widows and orphans. Nina suspected that he went to court her. That was a sore point with Perry, so she never mentioned it. One day the Old Man came back, his shoulders stiffer than usual. I’m done trying to help that crazy witch, he’d said. And that was that—three generations of complicated neighborly history officially unraveled.
He didn’t look stiff now. He’d shrunk a little at her words and slumped in his chair. But soon he rallied, picked up the paper, shook it, set it back down and pointed to the radio. “You’d better get the clothes off the line.”
“I think Sill talks to her.” Nina’s eyes stung. “She won’t talk to me, you know. My own daughter.” Her voice seemed too loud, and she blinked. She pulled the dishtowel off her shoulder and turned to swipe it along the counter by the sink, collecting more crumbs. “I’m going to make coffee. Do you want some?” They both needed something bracing. He loved her coffee, and he’d take it as it was meant—a peace offering.
The Old Man shook the newspaper again. “No, thanks.”
She opened the coffee canister and measured out a quarter pot’s worth. The smell made the kitchen brighter. “Oh, what the heck,” he said. “Okay.” So Nina kept going, counting out a full pot at twelve heaping scoops. She liked it strong, and so did he.
“She’ll come around,” the Old Man said to Nina’s back. “The girl won’t find what she needs over there.”
Nina drew a breath, sliding her shoulder blades down her back. “I just can’t believe he’s dead. That it happened. Do you remember that time at the creek when the kids were little and Lance almost drowned? He was only four. He did drown. I think his heart stopped. Remember? I can’t stop thinking about that day. Sill doesn’t remember anything about it…but why would she? None of us spoke of it after.”
She couldn’t tell if he was listening. He tapped his fingers against his chest, a nervous tic for as long as she’d known him, which was almost half of her life. When the smell of brewed coffee filled the room, she poured them each a mug. Ted Waite was back on the radio, talking about being alert, being careful. The Old Man shoved his chair back from the table as she set the mug in front of him.
“Sherwin, why didn’t we ever speak of what happened? At the creek, I mean. I don’t understand. It was so…was it out of respect for Rose, or some sort of, I don’t know, some sense of shame that we let it happen in the first place? Or fear? Was it too close for comfort?”
She slurped at the coffee and stood with one hand clasped behind her neck. Though she’d been horrified that Lance was killed fighting in that strangely muffled, faraway war, a part of her was not surprised. Rose had snatched him from the maw when he was a child, but all she’d done was buy some extra time. They were followed by a shadow. Nina believed this with a conviction as strong as any she had, and her convictions, though they’d narrowed over the years, had deepened apace. But she’d never say aloud what she thought about Rose to anyone, even the Old Man. She knew how it would sound.
Her questions sank into silence. The Old Man cleared a gob of phlegm from his throat, spat into a paper napkin, and took a sip of coffee. Perry would be amazed to hear her speak like this to his father. Her husband thought, because she was pushing him to take over, that she resented the Old Man as much as he did. Well, she didn’t have a buffer, like Perry did. She was the buffer. And most days, she and Perry passed like ships—with him, it was all logistics and whispered dethronings. But the Old Man was around and underfoot, peppering her day with conversation. They talked more than Perry would ever know. Both men would be shocked at the way she talked to the other. Constant daily betrayals.
“I had a friend in Korea,” he told her. “Joe Carnahan.” Not again. Another one of his rambling war stories. She stared into the black brew in her mug. “Got shot up outside of Pusan. He was a good guy. For more than a week I thought he was dead. Where do people get buried in a place like that? I mean, in New York City. That’s where he was from. It’s all I thought about. But it turned out he’d lost a leg and they shipped him home.” He’d never heard from Joe again. That’s how war was. People who were like your own flesh, then an empty space, and it all kept going. The names changed, but the purpose didn’t. They were Americans, that was all they were. “Common ground,” he said. “That’s what we fight for.”
She put her empty mug into the dishwasher and shut the door with a click.
The Old Man had trailed off. Ordinarily, she would say something about sacrifice or bravery or how the world used to be, but he didn’t seem to be waiting for that. He looked at his fingertips, pushing them together in a steeple shape. Perry and his Old Man would duke it out until the Old Man finally relented and let Perry make some decisions, and it would be up to her, Nina, to referee, to make sure it didn’t implode, or (and here’s where the tricky part came in) that it did. A necessary tumult before resolution.
“More coffee?” she asked, feeling her failure in the question. She would make a special trip this week to talk to Pastor Bowen. And she’d take Sill with her.
The Old Man stood, a struggle in the way he pushed himself against the wood table. His bones were worrying him. He crumpled the snotty napkin onto his dirty plate and pushed it, not unkindly, onto the counter next to Nina. Then he told her it was pointless to dwell on the past, reminded her about the sheets on the line, and limped out the door, probably to corral his son.
Wind pushed at the kitchen curtains. Nina grabbed the laundry basket from its spot near the back door and stepped outside.
She felt a sheet, pulled a handful to her nose, and deemed it dry enough. Light blue cloth slid off the line into her plastic basket, and a queen-sized vista opened in front of her where there had been percale. The same view she’d seen while gardening and hanging laundry for the past seventeen years: the downslope with its scratchy grass, the start of the fields, the big sky. There was the storm, all right. A heavy bank of clouds in the west, miles away.
She felt a prick in the air, a twingy feeling on her forearms and the back of her neck. The storm front cued in the rest of her senses. A breeze brought a smell of manure and minerals on a whiff of super-oxygenated air. Perry’s tractor grew louder—he must be pulling it up near the shed. Once he cut the engine an expectant silence fell. She pictured him sitting in the high seat, not yet moving, listening for her as she listened for him. Here we go again, stumbling through the motions and then pulling up, startled, to find ourselves in the thick of it. In the thickets.
If someone asked her whether she knew what to do in the event of an emergency she would laugh and say of course. But that’s not what Louise Logan asked her, or Rose or Sill. How will we bear it? On the horizon heavy clouds dipped low toward the ground, and then dipped again. She saw a little upside-down peak form, an exploratory finger, soon sucked back into the larger mass. It emerged again, and then again, larger each time until the peak became a funnel, dipping down, swirling back into itself. She’d often seen them from a distance. Once she’d watched two funnels emerge from the same cloud, a dark ribbon and its shadow, twisting together, receding from view. This one wasn’t receding, it was heading toward them—far enough away, but growing. A blurry gray-black, churning and strengthening.
Nina felt a pang in her stomach—she’d completely forgotten to eat lunch. There was something about the shape’s quickness, the darting of it, that reminded her of a child at play. What if Sill wasn’t with Rose? What if she was somewhere else, in the path and unprotected? Nina ran into the kitchen. The Old Man had the back panel off the transistor radio and was rummaging in the drawer for batteries. Perry came through the front door just as she set down the basket and turned to the phone. Here he was, finally, her husband, his eyes squinty and his face red. He asked for Sill. “She’s with Rose,” Nina said, and Perry nodded. The phone line was dead. His hands dangled at his sides as they always did when he was indoors, knobby and rough.
“Sill’s gotta be with Rose,” Nina repeated. The Old Man agreed, though she had no idea how he would know—he scarcely acknowledged his granddaughter most days. Perry looked at them both blankly, and the Old Man headed to the bathroom, grabbing his belt buckle as he went down the hall.
She