that sound like a story to you?? He plowed his 
finger into my ribcage, and I giggled until my stomach hurt. 
?Okay, okay! I can tell a story.? I chewed my lip and thought. I didn?t have 
stories; I was too small to have stories. I reached into the pocket of my jeans and felt 
the good luck penny, warm from being so close to my skin. 
?We smashed some stuff on the tracks the other day.? 
Opa wrinkled his nose. ?What does that mean?? 
I shrugged. ?We just put stuff on the tracks, and when the train comes it 
smashes the stuff flat.? 
Opa nodded slowly, thinking. ?What kind of stuff you been smashing?? 
?You know, pennies, tin cans, a key. It didn?t go to anything,? I said when 
Opa started to frown. I didn?t tell him about Shelva Ann?s coins, which wasn?t lying 
exactly, but I knew it was sort of like it. 
Opa nodded again, and then looked at me hard. ?What the hell you doing that 
for?? 
I shrugged again. ?I don?t know. It?s fun, I guess.? 
 ?Hold out your hand,? I said, quick, before I knew what I was doing.  
23 
 
  
 
Opa held out his hand. He looked like a little boy. I placed the penny in his 
palm and I felt some its warmth go from me to him. He held the penny between his 
index finger and his thumb, turning it back to front, looking at every smooth bump of 
what used to Lincoln?s face. He rubbed the penny against his cheek.  
?We used to ride them rails when we was boys,? he said, staring at the ceiling.  
I stood up and kissed Opa?s head.  
?I know, Opa,? I said and turned out the lights. I could already hear him 
snoring as I shut the bedroom door behind me 
  
After the coins, we brought mostly trash, stuff we found on the ground or took 
from the garbage bins on Monday mornings on the way to school. Little stuff, like a 
ladle with a broken handle, or a china piggy bank with chipped ears, or a bunch of 
headless Barbie dolls we found in the abandoned lot on Trogdon, by the waterworks. 
One day, Kevin brought a fire poker, and when Weathers Bolt asked him where he?d 
gotten it, he curled up his top lip like Weathers Bolt was a retard and said,  
?My house. Where?d you think?? 
 ?Won?t your daddy be angry that you took it?? I asked. 
 ?Naw. We don?t ever make fires. Fires is olden days shit.? 
 We brought bigger things to the tracks: a frying pan, a skateboard, a boombox. 
We quit taking things from the trash?it was dirty, and the neighbors were starting to 
give us the look when we went near their garbage?and instead took things from 
home, stuff we hoped our parents wouldn?t miss.  
24 
 
  
 
The weather started to get cold, the wind storming down from the mountains 
and pushing big gray clouds across the sky. We had to dig through crackling leaves to 
find our flattened treasures, and we blew on our fingers to keep them warm.  On a 
Saturday that smelled nearly like snow, Wayne came to the tracks carrying a full-
 length mirror above his head. He?d unscrewed it from the inside of his closet door; he 
told us he didn?t need to see so much of himself. We laid it across the tracks 
crosswise and stood in the brush to watch the train send glittering pieces of dark gray 
sky and pines and mountains sailing off, like they were going to be free. Except I 
knew the pieces had to land, and I was afraid one would land in my eye and for the 
rest of my life, all I would be able to see would be a reflection of the inside of my 
own head, twisted and dark like a corn maze.  
 Weathers Bolt started pinching stuff from his attic?an old ironing board, a 
pair of ice skates, his grandma?s silver tea service that his momma never used, but 
couldn?t give away. Wayne took a pair of hedge clippers from his daddy?s tool shed, 
and later, after the handles were splinters and the blades all mangled, told us how his 
daddy ripped the house apart looking for them, yelling at Wayne and Wayne?s 
momma and little sister, and how the rabbits sat hunkered down in their hutches 
outside, scared of the noise. Kevin never brought much, just a couple of bottle 
openers and a camping lantern, but that was allowed, because he was the foreman, he 
said, and the foreman at a factory doesn?t have to make the stuff, he only has to tell 
the workers how to make it right.  
 I tried to bring what I could, but there just wasn?t that much around my house 
that my mother or my granddad wouldn?t notice if it went missing. I could always 
25 
 
  
 
take cans from the recycling bin, because I was the one who sorted recycling and 
walked it the near mile to the recycling center. I brought some jars, but they weren?t 
big enough to scatter like the mirror. I sacrificed a heart-shaped locket I?d gotten for 
my seventh birthday and a whole houseful of dolls. I didn?t play with them anyhow.  
 One day we were headed for the tracks and passing around a big bag of boiled 
peanuts Weathers had bought from the roadside stand near school for us to share. 
Kevin asked each of us what we?d brought. When I said I had another Bush?s can, 
Kevin sucked his teeth and shook his head at me. 
 ?Laney, you are such a girl.? 
 I paused with my handful of peanuts halfway to my mouth. ?What?s that 
supposed to mean??  
?You know; you don?t contribute. You just show up and let the men do all the 
work.?  
 ??Work??? I asked, trying to make the word sound as mean and little as 
possible, like I was spitting out a wormy crab apple.  
 ?You don?t ever bring anything good to smash. Me and Wayne and Weathers 
Bolt are putting in our fair share, and you,? he pointed at me with a greasy finger, 
?just bring trash.? 
 My throat was all tight, and the space behind my eyes was hot. ?I brought a 
necklace! And all them dolls!?  
 Kevin laughed, a big spout of a laugh, and slapped his knee. Wayne let out a 
little snort, and I heard Weathers Bolt cough, trying to cover up a snicker. 
26 
 
  
 
 I wheeled around to look at Weathers Bolt and jammed my fists into my hips, 
peanuts falling from my hand into the dirt. ?What? What?s so funny?? 
 Weathers Bolt coughed again, and scratched the back of his head. 
 ?Well, I don?t know. It was all trash or girl stuff.? 
 ?Same thing!? yelled Kevin.  
 ?It kind of is,? said Weathers Bolt, and Wayne nodded his head. 
 There was a silent second. In it, I heard a leafy whisper in the brush and saw a 
blur of white-blond hair. Shelva Ann was watching us. She smiled a little, just a 
trembly turn-up on the corners of her mouth. I nodded to her and turned east toward 
home.  
  
It was a bad night, the kind of night when Opa didn?t know the difference 
between what was happening now and what happened a long time ago. During 
dinner, he kept calling Momma Fran and asking her where Jake had got to, and then 
Momma yelled ?I?m Jeanie! Jeanie! Your sister?s been dead longer than that damn 
dog has!? But then she was sorry, and said she had one of her headaches, and when I 
asked her if she wanted me to wash up, she patted my hand.  
?You?re a good girl, Laney,? she said.  
I did the dishes, remembering not to use soap on the cast iron, just letting it 
soak like Oma told me to. I put Opa to bed, but I didn?t stay with him, because he?d 
gone quiet, living at the distance we couldn?t reach. Once I closed the door of Opa?s 
bedroom, I went back into the living room and sat in Opa?s chair, because there was 
no one to tell me to go to bed. I picked bits of stuffing from the arm and watched the 
27 
 
  
 
world the way Opa sees it, except he doesn?t usually see it in the dark. Something in 
the corner caught my eye. It was the walker; I had put a whole bunch of glow-in-the-
 dark skeleton stickers on it at Halloween, and now they were bright green, glowing 
like a neon exit sign. 
The walker was easy to carry. I held it in front of me like it was a shield at 
first, but then halfway to the tracks I tried using it to walk. With each step, I flung the 
walker out in front of me with a snap of my wrists, then straightened out my arms and 
swung myself forward like a gymnast on the parallel bars. It made my arms tired, but 
I kept swinging. I liked the rhythm of the thud on the pavement and the lurch in my 
stomach as I sailed to catch up. That wasn?t the way Opa used the walker. I guessed it 
helped him, but he had to lean on it so hard that he fought to get its feet to shuffle to 
the next step. He never got to use it to swing free.  
When I got to the tracks, I couldn?t decide how to put the walker on the rails. 
If I laid it right in the middle, I was afraid it would get tangled up in the undercarriage 
and the train really would derail. But the walker was too big to balance on one rail, 
like we did for smaller things. I settled for a compromise; I placed the walker over 
one of the rails, so two of the feet were on crossties and two of them were on the 
gravel beside the tracks. Then I stepped back into the serviceberry and Sweet Betsy 
bushes and crouched down to wait.  
The moon was hiding in clumps of black clouds. Every so often it would 
appear and the stand of shrubs where I sat would glow silver; but then a cloud would 
cover the moon over again, and the light would go out. I thought about tomorrow 
morning, when I would show the boys what I had made in the factory. I thought about 
28 
 
  
 
bringing a broken-off leg of the walker, twisted into flat angles, to Weathers Bolt and 
giving it to him, telling him to keep it and think about me when he saw in on his 
bureau or his bookshelf. I thought about telling Kevin that I was running the smash 
factory now. I thought about bringing Shelva Ann out of the branches and leaves and 
letting her keep all her coins.  
My legs were getting tired of squatting, so I sat down in the dirt. I put my 
hands in the dead leaves, crunching them into dust in my fists. In one of the handfuls, 
I felt something sharp, and when I sifted through the mess, I saw something shine: 
one of my Monopoly tokens. It was all scratched up and mangled, so I couldn?t tell 
what it was. It might have been the old shoe, or maybe the top hat. 
I slipped the token in my pocket, but held on to it, closing it in my cold hand. 
Far off, I heard a train whistle.   
 
 
29 
 
  
 
 
Lowlands 
 Anna was certain that nothing more would fit in the car, but she didn?t bother 
telling Paul.  
Her parents had come by that morning to see them off and ended up helping 
Anna and Paul finish packing. They crammed the Volvo station wagon from floor to 
ceiling with the accumulated debris of six years together, and by the scheduled 
departure time of nine-thirty, it had been ready to go.  
Then Paul had realized that Anna?s sewing table had been left out.  
?It?s fine,? she?d said, standing on the driveway arms akimbo, surveying the 
car. ?I hardly ever sew anymore. My parents will keep it for me until the next time we 
drive up here.? 
Beth and Glenn had nodded. They were already keeping the couple?s bigger 
furniture items; what did one little sewing table more matter? 
?No, no, that?s not necessary,? Paul said, hoisting the sewing table back out of 
Anna?s parents? pick-up. ?It?s so small, I really think I can make it fit. Just give me a 
minute.? 
It had been over two hours. Paul had tried countless arrangements of the bags 
and boxes that crowded the station wagon, only to find that each time something was 
sticking out or had been forgotten on the driveway.  
Anna and her parents had retreated to the porch to wait. 
 Every so often, Glenn would call from his perch on the steps, ?Sure I can?t 
help you with that, son?? 
30 
 
  
 
 ?Thanks, Glenn, but I think I got it,? Paul would say without looking up. ?Just 
one more minute here.?  
 ?Puts me in the mind of that story, The Mitten,? Anna?s mother said. She and 
Anna were sitting on the porch swing, kicking their feet back and forth to keep it in 
motion. ?You know, where all the animals, the rabbit and the fox and the bear, get 
inside this mitten, but when a little mouse tries to get in, the mitten just can?t take 
another thing, and it bursts apart.? 
 Beth was the librarian at an elementary school in Blowing Rock. She firmly 
believed there was no situation so big or complicated that it couldn?t be clarified by 
relating it to a children?s book.  
 Beth leaned forward. ?Glenn, you remember that story.? 
 Anna?s father was sitting on the porch steps. He took a sip of his iced tea. The 
weather was cool?March in western North Carolina allowed only the hint of 
spring?but Glenn could drink iced tea all year round, in any kind of weather.  
 ?Let?s see. The Mitten, you said? I don?t believe I recall that one.?  
Glenn furrowed his bushy brows. As a teenager, Anna had been mortified by 
the way his brows grew up and away from his face, and she?d begged him to let her 
trim them. Her father had always calmly refused.  
Once Anna had burst out in frustration, ?But Daddy, they make you look like 
a Great Horned Owl!? 
Glenn had laughed and laughed. For days afterward, he would sneak up on 
Anna while she was studying or talking on the phone, swoop his arms and let out a 
loud hoot. Ten years later, he still sometimes called her Owlet.  
31 
 
  
 
?Yes, you do, Glenn, that?s the one with the little Scandinavian children. You 
remember that.? 
?Of course, dear.? 
Beth gave her husband a peevish glare, then looked out over the yard. Paul 
was holding Anna?s KitchenAid stand mixer in his arms; now that the sewing table 
was in, there was no room for this.  
?Paul, you remember that story.? 
?What story?? Paul said without glancing up. He was chewing on the inside of 
his lip in the way that Anna knew meant he was somewhere else.  
?The Mitten. You know, the one about all the animals who get inside that 
mitten.? 
?I don?t know that story, Beth.? He rested the stand-mixer on the car?s 
bumper. 
 ?Oh sure you do, honey. You must have read it as a kid. Anna did.? 
 ?Mom, you know Paul?s not a reader.?  
 ?Well, you don?t have to be a reader to read. Isn?t that right, Paul??  
Beth?s tone was light, but Anna could hear the steel that crept along the edges 
of her voice. Since Anna had lost the baby, Beth hadn?t been as warm to Paul as she 
once was. Anna tried to tell her that it had nothing to do with Paul. But Anna had 
never lied well to her mother, and she knew her mother hadn?t bought the story about 
the miscarriage, even if Beth didn?t actually know the truth. 
 ?I really ought to read more.? 
32 
 
  
 
Paul grimaced ruefully at Anna, but she just turned up the corners of her 
mouth in a noncommittal way. She didn?t want to be on anybody?s side.  
 There was silence for a moment.  
Anna looked out from the porch, surveying the land she would soon be 
leaving. Morning sun was burning the wisps of fog from the peaks of the Blue Ridge 
sleeping on the horizon. The mountains surrounding her home had always made Anna 
feel safe and contained. They were a seam hemming in her known world. They 
showed her just where she belonged. 
The yard in front of their house was small and neat. Anna hadn?t ever gotten 
around to digging the vegetable garden she?d planned when she and Paul had moved 
in three years ago, but she?d planted some native azaleas in front of the house and 
made a small bed of coreopsis and sweet alyssum around the mailbox. The last of the 
snowdrops were blooming in the shadiest corners of the yard, while in the spots with 
full sun tightly furled crocuses were beginning to thrust themselves from the cold 
earth.  
 Anna didn?t know what kind of plants grew in Florida. She could only 
imagine palm trees and hibiscus, plants that were strange and unwelcoming to her. 
When she?d mentioned it to Paul, he?d told her that north Florida wasn?t really so 
different from the rest of South, that despite being near the ocean, she?d be surprised 
how much Jacksonville would remind her of home.  
 ?Easy for you to say,? she?d said, as she toyed with her dinner. ?It is like your 
home.? 
33 
 
  
 
 Paul scoffed through a mouthful of spaghetti. ?That makes no sense. Florida is 
nothing like Delaware.? 
 ?Well, they?re both coastal. They?re flat. No hills, no valleys, everything the 
same?it?s unnerving.? 
 Paul reached under the table and squeezed her knee. ?Spoken like a true 
hillbilly.? 
 On the porch, Anna frowned. The hillbilly crack was part of a long-standing 
joke in their relationship, ever since they?d started dating during their sophomore year 
at UNC. Paul always teased Anna about her gentle mountain twang and her steadfast 
love of the Blue Ridge, but it had seemed harmless and good-natured. In fact, she?d 
always assumed Paul envied her firm sense of origin. After all, what kind of place 
was Delaware? What could it possibly mean, she wondered, to be from such a place? 
Her assumption was confirmed when he agreed to move to Boone with her while she 
got her teaching certificate at Appalachian State. He did computer consulting. He said 
he could do that anywhere, so it might as well be somewhere beautiful.  
 But then Paul had started applying for jobs with tech companies. A week ago, 
just after the abortion, he?d accepted a lucrative offer in Jacksonville.  
 ?You?re a teacher,? he?d said. ?That?s a job you can do anywhere.?  
Anna said nothing. She looked out the window behind him and fixed her eyes 
on the fog trapped in the trees at the top of Howard Knob. 
 Now, the jokes about her heritage were starting to grate at Anna; in preparing 
to leave her home, she couldn?t bear to take it lightly anymore. She realized, too, that 
she had nothing to say back to Paul when he called her a hick or made a joke about 
34 
 
  
 
moonshine. She could think of nothing clever or cutting to say about Delaware. 
Secretly, she thought this meant there was nothing special about the place at all. 
 Glenn drained the last of his ice tea, jangling the ice cubes around in the 
bottom of the glass.  
 ?You sure I can?t help you there, son??  
Paul had a garbage bag full of bedclothes in his hand, and he was studying the 
open hatch.  
 ?I think we?ll just have to leave these. I can?t see how they?re going to fit.? 
 Anna frowned. ?If we leave something, don?t you think it ought to be the 
table??  
  ?We can use the table; we don?t need all these blankets.? 
 ?But I want the blankets.? Anna winced as she heard how her words 
sounded?petulant and childish?and wished she could pull them back into her 
mouth. But it was true. The sewing table had come from Ikea in Charlotte. Most of 
the blankets were handmade or hand-me-downs.  
 Paul looked at her, head cocked to one side. It was the look that said, be 
reasonable. 
?Anna, it?s Florida. Do you really think we need two huge bags full of 
blankets? 
 Anna opened her mouth and took in a breath to speak, then quickly exhaled 
and shut it. After a pause, she said, ?I suppose not.?  
 She hoped that the afghan her grandmother had crocheted was in the other 
bag.  
35 
 
  
 
 Paul tossed the garbage bag into the back of the truck.  
 ?Well, folks,? he said, striding over the porch. ?Looks like it?s about that 
time.? He smiled at Anna. ?You ready?? 
 Anna wanted to remind him that she was the one who?d been waiting hours 
for him. But there were twelve hours in a car ahead of her, and she figured there were 
no percentages in a comment like that. 
 Anna turned to her mother and hugged her. Beth squeezed Anna hard. 
 ?It may seem like a long way, but I?m always close to you, honey.? 
 ?Mom.? Anna tried to sound exasperated, but there was a scratchy feeling in 
the back of her throat.  
 ?Don?t you ?Mom,? me, missy.?  
Beth gave Anna one last squeeze, then pushed Anna out to arm?s length. She 
looked at Anna, smiling, tears welling. Anna blushed and looked away.  
Anna pecked her mother on the cheek, and stood up quickly. On the steps, her 
father was standing up creakily, slowly straightening out his legs with a little grimace 
of pain; Glenn?s knees had taken a beating when he played football for State, and 
they?d given him trouble ever since. Anna reached out her hand to help her father, but 
he didn?t take it until he was already standing. He held her hand in one of his big 
palms, and patted it with the other.  
?You take care, now, Owlet.? There was a little crease of worry in between 
Glenn?s eyebrows.  
?I will, Daddy.? Anna?s chest felt tight. ?We?ve got to get going.? 
36 
 
