had given many good pups.
Now, outside the window, the sunset was doing the same thing it had done that day when she was ten. It gave the open landscape a golden glow that faded and tarnished and deepened to orange, then to a color that was fragile and plumy—that old piece of coal, lingering. The shadows rose up from the roots of the grass. There were no lights on in the living room. When it was finally dark, the heating pad slipped off her shoulder and as she reached up to catch it, the pain came back—the clenched soreness across her shoulders and neck. She heard the screen door bang on the back porch. Grandpa was coming in. She leaned forward to get up, but it hurt too much, so she leaned back into the chair. She heard Grandpa come in the back door and click on the light in the kitchen. Then he padded through the kitchen until he stood in the doorway of the living room in his sock feet.
“’S dark,” he said.
We didn’t have the same glowering sunset that evening on our farm, just the blankness of night snuffing out a cloudy day. It had been the kind of dim day that didn’t feel like day anyway, but like some outer province of night. We had an early dinner, and afterward Dad and I were excused from the dishwashing. We carried our gear to the car, then trekked across the barnyard. The calf named Kat was being weaned, and she’d been shut in a stall in the barn for a week already, bawling day and night for her mother. Now she went quiet when we came into the barn. From the shadowy corner of the stall, she watched Dad pour grain into her trough, and then she turned a circle—as if looking for an exit—and looked at the trough again. We turned out the light and left. As we reached the car, her woeful crying resumed.
We picked up my classmate Ryan Rutledge on the other side of Russellville, then continued out on Route C. I showed Ryan my new hiking boots and their tiny, zippered pockets, which, I explained, were big enough to hold two quarters each, or a fair number of movie tickets.
“Why?” Ryan asked.
“Why what?”
“Why would you put movie tickets in your boots?”
Outside Craig Linhardt’s house, we gathered with the other Cub Scouts, and soon the coon dogs were let loose, and they milled among us, all noses and feet, and then all of us—dogs and men and a whole string of boys—went into the woods, following Craig’s dad. My dad walked behind us, and in between the two dads was a total of seven Cub Scouts.
We walked through mud and passed black trunks of oaks and hickories. We each had our own flashlight, but even the most powerful of these barely penetrated the night. Craig’s dad had a different kind of light—a hissing flame that bloomed from a silver reflector strapped to his forehead. This left his hands free for a rifle.
We stopped in a clearing of clumpy grass. The dads had us all turn out our flashlights, and we stood there in the dark, silent, listening to the baying of the dogs far away.
“Can you hear,” Craig’s dad asked, “how their pitch has changed? Like they’re a little bit more excited?”
We resumed moving forward, listening to the dogs, following them, dodging low branches, trying to avoid brambles, splashing through soggy spots. We tromped onward, going around the side of this little hill, up that grassy draw, onward, onward. The night was moist but not foggy. I’d never been in these woods in the daytime, and so to traverse them at night was a strange introduction. We paused at a barbed-wire fence—a property line—and saw in the distance the light of a house.
But however fast or far we went, the dogs remained distant, which meant they had not treed a raccoon—or anything, for that matter—and were either chasing something elusive and fast, or were simply on the trail of nothing at all.
Eventually their baying became more scattered and halting, and then we could hear that they were approaching us, and suddenly they appeared among us again and quieted, and one of them laid down, right there, and panted. Which is to say, the hunt was over.
At home, Elizabeth was on the phone. She wasn’t supposed to be—not only was she grounded, but she should have been studying for tomorrow. That was the agreement she’d made with Mom. She and Mom had argued all through dinner about whether she could go to Catherine’s house on Friday. But now she’d been thinking about Wayne, how he’d given her roses on Halloween, and how he’d been dressed up as a hoodlum, with his hair slicked back, and had looked even cuter than usual. And once she started thinking about Wayne, how could she not call him?
She’d been talking to him for half an hour when Susan opened the door to their room, saw Elizabeth on the phone, then backed out and closed the door.
“Shit,” Elizabeth said. “Susan’s going to tell Mom I’m on the phone.”
Sure enough, within moments Elizabeth heard the kitchen extension pick up.
“Elizabeth, how long have you been on the line?” Mom asked.
“Five minutes.”
“It’s time to end it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m putting a one-minute timer on the microwave and when it goes off, that’s it.” Then Mom hung up.
“Good evening, Mrs. Jackson,” Wayne said, knowing she was gone.
“This is a crock,” Elizabeth said.
Exactly a minute later, Mom came on again. “Now!” she said.
“Okay!” Elizabeth said.
“I said one minute!” Mom said.
Then there was a clunk, and another clunk, a scraping sound, and a strange kind of chanting—like a two-year-old having a parade.
“What in the hell is that?” Wayne asked.
“I don’t . . . oh . . . Jesus . . . ,” Elizabeth said.
The kitchen phone had a twenty-foot cord between the receiver and the handset, and Mom was dragging the handset around the kitchen, like a dog on a leash, while chanting “Time! To! Get off the phone! Time! To! Get off the phone!”
When Elizabeth got down there, she was still doing it.
“I hung up, all right?” Elizabeth yelled.
Mom stopped. She put the phone back on the hook. The long cord contracted and coiled.
“Why’d you have to embarrass me like that?” Elizabeth asked.
“You broke our agreement,” Mom said calmly.
“So? I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Being grounded means no calls.”
“So ground me some more!”
Mom abruptly sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Then her face changed. It turned red, it clenched. She started crying—and talking at the same time. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” she howled. “We had an agreement and that didn’t mean anything to you! You wouldn’t . . . I do everything! Everything! I cook everything, I clean everything, I do the laundry, I sew your clothes, and, I, and I, and you don’t even listen to me—I’m in the dark with you—and I can’t do it!” Then it was just crying. Under the bright fluorescent light of the kitchen.
Elizabeth stood there. She felt shame and heat. She set her jaw. Then she turned. She went back upstairs. She walked into the room she and Susan shared. She closed the door. She turned off the overhead light. She sat on the bed. Susan must have been hiding downstairs, because she wasn’t here.
Elizabeth knew she caused Mom and Dad pain. She knew she disobeyed and broke curfew. And she felt trapped by who she was—the person who did those things, who hurt the parents who were so good to her—but she didn’t really know how to change. She was a bad daughter.
She decided to study, to put her frustration into work. After a while, Susan came in and started getting ready for bed. They didn’t say anything to each other. Susan went into the bathroom and shut the door. Elizabeth