Nina knew the sound of that old junker. Stupidly, she hadn’t checked the side of the house where it was usually parked. Rose had just gone to town, out driving, running errands like any normal person—she didn’t want Nina’s charity.
Nina leaped up from the table. Her chair clattered onto the floor, note fluttering after it. The pen she’d found in a drawer near the phone rolled off the table toward a crack by the baseboards. She grabbed her tote bag and rushed out the back door, rounding the house and cutting through shrubs toward the low wall that separated the yard from the fields. Then she chucked the bag over the wall and scrambled after it into the corn. Behind her, the hayloft leaned at a funny angle and a bird minced from one corner of the eaves to another.
Nina half-jogged home, only pausing when she hit the base of the hill. The Brown house was the only place for miles with a view—a sloping elevation starting just past the old carriage barn and leveling off twenty feet above ground. Who had the luxury, in the old days, of using horses for any purpose other than working the fields? For that was how Perry’s great-grandfather, Elias Brown, had done it: hitched up the horses to push dirt into this homemade hill. Then he packed it down hard. Earth heaped as a pedestal, out of hubris or spiritual symbolism or just a desire to look down at the neighbors. The house appeared reproachful to Nina. She felt utterly ridiculous, dodging Rose like that. It was cowardly. She took a breath, not ready to go inside. The Old Man would be there and Sill wouldn’t. Nina walked into the yard, stepped into her garden shed and clicked the latch tight.
The shed smelled of good, clean dirt. It was the one place entirely her own—her labels on the neatly ordered shelves, her carefully chosen seed packets sealed in airtight plastic containers. Perry and his Old Man argued about how to handle their hundreds of acres, but the vegetables that they ate most every night—those were hers. Nina puttered to collect herself, letting her sweat cool and dry. She pulled a container of seed packets from the shelf and flipped through, planning what to sow once the rabbit fence was fixed, feeling steadied by each decision she made.
Slipping a seed packet into her pocket, she picked up a trowel and went to the garden. The southeast corner of the fence had succumbed to the thumping feet of hungry rabbits. Nina’s carrots and crunchy romaine were the first to go. Now they’d had most of her baby spinach and lemon cucumbers. She pulled the damaged plants, tossing them into a bucket. Then she sat in the cleared space. It was still humid, and the sky felt a shade less bright. The few sprouts the rabbits had left behind bent toward the dirt—a sign of threatening weather. Nina crouched to look at the indentation her butt had made. She poked a dozen holes into each moon shape, sprinkling in some arugula seeds and patting the dirt back into place, and then pulled out the hose to soak the soil. Arugula was peppery and bitter. Perry and the Old Man pushed it around on their plates, but she and Sill liked it, and best of all, it grew like a weed—the rabbits let it be.
In the laundry room, she slung her braid away from her hot neck, peeled off her dirty sweatshirt, and washed her hands and face. The lunch hour had come and gone. She strode to the kitchen, pulled out the orange juice and paused, listening for sounds upstairs. Nothing. She took a long drink, cold and sweet from the carton.
The downstairs bathroom door bashed against the wall. “Storm’s coming,” the Old Man said, shuffling in.
“Zipper,” she replied, setting the carton back on its shelf. Ever since he’d been struck by lightning out near the Infamous Elm, he’d been slipping—he had walked out of the bathroom once with his pecker still hanging out of his pants. But aside from that one thing, she didn’t mind the change. He was humbler now, and didn’t act like he owned the world.
“Seen Sill?” she asked. Sill had claimed cramps this morning and begged Nina to let her call in sick to school. Nina had agreed, though that excuse, like all the others, was wearing thin. At first she had indulged Sill’s grief, but her daughter had to learn how to stand against it and keep going—and if that meant Nina being brusque or cold, well, so be it.
The Old Man shook his head, clacking his cane against the table legs as he settled into a chair, and gave a phlegmy cough. “I can feel it coming.”
She’d had enough of kitchens for one day. Nina went up to the second floor without another word to her father-in-law. As she’d expected, Sill wasn’t in her room. There had been no sign of her at Rose’s; maybe they’d gone to town together. Nina sat on Sill’s bed, running her hand over the pink-flowered comforter cover.
How will she bear it? she’d whispered to Perry, meaning Rose of course—but she’d meant Sill too. On a corkboard above Sill’s dresser was a photo of Lance. He leaned his back against a tree trunk and looked into the camera with his head tilted. The expression in his eyes—a soft velvety brown—was blatantly seductive. Looking at it now, Nina knew: They slept together. That bolt of knowledge made her scan his face for deceit, but she saw just a boy, looking seductively at her, Nina, with a question in his eyes that she couldn’t decipher. Thank God Sill hadn’t gotten pregnant. She pulled the comforter cover into her fist and smoothed it out again.
It would be necessary for Perry to take over Rose’s land—what she’d seen today made that clear. If the Browns didn’t get it, the bank would. Perry would require Nina’s firm hand on his shoulder to see it through, just as he needed her encouragement to stand up to the Old Man. She took a breath before she stood, and then fluffed Sill’s pillows.
Downstairs the Old Man still sat in the kitchen, listening to the radio. The weatherman, Ted Waite, recited a list of the counties on alert. Perry had known the man a bit, years before, when he went by “Eddie” and sauntered through town picking up girls. Nina thought the radioman still sounded like a philanderer, even now, with that wide, shallow smile in his voice. She turned the volume down.
“How about fixing Sill’s bike? The front wheel has some bent spokes.” She was usually able to get the Old Man to do things for her, though she didn’t push. First she’d ask him to do the bike, and if he balked at that she’d move onto the thing she really wanted—the rabbit fence. She’d learned how to handle her father-in-law through trial and error, and unlike Perry, she didn’t take one stone for a whole wall.
He stuck his pinky finger into his ear and then withdrew it for inspection. “I’ll take a look.”
“That’d be great.” She opened the dishwasher and started unloading.
“Not today.”
“Okay, whenever you can.” Perry planned to ask his father again about his idea to try some livestock. She’d urged him to—it was past time that he took over officially, and the way his father was stringing him along would only bring about more bitterness. The Old Man coughed. He’d sit there for hours, rattling the newspaper and working his post-nasal drip. If she turned around now, she’d hurl something, or scream.
“We’ve gotta get ready,” he said.
Toast crumbs littered the sink. She rinsed them down the drain and wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “I know.” She had the storm routine down pat—they’d done it often enough, when tornadoes had cut close, but ultimately passed them by. Nina would open windows to give the wind leeway. Then she’d help the Old Man to the root cellar and they’d sit, breathing the dank air until the battery-operated radio gave the all clear.
The confident voice on the radio faded out and a jingle for an auto body chain came on, offering an oil change and brake check special. For no reason at all, the neat pyramid of canned corn she’d seen in Rose’s sewing room popped into her head: the only tidy thing in the whole house.
“Sherwin, I went to Rose’s this morning.”
The Old Man set down the paper, waiting.
“She wasn’t there. The place isn’t…she’s not…I cleaned the fridge.” Sill would be with Rose now, maybe eating lunch—did they sit and talk and cry about Lance?
The Old Man brushed his hand over his head and touched the tobacco tin in his left shirt pocket. He had done his part to ruin the friendship between their two families. She’d never asked what his regrets were. When Theo died and Rose was alone with her boy and