  
 
?Of course.? Glenn dropped his daughter?s hand. He turned to Paul. ?Drive 
safe, son.? 
Paul nodded. ?Will do.? He raised a hand to Anna?s mother. ?Thanks for all 
the help, Beth. I?m sure we?ll be back up to visit before too long.? 
?That would be nice.? Beth was holding onto the porch railing. She was 
smiling, but Anna saw her eyes dart back and forth from Paul to her daughter.  
Anna took Paul?s elbow. ?Let?s go.? 
As usual, Paul insisted on taking the backroads. Paul loved to take 
backroads?state highways, country lanes, countless Main Streets. It was the one 
vestige of the Kerouac-ian image of himself he had treasured in college: there had 
been no Interstates when On the Road was published. Normally, his obsession 
annoyed Anna?road trips with Paul invariably took hours longer than they would 
with any other person?but today, as they wound along the esses and switchbacks of 
the Blue Ridge Parkway, Anna was thankful.  
She watched the landscape flash by. Later in their drive, once they had left her 
corner of the state, Anna knew she would see the South as most people understood it. 
There would be an endless parade of nameless and crumbling towns, each one 
containing the same elements, as if they were standard issue: convenience stores 
selling bait and tackle; Waffle Houses with letters missing from the sign like gaps in a 
toothy smile; abandoned Wal-Marts across the street from bustling Super Wal-Marts. 
One desiccated hulk of mid-century America after another.  
But now, now they were still in the mountains, where the world was cleaner 
and crisper, where the light possessed a certain clarity you didn?t find anywhere else. 
37 
 
  
 
Here in the mountains, Anna could only just see the world emerging from the cover 
of winter. Huge icicles dripped from a rock face, but underneath them, the grass was 
greening into its spring brilliance. On the rolling ridges the tree tops were mostly a 
sea of dusty brown, but here and there, Anna could see buds, purplish and densely 
clotted, dotting the skeleton branches. The leaves of the rhododendron were 
beginning to unfurl, spreading their dark waxy faces to a sun that was newly 
welcoming. In a few months, these roads would be clogged with tourists come to see 
the rhododendron?s dramatic blossoms and the quieter saucer-shaped blooms of the 
mountain laurel. Though most locals complained about the influx, Anna didn?t blame 
these visitors. There was nothing more beautiful than the Blue Ridge in spring. 
 Paul glanced over at Anna looking out the window.  
 ?I know you?re going to miss it. I?m sorry.?   
Anna shook her head, tossing her hair back on her shoulders. She smiled at 
Paul and reached over to put her hand on his thigh. 
?It?s okay. It?ll be fine.? 
He covered his hand with hers. ?Of course it will.? 
After a moment, Paul switched on the radio and tuned it to WNCW, the 
station out of Isothermal Community College. It was Saturday, but it didn?t matter; 
here, Jesus was always on the radio. Right now, a gospel bluegrass program was on. 
In a tinny recording, the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers were belting out ?Behold the 
Morning Sun.?  
Anna began humming along. 
Paul snorted. ?I still say that stuff is ridiculous.? 
38 
 
  
 
Anna thought it sounded riotous and joyful, like people who just couldn?t 
contain their happiness. She didn?t say anything. 
 ?It just sounds like shouting,? Paul said, and reached for the dial. 
Several hours later, as they were gliding across the scrub-dotted land of the 
Georgia Piedmont, Paul turned down the radio.  
 ?You want to stop in Augusta for lunch?? he asked. 
Anna responded without looking at him. ?It?s already after four. We might as 
well just wait until dinner.?  
?I don?t know. There might not be all that much between Augusta and 
Jacksonville. I don?t want you getting too hungry.? 
 ?I?m not hungry.? She pressed her fingertips to the window. It was warm. ?I 
want to keep going.? 
 ?It?s up to you, but keep in mind we still have a good six hours before 
Jacksonville. We might be stuck with fast food.? 
 ?It doesn?t matter,? Anna said. They were passing a roadside stand selling 
tomatoes and watermelon that had probably been shipped in from South Florida. A 
little boy was leaning over the counter, waving to the cars as they passed. Anna 
waved back. 
 Paul glanced at the clock on the dash and tilted his head slightly to consider 
their progress. ?It?s probably more like seven hours. Going?s always slow on 121. All 
those lights.? 
?I don?t mind.?  
?Really? It?s up to you, but I just think it?s going to be a long way.? 
39 
 
  
 
The tomato boy was receding out of sight. Anna could see him craning his 
neck around the stand, looking for the next car to welcome. She leaned out the 
window a bit to watch him disappear behind a hill.  
She sat back and put her hands in her lap.  
When they had first started dating, Anna had been impressed with Paul?s 
willingness to take her opinion into consideration. Before Paul, she?d only ever dated 
boys from her hometown or places like it. Boys like these had hitched their parents? 
and grandparents? notions about relationships to their pick-ups and hauled them into 
the twenty-first century. If they took her to dinner, they chose the place and the and 
the date and the time. Sometimes they chose her meal. They always knew what drink 
she wanted, and they always ordered it with a knowing wink tipped in her direction. 
With Paul, it had been different. Paul asked her what she liked, where she 
wanted to go, and he?d never ordered for her. When she?d ask him what their plans 
were for the evening, he always said, ?It?s up to you.? He?d also been good at 
interpreting what she wanted when she was too shy or confused to say it. When she?d 
walked out of her chemistry final exam and burst into tears, knowing she?d failed the 
course for the second time, he?d taken her to his car and pointed the old Volvo 
northwest, toward her parents? house. When Anna led him by the hand to her 
apartment, vacant for once of her vacuous roommates, and then stalled once they 
reached the bedroom, Paul began singing ?You Fill Up My Senses? in a loud and 
wobbly falsetto. Anna?s laughter untangled the nerves that were knotted up in the pit 
of her stomach. She slid her tee-shirt over her head and pulled Paul all the way under 
the covers with her.  
40 
 
  
 
After they?d been together a year, Anna began to notice more carefully the 
way Paul asked her things. The question began wide and expansive, with limitless 
answers, but by the time he reached the end, passing through the ?up to you? and ?I 
guess it doesn?t matter but? and ?I?m just concerned,? it had become a narrow 
hallway leading inexorably to the chink of light coming from the only open door.  
For a time, she?d thought this was an amusing little quirk of his, the kind of 
thing she could laugh about with her mother as they washed the dishes or put up 
butter beans for the winter, the kind of observation of male behavior that would be 
followed by an indulgent shake of the head, a little loving laugh. Lately, though, it 
had begun to seem less lovable. She didn?t know how to arm herself against his 
backhanded persuasion. Paul knew how to make Anna think that she?d come up with 
whatever it was he wanted. It would only be later that she would realize he?d gotten 
his way.  
They got into Augusta around five o?clock. The city depressed Anna: a parody 
of itself, all stately brick and tall white columns. She tried to convince Paul that they 
should just get a snack and push on to Jacksonville; they still had a ways to go. 
?Now, if we?d taken the highway?? She cut herself off when she saw Paul?s 
crumpled expression, and she cringed at her own meanness.  
?Never mind; you?re right,? Anna said, putting her hand to the back of his 
neck. ?I?m just cranky from being in the car so long. Let?s get something to eat.? She 
brushed the little curls that escaped down Paul?s neck with her fingernails. ?Do you 
forgive me?? 
41 
 
  
 
They were at a red light. Paul leaned over to peck her cheek. ?There?s nothing 
to forgive.? He leaned back and considered her for a moment. ?Is your hair 
different?? 
Anna smoothed the flyaways from her forehead. ?Yeah. I got it cut yesterday. 
I wanted something new for the move. You know, to make a change.? 
?I like it.? Paul tucked a lazy wisp behind Anna?s ear.  
Anna felt her cheeks pink. Paul?s compliments were always small, but they 
warmed her in a way she couldn?t quite define. Perhaps it was their smallness; it 
made them feel genuine. 
Their restaurant choices were limited, so they settled on the Boll Weevil 
Eatery. The sign near the restaurant read ?Ninth Street? at one end of the road; at the 
other end, closer to the river, there was a hand-lettered strip of cardboard taped to the 
pole that read ?James Brown Blvd.? When they asked their waitress about it, she told 
them that after the singer?s death, the street?s name had been officially changed on 
maps. The city, however, hadn?t gotten around the amending the sign, causing great 
confusion for the tourists who came to town for the PGA tournament. The cardboard 
was the restaurant?s temporary solution.  
?Why did you only change on the side by the river?? Paul had asked. He was 
always chatty with waitresses and handymen and gas station attendants. 
The waitress shrugged and fluffed her cumulous puff of hair. ?Only tourists 
go along the river. Locals know what?s what.?  
The cover of the menu proclaimed ?The Boll Weevil Eatery: Meat-and-Three 
Just Like Home!? But a quick perusal of the inside pages revealed that it was actually 
42 
 
  
 
meat-and-two. Anna wondered what had prompted the shift: maybe hard times or 
maybe the changing culinary habits of modern Americans. She understood, though, 
why the restaurant hadn?t changed the tagline: ?Meat-and-three? had such a nice ring 
to it.  
Anna could have read the menu three times cover to cover in the time it took 
for the waitress to return with their sweet tea and a fat order pad with crinkled pages, 
but she still didn?t know what she wanted. Paul ordered biscuits and gravy from the 
all-day breakfast options while Anna poured over the menu. She was still deliberating 
after Paul had finished ordering.  
Paul laughed and gave the waitress a sympathetic look. ?She always does 
this.? 
?I?m thinking, I?m thinking,? she said with a note of panic in her voice. 
Ordering at restaurants made her anxious, like there was a right answer somewhere on 
the menu but she couldn?t be sure what it was and choosing wrong would alter her 
life forever.  
Paul put his hand on her back. ?Why don?t you get catfish? The catfish looks 
good.? 
Anna shrugged his hand off. ?I don?t know. Just give me a sec.? She looked 
up at the waitress. ?I?m sorry. I?ll just be one second.? 
?Take your time, darlin?,? the waitress said, shifting her considerable weight 
to the other Ked-clad foot. ?But do y?all mind if I sit down while you think?? She 
gestured to the unoccupied side of the booth. ?My feet can?t hardly hold me up any 
more.? 
43 
 
  
 
Anna felt a surge of warmth for this woman who called her darlin?, who 
wasn?t in a hurry, who didn?t tell her what she wanted.  
?Please, sit down. Take a load off.? 
The waitress sat heavily and the vinyl cushion released a little ?oof? of air.  
?Thanks, honey.? She leaned back in the seat. ?Ever since I had Carlene?
 she?s my fourth, she was a real big baby?my circulation just hasn?t been the same.?  
Anna felt a little flutter in her chest. 
?Carlene. That?s a nice name.? 
The waitress beamed. ?You want to see her picture?? She pronounced it 
?pitcher.? ?I keep pictures of all my kids in the back of my order pad here.?  
The waitress flipped open the pad and pulled out several wallet-sized school 
photos. Anna remembered having those taken as a child. She was always so excited 
about picture day, but when the pictures came out, Anna was disappointed. She 
always hoped that the photograph would somehow make her a better version of 
herself, but despite the rainforest background and new haircut, it was just Anna, 
nothing more.  
The waitress shuffled through the photos, then selected one and pushed it 
across the table.  
?That there is Carlene.? 
Anna smiled. The girl in the picture was all blonde curls and pink cheeks, 
nothing like Anna. Anna had been an awkward child: too thin, biggish ears, hair that 
would never hold a curl. 
 ?She lovely. How old is she?? 
44 
 
  
 
?She?s about to be five this spring. She?s real advanced for her age; she reads 
almost as good as her brother, and he?s eight.? 
Anna studied the photo. Carlene had a small dimple in her right cheek, slight 
enough that if you didn?t look hard, you might think it was a smudge. Anna liked the 
way it made her face look a little off-balance. 
Anna glanced sideways at Paul. He was looking over the top of the waitress?s 
head, trying to get a view of the Hawks game on the television over the bar. Under 
the table, his leg bounced and he was twirling his spoon around in his fingers without 
seeming to notice. For a moment, white heat surged in Anna?s head; Paul didn?t even 
like basketball. She slid the photo over to him.  
?Isn?t she cute??  
It was a mean question. Paul didn?t think children were cute. He thought they 
were loud and obnoxious in restaurants; otherwise, he didn?t think of them at all. He 
was unmoved by a tiny knitted hat with bear ears; he was confused by other?s impulse 
to talk to children in line at the grocery store.  When Anna?s friends became pregnant, 
Paul had pitied them. They were so young, he always said. They were ending their 
lives at twenty-five. Asking him about Carlene put Paul in a bad spot: either he lied or 
he sounded cruel. But Anna wanted to see which he chose would choose. 
Paul cleared his throat and pushed the picture back to her. ?Honey, don?t you 
think we should make this a quick lunch?? He smiled at the waitress. ?We?ve still got 
a long road ahead of us.? 
Anna sighed. The heat had faded. He was right; Jacksonville was still far. She 
slid the picture back across the Formica to the waitress.  
45 
 
  
 
?I?ll have the catfish.? 
  
As they ate, Paul chattered about the trip, the new house. He?d heard 
Jacksonville had good golfing, and he was hoping to take it up. 
?If nothing else, I?ll get to ride the golf carts. That looks like the best part of 
the whole thing.? 
Anna made agreeing sounds where appropriate and nodded to show she was 
listening, but she kept quiet while she ate. Lately, eating had been an obligation she 
had to make herself fulfill. She had to devise little games and benchmarks for herself 
to convince her to fork peas or potatoes or pot roast into her mouth. How about you 
eat around the clock, she?d tell herself, arranging her food in stations on the border of 
her plate. You need to eat half of everything here, she?d think, and divide the food 
into two portions: the one she would eat, and the one she could leave behind. Just one 
more bite of green beans, and then you can be excused.  
They finished eating and paid the bill. Anna left an extra dollar in tip. 
?Should we get back on the road??  
Paul was tucking his wallet back into his back pocket. The wallet had been a 
present from Anna several years ago; she?d made it out of scraps of leather in an art 
class in college. Now her poorly-sewn seams were beginning to strain.  
?I suppose,? Anna said, scooting sideways out of the booth. She smoothed her 
shirt and skirt, brushing away crumbs and bits of lint.  
As they walked out, they passed the waitress leaning against the building, 
smoking a cigarette. Anna put up a hand in farewell. 
46 
 
  
 
?It was nice talking to you,? she said.  
?Bye, darlin?. You take care, now.?  
As they continued south, Anna felt the landscape flattening. This kind of land 
made her nervous, and she wondered how anything could grow here. There was 
something so barren about a land with no valleys or peaks; there was no refuge. 
Anna rested her head against the taut fabric of her seatbelt, and without 
thinking, let out a long, slow sigh.  
?You okay??  
Paul glanced briefly at her. She could see worry lines around his mouth. 
Anna nodded, but she didn?t sit up. Her head felt so heavy. 
 ?Just a little tired.? 
 ?Well, you just rest, then. You can take a nap, if you want. It might be good 
for you.? 
 ?Please don?t worry about me.? 
Anna tried to make it sound light-hearted, like she appreciated his concern, 
but actually, those concerned looks he?d been giving her the last week set her teeth on 
edge, made her nervous and irritable. He handled her like a piece of china that had 
been broken and mended, but in which the crack was still plainly visible. 
She knew it was her own fault, in many ways. When she found out, Paul had 
been in Raleigh visiting college friends. She had picked up her phone to call him and 
tell him the good news, that she wasn?t anemic, just pregnant, but Anna had never 
imagined having to call Paul to tell him she was expecting. She wanted to be waiting 
for him on the porch when he came home. She?d imagined the way he would swoop 
47 
 
  
 
her into a hug, burying his face in her hair, how he might put his hand reverently on 
her belly and ask her if she could feel it, and she would laugh and tell him it would be 
months before the baby?s squirming would be noticeable. She would make them 
dinner, something wholesome and traditional, so the baby would know right away 
where it came from. Maybe they would eat huddled on the sofa. Maybe they would 
make love there, tossing the throw pillows to the floor, and then fall asleep on the 
couch, waking up with cricks in their necks. 
Anna was sure this wasn?t phone news. It couldn?t carry over wires and 
distances. Paul wouldn?t be able to see the barely suppressed smile, her suffused joy. 
Paul was coming home day after next; she would tell him then.  
But two days seemed a long time to keep the news to herself, so she went to 
her parents? home. She sang hymns as she drove, making up words or melodies to fill 
the gaps in her memories from junior choir. She?d quit when she was fifteen?her 
voice wasn?t really good enough to sing with the adult choir, and anyway, they took 
their music seriously, while all Anna wanted was a chance to make joyful noise in a 
solemn place. When she arrived, she flew into the old brick rambler. Beth was in the 
back, turning over a vegetable bed, preparing it for the tomatoes she would plant 
come May. Anna flung her arms around her mother and told her. Anna?s mother 
began to cry. Anna could never keep her eyes dry when her mother was weeping, so 
they stood there in the garden, compost staining their shoes, holding each other. 
When they were done crying, they giggled at themselves, only slightly embarrassed 
by their outpouring, and went inside. Beth poured them iced tea. Anna decided to stay 
until her father came home so she could tell him, too. He hugged her and offered her 
48 
 
  
 
a celebratory drink of scotch, then red-faced, retracted the offer as Anna and her 
mother laughed. Anna spent the night, and slept in her childhood bed.  
Over the next several days, Anna tried to plan how she would tell Paul. The 
ideas that fit the importance of the situation seemed stuffy and too grown-up: a 
special dinner, a long walk on the Parkway. And the ideas that reflected her 
giddiness?a series of clues hidden around the house, hiding in the broom closet and 
jumping out to surprise him?seemed silly and trivialized the news.  
 In the end, she went with no plan. When she heard Paul?s car pulling into the 
driveway on Wednesday night, she jumped up from the couch where she had been 
grading math quizzes and ran into the yard. She didn?t bother to put on her shoes, and 
her stocking feet slapped wetly on the cold walkway. Paul was still in the car, 
gathering his things from the passenger seat. When she tapped lightly on the window, 
he looked up, startled. Then his face relaxed into a smile. He opened the door. 
 ?Hey you.? 
 ?Hey.? Anna?s heart was thumping wildly in her chest, pounding against her 
rib cage. She was ahead of herself by several minutes in her mind, already at the 
moment of revelation and rejoicing.   
 Paul stepped out of the car, looking disheveled. He hadn?t shaved in a day or 
two and when he kissed her, the stubble grazed her cheek, rough as concrete.  
 ?I?m happy you?re home.? 
  ?Me too.? 
 He turned to the car to retrieve his duffel bag and laptop case. She watched 
him rummaging in the back seat, looking for his phone or keys. She noticed that his 
49 
 
  
 
hair was getting long. She would ask him if he wanted her to trim it for him 
tomorrow. 
 ?Paul?? 
 He straightened and faced her. In the dim light of the moon, he looked just 
like he had when they were nineteen; she couldn?t see the lines that had begun to set 
around his mouth and on his forehead like she could in the sun. 
 ?Yeah??  
 Anna tamped down the grin that tried to creep onto her face, managing to 
subdue it into a wry wrinkling of her chin. She felt a swell of laughter and nerves. 
 Paul gave crinkled his eyes at her quizzically. ?What is it? You didn?t get 
another cat, did you??  
 She shook her head. She took his hand that wasn?t holding the duffel bag. She 
looked right into his eyes; that was always how it was in the movies.  
 ?I?m pregnant.? 
 ?What?? Paul barked the word so sharply and loudly that Anna felt it ring in 
her chest. Her eyes grew wide.  
 ?A baby, we?re going to have?? 
 ?I heard you the first time. Fuck.? 
 There was a long silence. He dropped her hand and ran it through his hair. 
Anna kept her eyes on his face, waiting for some light to break through, but his face 
was long and shocked, and a line was deepening between his eyebrows. As the 
silence stretched on, Anna noticed that though the day had been warm, the night was 
cold, maybe even cold enough for a late frost. The damp grass of the lawn had soaked 
50 
 
  
 
her socks through, and she realized that her toes were growing numb. She looked 
down at her fingers; the nails looked blue. 
 Paul let out a long, ragged sigh. He ruffled his hair again, this time with both 
hands. Anna had seen Paul?s father make the same gesture. 
 ?Jesus.? He leaned against the car. ?Jesus Christ.? 
 She nodded, but she didn?t look up from her hands.  
  ?We?ll figure this out. We?ll figure out a plan,? he said, looking past her at 
the dark mountains. 
 Anna wanted to tell him that there was nothing to figure out, that she had 
already figured everything out. There was already a plan and it included nights 
pouring over books of baby names, a second-hand stroller, a swing set in the 
backyard, homemade Halloween costumes. But there were no words for all this now. 
 She pressed her lips together, clamping them shut with her teeth. 
 ?Hey, don?t worry.? Paul reached for her hand. Anna let him take it, but it felt 
lifeless to her, like it belonged to someone else. ?It?s going to be okay. I?m sorry I got 
upset.? 
 For a moment the weight on Anna?s shoulders lightened. She looked up at 
him, a tentative smile tucked into the corners of her mouth.  
 ?Really?? 
 ?Of course.? Paul pulled her into his arms. ?I was?? The crease in his 
forehead deepened again. ?But it doesn?t have to be a big deal, right? I mean, I hear 
they just give you a pill if you?re not too far along.? 
51 
 
  
 
 Anna suddenly felt unsteady on her feet. Her vision seemed to warp; the 
streetlights twisted and the moon wavered in the sky. She felt as if she had just 
stepped off a carousel. She held onto Paul more tightly, fearing she might fall. 
 ?It?s nothing to be scared of. Lots of women?you know. It doesn?t mean 
anything.? 
 ?Nothing at all?? 
 Paul hugged her hard. ?Nothing at all.? He paused. ?We?re still so young, you 
know? Too young for that. I mean, we?d be lousy parents.? 
 Anna tried to keep steady, but she was trembling all over. She felt that if she 
didn?t hold very still, she would fly apart. Her teeth started to chatter. 
 ?You must be cold.? Paul rubbed her upper arms with his palms. ?Let?s go 
inside.? 
 Anna followed Paul into the house. 
Over the next few weeks, Anna thought again and again how stupid she had 
been. If she?d talked to Paul first, if she had waited to tell her parents, they would 
never have known. The baby would have existed only for her and Paul, just briefly, a 
minor inconvenience that had appeared and disappeared in the same breath. She 
should have thought about the situation before letting anyone know. Paul was right; 
they were still so young.  
As it was, she?d had to lie. She told them she?d lost the baby. It was plausible; 
she?d read it happened to some fifteen percent of women. Her mother had pressed her 
lips into a thin white line, then turned back to the stew on the stove. When she faced 
Anna again, her eyes were dry, but it seemed Anna that her faced looked disarranged, 
52 
 
  
 
as if it had been re-etched more deeply by someone less adept with the chisel.  Her 
father simply sat hard in his armchair. Then he took her hand.  
?I?m so sorry. I am so deeply sorry,? he said.  
Now when she saw them, she had nothing to say. 
 
As they neared the Florida line, Paul pulled over for gas and cigarettes. He?d 
officially quit several years ago, but he still smoked on occasion, especially on long 
car trips. As long as it didn?t happen often, Paul reasoned it couldn?t hurt too much. 
He referred to these times as smoking ?off the record.? 
 At the gas station, Paul put the pump into the car and went into the 
convenience store. Anna thought she might be able to drift to sleep?that would make 
the trip seem faster?but before she could begin to doze off, she heard car horns, loud 
and angry. She tried to ignore them, but they kept coming, a succession of short and 
long blasts, like a Morse code signal.  
She sat up and looked toward the road. It was mid-sized with a steady stream 
of traffic, and all the cars seemed to be swerving around something. When she stuck 
her neck out the window, Anna could see it was a dog, trotting down the middle of 
the road. Anna thought he was a German shepherd, a big-chested fellow with tall 
ears. He seemed unafraid of the cars and bleating horns around him. He simply kept 
traveling down the road, his pace consistent, his course fixed.  
Anna got out of the car and stood by the curb. Now that she was closer, she 
could see that though the dog seemed to have a mission, a place to be, his step was 
unstable, his path erratic. Sometimes, he appeared to stumble. He looked straight 
53 
 
  
 
ahead, and Anna began to think it wasn?t bravery that kept him focused, but illness; 
he seemed oblivious to everything around him. Only the drivers? concern was 
keeping him unharmed; the dog himself was doing nothing to avoid them.  
Anna looked back at the convenience store. She could see Paul leaning on the 
counter, chatting with the clerk. The dog was already fifty yards down the road, the 
honking and swerving following him. Despite his odd behavior, he was making pretty 
good time, and Anna decided that to catch him, she would have to run.  
It had been a while since she had run. All her flesh felt loose on her body, but 
it was good to be moving, to be going somewhere with a purpose. Anna stretched out 
her arms and turned her palms against the breeze. As she ran, she tried to keep her 
eyes on the dog. She didn?t think he was getting any farther away, but he also wasn?t 
getting any closer. When she couldn?t make him out, she could usually tell where he 
was by the noise and direction of the cars avoiding him. She wanted to call out?
 maybe if he heard someone?s voice, he would leave the street?but she didn?t know 
what to call. She didn?t know his name, and calling out ?dog? felt wrong, 
disrespectful almost, as if she couldn?t be bothered to know him. She?d never had a 
dog, only cats, who sometimes came to a sort of kissing noise. Anna pursed her lips 
and made the sound, but it was drowned in the roar of the passing cars.  
After a few minutes, the dog came to an intersection and made a sharp left.  
Anna followed him. She was in a neighborhood now. The houses were small with 
pocket handkerchief-sized front lawns and porches crowded with furniture made to 
stay indoors. Though the houses were shabby, they looked as though their owners 
took pride in them. The lawns were neatly mown, the walkways edged with little 
54 
 
  
 
plastic borders. There were gardens in front of some houses; other had silk flowers 
planted in the dirt. People were outside: washing their cars, sweeping their porches, 
watching their children run in the yard. Some of them waved to her.  
In making the turn, Anna had lost sight of the dog. Fear fluttered in her 
stomach. But as she crested a hill, passing two bicycling children who eyed her 
suspiciously, she saw the dog a few blocks down. He had slowed some, but he was 
still in the middle of the street, still weaving shakily. She ran hard; she thought now 
she could catch up with him. She began calling, not to really to elicit any response 
from the dog, but rather to let people she ran past know that she had a purpose, that 
she wasn?t just a stranger out for a run in a denim skirt and ballet flats. 
?Here, puppy,? she called. ?Come here!? She even tried whistling a little, but 
her whistle was weak under the best of circumstances, and now she was almost 
winded.  
She was afraid she would have to stop soon?her heart was pounding and 
there was a stitch in her side?but the thought of turning around without even having 
reached the dog was unbearable. So though she could feel the blisters forming on her 
heels and big toes, Anna managed to work up something close to a sprint.  When she 
was within ten yards of the dog, she crossed to the opposite side of the street; she 
wanted to overtake him so she could approach him face to face. Finally ahead of him, 
she recrossed and waited for him at the corner under a tulip magnolia.  
The dog seemed not to see her until he was just a few feet away. His eyes 
were milky and clouded, and she realized he was probably half-blind. He stopped 
abruptly, his nose twitching, smelling someone in his path. Even when he stood still, 
55 
 
  
 
he swayed slightly, as if he were standing on the deck of a ship. His fur was rumpled 
and missing in patches, and his ears were tattered. The fine hair around his muzzle 
was going grey.  
She?d read somewhere that dogs like to smell a person?s hand first. Anna held 
out her right hand, palm down, hoping it would be like a friendly wave to the dog.  
?Hey there,? she said softly, taking careful steps forward. ?Hey, puppy-dog.? 
Her hand still out, she crept closer, rolling her feet to keep from making noise 
against the pavement. She kept murmuring little greetings, telling him what a 
handsome dog he was, asking him where he lived.  
The dog made no sign that he noticed her until she was very close to him, her 
hand less than a foot away from his face. Because his eyes were so filmy, almost 
opaque, she couldn?t tell where he was looking, if he could even see her at all. Then 
suddenly, he stiffened, seemed to exercise enough control to quell the swaying of his 
hindquarters, the shaking of his joints. Slowly, as if with great effort, the dog curled 
his upper lip and bared his teeth. He did not growl, did not raise his hackles, or lower 
his head. He merely lifted his lip. He seemed prepared to maintain this pose 
indefinitely.  
Anna dropped her hand to her side and backed away, shuffling her shoes over 
the concrete. When she had retreated all the way to the corner, her feet stirring up the 
rosy petals of the tulip magnolia?s fallen blossoms, the dog turned and crossed the 
street. With hips wobbling and feet weaving, he trotted away. She watched him until 
he turned a corner and was lost to her. 
56 
 
  
 
Anna was suddenly very tired. For a time, she stood completely still. The sun 
was starting to set, glazing the top of her head and the roofs of the houses. Several 
doors down, a girl shrieked as her brother chased her with a squirt gun. She heard a 
vacuum cleaner running in one house. In another, someone was practicing the 
clarinet.  
When she at last looked back in the direction she had come, she saw the main 
street wasn?t more than a half-mile away. She was surprised her to see it so close; she 
felt as if she had come a very long way.  The distance to the car felt shorter, too, even 
though she was walking now. She thought how strange it was, how much quicker and 
more obvious things seemed the second time through, once you knew what to expect.    
The stretch Anna had to travel was straight and flat. She could see the gas 
station almost as soon as she returned to the main road, but the street was lined with 
crepe myrtles that had been trained tall, and their arms, weighted now with unruly 
bunches of crinkled pink, kept her mostly sheltered from sight. When she reached the 
corner across the street from their car, she paused. She could see Paul now. He was 
pacing the parking lot, circling the pumps. When he came back around to the car, he 
looked inside, cupping his hands against the window. Then he pushed off the car and 
swung back into his orbit. Both hands went to his hair and riffled through it, sending 
hanks sticking out in all directions; she could tell he was angry at himself for 
checking a spot he was already sure she wouldn?t be. Every few seconds, he jammed 
a hand into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and without looking at it, shoved it back 
in. The clerk with whom Paul had been chatting spanieled after him, making helpless 
hand gestures. A man with a huge belly stood by the door of the convenience store, a 
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the receiver of a cordless phone cradled between his chin and shoulder. Paul shouted 
at this man, perhaps the store manager, and the man shrugged and motioned towards 
the phone, as if abdicating responsibility.  
Anna drew a deep breath. She should go to him. The trees didn?t keep her 
completely hidden. Any second now, Paul would look across the street and notice a 
form behind the branches. Besides, it was time to be getting on with things. To be 
moving.  
There was a lull in the traffic, and the evening grew quiet. Over the twilight 
sounds of birds and tree frogs, Anna heard Paul?s voice. She couldn?t make out the 
words, but his tone was clear enough: too high, ragged around the edges. The portly 
manager spoke, and when Paul responded, his voice wavered among the shifting 
border notes of panic.  
Paul turned away from the manager, toward the road. His eyes roved the 
sidewalk, squinting into the crepe myrtles. It seemed to Anna that just then, the 
moment froze, and Paul was suspended, poised on the instant of recognition. She 
knew it would not last, that soon, Paul would realize that he had seen her, would 
come to fetch her, and her life would continue. But until it did, the pause, this 
infinitesimal interlude, was hers.  
58 
 
  
 
 
Terminus 
Ida was a quiet baby. She rarely cried, even as an infant, just lay in her 
bassinette staring, drinking in her surroundings with liquid blue eyes. When she was a 
little older, her eyes began to darken. I cried when I noticed the hazel rings around the 
blue: I?d wanted her eyes to stay blue like Jonas?s, not turn muddy brown like mine. 
Jonas had laughed and pulled me close.  
 ?It?s better this way,? he said as I nuzzled my damp cheek against his sweater. 
?Hazel is a combination of blue and brown; she has both our eyes.? 
  I didn?t tell him that hazel was really a combination of green and brown. I 
liked his idea better, and he wouldn?t have believed me, anyway. I squeezed him 
hard, as if by holding him, I could freeze this moment and keep it like a souvenir. 
 The first year after Ida was born, I didn?t have a job. Jonas did ironwork?
 making custom gates and patio furniture?to support all three of us, though he really 
saw himself as a rock god. For a time, he seemed content working at something 
tangible and dependable while I stayed home. I thought I was taking time off to take 
care of my daughter. I realized later that Jonas just thought of me as unemployed.  
 The mornings stretched out long and delicious in front of Ida and me that 
year. I had always been a night person, but somehow Ida made me want to wake up at 
5:30 in the morning. I didn?t even need an alarm, my ears were so attuned to the little 
peeps Ida made when she opened her eyes and found herself alone in the crib. It 
helped that she slept in our bedroom, the only bedroom. When she saw me rise from 
the bed, she would haul herself to her feet, gripping the rails of the crib with two fat 
59 
 
  
 
fists, and beam at me from across the room. I would feed her breakfast, then bundle 
her into the old-fashioned baby carriage we bought at a flea market in Iowa to take 
her exploring. For hours, I rolled Ida along the Missouri, naming the trees and flowers 
for her. Grayson, a friend of mine from junior high, was working at the Doorly Zoo, 
and he let us in for free. Ida and I went there several times every week. I would hold 
her up to watch the animals?tiny wiry meerkats, lions lounging in the shade, 
peacocks unfolding their tails?and Ida would coo and clap her hands while I nuzzled 
the soft curls at the nape of her neck. I ate popsicles shaped like Disney characters 
and fed Ida her teething biscuits and it was easy to say no when Grayson offered me 
some of the pot he and the other employees were smoking behind the gorilla 
enclosure.  
 In the afternoons, we slept and waited for Jonas to come home. That year, 
every time he opened the door to find Ida and me waiting for him, his face registered 
a bewildered delight, as if he had expected to find the apartment empty and himself 
alone.  
 ?Come here and let me hug you both,? he would say. I would scoop up Ida, 
and Jonas would wrap his ropy arms around us, smelling of fire and the lanolin he 
smeared over his chapped knuckles. 
 Ida would be drowsy and soft by then, her head nodding onto her chest like a 
bright drooping poppy, little bubbles of spit forming at the corners of her mouth. 
Jonas always put her to bed. I was supposed to be making dinner, but more often, I 
was lurking in the hallway, watching the way his great, callused fingers tenderly 
slipped each pudgy limb into her footie pajamas, the way her head rested like a peach 
60 
 
  
 
in his palm. Once she was lying in the crib, surrounded by a legion of stuffed animals, 
Jonas would get out the battered acoustic Hohner he?d been strumming since high 
school and play softly to her until she fell asleep. My favorite song was one that only 
had two lines. It went ?You?re my little potato, dug you up / You come from 
underground.? On ?ground,? Jonas?s baritone would stretch all the way to the bottom 
of its range, as if with his voice he was scooping his spud daughter from the loam.  
 Then he would emerge from the bedroom and we would eat pasta or red beans 
and rice or something else that didn?t cost much and went a long way. Jonas wouldn?t 
drink more than three or four beers and we would make quiet love on the couch 
before we went to bed. I didn?t tell him that I could hear his songs; I knew they were 
meant only for Ida. 
 
We had very little. The rooms in our apartment were small, but they had an 
empty, echoing feel from lack of furniture and habitual transience. Only the closet in 
the hall was full. Every Christmas, Jonas?s grandmother sent him three sweaters: one 
black, one maroon, and one mustard yellow, the colors of a dusty German flag. There 
were dozens of them: he?d kept every one she?d sent him since he was in ninth grade. 
She seemed to expect that he would need new sweaters every year, but she knitted 
them out of sturdy worsted wool, and embellished them with cables and ribbing that 
only added to their bulk and tenacity.   
Once, before Ida was born, Jonas and I were drinking hot chocolate with 
peppermint schnapps on a snowy night in January. Jonas didn?t finish his hot 
61 
 
  
 
chocolate, but poured himself a large tumbler of schnapps and then another and 
another.  
?It?s hot, it?s so fucking hot in here!? he bellowed. He leapt up from the 
couch, lurched over to the window, and threw it open. He tore off his sweater?dark 
red?and stood before the frosted night, breathing the cold air in deeply, dramatically, 
like a Viking lord. My laughter turned soon into shivering and I pleaded with Jonas to 
shut the window. He refused. Instead, he grabbed his abandoned sweater and jammed 
it over my head. 
?I?m still cold,? I whined, pulling his hand like a child.  
Jonas took another sweater from the closet, and I wriggled into this as well.  
?Well?? Jonas asked, rubbing my arms with his palms.  
?Still cold!? I was giggling, from the alcohol and the cold and because 
sometimes with Jonas, I didn?t know how to stop laughing.  
He pulled another sweater over my head. I was warm, but now we were both 
giddy. 
?Still cold!? I chirped. Jonas came back from the hall this time with as many 
sweaters as he could hold. One by one, he pulled them over my head, until I felt like 
the core of rubber inside a baseball. My arms stuck out from my sides at right angles, 
and I couldn?t see my feet. Finally, Jonas could no longer fit another sweater over the 
ball of wool that I?d become. He held my face and kissed me, then peeled off my 
layers one by one, marveling as my true form emerged. 
It was what drew me to Jonas to begin with, these acts of fierce tenderness. He 
could crush a walnut in his hands?he would do it sometimes at parties after a few 
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beers and concerted prodding?but I had also seen him pluck worms from the 
sidewalk after a heavy rain, then use the toe of his boot to gouge a hole in the dirt to 
drop them in. Under his tenderest gesture was a layer of force, and though it scared 
me, I wanted to see the places where the gentle mantle had worn away.  
We?d met because we traveled through the same circles of burnouts, tramps, 
and aspiring artists, though we had arrived there from different directions: I had 
adopted a drifting life; Jonas had been born into it. We both tried to compensate, 
Jonas, for what he didn?t have as a child, and I, for what I did. We tried not to talk 
about the difference.  
But sometimes I didn?t know how to mask my upbringing. Jonas and his 
father didn?t get along, but I had always liked Albert. I?d mentioned it once, early in 
our relationship.  
Jonas snorted. ?Of course you do. He?s not your father.? 
?It?s not just that,? I?d said. ?I know things were hard with him, but he cares 
about you. I mean, isn?t that what?s important? Ultimately?? 
Jonas glared at me. His eyes raked my face, but didn?t find what they were 
looking for, and his features softened. He put his hand on the top of my head and 
kissed my hairline 
?That?s what people with good parents think.? 
For a moment, I was stung. I knew, though, that he was right. I had two 
parents, happily married, gainfully employed. They were upright. They were loving. 
There was always one-percent milk in the fridge and moderately sweetened cereal in 
the pantry and a brand new box of crayons on the first day of school. The fact that I 
63 
 
  
 
hadn?t spoken to my parents in years, not since I?d dropped out of high school and 
took the MegaBus to Chicago with a boy who played viola in the school orchestra?
 that had been my choice. Every so often, I?d call home and listen as my mother or 
father shouted ?Hello?? into the silence. As little as I deserved it, I believed they 
remained as they had been when I left, loving me, waiting for me to return so they 
could forgive me.  
Jonas?s childhood had been different. It was the stuff of social work case 
studies, an obvious narrative of substance abuse and poverty, its after-school-special 
familiarity somehow conferring still another notch of suffering. Jonas?s mother had 
disappeared when he was seven because of Albert?s drinking, leaving Jonas with the 
weekend binges, the whiskey-infused verbal torrents, the shut off heat and water and 
telephone. Jonas had left home at sixteen; shortly thereafter, Albert got clean. I was 
happy for Albert, who loved his religion and sobriety, but I also thought that his 
timing seemed a little cruel. 
When Ida was little, before Albert?s thyroid cancer got bad, we?d go out to 
Des Moines to visit him. We?d sit on his crumbling porch that looked out over a 
junkyard and a bowling alley parking lot, chatting and drinking iced tea so sweet it 
made my molars ache. Sometimes I?d read to him from the newspaper or the Bible; 
he had a cataract in one eye, a nacreous film like skim milk. The times when I had 
Jonas?s car, I drove Albert to his AA meetings; he went five times a week and told me 
every time I visited how he never missed, not once. Albert always had some present 
for Ida, even when we hadn?t told him we were coming: a handful of candy, a little 
china poodle, a hair clip in the shape of a watermelon slice. After a few times, Ida 
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began to clap and crow when we pulled into the Des Moines bus station. She knew 
something good was coming.  
In the beginning, I could usually convince Jonas to go with me. These visits 
started out well enough, but there was always a moment when they soured. Jonas 
might crack one of the beers he?d brought, and Albert would try to offer him a soda. 
Or maybe Jonas would say something about a gig he?d gotten with whatever motley 
assortment of half-assed musicians he was playing with at the time, and Albert would 
say make a comment about an honest day?s work and putting family first. There?d be 
a heated discussion that would evolve into an argument and more often than not, the 
day ended in shouting, fists pounding on tables, Jonas storming out the door as I 
gathered Ida and her accoutrements and made little apologetic noises to Albert.  
?Fuck him,? Jonas would say as we left. ?He can?t tell me shit. Where was all 
that fucking responsibility when I was a kid??  
He would mutter to himself the whole way home, chanting some private 
litany. I?d rub his back and tell him I understood, but in truth, I didn?t. I was the only 
fuck up in my family.  
Once Albert got sick, there was nothing I could do to make Jonas come to Des 
Moines with me.  
?He?d rather just see you and Ida, anyway,? he said without looking up from 
the riff he was picking out on the Hohner. 
I felt a little heat flare in my chest. ?He?s your father, Jonas. You need to see 
him.? 
65 
 
  
 
He stopped playing. When he looked up at me, his eyes looked hard and 
glassy, and I could see a vein standing out by his temple. He closed his eyes and he 
slumped, deflated. I?d never seen him look so young.  
?It?s hard.? His voice was ragged. ?It?s just?? His raised his hands, searching 
for the word. ?Hard.? 
I sat beside him on the couch and put my arm around him. I wished in that 
moment that I could pick him up and carry him somewhere safe, like the inside of a 
seashell where we could curl together and rock in the waves. But I couldn?t even 
reach all the way across his back. 
 ?I know,? I said, resting my head on his shoulder.  
He took my hand and squeezed so hard the fingers went white and bloodless. 
?No, you don?t.? 
He was right. 
 
When Albert died, he left Jonas some money, not much, but enough to make a 
difference. I thought we could use the money to make the security deposit and first 
month?s rent on a nicer apartment, one where the carpet didn?t smell like corn chips 
and the water didn?t come out yellow. Ida was about to start pre-school, and I thought 
it would be good to live closer to the Head Start she would go to. Jonas agreed, but he 
was twitchy when we talked about it. He kept looking around like there might be 
some better conversation to join, and he tore a paper napkin into confetti. 
Over the next few weeks, I took Ida to the library almost daily. I?d gather a 
stack of books from the children?s section and plunk Ida down with them while I used 
66 
 
  
 
the computer to look at rentals. I wanted two bedrooms, so that Ida could have her 
own space. I imagined her bedroom with ceiling-high bookshelves and a window seat 
piled with plush creatures. I wanted enough space for a kitchen table, so we didn?t 
have to eat dinner in the living room with our plates in our laps. I saw family dinners 
at which the three of us sat around the table eating a meal that included at least four of 
the major food groups, using real silverware, not plastic. I printed promising listings 
using change scrounged from return slot on the library?s vending machine and hung 
them on the refrigerator.  
Whenever I suggested we go look at some of these places, Jonas shrugged me 
off. He was in a new band, a rockabilly group that played Buddy Holly and Roy 
Orbison covers at local dives. He?d even bought a Western shirt to wear at their gigs. 
I teased him about it, called him Hopalong, but he just tugged at the sleeves, trying to 
make the pearl snaps close around his thick forearms. The band was good, he said, the 
best group he?d been with in a while, and they were practicing a lot. He?d go straight 
from work to practice most nights, and often didn?t come home until I was asleep. He 
invited me to their gigs a few times, but the only person we knew who would watch 
Ida for free was Grayson, and Jonas said he didn?t want a drug dealer taking care of 
his daughter. I stayed home. 
It was a beautiful day when I found the guitar. It was warm, almost hot, and 
determined, fuzzed-out clouds scudded across the sky. Pollen drifted in the air, thick 
as soot, and everything was shooting forth leaves and blossoms. I wanted to be 
outside, under a tree by the river on a picnic blanket, watching Ida get grass stains on 
her knees and elbows while I plaited dandelions into a chain for her hair. But Ida had 
67 
 
  
 
a bug, so we stayed home. We?d played Candyland earlier, but the children?s Tylenol 
I?d given her for the fever made her sleepy. Now she was curled on the couch, 
sucking her thumb and watching cooking shows. For a while I sat next to her, 
stroking her wheat-colored curls. Soon she began to drift in and out of sleep. I got up 
carefully, arranging the afghan over her, turned down the television, and went to the 
hall by the bedroom.  
In preparation for our move, I?d been doing deep cleaning: vacuuming under 
the heavy furniture, scrubbing the baseboards. I?d also been collecting things to get 
rid of. There were a couple boxes in the bedroom, mostly full of baby stuff Ida no 
longer needed. I was planning to take the boxes to Thrift World before the move. A 
lot of the boxes were filled with things that had come from there or someplace like it, 
and I liked the neat circularity of returning the things now that we no longer needed 
them. It made me feel part of something, connected to all those living on the borders 
of poverty who bought bassinettes and board books secondhand. 
Jonas had been complaining about his grandmother?s sweaters for years. 
There was only one he ever wore; the rest sat in the closet getting musty and moth-
 eaten. Every so often, he?d talk about boxing them up and taking them to a donation 
center, but he never quite got around to it. Now it was time: I had arranged to borrow 
a small pick-up from Feliks, our Estonian neighbor, who, after years of begging us to 
borrow or take his belongings?a camping stove, a croquet set, military-grade 
sleeping bags, wicker furniture, whole libraries of books, loaf upon loaf of fragrant, 
pitchy bread?was delighted to discover himself in possession of something we could 
actually use. I was loading it up and going to the donation center in the morning. 
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I pulled out the sweaters and stuffed them into an economy-size trash bag. As 
the back wall of the closet came into view, I noticed a sweater in a particularly 
gruesome shade of mustard. It had an odd shape, like a creature with no arms was 
wearing it. When I tugged on the collar, an oblong black shape emerged. It looked 
like the top of a guitar case, but that didn?t make sense. Jonas brought his guitar with 
him to work every day so he could take it straight to practice. I dug into the remaining 
sweaters, burrowing like a badger, throwing the sweaters behind me without 
bothering to bag them. I dragged out the case, my heart thumping against my ribs, and 
flicked open the latches.  
The guitar was beautiful. It was a hollow-body electric, the body round and 
deeply feminine. There were mother-of-pearl inlays all along the neck and on the 
tuning pegs. The finish was a bright cherry sunburst, the center a honey gold that 
graduated to crimson along the edges.  
That night, it was hard to keep my brain focused. I kept drifting away, coming 
to and finding I?d made Ida?s dinner or done all the dishes. When I paused in the 
middle of a sentence in the book I was reading Ida before bed, she looked at me, her 
forehead furrowed. She prodded my upper arm. 
?Where did you go??  
I shook my head. ?Nowhere,? I told her. ?I?m right here.? 
But Ida still frowned, and when I turned off the lights, she asked me to stay 
with her until she fell asleep.  
I sat on the edge of her bed, worrying the quilt between my thumbs and 
forefingers until Ida began to twitch and paddle her feet like she was swimming, 
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mumbling a little in a sleep-language I couldn?t understand. She was a kinetic sleeper. 
Her thrashing sometimes became so violent that she would throw herself out of bed. 
When her sleep talk was intelligible, I could hold a conversation with her. She?d 
mutter something about giraffes and if I asked her where the giraffes were, she?d tell 
me that of course they were in the kitchen, couldn?t I see them. In her sleep she 
always seemed surprised that I didn?t know these things that were revealed to her in 
dreams. 
That night I had the urge to wake her up. I thought that maybe if I interrupted 
the dream, she would tell me all the fantastic things that were happening in her head. I 
was tired of being on the outside. But I didn?t want to disturb her, so as Ida mumbled 
something about celery fingers, I kissed her softly and left the bedroom.  
I sat on the sofa, waiting for Jonas, drinking bourbon. As the alcohol spread 
through my body, making my limbs soft and malleable, I felt anger roiling in the pit 
of my stomach. I could see our new apartment, the one I?d imagined for us. It was on 
a ship that was slowly pulling away from the port while I stood on the dock, waving. 
When Jonas came in, he shut the door carefully so as not to make a sound. He 
pushed his keys into his pocket and turned around. I saw him start: his eyes widened 
and he drew his breath in sharply. The expression he made was one of surprise, 
surprise mixed with anger.  
?Jesus, you scared me.? 
?I?m just sitting here. How can I scare you?? 
?I didn?t expect to see you.? 
I snorted. ?You didn?t expect to see me? I live here.? 
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Jonas frowned. ?What?s wrong with you?? 
I shrugged. It was a good question, but one that didn?t seem to matter much 
anymore.  
He glanced at the coffee table; I saw his eyes darken and his brows crowd 
together over the bridge of his nose as he noticed the bottle of Old Crow. 
?Have you been drinking?? 
 ?Maybe.? I felt the urge to giggle, so I bit the inside of my lip. 
?Jesus Christ! You?re the only one home with Ida. What if something had 
happened, what if there?d been a fire or an intruder or something? What the fuck?? 
I tried to sit up quickly, but the cushions were too deep and the springs in the 
sofa were going soft, so I flailed, trying to use my arms to leverage myself upright. 
After a moment, I gave up, and just propped myself up on my elbows. The heat of the 
bourbon was searing the tips of my fingers, pushing behind my eyes, and the room 
seemed to glow red, as if it were lit by a fire and not the overhead fluorescent.  
?What about you, Jonas? What about giving a fuck about your family??  
I struggled again against the gravitational pull of the couch; the anger was 
pins and needles all over my body, and I wanted to get up, to storm around the room, 
pace and point my finger. But the aging cushions had me trapped. I couldn?t get my 
feet to the floor.  
Jonas sighed. ?Listen, I?ve just been busy, and you know, with the band just 
starting?? He trailed off and sighed again. 
 ?What about the apartment?? I said. 
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I saw Jonas?s eyes twitch away for just a second. ?I don?t know. I mean, I just 
think maybe we should think about waiting?? 
With a kick of my feet, I finally rocked myself forward enough to stand. I 
shoved off the couch, steadying myself on the coffee table. Jonas stopped talking and 
watched me. His fingers played with the bottom snap of his shirt, fastening and 
unfastening it again and again. 
I strode to the hall closet, pulled out the guitar. I didn?t know how to play?
 I?d never had the discipline to learn an instrument?but I tried to imitate what I?d 
seen Jonas do, placing the fingers of my left hand in contorted patterns while I 
strummed violently with the fingernails of my right. I didn?t think Ida would wake up, 
or I guess at that moment I didn?t care if she did.  
Strumming loud and singing, I stomped back into the living room.  
?Look!? I slurred as I crashed out a few fractured chords. ??I?m learning to 
play! ?Pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue!?? 
For a moment Jonas froze, his eyes wide in horror, his hands motionless. 
Then, in an instant, he seemed to spring into motion. He crossed the living room in 
two big strides, grabbed the neck of the guitar and yanked the instrument from my 
hands. The force of his pull put me off balance. I fell against an armchair, twisting my 
wrist as I broke my fall.  
Jonas looked up and down the guitar, stroking it with his fingertips, checking 
the frets and the bridge and the tuning pegs, inspecting it like a parent might check a 
child who?s fallen from the monkey bars, searching for damage. Once he was 
satisfied that the guitar was unharmed, he placed it back in its case, clicking each 
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latch into place and making sure that the case was closed up tight. He stayed crouched 
by the case, looking down, his hands flat along the top.  
I looked at him. The Western shirt was too tight across the shoulders, and I 
could see the seams straining. Along his neck, his dark hair was getting long; I hadn?t 
cut it in a while.  
I felt the pins and needles dissipate. The energy of anger was replaced by bone 
weariness. I sat on the floor beside Jonas. He didn?t move.  
?When did you get it?? I asked. 
?Couple weeks ago,? he said, still staring at the case. 
?It?s pretty.? 
 ?Gibson Les Paul, hollow body. It?s a reissue of the ?59 version. Keith 
Richards has one.? He paused. ?The original. Not the reissue.?  
My throat felt like it was full of cotton, like I would have to cough up wads of 
fluffy batting before I?d be able to speak again.  
Jonas said softly, ?This guy was selling it over in Miracle Hills. He was old. 
Had arthritis and couldn?t play anymore. Said he couldn?t stand to see it around his 
house. Made him too sad.? 
We sat quiet for a moment. When I talked I felt like I was cracking the air.  
?How much was it?? 
Jonas said nothing. 
I closed my eyes. ?Is there anything left?? 
Jonas looked up at me.  
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Once, when I was six or seven, I tried to trap a feral cat. I chased it into our 
garage, backed it behind the Oldsmobile, between the lawn mower and the recycling 
bin so it had no way out. At first it hissed and swatted at me, but as I came closer, it 
just crouched, paralyzed, waiting for whatever horrible thing it was sure was coming. 
I walked backwards out of the garage and hid behind a boxwood until it ran out, its 
tail fat and frizzed as a bottlebrush. 
?I thought I could do it. But then Dad died and?? His eyes darted all over my 
face, looking for a safe place to rest, not finding one.  
?I?m sorry,? he whispered. 
?It?s okay,? I said, starting to cry.  
I put my head on his shoulder and he put his arm around me, and we stayed 
that way for a long time. 
 
We walked him to the bus stop the day he left. Ida kept asking when Jonas 
was coming back. Jonas took her little hand in his. I could see a faint downturn in the 
corners of his mouth, and he clenched his jaw so the muscles stood out.  
?I?ll see you soon,? he said.  
Ida and I sat on a bench at the station while Jonas boarded the big Greyhound 
that would take two days weaving westward to Seattle. He had a friend there, fulltime 
musician, making it, Jonas said. I pressed my fingernails into my palms. When 
Jonas?s face appeared in a window of the bus, I pointed to him. 
?There?s your daddy,? I said, pinching my palm hard.  
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Ida looked up. She?d been drawing in her notebook and kicking the heels of 
her sneakers against the leg of the bench.  
She squinted at the bus and laughed. ?He looks so little!?  
The engine rumbled and the bus began to pull slowly toward the road.  
I stood up. ?Wave to your daddy, Ida.? 
Ida swooped her chubby hand through the air, making little bird noises of 
farewell. When the bus was gone, I stooped and hugged Ida hard, so hard that she 
whined and wriggled away from me. We walked home.  
 
I held us together for more than a year after Jonas left. I got a job as a 
receptionist at a dental clinic; I made appointments, handled billing and insurance, 
consoled people whose mouths were limp and gums were swollen. Ida and I moved to 
a smaller, uglier apartment with water stains on the walls and ceiling.  
At first, Ida asked me about Jonas almost daily, wanting to know where he?d 
gone, when he was coming back. Every time she asked, I felt the floor beneath me 
collapse a little more. I tried to give her what answers I could, but after a while, I 
couldn?t answer anymore. I could only swallow another Xanax and lie facedown on 
the bed. She stopped asking.  
Ida started pre-school that fall. I went to parent-teacher conferences, where the 
round-faced teacher told me how well Ida was reading for her age, how she was 
always very quiet and polite. I volunteered in the classroom once a month. I would go 
and the teacher would have me cut out construction paper circles for an art project or 
staple smiling suns and grumpy clouds to the bulletin board.  
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Each time I came in, Ida beamed and told her classmates loudly, ?That?s my 
mom!?  
When Ida lit up at my entrance, I could briefly see myself as she saw me. Her 
face reflected the mother I wanted to be: grown-up, confident, poised. A mother who 
prepared healthy meals from scratch. A mother who knew how to fold origami just 
like it looks in the book. A mother who always had sleek hair and a coordinated 
outfit, who smelled like lavender. A mother like my own. 
None of this was true. We ate what was on special and required minimal effort 
to prepare. I couldn?t instruct Ida in clever arts and crafts; I didn?t want her to see me 
fail at them. I slept in, woke up hung over and strung out, forgot to comb my hair, 
wore the same sweater for days. But Ida didn?t see this. She saw a mother, her 
mother, and that image pushed me forward. I got Ida up and out the door in time for 
school, made sure she had her cat-shaped knapsack and two matching shoes. I 
showed up for work at the dental office with a thermos of coffee and gritted my teeth 
when the dentists tossed paperwork at me like I was their spaniel. I did not think 
about how much easier it would be to give up if Jonas had taken Ida with him.  
Occasionally, the schedule would conspire to give me a day off during the 
week. These days always began with such promise?I?d plan projects, cleaning, long 
walks?but by mid-morning, I?d be limp and frayed, lying on the bed staring at the 
travel alarm clock. Once I?d given up on the afternoon, I was free to take pills and 
drink and ignore the phone and cry in loud, jagged heaves, free to be as fucked up as I 
felt, so long as I pulled myself together by 4pm. No one?s eyes were on me then; no 
one needed me to be anything. 
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On one of these days off, I called my parents. It had been a while since I had 
called them?not to talk, just to listen?and today it was damp and cold, the clouds 
bellied with pent-up rain, and I was alone, and I wanted to hear my mother?s voice, 
her soft lull that made me feel like whatever I had done could be fixed, and that 
tomorrow I could start off new, re-made. I lay on my side on the floor, the phone 
balanced over my ear, the key pad sticking to my cheek. 
?Hello??  
The voice that answered was a man?s voice, but not my father?s. It was deep 
and resonant; though my father was a big man, he had an incongruously reedy voice. 
I sat up, the phone falling to the floor. Without picking it up again, I pressed 
?End Call,? my arm stretched out stiffly, trying to get as much distance as I could 
between me and the unknown voice. For a while, I watched the phone, waiting as if 
any moment, the malfunction would be repaired or the prank revealed. A ring, my 
father?s voice, ?Just pulling your leg, kiddo!?  
I couldn?t think whom the voice could have belonged to. My parents? siblings 
were dead or far away, and I couldn?t imagine they would ever let their friends 
answer the phone; that wouldn?t have been mannerly. Maybe they were on vacation, 
and had hired a house sitter. But I knew that wasn?t right. My parents would never 
have hired a stranger to watch after their home. 
I dialed the number again, holding the phone a few inches away from my ear. 
?Hello?? 
The same unfamiliar voice.  
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?Hello? Is anyone there?? The man sighed sharply. ?Now, listen, whoever this 
is had better stop calling?? 
?Can I talk to Patty or Len?? The words fell out of my mouth too fast for me 
to stuff them back in. They tumbled on top of each other so I sounded slurred, even 
though I hadn?t been drinking.  
There was a pause at the end of the line. ?Who?? 
?I?m looking for Patricia and Leonard. Are they there?? 
?No, I?m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.? 
?I don?t.? My heart was beating fast. ?I mean, this is their number.? I didn?t 
tell him that for seventeen years it had been my number, too. 
?Oh, okay.? The deep voice sounded a little assured now, on firmer ground. 
?You?re looking for the previous residents.? 
My breath caught in my chest.  
 ?Previous?? 
?Mm-hmm.? I could hear him switch the phone to the other ear. ?I have their 
new number here somewhere, I think. At least, I used to.? 
?No, it?s okay,? I said. The phone was suddenly heavy, and I wanted only to 
put it down. ?Don?t worry about it. Thank you.? 
I hung up and laid the phone on an oblong stain in the carpet, gentling it to the 
floor as if afraid of waking it. But even with the phone down, my arm still felt 
unbearably heavy, my marrow replaced with lead.  
My parents didn?t know my number or my address. They didn?t know what 
city or state I was in or what I was doing or whether I was alive. How could they have 
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let me know they were moving? But they were my parents, my perfect parents. I?d 
figured that somehow they knew where I was, because they were the sort of parents 
who always knew. I?d believed their silence was love: they understood I needed 
distance, so they gave it to me. That?s what good parents do: they give their children 
what the children need, even when it hurts them to give it.  
I wondered why they had moved. Had my father finally quit his job at the 
bank, found a job that let him be outside, let him travel a little? Had he retired? 
Maybe my parents had made good on their promise to move to the country. My 
mother could have a wild garden where basil and snapdragons ran riot side by side. 
She could keep suspicious hens who pecked neurotically in the dirt and a hive of 
honeybees. My father would roam through the woods, writing down the names of 
trees and shrubs, noting instances of Dutch elm disease or a particularly vigorous 
clutch of native azalea. He?d pick up burrs on his clothes, and my mother would scold 
him for bring them in the house.  
They?d talked about their country dream for years. When I was young, I was 
sure that my husband and I would move to the country with them, build our own 
house on the edge of their property, have dinner with them on Sundays. Now they 
were there without me. 
In the nightstand drawer was a Tic-Tac box filled with pills, a sampling of 
Grayson?s current stash, purchased at the cost of pizza, beer, and bowling with Ida. I 
pried off the top so I could dump the contents into a small heap on the bed. The 
assortment was colorful, like candy. How much better, I thought: a combination of 
colors, not just one. I scooped up the pile and downed them with grape juice.  
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Time warped and collapsed, folded itself into innumerable accordion pleats, 
stretched like taffy, dense and sticky and growing longer with every pull. I couldn?t 
understand what the clock was telling me. I curled up on the bed, pulled the covers all 
the way over my head.  
After what seemed like seconds, I felt someone prodding my shoulder. I rolled 
over, wiping a line of drool from my cheek, and lifted the comforter off my face.  
Grayson was standing in the bedroom, and it was dark outside.  
?Jesus!? I sprang to my feet. ?What time is it?? I pawed under the bed looking 
for shoes. ?I have to get Ida, she?s still at school! Where are my goddamn shoes?? 
Grayson squatted down.  
?It?s six-thirty. Ida?s here.? 
I sat heavily on the floor. My hands lay limp in my lap; I couldn?t tell if they 
belonged to me.  
Grayson sat beside me. ?When they couldn?t reach you, they called me. You 
put me down as your emergency contact, they said.? He picked at a loose thread in 
the rug. ?That was nice of you.? 
?Thank you,? I whispered.  
I could see the sofa from where I had fallen. Ida was sitting there, hands in her 
lap, kicking the couch with her heels. She looked over at me and when she met my 
gaze, I tried to smile, but my muscles seemed to have forgotten how. I reached out 
my arm, creaked my wrist to call her to me. She slid off the couch and came to the 
bedroom door.  
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I pushed the hair out of my face, pinched my thigh so I could marshal my 
consciousness around the pain.  
?Ida Bean!? I sang, gathering her into my arms. ?I?m so glad you?re home! 
I?m sorry I couldn?t come get you today; I meant to tell you, but I forgot.? 
Ida said nothing. I pushed on. 
 ?I?m so sorry you had to wait. We wanted to come sooner, but Grayson was 
working.? 
Ida pulled at a hangnail on my finger. ?Is that why you couldn?t come? You 
were working??  
?Yes,? I said, nodding and giving Ida another squeeze. ?I had to fill in for 
someone else who was sick.? 
Ida chewed her lips and studied me. The sun was mostly set and the light in 
the bedroom was dim. Ida?s pupils were dilated wide, swallowing up the gold-
 threaded hazel irises, and in those dark blooms, I saw myself: my hair a nest on the 
side of my head, my eyes shot with veins from sleeping with my contacts in, my lips 
chapped, blood crusted in the cracked corners. The moment froze, extended 
indefinitely between us. 
Then Ida blinked, and the image was gone.  
?It?s okay,? she said. ?Grayson bought me Fritos from a machine.? 
I looked at Grayson, standing greasy-haired and slope-shouldered by the 
closet, as if he were contemplating stepping into it. He smiled and shrugged. 
?They were out of animal crackers.? 
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After that, I made us all, me, Grayson, and Ida, chili from canned tomatoes 
and kidney beans. When we were done with dinner, we ate gummy worms until our 
tongues were sore from the sour, and watched three episodes of The Munsters. 
 
Ida seemed to forget the incident, but I couldn?t. I tried to maintain the life I?d 
strung together, but it became harder and harder to remember how to be good. I lost 
the job at the dental office. I billed four patients $265,000 for a check-up, instead of 
$265, and I kept forgetting to record appointments in the database. These mistakes 
were partially the result of the various controlled substances camped in my veins, but 
they were honest mistakes, I thought, simple oversights. The dentists didn?t see it that 
way.  
After that, I got a job as an assistant at an animal hospital, which really meant 
that I took dogs for walks and cleaned up pens. I liked the job. The dogs depended on 
me, but it was easy not to let them down. But once after snorting some Adderall, I 
gave away three of the dogs to some homeless men I met on my walk. I lost that job, 
too.  
I kept getting jobs and losing them: grocery store bagger, parking lot 
attendant, dollar store stocker. After a few, I didn?t even try to keep them anymore. I 
burned through jobs like matches. 
I lost the last one?gas station convenience store night clerk?early on a 
Thursday morning.  I hadn?t worked there long, less than a week, and it was the only 
job I left with some measure of volition. I had made the wrong change for the eighth 
time in a row, and as the customer left, I saw the other cashier shaking his head. I felt 
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my face burn, but the guy, Terrence, had been nice enough so far, so I tried to joke 
about it.  
?Ridiculous, right?? I said. ?I?m awful at making change. Anything with 
numbers, really. The worst.? I shrugged and aimed for a rueful chuckle, but it came 
out raspy and thin.  
?That?s kind of funny.? Terrence tilted his head a fraction. ?I mean, that?s all 
you really have to do for this job?count stuff, make change. Why are you here?? 
I didn?t have an answer. 
At 3:47, Terrence took his ten, smoking out back by the Dumpsters. I gathered 
my belongings, waited for nine minutes to pass?I didn?t want to leave the store 
unattended too long?and left through the front doors. I contemplated going to 
Grayson?s to pick up Ida, but I didn?t want to worry either of them, and Grayson had 
said he would take Ida to school.  
At home, I lay on the bed, on top of the covers, clothes on, not planning to 
sleep. There was a water stain on the ceiling shaped like a saxophone, and I stared at 
it, making it take up my whole mind. Every so often, I checked the clock. Time was 
passing normally, neither too slow nor too fast, just methodically going about the 
business of moving on. It was comforting.  
At 7:04, I opened the night stand drawer and pulled out the Tic-Tac box. 
Grayson had resupplied me, mostly with Klonopin and Ambien, his favorites. I shook 
the container until two baby pink Oxys shifted to the top. With my thumbnail, I 
scratched off the coating, letting it flake onto the floor, then cracked the bitter disks 
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with my molars. I watched the saxophone until the edges started to blur and the warm 
drifting began.  
The world safely blunted, I retrieved my phone from my bag. It was 7:23, so I 
thought there was a good chance I would catch my parents? successor at home. He?d 
be in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a travel mug, getting ready to set out for his 
respectable grown-up job that nevertheless allowed him to spend ample time with his 
family and pursue several fulfilling hobbies. Naturally, his wife wouldn?t answer?
 she?d be tending to the children, making sure everyone?s homework had a name and a 
date on it before they all walked to the bus stop. When the deep voice answered, it 
sounded harried, and I smiled, imagining him holding the Reagan-era receiver with 
his chin, trying to stretch the cord out enough to get the half-and-half from the fridge. 
I wanted to tell him to pass it over the kitchen table, not around?that?s the only way 
it would reach?but I was sure he would figure that out on his own. 
 I was pleased to hear him, as if we were old friends. He was easy to talk to. 
He didn?t think it strange that I wanted the previous residents? forwarding address. 
Why should he? It was all perfectly normal. I might have anniversary cards or 
birthday gifts to send. As I explained that I was a niece, had made Auntie Pat?s 
signature rhubarb-ginger jam, wanted to send her some, didn?t have the address, but 
couldn?t call and ask, wanted it to be a surprise, his syllables of understanding 
sounded polite but impatient. Of course they did; wasn?t it about time for the 
recycling truck to be rolling by the house, blocking the driveway, and now it was 7:35 
and time to leave? I waited for him to retrieve the card the previous owners had sent, 
printed the address neatly in all caps on a gum wrapper, thanked him, and hung up. I 
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folded the gum wrapper into fourths, careful not to smudge the pen, and tucked it into 
my wallet.  
That week the weather finally turned. It had been an irritable kind of spring, 
squally and raw, occasionally teasing with a warm morning, but reneging by 
afternoon. But, now, in late April, the world delivered a succession of beautiful days, 
all soft and airy like a chiffon scarf. Ida was turning five. In the week leading up to 
her birthday, she told me in exquisite detail how Hector, her friend at school, had 
gone to Fun-Plex for his birthday, how he floated in the Lazy River, rode the Bumper 
Boats, won a fluffy orange gorilla at Skee-Ball.  
?He got a funnel cake to himself,? she said, looking up from the 
hippopotamus connect-the-dots she was doing. ?A whole one.? She pushed the eraser 
end of the pencil against her chin.  
I knew exactly how much was in my bank account. After my final check from 
the convenience store deposited, there would be just enough to get to Madison and 
back: Grayson could lend me his car, but not the gas money. There would be some 
left for food, but not for two passes to an amusement park. And in my mind, Fun-Plex 
was filled with happy families, families who laughed, who teamed up at Whac-A-
 Mole, who held hands as their cars reached the apex of the roller coaster. Even if I?d 
had the money, we wouldn?t have gone. 
  Ida watched me, expectant, hopeful, and heat pricked behind my eyes. But I 
shook my head and reset my face. 
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?How about this,? I said, reaching for her hand. ?We?ll have our own birthday 
party right here. You can have anything you want for dinner, and I?ll let you pick out 
a movie at the video store.?  
Ida considered the hippopotamus. ?I can have anything I want for dinner?? 
 I nodded. 
?And at the video store??  
?Anything.? 
She shrieked; her happiness had become particularly shrill lately.  
The morning of Ida?s birthday I went shopping. I sprung for the Hershey?s 
chocolate syrup instead of the store brand with the diseased-looking chocolate cow on 
the label. I bought a roll of fuchsia crepe paper at the dollar store and draped it in 
crazy loops over the doorframes and light fixtures until the apartment looked like the 
web of a flamboyant spider.  
When I picked up Ida at school, she ran into my arms. She hopped along the 
sidewalk on one foot, picked dandelion clocks and exploded them with a wet whoosh 
of breath. I bit the inside of my lip. Her party was small and pathetic, but Ida didn?t 
know. She was satisfied with so little. I remembered my childhood birthday parties. 
They were big affairs with dozens of friends and specially decorated cakes and games 
my mother had devised around a theme. There had been an Alice in Wonderland party 
with a Painting the Roses Red relay race and a medieval castle party with princess 
hats for all the girls and knight helmets made of milk jugs for the boys. My mother 
would spend days on the handmade invitations, the goodie bags of homemade treats. 
One year it rained, forcing the party indoors. Everyone else adapted and went on, but 
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I was furious at my parents. It had seemed like their fault that the weather was bad, 
and I was sure that if they?d really tried, they could have brought out the sun. I was 
eventually sent to my room to have my tantrum while the party continued without me.  
We stopped at the video store, and after much deliberation, Ida chose a 
documentary on the Gnostic gospels. I tried my best to persuade her otherwise, but 
she liked the drawing of the blue-eyed, bearded man on the cover.  
?He looks like Grandpa Albert,? she said, studying the picture.  
Albert hadn?t had a beard or blue eyes. I checked the impulse to hug her hard, 
said, ?It looks like a great movie,? and let her give it to the clerk. 
We had our macaroni and cheese with hot dog slices while the oldies station 
played on the radio. Ida wiggled along to the music in her booster seat, chattering 
about school and roly poly bugs and how to make waffles. I didn?t scold her for 
talking with her mouth full. She sang along at top volume, even though she didn?t 
know the words or the tune. After dinner, Ida nestled in the corner of the couch where 
the springs were soggiest, and I brought her a modest ice cream sundae with a candle 
in it. We started the documentary Ida had chosen. She furrowed her brows, trying her 
best to pay attention, but it wasn?t long before she nodded, a loose wisp of hair 
dangling into the melted ice cream at the bottom of the bowl. I turned off the 
television and led her to bed.  
I didn?t go to bed myself. I?d decided that it was best to leave during the night. 
I hoped that once she?d entered that deep sleep of children, the kind where I could 
brush her teeth and put her pajamas on without disturbing her, she might not wake 
until we?d reached our destination. We were actually going a bit past Madison, to the 
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edges of a small suburb called Sun Prairie, and the directions I?d printed at the library 
said it would take us seven hours. The house was on little Brazee Lake. I saw us 
pulling up to the house right as the sun began to ornament the water. 
Around midnight, I gathered Ida from her bed, held her warm tangle of limbs 
against my chest and carried her down to Grayson?s Bonneville, already packed with 
her most necessary possessions?clothes, shoes, toothbrush, a copy of The Velveteen 
Rabbit, a purple plush elephant, a ratty yellow blanket Jonas had dubbed Swiss 
Cheese. She mumbled and squirmed when I buckled her into the car seat, but didn?t 
wake. I brushed a damp curl from her mouth and smoothed the cowlick on her 
forehead before I got into the driver?s seat and headed east.  
 The pills I?d taken turned off my thoughts but left me lucid, and I was able to 
play memories on demand.  I projected images onto the windshield, where they were 
warped by a long lateral crack in the glass, keeping the sound off, so as not to bother 
Ida. I watched myself, my parents, and my older brother live as our younger selves in 
total silence. My mother sang to me but no tune came from her mouth. My father 
lectured me about the value of hard work, but his lips merely flapped and no lesson 
was issued. I tried to learn the violin, but the instrument was mute. My brother revved 
the engine on his Victory Cruiser, but all I heard was the blood snickering in my own 
ears. When I reached the end of my childhood, I simply stopped the tape and rewound 
to the beginning. 
I?d chosen a route with long detours around the cities?the key to keeping Ida 
asleep was steady driving, no drastic changes in speed or sharp turns. It was a quiet 
drive: mile upon mile of quilted farmland buttoned with cow ponds and silos. We hit 
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some pockets of rain as we crossed from Iowa to Wisconsin, but the sky cleared when 
we neared Madison. A murmur of pink suggested itself above the tree line. 
The street written on my gum wrapper started as a four-lane county highway, 
but when the strip malls and housing developments thinned out, the road narrowed. 
As we turned away from town, fields unfolded on either side of us, vast expanses of 
corn, still bright and tassel-less this early in the season, stretching out to the blurred 
horizon. The line in the middle of the road vanished abruptly when we turned right 
toward the lake?no warning sign, no tapering off, just a blunt end where the 
engineers decided enough was enough, drivers should be able to work things out on 
their own by now. We bumped down from the crust of recently laid road to older 
blacktop, pitted, pale, graphed with winter?s fissures. Trees returned. The lake was to 
our left, but hidden by just-greening sugar maple and beech. Houses became sparse, 
reclusive at the ends of long driveways.  
I slowed the Bonneville to a crawl and switched off the headlights?the sun 
was up enough now that I almost didn?t need them.  I pulled off the road, which was 
now mostly gravel in between islands of asphalt, a paved road only in theory, and 
onto the weedy shoulder on the lake side, farther from the houses.  
Ida stirred, burbling through vestiges of sleep. 
?Are we there yet??  
I reached my arm into the backseat without turning around. After a few 
seconds of floundering, I found her foot, a measure of sock hanging past her toes. 
She?d had canvas sneakers on when we started, but Ida had always been good at 
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unshoeing herself on the sly. I had a box of single shoes whose mates had been tossed 
from the stroller or abandoned at the park.  
I squeezed her big toe gently.  
?Just about.? I checked the time on the dashboard clock, a tiny round analog 
with glow-in-the-dark hands. I knew from riding with Grayson that the clock?s ability 
to keep time was limited. After a while, it would start to lose seconds, then minutes 
and hours, until you realized it had stopped all together. But I had set the clock back 
in Omaha, and I was pretty sure it was still close enough to correct.  
It was just half-past six?we?d made the trip more quickly than the map had 
predicted?so we still had some time to kill. I?d wanted to get there late enough that 
my parents would be up and about, but early enough that they wouldn?t yet be off to 
work, though in truth, I didn?t know what time that meant. I was judging by a long-
 outdated schedule. Maybe now they worked from home. Maybe they?d retired.   
I twisted in the seat, giving my arm a few more inches of reach until I could 
pat Ida?s knee. Her face was flushed with sleep, curls stuck wetly to her cheeks, and 
she was still bobbing on the surface of consciousness, only curiosity keeping her from 
sinking back under.  
?We have to wait a little bit before we get out. Do you think you can make 
it??  
I traced the knob of her kneecap with my little finger, remembered how fat 
and dimpled the joint once had been.  
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Ida nodded. ?I can wait,? she whispered, already mostly asleep again. She 
shifted, nestling her head against the side of the car seat, and sighed deeply. I kept my 
hand on her knee until my arm tingled and went numb and I drew it back to my side.  
When the sunlight began to clarify, stabbing rays through the trees, I inched 
the car closer to the house. From the sloping bank, I could see it only in fragments: a 
dormer window with uneven blinds; porch railings, the ones on the far left leaning on 
each other drunkenly; a detached garage with a basketball hoop nailed under the 
eaves?remnant of previous owners, I supposed. It wasn?t exactly what I would have 
imagined, or wanted, for my parents. It was a newer house, and they?d always wanted 
something old, something, as my father said, with some history. The siding was vinyl 
and the front yard looked rumpled and weedy. But people changed as they aged. They 
compromised, made things easier for themselves. A few broken slats on the porch 
didn?t make the porch less functional. Vinyl didn?t rot. And what was a weed but a 
flower that grew without assistance? But some things, I knew, would be the same. I 
couldn?t see the front door, but I knew it would be hung with a wreath, a nice one 
made of seasonal dried flowers or herbs or living succulents growing from a coronet 
of sphagnum moss?my mother didn?t go for fake flowers, or artifice of any kind. 
There was nothing ?butter-flavored? in our household, nothing an imitation of itself.  
I wanted to see some signs that my parents were awake and beginning their 
day, but by quarter after seven, I hadn?t seen anything. No lights switched on or off in 
windows. My father didn?t come down the walkway to get the paper.  
Ida?s awakening process was in its late stages. She twitched her fingers along 
the armrests of the carseat, drew her knees to her chest and let them fall again, wiped 
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the crusted corners of her eyes with tight fists. I?d often tried to prolong this liminal 
state to give myself a few more moments of quiet, but it never worked; she was too 
far along the irreversible path to consciousness. She?d be up soon.  
Squinting into the trees, I thought I could see a light in the house, dimly, in a 
back room. That made sense. Kitchens are usually in the back, and that?s where my 
mother would be this time of day, stirring oatmeal on the stove, waiting for my father 
to find his glasses. The curtain in a front window shivered, and I tightened my grip on 
the steering wheel, expecting to see a face, but none came. It took me a long minute 
to loosen my hands enough to move them. 
The air outside the car was cold, still rang of the winter that dawdled late. I 
could see my breath out in front of me, predicting my steps before I took them. Ida 
waved sleepily at me as I walked by her window. I held up a finger to tell her to wait, 
and she nodded, corked her thumb into her mouth and looked outside. When I took 
Ida?s bags out of the trunk, I realized they were too many and too heavy for Ida to 
carry on her own. I circled to the side of the car farthest from the house, crouching 
down so my head didn?t rise over the roof. Ida?s little cat backpack didn?t hold much, 
so I had to perform triage on her belongings. One outfit, one pair of shoes, extra 
underwear. There wasn?t room for both the elephant and the blanket, so I chose the 
blanket. I hoped she?d remember its name. I hefted the knapsack in my hands, 
judging its weight. It was heavy, but I thought Ida could manage it. She wouldn?t 
have to carry it for long.  
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My hand shook as I reached for the door handle. I couldn?t feel my face, and I 
had to put my other hand to my lips to see if I had succeeded in hitching them into a 
smile.  
?Ida Bean!? I sang, as I leaned into the car. ?We?re here!? 
She grinned and stretched out her arms to me, straining at the car seat straps. I 
unbuckled them, and she helped me; it wouldn?t be long before she?d be getting out 
on her own. As I held her against my hip, straightening her blouse, she looked 
around, sniffing the air like a rabbit. I found her shoes on the car floor and slipped 
them back on her feet, and she craned her neck over my shoulder, eyes wide and 
searching.  
?It smells like Christmas,? she said. 
?That?s all the pine trees.? I turned to point out a stand of them on the lake 
side of the road. ?They make that wonderful smell. You?ve never lived somewhere 
with so many pine trees. You?ll like the woods.? 
Ida studied the trees for a moment, then faced me again. She had gotten hold 
of a hank of my hair and draped it across one palm, petting it like a sleeping cat.  
?Do we live here now??  
 I looked over her head, following the jagged line of her part, past the whorl 
on her crown where I could remember the soft pulse of fontanelle, then out beyond 
her and down the road. The sun was up in full, and though I still couldn?t see the lake, 
I thought I caught its glimmer, a million refracted shards of light glancing off the tree 
trunks and leaves. A barn owl screamed. I set Ida down and placed the backpack over 
her shoulders. 
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I say: Think of it like a game, a game with instructions to follow; you want to 
win the game, so you have to play by the rules; I can?t play; it?s a game just for you; 
if I play, the game won?t mean anything; you won?t win; ring the doorbell, or if there 
isn?t one, knock, and make sure to knock hard so they can hear you everywhere in the 
house; tell them your name; it?s okay to tell them, they aren?t strangers, at least, they 
won?t be for long; you don?t know them and they don?t know you, but they already 
love you; give them this; it?s just a note from me, so they?ll understand; eat your 
breakfast when they give it to you, I bet it will be oatmeal, and you can have sugar 
and raisins; show them how you well you can draw, draw them your best zoo 
animals, you do those so nicely; let them read to you, you can even ask for funny 
voices; tell them when your birthday is and how high you can count and your favorite 
color and what you?re afraid of and what you?ll be when you grow up; tell them all 
about yourself; let them give you everything you want; be good; be good.   
Before she was halfway up the walkway, I was back in the car. When she 
neared the porch, I started the engine. She tugged the straps of the knapsack, fighting 
the weight, and I pulled onto the road, reversed over the gravel, pointed the 
Bonneville the way we had come. As she climbed up to the porch, placing one foot 
and then the other on each step because the steps were too tall and deep for her short 
stride, I crept forward. I could see the porch more clearly now, but the door was still 
shadowed. Was there a wreath? All I could see was a dark smudge. She found the 
bell, pressed it, and I crawled a few more feet, peered at the door, the image in the 
empty space refusing to hold still. There was a wreath. It was just a brass knocker. It 
was a wreath. The clock on the dash ticked away a distorted minute. She knocked, 
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and I could see her swing her arm hard to make sure she was loud. Did the lace 
behind the window by the door shift? Did eyes appear at the glass? I thought there 
was the outline of a face I didn?t recognize; then I thought it was just a reflection of a 
cluster of pine boughs. Ida?s hand was still raised, her fingers still balled into a tight 
fist when the handle on the door turned toward the ground, and the light shifted, and 
there was no wreath, and the door began to open, and there was a wreath, and my foot 
depressed the gas, and there was no wreath, and I was gone.  
 
 The period just after Ida is hard to remember. Everything until that moment is 
clear, but the time following it is a dull smear. Grayson medicated me out of pity and 
maybe to conceal his own shame. Eventually, he got scared and refused to give or sell 
me anything else. I lived on Grayson?s couch. I slept for days at a time. I got clean, 
not because it was right or healthy, not to ease Grayson?s worry or try to make 
something of my life, but because disappearance was too easy and too kind. Sobriety 
is my penance.   
Now I go to AA meetings, just like Albert, though unlike him, I never tell the 
whole story. I have a collection of plastic coins, rewards for temperance. At each 
milestone, which now come only yearly, I get a new one, and all the people say what 
a blessing my success is. I always thank them and say that I know this life is what I 
truly deserve. I don?t mean what they think I do, but it doesn?t matter; they beam and 
move on. I keep the coins in a little sweetgrass basket on the nightstand. I sift through 
them to hear their tinny clinking.  
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 I got a job at the information booth at Crossroads Mall. It?s quiet, and people 
rarely need me. I will work there until there is no more mall or no more information. 
Floyd is my boss and the Crossroads Mall Operations Manager. He has an aluminum 
clipboard and an ancient mother who is always ailing and who will live to be one 
hundred and ninety years old. I have a co-worker, Juanita, who believes it is her job 
to love and scold the earth?s population. She carries a fat tote bag that says, ?The City 
That Reads!? but doesn?t say what city, so it seems like it?s referring to the woman 
herself: The City of Juanita. I would live there. It would be safe and everyone would 
have nice manners. 
There isn?t much to do. Sometimes I answer questions about where stores are 
or opening and closing hours. Sometimes there are announcements I have to make or 
boxes of new pamphlets I have to unpack and arrange. I periodically check the large 
cardboard box that serves as the mall?s official lost and found. Before I began 
working there, someone wrote on it in purple magic marker ?Lost In Found,? and 
whenever I see it, the mangled phrase swells terrible and lovely in my chest.  
Mostly, though, it?s quiet, and I watch people walk by. I catalog their 
qualities, all the many kinds of wonderful strangeness: an old man with jutting 
hipbones and the glasses that are supposed to change tint but are set on permanent 
dusk; a beautiful teenage girl with orthodontic headgear protruding from her mouth 
like fishhooks; a bleached-blonde boy in a fraternity hoodie sitting alone in a corner 
reading Twilight. In a separate drawer I file all the stroller babies with one missing 
shoe. 
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 On days when I go to meetings, Grayson picks me up. He?ll even come in the 
church sometimes, though he only loiters around the periphery drinking instant hot 
chocolate and eating Hydrox cookies. When there?s no meeting, I take the bus home. 
If it?s dark when my shift ends, I pay to ride to the end of the line and back. I find a 
pair of seats I don?t have to share and sit sideways with my feet towards the aisle. It 
reminds me of road trips as a child, when we?d been traveling all day and night would 
start to fall and I?d drift off, lulled by the security of my father at the helm and the 
knowledge someone else was certain of the way to go. As the bus trundles through 
the dark, I can give up a little. That?s when I can see the other worlds.   
 There are hundreds of other worlds all around us, all the time, hidden. All 
these worlds are stitched together like a crazy quilt, and if I am still and thankful, I 
can see the seams, the limits of what happened and what could have happened, of 
what you said and what you only thought, of what you expected and what ambushed 
you when you were looking the other way. 
 If I look all the way to the left, I can just barely see the world in which Jonas 
didn?t leave. The blades of grass there are made of aluminum foil, and all the words 
ever written or spoken can fit on the head of a pin. There, Jonas calls his father before 
the cancer ravages his brain. By the time Albert dies, they have made a delicate 
peace, peace like lace or a souffl?. I comfort him, we cry together, for the parents we 
had, for the parents we should have had, for the parents we want to be. We get 
married when Ida is old enough to hold the rings. We honeymoon holed up in the 
apartment, eating the leftover summer-flavored wedding cake and playing a game of 
Chutes and Ladders with Ida where the chutes are big enough to slide down and end 
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in swimming pools of soft, boiled wool. Jonas stops drinking. He loves my body even 
as middle age encroaches, and my thighs grow soft and pocked. He never seems to 
age. We die together and turn into trees, cherry and pear, and our branches bear both 
fruits.  
It is an almost perfect world, this Jonas world, but it is not the only one. If I 
look all the way up, strain my eyes so far it hurts, I can see another world, one in 
which Jonas?s departure doesn?t rip a giant fissure in my world, in which escape 
doesn?t seem so imperative, in which the alcohol and the cough syrup and the 
Adderall and the Dilaudid aren?t so tempting, or at least, are harder to get my hands 
on.  
In this world, Ida is still my beautiful girl. We buy picture books second-hand 
and read them lying on the rug of the living room. Whos and Wild Things romp 
through the bedroom; Toad and Frog have tea at our kitchen table. Every Sunday 
morning, we go to the zoo. We name all the meerkats after colors. When she is six, 
Ida learns to play the recorder, and marches around the house piping ?Hot Cross 
Buns? for hours. I am irritated and turn up the radio. In third grade, Ida will only wear 
green. In fifth grade, she is obsessed with Australia and dresses as a wombat for 
Halloween. She makes the costume herself and doesn?t care when everyone, even the 
grown-ups, think she is a mouse. Soon after, Ida begins to hate me. We have 
screaming matches, then late at night we make up tearfully and watch bad old sci-fi 
movies on TV. Ida goes to college in Oregon; she stops hating me. I knit her sweaters 
I am certain she does not wear. When I am old and Ida is married, she fixes up a room 
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for me off her kitchen, and she tolerates me when I can?t remember her husband?s 
name. After I die, Ida tells her children how much I would have loved them. 
When we get to the edge of Benson Park, I lean my head against the window; 
it is always cool, in winter, from the weather and in summer from the air 
conditioning. Every jerk of the bus thumps my head against the glass, but I don?t 
move. I imagine that each contact is all there is of me, just a series of pinpricks like a 
distant constellation. There is so little left, little enough that, in these moments, I can 
bear its weight.  
The bus reaches the terminal?it does every time, no matter how resolutely I 
believe that I can ride forever. I walk home. I go into my apartment, but I don?t turn 
on the lights. If I do, I?ll see the other worlds receding away from me, the borders of 
the world I have made and chosen becoming firmer and the possibility of travel from 
one to the next becoming more and more remote. I undress and lie staring into the 
dark, wanting sleep, fearing it.  Ida?s shadow hovers beside my bed, and in my 
dreams I leave her and I leave her and I leave her.  
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The Hour Hand 
In the beginning, she taught fifth grade. The children were ten or eleven, and 
they had long ago?long ago in child-time?learned to tell time, so when she told 
them her name on the first day of class, they gaped at her. 
 ?Your name is Miss Hour Hand?? 
 She would then patiently explain that though her last name sounded much like 
this feature of the analog clock, her name was not ?Miss Hour Hand,? but in fact, 
Miss Hourihan. She pointed to the punctilious cursive she had labored over before 
class had begun, her name scripted neatly in chalk on the freshly wiped surface of the 
green blackboard, and tell the open-mouthed children about the Irish origins of her 
name. She pulled down the map and, with a finger she had always hoped would turn 
out slenderer than it was, circled the cramped little island. When she asked the 
students where their families came from, most often they listed neighboring towns or 
states in other parts of the country that were, for them, defined by the presence of 
grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. After this short lesson, the fifth graders 
accepted her name, and there was no more talk of clock-parts for the rest of the one-
 hundred and eighty days until summer.  
 She appreciated their acceptance and appreciated, too, that a visual 
representation of her name was forever ingrained in her pupils? minds. She was 
twenty-one years old, and it was the first time in Miss Hourihan?s life that her name 
had been consistently spelled correctly.  
 Teaching satisfied Miss Hourihan. She was young and had just begun, and so 
she suspected there was much more to discover in this profession, a world where bells 
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rang at precisely quarter-past the hour, where the cafeteria served milk in half-pint 
cardboard cartons, where the janitor whistled Harry Belafonte tunes as he pushed the 
polisher over the floor on Friday afternoons. True, it was not as exciting as the careers 
her college friends had pursued; that didn?t make it any less meaningful. So she 
wasn?t singing folk songs night after night in dingy East Village clubs, like her 
sophomore-year roommate?what relevance did these songs have, anyway, songs 
about ship wrecks and mining disasters? She hadn?t been wrecked or buried, and 
neither had Elise. So she wasn?t helping Somali villagers dig wells, like her senior-
 year boyfriend, Kevin, who had left her when he joined the Peace Corps. What did 
Kevin know about digging wells? He had grown up in Boston. It was 1972, she had 
said to herself after she had accepted the job at St. Charles Elementary School. In this 
age, everything was exciting. Everything had been made new. There were 
experimental teaching models to try, interactive lessons involving colors and songs 
and social consciousness.  
And there were plenty of other young teachers at Hilltop Elementary who 
shared her optimism. Miss Beck came from Marblehead and spoke with a New 
England accent Miss Hourihan associated with her parents? generation. She taught 
kindergarten, where she used gymnastics to teach the alphabet: the children learned to 
contort their bodies into rough approximations of all twenty-six letters. Mr. 
Baumbach was Jewish and had lived for several years in Tel Aviv, facts that made 
him impressive at the school and in the town, without his ever having to try very hard 
to impress anyone. Mr. Reid began the after-lunch portion of every day of his second-
 grade class with a song. Sometimes, if her students were at the library or the gym, 
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Miss Hourihan would linger outside his door to listen to a tenor so sweet it was 
almost hard to bear.  
Mr. Childers, also a recent graduate of UMass, though Miss Hourihan had 
never known him while he was there?he had been part of the radical crowd that 
stormed the ROTC building in ?68?taught sixth grade history. His version of history 
was inevitably a subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, lesson in materialist dialectics.  
?Two forces in opposition,? he would begin, pacing in front of the rows of 
disinterested pre-teens. ?They come into conflict.? Here he would butt his fists 
together like two rams? heads. ?They fight. They rage. But eventually, they merge. 
Then you have something new, made from something old.?  
He was convinced that his proto-socialist rhetoric enlivened what otherwise 
was little more than, as he often said in the teachers? lounge over burnt coffee, ?the 
greedy machinations of dead white men.?  
Miss Hourihan doubted his students had any idea what he was talking about, 
and suspected that at the end of each class, what his students really wanted to know 
was whether they would be expected to memorize the Tudor lineage for the test, or 
could they just use their notes.  
But aloud, she often proclaimed how much she wished more teachers could be 
like him. This was true?she did wish more teachers cared as much about their jobs 
as Mr. Childers did. She liked the way his hawk-nose and bright green eyes looked 
nearly dangerous when he began to work himself into a good sweat about the 
oppression of the masses. She liked the way he stared intently at her when she offered 
that her blue-collar father had toiled all his life in a steel foundry only to be let go at 
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the age of 52, three years before his retirement, and had died less than a year later of 
what was supposedly pleurosis, but what Miss Hourihan privately knew was lack of a 
reason to get up in the morning.  
Mr. Childers had banged his fist down on the table in the lounge, sending a 
fork skittering to the linoleum.  
?Criminal!? he?d shouted. Then, lowering his voice to a hiss, ?It?s a 
goddamned tragedy, and it?s happening every goddamned day.?  
When Mr. Childers asked Miss Hourihan to come to his basement apartment 
and watch a Cronkite special, Miss Hourihan accepted readily. An affair with 
someone as radical, as driven, as frankly unbalanced-seeming as Mr. Childers was 
just the sort of wild turn she expected her life to take.  
Mr. Childers?s apartment was carpeted all in green shag and the walls of the 
living room were covered with an ochre paper that had probably been meant to look 
like brocade, but instead reminded Miss Hourihan of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
story she had read as an undergraduate. She almost expected to see version of herself 
in bombazine frills creeping around beneath the floral arabesques.  
He saw her looking around with what must have been an expression of 
distaste. 
 ?Ugly, isn?t it?? he said, flopping on the sagging couch, and patting the space 
next to him. She sat down, but did not lean back. ?I?m only glad I didn?t know the 
people who decorated it. They?ve probably been voting Republican since 1945.? 
 Miss Hourihan laughed a little, but didn?t quite understand why bad taste 
should correlate with conservatism. ?Why don?t you change it?? 
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 Mr. Childers shrugged. ?Not really worth it. It?s just decoration, mere 
trappings of the bourgeois lifestyle I eschew.? He smiled, only half-ironically. 
 Throughout the debate, Mr. Childers was a show of misery. He hated Nixon 
and after every sentence the man spoke, Mr. Childers would slam his palms on his 
knees and yell ?Bullshit!? But he didn?t much care for McGovern, either, and kept 
calling him a ?tool of the system.? 
 ?That man?s got the backbone of an ?clair,? he said, then took a disgusted pull 
from his beer.  
 Miss Hourihan wanted to ask him if he hated both candidates so much, why 
was he watching the special at all, and if neither party had anything to offer, what 
should the country do about governance, and did he honestly think the masses were 
rising up anytime soon, because she didn?t think it was worth holding her breath for. 
But then he swung his arm around her shoulders, as if casually, as if without the 
slightest internal debate, and Miss Hourihan had the both pleasurable and 
embarrassing realization that she suddenly had no interest in the men on the screen.  
 For all his talk about radicalism, Mr. Childers was a shy, even a conventional 
lover. He insisted that the lights be off during sex, and the platitudes he murmured in 
her ear were no more creative than those any of her college boyfriends had come up 
with. The long foreplay seemed luxurious at first, but as their relationship progressed, 
Miss Hourihan began to wish that Mr. Childers would get to the point a little faster. 
One night, frustrated with his inability to find her clitoris, she grabbed his forefinger 
and pressed it against the little button of flesh, hard. Mr. Childers?s eyebrows 
crumpled in surprise and hurt. 
104 
 
  
 
 ?I know what I?m doing,? he said defensively, snatching his hand away from 
her as if he?d been bitten. 
 Miss Hourihan bit back the snide remark that rose in her throat like bile.  
?I?m sorry; I guess I just can?t control myself when I?m with you.? 
It sounded like a joke coming out of her mouth, but Mr. Childers was 
mollified and went back to fumbling in the nether regions under the coverlet as if 
nothing had happened. 
As the weeks and then months passed, Miss Hourihan saw the boundaries of 
Mr. Childress?s performance. His act?the radical, the activist, the man who leaned 
so far left that it only seemed a matter of time before he fell completely over?was 
convincing, but it was limited. His radicalism was in truth confined to pontificating to 
sixth-graders and television-side fist-shaking. When they were alone, Miss Hourihan 
tried to engage him in discussions about literature or even mild gossip about people at 
school, but if the subject didn?t offer him a chance for righteous indignation, he?d 
shrug her off. Under the thin patina of revolutionary zeal, she thought there might be 
someone quite ordinary, maybe even boring: he loved pot roast more than almost 
anything. 
There was a week off from school at Easter. Some time before, Miss Hourihan 
noticed Mr. Childers was arranging a trip for the two of them. Though he tried to be 
secretive about it, he couldn?t seem to help but expose his planning. It felt as though 
every time she walked into the kitchen at his house or the teacher?s lounge at school, 
she?d catch him shoving maps under the table, crumpling itineraries into a pocket, 
breaking off conversations mid-sentence.  
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One afternoon before the break, Miss Hourihan was on the phone with her 
mother. She talked to her mother once a week, every week. Her mother always had 
lots to say about nothing. She told Miss Hourihan about the sewing circle at church 
and the price of milk and the terrible thing the neighbors had done with their front 
yard flowerbed. Miss Hourihan had hated these obligatory talks when she was in 
college. Her mother?s life had seemed pitiably limited and contained, sadly defined 
by little hedges of routine and habit. Lately, however, Miss Hourihan had begun to 
see her mother?s life as a small, complete thing, neatly ordered and always pleasant, 
like a city inside a snow globe. She missed her mother.  
Mrs. Hourihan wanted to know if Miss Hourihan was coming home for 
Easter.  
?I don?t know, Mom,? Miss Hourihan said, trying to keep the regret from 
creeping into her voice. ?Mr. Childers is planning some sort of trip for us. I don?t how 
long that whole business is going to take.? 
When she hung up the phone a few minutes later, Mr. Childers was sitting at 
her kitchen table, tearing her paper napkins to shreds. She swallowed hard, downing 
surprise and a surge of anger. 
?How did you get in?? After she said it, though, she realized the door was 
unlocked. The door was almost always unlocked. 
Mr. Childers looked up at her. There were uneven red patches under his 
stubble and his brows were crumpled over his eyes; she couldn?t tell if he was close 
to shouting or tears.  
??Mr. Childers?? You call me ?Mr. Childers???  
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Miss Hourihan sighed. At school, the teachers were required to call each other 
by these formal names, and even though she knew her colleagues? first names, she 
could not get used to calling them anything but Mr. This or Mrs. That. She knew 
them by these names; to call them something else made them seem like other people. 
Miss Hourihan sighed again and said nothing.  
Mr. Childers stared, his mouth slightly open, the red patches spreading to his 
forehead and chin. ?Do you even know my first name?? 
Of course she did. Of course she knew his first name. She had been sleeping 
with him for nearly six months now, for heaven?s sake. But just at that second, she 
could not find the name in the jumble of her brain. It was a slip in a card catalogue 
that had been misfiled: there, but unreachable.  
?Oh my God.? Mr. Childers was on his feet. ?Oh my fucking God.?  
?Dan! Dan!? Miss Hourihan blurted. ?Of course I know your name, Dan!? 
But the moment had passed, and she had failed. 
?I can?t believe this!? Mr. Childers stalked around the kitchen, but the room 
was tiny and he could only go four steps before he had to turn around again. ?I cannot 
believe this. Do you know where we were going next week?? He turned to her and 
crossed his arms across his chest. 
Miss Hourihan shook her head. 
?Niagara Falls. Niagara Fucking Falls! I was going to fucking propose.? 
Miss Hourihan tried to clamp her lips between her teeth, but the words 
wriggled out anyway. ?Niagara Falls??  
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And she began to laugh. Niagara Falls was where her father had proposed to 
her mother, where her father?s parents had taken their honeymoon, where she thought 
someone would propose to her?when she was eight. She tried to stop laughing, but 
she couldn?t, couldn?t stop thinking of Dan Childers, revolutionary, standing in the 
middle of a crowd of cooing tourists and handing her a half-karat cubic zirconium 
ring in a red velvet box while, in the background, hundreds of thousands of gallons of 
water rushed over a cliff every second.  
?I can?t be here anymore.? Mr. Childers grabbed his jacket from the back of a 
kitchen chair, toppling the chair with the sudden change in balance, and stormed out. 
When he slammed the door, a framed photograph of the Alhambra fell to the floor in 
the hallway.  
Miss Hourihan bent slowly, righted the chair, and sat in it. She waited for 
tears to well or a sense of loss to overwhelm her, but mostly what she noticed was 
how quiet the house had become and the muted, affable sound of the bells ringing in 
the Presbyterian church down the road.  For a while, she watched a cardinal through 
the window, saw him flutter over and over again from the sugar maple to the ground 
and back again. She scanned the branches of the tree until she spotted her, the dun-
 colored female nesting between the budding branches. Then Miss Hourihan stood, 
swept the shredded napkins into a cupped palm, and put water on for tea.  
Her relations with the other members of the staff changed after she and Mr. 
Childers broke up. Those who found Mr. Childers dynamic, inspiring, a man of 
principle, gave Miss Hourihan cool looks over Corelle teacups when she walked into 
the teachers? lounge. They made a point?Mr. Childers and his new posse?of 
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leaving for the Watering Hole in a group on Friday afternoons, of laughing especially 
loudly and looking especially happy when they passed her in the parking lot as she 
struggled to open the door of her Bel Air.  
On the other hand, among the teachers who had always, she now discovered, 
found Mr. Childers more than a little grating, she was a hero, or had at least achieved 
a low level of celebrity. Mr. Reid, whose nature turned out to be as gentle as his 
voice, invited her to join a group going to see Carole King in Providence. Miss 
Alberti, a third grade teacher, was committed to world peace and macrobiotic baking; 
she often brought sprouted mung bean cookies for the teachers to share. After her first 
one, Miss Hourihan took the cookies to ?save for later? and disposed of them once 
Miss Alberti had left the room. Mr. Gardner, the art instructor, did impressions of the 
members of the administration that made Miss Hourihan laugh until her stomach 
ached.  
There were a few weeks during which school was uncomfortable for Miss 
Hourihan, but soon, stasis returned. Mr. Childers started dating Miss Shaughnessy, a 
bony kindergarten teacher, and his hostile glares turned into pitying glances when 
Miss Hourihan passed him in the hallways, Miss Hourihan found that she cared very 
little. She had new friends. She had a comfortable one-bedroom apartment. She had 
teaching.  
Though she grumbled along about the work load when break-room 
conversation required it, Miss Hourihan liked the way the duties of teaching could 
expand to fill any amount of time she allotted them, the way a goldfish would grow as 
large as its tank would allow. There were always lessons to plan: teaching remainders 
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using M&Ms; casting children in plays about the American Revolution; mapping 
walks around the grounds so she could point out all the kinds of trees. There were 
long hours of dim frustration, but these were illuminated by scintillating moments in 
which a student finally understood what fractions meant, or the class found the humor 
in ?The Cremation of Sam McGee,? or a child brought her a bunch of pale fragrant 
lilacs, clipped that morning, most likely in secret, from his mother?s garden. They 
were too old to hug her or be hugged, but Miss Hourihan was often washed by such a 
powerful love for her pupils that she wanted to gather them all into her arms at once.  
Many of the young teachers did not return for a second year at Hilltop. For 
them, teaching had been a stopgap between college and graduate school, or a money-
 making venture before they moved to Kabul or Manhattan. Some had simply found 
teaching boring.  
That fall she was restless. Maybe she would leave, too, she thought. Maybe 
this would be her last year. She researched graduate programs in Europe?to study 
Chaucer in London or Dante in Florence, how glamorous!?and she sent away for a 
packet about the Peace Corps. But by the time Christmas break came, Miss Hourihan 
realized that she was happy never to plow through medieval texts teasing out allegory 
and political satire. What was the point? What difference did her interpretation of a 
collection of words make? And the Peace Corps?well, it was condescension of a 
kind, wasn?t it? Who was she, Miss Hourihan from Springfield, Mass, to tell a woman 
in the Himalayas that the way she kept her house was unsanitary? And why teach 
children thousands of miles away? There were children here, right in Woburn, who 
needed education, needed what she had to offer. Also, Miss Hourihan suspected that 
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the Peace Corps would mean showers would be irregular and toilets rudimentary, and 
she had always, always, considered nice indoor plumbing mankind?s greatest 
technological advance.  
So Miss Hourihan stayed for a third year, and then a fourth. By her fifth year, 
there were only four of the teachers left who had begun teaching with her. By the 
seventh, there were only two. By her tenth year of teaching fifth grade at Hilltop, only 
she and Mr. Reid remained of the original dozen. There was a new crop of young 
teachers, and though they, too, were brimming with optimism and na?vet?, they were 
of a different breed. They itched to rebuild traditions, restore order, reinstate the 
nation as the world leader in rightness. And they wanted, even expected, to be 
wealthy.  
A younger Miss Hourihan would have been disgusted by their ready 
acceptance of the Reagan administration?s bleating about family values and the 
American Dream; but she was thirty-four. She knew that these new teachers would 
either move on, or they would accept, as she had, that the world was as it was. They 
would replace their lust for paradigm shift with the hope that the girl with the braces 
would for once pass a spelling test, or that the bigger boys would let the tiny boy with 
the cleft palate enjoy his recess in peace. They would let go of triumphal dreams and 
feel a surge of pride when listening to the class recite their threes times tables loudly 
and correctly. They would forget that they had expected ecstasy, and instead take 
pleasure in a row of uniformly sharpened pencils, a finely looped lower case ?g? on 
the chalkboard, a day off.  
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As a college student, Miss Hourihan had outwardly embraced the skepticism 
about marriage that was in vogue among her peers, but despite the institution?s flaws, 
she had always assumed that she would end up married herself, in a quiet, but 
enduring relationship with a quiet but enduring man. She met no such man in her 
twenties or her thirties, and conducted instead a string of fairly unsatisfying and short-
 lived affairs with men who excited her, until they didn?t, found her charming, until 
they didn?t. And when she met a quiet and enduring man at the age of forty-two, she 
found that she did not want to be married; her life had become a small, complete 
thing. When the man realized that she was content drifting along as undefined 
partners, he quietly and permanently drifted away. Miss Hourihan took up Pilates.  
Six days before her fiftieth birthday, the principal of Hilltop asked Miss 
Hourihan to meet her in her office after school.  
?As you know, there?s been some significant budget cuts this year.?  
There have been some significant budget cuts this year, Miss Hourihan 
mentally corrected. She nodded, and folded her hands to keep from picking at a 
hangnail on her left thumb. Her nails, once so pink and smooth, had become ragged 
and ridged as she grew older.  
She knew there had been budget cuts. That was all anyone ever talked about 
these days. The second art teacher and the second music teacher had been let go. The 
children now went to gym only once a week instead of twice. The cost of even the 
reduced lunches had risen by a dime. Obviously she knew. But unlike the younger 
teachers, she wasn?t worried. There would be changes. Some teachers might have to 
leave. But nothing would change, nothing fundamental. There would always be 
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teachers. There would always be students. Miss Hourihan took comfort in the 
everlastingness. 
?There?s also a new elementary school opening near Winchester. We expect 
to lose nearly thirty percent of our student body, especially in the older grades.? 
Miss Hourihan nodded again. She knew this, too. But surely, she was not 
being laid off. There were only three or four teachers who had been here as long as 
she had. Why, then, the preparatory speech? 
The principal gathered some papers into a neat stack, tapped the stack several 
times on the desk to straighten it. 
?We?ve decided we?re going to cut two fifth grade classes. We won?t have as 
many students, so we won?t need as many teachers.? The principal shifted her eyes 
around the room, settling on the china doll plant that Miss Hourihan had noticed 
needed watering.  
?Am I being let go??  
?No! No, of course not.? The principal laughed weakly. ?No, it?s just 
that?well, you are one of our most valued teachers, and we wouldn?t even consider 
this if we didn?t think you could handle it.? 
Such a sentence could only be prelude to something unpleasant.  
?This coming fall,? the principal began, still staring intently at the plant. 
?Hilltop will be offering three special education classes, divided by age. We have 
teachers lined up for two of them; the final class is still without an instructor. Before 
we continue our search, we?the other administrators and myself?? 
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The other administrators and I. Why did people insist on using the reflexive 
when the simple first person would suffice? 
?We thought we would offer the position to you.? 
Miss Hourihan said nothing for several moments. She unfolded her hands and 
began picking at her hangnail.  
After the second hand?s ticking became painfully loud, the principal cleared 
her throat. ?Of course, we would arrange for you to obtain your certification over the 
summer. Some of the classes you?ve taken through the Extended Learning Program 
will count towards the program, so the summer should really be enough time to 
complete an alternative licensure.? 
Miss Hourihan inspected the other hand. Hangnails on the index, the middle, 
and the pinky. Damn it.  
?This certification, I might add, really would boost your resume. Special 
education teachers are highly sought after, one of the few education fields that is 
really growing.? 
Miss Hourihan looked up from her hands. ?And if I don?t take this new 
position?? 
The principal looked like she was trying to keep from crying. ?Then I?m 
afraid we wouldn?t have a place for you.? 
That evening, Miss Hourihan tried to work on the afghan she had been 
knitting for the past four years, but she kept putting it down to go the kitchen table 
and look at the information packet the principal had left with her. The training 
program was in Boston. Miss Hourihan hated driving on the freeway, and it wasn?t, 
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she explained to herself, just because she was old; she had never felt comfortable 
driving with all those other hunks of metal flying by her on either side. The training 
program was five days a week, from 8 until 4. Well, that was the end of the trip to 
San Francisco she had been planning as a birthday present to herself.   
This was the way the world was, Miss Hourihan thought. You worked on one 
thing all your life, and then suddenly, someone who didn?t have nearly the breadth of 
knowledge or depth of experience you did told you that from now on, your life would 
be different. She wished she could call her mother, but her mother had been dead for 
nearly ten years now. And what would her mother have said? ?You do what you have 
to do, Lizzie. You have to be strong.? Her mother was the only person who had ever 
called her Lizzie. 
The classes at BU were grueling. Miss Hourihan had forgotten how long an 
hour could be. When her students whined and fidgeted through the fifty-minute 
periods, she?d usually been unsympathetic. How many times had she told some 
squirming child that if he could sit through three of his favorite cartoon programs in a 
row, then he could pay attention to an entire math lesson? Now, back in the classroom 
herself, Miss Hourihan felt the weight of every minute. At the beginning of each day, 
she was bright-eyed enough, but by nine o?clock, the clock started to tug at her 
attention. She?d defer and defer the need to look until she was sure the morning 
session was nearly over, but when she at last let her eyes rivet to the right wall, it was 
invariably only a quarter past ten. She had some strange knack for looking at the 
clock at that exact moment every day. On one such occasion, as the eager young 
instructor floated another raft of acronyms at the class, Miss Hourihan wondered if 
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this ability to somehow intuit when it was 10:15 a.m. indicated a skill she could 
parlay into a new occupation. She started a list in the margin of her notebook, but all 
she came up with was ?Sideshow Career as the Incredible Time-Telling Woman.? 
Frowning at herself, she crossed out the words, and forced her attention back to the 
yellow image from the overhead projector. 
 The course seemed designed to teach both too much and not enough. Miss 
Hourihan emerged from the School of Education building with her brain feeling 
blunted and soggy from the deluge of information it had endured. On the drive home, 
she tried to reinforce what they had covered that day by intoning key vocabulary, 
names, and concepts out loud over the attenuated mutter of public radio. But by the 
time she pulled into her driveway, the new knowledge was already fading, and she 
was reduced to performing a kind of desperate mental triage: Dyslexia, that she 
already knew, no sense wasting time thinking about the definition. Sequencing 
dysfunction?that had something to do with auditory processing, didn?t it? She 
thought she might just be able to come up with the cause if she put her mind to it. 
Heller?s syndrome? No, she couldn?t remember word one about it; whatever she may 
have heard was already gone. She?d just have to look it up again later.  
And though she felt thoroughly overburdened by the diagnoses and modalities 
and legislations and acronyms, the never-ending, everlasting acronyms, Miss 
Hourihan also felt certain in the very center of herself that she would enter the 
classroom that fall unprepared. It had been that way when she started teaching. Then, 
of course, she really had been unprepared; teaching hadn?t required training then. She 
was a reasonably intelligent woman who was willing to be patient, or at least appear 
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so. Little else was asked of her. Now, she was sure she could never hope to know all 
that she would require to attend to the needs of her new students, knew without 
question that this training, any training, would not be enough.  
During longer breaks, Miss Hourihan crossed the footbridge over Storrow 
Drive and walked along the Charles River while her extremities thawed: the over-
 zealous air-conditioning in the School of Education activated her Raynaud?s and she 
often finished class with her finger tips numb and as pale as blanched almonds. 
Sometimes she sat on a bench to have her lunch, brought from home to save time and 
money. Sometimes she preferred to keep walking after so long being still and so ate 
in motion; some food tasted better that way.  
She rarely saw her classmates at the park; most of them were younger women 
who went to the student union at lunchtime. They were not unkind; they had invited 
her to join them, and she had gone once, early in the summer. They had inquired 
about Miss Hourihan?s teaching background, admired her experience, asked her 
advice. Miss Hourihan believed they were sincere, but after the first time, she had not 
returned to lunch with them. It was such an effort, and she preferred the quiet of the 
river. There, she could walk and eat egg salad on pumpernickel, her favorite sandwich 
and one she ate only out of doors so the faint sulfurous stink wouldn?t both anyone. 
Now that she ate all her lunches outside, she?d started bringing this meal twice a 
week. In her mind, she referred to it as the ?Esplanade Special.? 
All summer, she made lesson plans. She made a gigantic checklist for herself 
and hung it on her fridge, and when she had made lesson plans for a subject, she used 
a thick red marker to cross it off the list. When a lesson was done, she read it aloud to 
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herself, and imagined how it would sound if she were not herself: What if I did not 
know the word ?imagine?? What if numbers looked backwards to me? What if I 
could not remember the beginning of a sentence once I had gotten to the end? 
Miss Hourihan thought about the details of her classroom, too. There should 
be fat pencils, easier for twisted fingers to grip. The reading corner should include 
colors the social worker who visited her BU class had said some children found 
calming: soft blues and violets. To help the children learn empathy, she adopted?she 
preferred that word to ?bought??a rabbit from a local pet store. He was a docile and 
sleepy lop-eared giant, splotched with fawn and white. He enjoyed slices of apple and 
having his quivering nose petted with a fingertip. Miss Hourihan pulled his ears to see 
how he would react to insensitive hands. After several vigorous tugs, the rabbit shook 
his head and sneezed, then went back to slowly licking her arm. She named him 
Flapjack. 
On September 3, Miss Hourihan arrived at school even earlier than usual. She 
started down the hall for the fifth and sixth grade corridor, but stopped herself at a 
bulletin board that screamed ?Drop Everything And Read!? Then she turned back 
around to head for the northwestern wing, where several first grade classes had been 
converted into the new Special Education Rooms.  
 Everything in 124B was in order. Miss Hourihan had been at school every day 
the two weeks before. She had hung posters on the walls, mostly the same ones she 
had used in her former teaching life, but with some additions she hoped would appeal 
to her new students. She had brought philodendrons to creep along the windowsills 
and keep the room smelling fresh. She?d made a reading corner and an arts and crafts 
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table. She?d set up Flapjack?s hutch and playpen in the back corner, and labeled his 
cage with a sign bearing his name in letters of cut-out cardstock.  
At her desk, Miss Hourihan sipped coffee from a travel mug and waited for 
the first day to begin. She noticed as she raised the cup to her lips that her hands were 
trembling slightly. She put down the mug and gripped it tightly between her palms, 
pressing inward evenly from all sides. The action made her think of pottery classes 
she had taken some years ago. Though she?d never been able to make much?her 
pieces always buckled and warped before she could coax them to rise tall enough to 
be vases or bowls?she had loved centering the clay. It required dedication and care, 
but also a certain amount of resolute strength; the clay wasn?t going to center itself 
just because you suggested it. She took two sessions of pottery lessons before 
deciding she had more than enough ashtrays, but she still thought of centering when 
she wanted to still her mind, imagined the steady act of compression that gradually 
resulted in a perfectly symmetrical spinning mass.  
She glanced up at the clock ticking away steadily on the wall opposite the 
windows. There were still twenty minutes to go before she could reasonably expect 
even the earliest of the students to arrive. What else was there to do? Suddenly, she 
sprang to her feet. She opened the cardboard box and shook out a fresh piece of chalk. 
The white stick sliding from between its fellow reminded her of a cigarette, and 
suddenly she had a craving for the sour bite of tobacco and the edge nicotine put on 
her mind, though she had quit smoking decades ago. Carefully, Miss Hourihan looped 
her name across the board. It was strange after all these years to still call herself 
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?Miss.? But when she had started, ?Ms.? was something new and she had thought it 
made her sound too strident and too radical. Now it seemed too late to change.  
By 8:20, all six students were seated in the classroom. She glanced down at 
her roster. Each name was helpfully accompanied by a photograph, but these were 
last year?s school pictures and it wasn?t always obvious which photo belonged to 
which student; they changed so fast at this age. After several moments of study, Miss 
Hourihan thought she had determined who everyone was. Bobby and Karl were 
absorbed in books, one reading a history of NASA and the other about marsupials. 
Patricia, the girl with cerebral palsy, was having her hair combed away from her face 
by her assistant. Gregory was peeling his shoelace into tiny filaments. Miss Hourihan 
didn?t know how he would ever tie it again. Aaron was concentrating intently on a 
drawing in pencil. The final student, Josie, a very small and towheaded girl, was 
simply sitting, her hands folded on her desk, staring straight at Miss Hourihan.  
After the bell rang and they had listened to the announcements and said the 
Pledge of Allegiance, albeit less coherently than Miss Hourihan was used to hearing 
it, it was time to begin class. She stood before the class, arms straight down by her 
side, warm palms pressed against her slacks.  
?Good morning, class.? She paused to let them reply with a half-sung ?good 
morning.? There was no response. After her work over the summer, Miss Hourihan 
knew enough not to have expected one, but as the silence stretched out over the 
seconds, she realized she had hoped nevertheless. Hearing their answering chime 
would have put her at ease, told her that while some things might have changed, the 
fundamentals remained the same. Ridiculous, she chided herself. You know very well 
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that this situation is entirely different. How dare you expect more than these children 
are capable of just to make yourself feel competent? She gave her thigh a slight pinch 
and pressed on.  
?I am your teacher for this year. My name is Miss Hourihan.? She pivoted 
fractionally to point to the cursive on the board. As she turned back to the class, she 
saw a hand shoot up in the air, straight and full of purpose.  
?Yes, Karl?? 
?Your name is Miss Hour Hand. That is the part of the analog clock by which 
a person can tell what hour it is.? 
Miss Hourihan smiled. Some things had not changed, after all.  
?That?s very good, Karl. However, my name only sounds like ?Miss Hour 
Hand.? Actually, it is ?Miss Hourihan.? That?s an Irish??  
The hand went up again. 
?Yes, Karl?? 
?In that case, your name is a homonym, which is a word that sounds like 
another word, but means something different.? 
Miss Hourihan faltered. It was nonsense, naturally, but there was a certain 
kind of logic to the boy?s conclusion.  
?Well, that is what a homonym is, but I?m not sure a name could really be 
considered a homonym.? 
?Why not?? 
?It?s just that a name isn?t really the same as an ordinary word; it doesn?t 
mean anything exactly?? 
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?Doesn?t it mean the person whose name the word belongs to?? 
In any other class, Miss Hourihan would have known that the boy was merely 
testing her, plumbing this new experience to see how far he could go. She would have 
ended the conversation there, and asked him to step outside until he could be more 
polite. But Karl wasn?t antagonizing her. His face was blank, his voice flat. He was 
relaying information.  
?Well, I?m not sure about that.? She felt her hands move toward each other, 
felt her fingertips seeking out the tiny strips of skin around the nails. ?Let?s just move 
on, shall we??  
Miss Hourihan went to her desk to retrieve the stack of worksheets she had 
run through the Ditto machine that morning. The ink, she hoped, would be dry by 
now, but there was still a strong chemical scent rising from them.  
When she turned back to face the class, Josie had her hand halfway in the air. 
?Yes, Josie?? 
The tiny girl opened and closed her mouth several times. When she finally 
spoke, her words were crowded together and blurred. Miss Hourihan had to ask Josie 
to repeat herself, and she felt her face reddening; she hated to appear so lost and 
uncertain. Finally, on the third time through, Miss Hourihan understood: 
?You can?t be a teacher if you are part of a clock.? Having delivered her 
pronouncement, Josie continued staring at Miss Hourihan, her irises wide and rimmed 
with white.  
Miss Hourihan couldn?t tell whether she wanted to laugh or scream. She 
swallowed the feeling. This absurdly literal interpretation of the world was common 
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for children like these. She couldn?t, she reminded herself, depend upon her students 
adhering to the rules of the world as she knew them; their worlds operated on 
different principles.  
?I can be a teacher because I?m not part of a clock. My name just sounds like 
that.? She gestured back at the board, appealing to the concreteness of letters and 
chalk dust. ?In fact, if you?ll pay close attention, it doesn?t even sound exactly like 
?hour hand.?? She pronounced her name again, placing greater emphasis on the 
second syllable than normal.  
Josie?s hand was in the air, and she didn?t wait for Miss Hourihan to call on 
her before she started speaking.  
?You can?t be a teacher if you are part of a clock.? 
Miss Hourihan looked to the other students, hoping they would show some 
sign of understanding the wrongness of Josie?s position or at least readiness to move 
on from it. But Aaron was bent over on his drawing; Bobby had returned to his 
marsupials; Gregory was still attending to the destruction of his shoelaces; and 
Patricia was struggling to just to steady her neck. Karl, the only student besides Josie 
who was paying attention, was looking at Miss Hourihan like he wasn?t sure he could 
trust her, like he suspected her of being part of some vast timepiece conspiracy. When 
Miss Hourihan glanced at the aide, the woman just shrugged, as if to say she had seen 
this before and would see it again.  
Miss Hourihan turned around, facing the board. As she counted to ten in her 
head, more slowly than might have been necessary, she traced the curves of her name 
with her eyes. 
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She turned back to face them. 
?Let?s talk about what we did over summer vacation.? 
Every day for a week, class began much the same way. The children who 
could engage were primarily interested in why her name was so strange, so wrong for 
a person, so clearly belonging to an object. The more they talked about it, the more 
they were fixated on it, and no amount of explanation from Miss Hourihan could 
satisfy them. It seemed to grow worse, not better, as the days passed. Though the 
students struggled to interact with each other, this was one standard around which 
they could rally. By Friday, Miss Hourihan was sure most of the class seemed to 
believe that Miss Hourihan was perpetrating some kind of horrible trick on them: she 
was the hour hand of the clock disguised as a teacher. She came to expect that the 
first fifteen minutes of the day would be lost to this subject, and always Josie would 
insist: You can?t be a teacher if you are part of a clock.  
When she finished bus line duty on Friday afternoon, Miss Hourihan went 
back to her classroom and let herself fall onto the plush purple beanbag in the reading 
corner. She had exercises to mark and reading lessons to plan, but for a long, she 
simply sat, taking up most of the child-size chair, her mind an exhausted blank. She 
had never been so tired. She felt as though she had been squeezed through the wringer 
her grandmother had used on laundry days. The teaching was difficult, yes, but that 
she could do. She?d already noticed what classroom management strategies didn?t 
work for these students, what ways of phrasing instructions produced results and 
which produced stares, or worse, tantrums. The world geography lesson had seemed 
to upset some students and the group work activity about the rainforest had been a 
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bust, but she would learn how to do these things. But how, she wondered as she 
listened to the fading sounds of the last of the carpool, how could she ever convince 
them that she was a person? 
On Sunday night before the start of the second week of class, Miss Hourihan 
looked over the syllabus for the year. In mid-November, the week before 
Thanksgiving break, were printed the words ?Telling Time.? Miss Hourihan put 
down her pen?she still insisted on fountain pens?and went to the hall closet. There 
was a canvas drop cloth on the bottom shelf that she used for various messy jobs: 
covering the floor when she was retouching the trim in the living room; testing out 
the baking soda vinegar volcano she had made for a lesson on geology. The sheet was 
stained, but clean, and smelled like baking soda and lavender sachets. Spreading the 
sheet on the floor, Miss Hourihan traced the largest circle she could, then started 
cutting. 
 
?Why are the desks wrong?? Bobby was standing in front of where his desk 
should have been, his arms crossed, his chin jutting out in anger. ?The desks are not 
supposed to be this way.? 
?Don?t worry,? Miss Hourihan said from her own desk at the front of the 
room. ?I just put them in a circle for now. In a little while, we?ll change them back to 
rows.? 
?How long is a little while?? 
Miss Hourihan had already learned the value of precision when speaking to 
Bobby. She checked her watch: five minutes until all the students were here, ten 
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minutes for announcements and pledge, and five minutes for what she planned next. 
?I would say not more than twenty-two minutes.? 
Bobby nodded, and sat. 
Once everyone was settled, announcements heard, pledge recited, Miss 
Hourihan reached into her ample tote bag. She removed the Tupperware container of 
leftover lentil soup and placed it in the bottom drawer of her desk. The Ogden Nash 
collection she laid on top of the desk, giving the drawing of Custard the Dragon on 
the cover a fond little pat. She?d been probably been silly to bring the book; it was 
highly unlikely any of these students would find anything to enjoy in the poems. The 
humor often came from incorrect use of language, which was only funny when you 
knew what the words were supposed to sound like. But it was a personal favorite, and 
she?d used this very edition in poetry units every year since she started teaching. Let 
her read it to complete silence, let no one laugh at a single pun, let them complain and 
tic if they must; there were some things she couldn?t give up. 
Usually, Miss Hourihan made sure that her supplies were arranged before 
class started, but today she hoped the suspense would keep them attentive, at least 
briefly, so she unpacked deliberately. As she did, she saw from the corner of her eye 
two hands go up. She knew that one belonged to Karl and the other to Josie. They 
were preparing to begin their inquisition into the nature of her being. She ignored 
them. When she reached the bottom of the bag, she pulled out a tape measure and the 
sheet, now cut into a circle and painted around the edges with numbers one through 
twelve.  
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She brought the sheet and the tape measure into the center of the circle of 
desks she had created that morning. With a flourish, she snapped out the sheet flat in 
the air and laid it on the ochre tiles.  
?Only seven more minutes, Miss Hourihan.? 
Miss Hourihan smiled at Bobby, who had his shins resting on his chair so he 
could lean over the desk toward her. His fingers gripped the edge of the desk like he 
was afraid he might fall.  
?Thank you, Bobby. I?m lucky to have someone who can help me keep an eye 
on the time. Now, please sit in your seat.?   
He lowered until his rear was hovering over the chair. When she continued 
gazing at him, he dropped down with a thud she thought sounded painful, though 
Bobby didn?t seem to mind.  
Josie and Karl still had their hands raised. Karl was getting anxious, rocking 
very slightly in his seat, occasionally lowering his hand, shaking it, and raising it 
again, as if it were a flashlight with dying batteries. Josie was utterly still, her arm 
locked at the elbow, her fingers spread as wide as they could go.  
  Miss Hourihan looked again at her watch. 8:21. Stretching out the tape 
measure to its full six feet, she clicked the button into place to keep the tape extended, 
then placed the metal square in the middle of the circle with the bright yellow tape 
pointing in between the four and the five. 
The class watched. Even Aaron had paused in his drawing of a whale to look 
at her. Patricia moaned softly, her usually rolling eyes stilled on the woman in the 
middle of the room.  
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Slowly, gently, Miss Hourihan lowered herself to the floor. Her knees 
creaked, and her lower back twinged. She lifted her arms above her head, pressing 
them to her ears as she had been instructed to do many years ago when she was 
learning to dive.  
?Look at me, children,? she said. Her voice sounded strange coming from the 
floor. ?This sheet is the face of the clock. This tape measure is pointing between the 
four and the five. That is the minute hand. I am pointing between the eight and the 
nine. I am the hour hand. It is eight twenty-two, and I am the hour hand.? 
Lying on the sheet, Miss Hourihan was suddenly very conscious of her body: 
the soft spread of her thighs and belly; the increasingly sloped angle of her shoulders; 
the raw-looking bunions on her feet at the middle point of the sheet-clock; the folds 
of skin around her neck that now fell away toward the center of the earth. She thought 
of the woman she had always imagined she would become, a woman who was tall 
and lovely, elegant and witty, successful, assured, beloved. For as long as she could 
remember, she had been poised on the cusp of becoming this self, never getting any 
father from or coming any closer to her, the woman?s vague shape flickering at the 
limit of her vision.   
Silence stretched on, fractured only by the ticking of the clock on the wall. 
Miss Hourihan counted the seconds, waiting for someone to speak, for someone to 
gasp in sudden comprehension, for the world to change, for the instant when she 
would know it had, for something, she didn?t know what, but at that moment, she felt 
she could wait forever.