I understood Cade’s hurt. I understood his mother’s stoicism. It was Candy who puzzled and worried me. Since Elias’s death she had gone nearly silent, slapping down paper and pencils for her children at the dining table each morning after breakfast, offering a few perfunctory lessons from a math or grammar book before sending them outside to play for the rest of the day. The meals she made were strange. For supper one night she served three canned vegetables and nothing else; the next she put together an elaborate feast of all of Elias’s favorite foods. Leela worked to engage her in the craft show project, bringing down boxes of half-sewn garden flags patterned like the Stars and Stripes, a concession to Candy’s crafting preferences; she would tell her daughter in a firm tone that they needed to be completed by a certain date. Candy, who had set up the sewing machine at one end of the dining table, would hammer them all out in an hour, working at a sweatshop pace, then toss the pile back into the box and hand it over. She took not an ounce of pleasure in the work, and her frenetic energy set me on edge. I gave her a wide berth, working apart from her as much as possible.
One morning, as I was on my knees in Candy’s garden, I saw a truck coming from a long way down the road, a small shimmering shape growing larger against the mountains that had gone blaze-orange below the tree line. At first I thought it might be Dodge’s, until it came close enough that its dark green color was apparent. I rose from my task—pulling the last of the carrots from the ground before snow buried the garden—and shaded my eyes with my hand, trying to discern the driver. When the strange truck pulled into the driveway and a child climbed out, I stayed to look but didn’t go over right away. A few feet away from me, TJ napped in the laundry basket, bundled in a thick sweater and shaded by a quilt pulled half over the top. I didn’t feel comfortable walking away from him, as small as he was. A pioneer woman might have, but my pioneer skills didn’t extend that far.
As the child from the car approached, I saw that both of the little boy’s hands were occupied with a giant plate covered in aluminum foil that reflected piercing rays of the sun. He looked up at the house in an uncertain way, then started toward it. Hurriedly I waved him over. With Candy’s boys where once I had reported them to her for their obnoxious behaviors, I didn’t dare now. They had begun flinching when she even reached over their shoulders to gesture how to do a math problem or find a state on a map. It was still silly to think she’d manhandle a neighbor’s child, but keeping kids away from her had turned into a gut instinct for me.
The little boy was perfectly combed, in a neat flannel shirt and corduroys. He handed over the heavy plate and said, “This is for you, Mrs. Powell.”
“Oh, I’m not Mrs. Powell. But I’ll make sure she gets it. Okay, buddy?”
He nodded and squinted in the sunlight. “Are you kin to her?”
“Kin? Yeah…well, I’m her sister-in-law. Her brother’s wife.” The boy nodded again, though I was sure he was too small to make sense of the connections. “Thanks.”
He glanced back toward the truck. In a reedy little voice he rattled out, “Our family would like to express our sincere condolences at the loss of your son and brother who valiantly served our nation. The Bible says, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ John Chapter fifteen, verse thirteen.”
I stared at him.
“We have you on our family prayer list for every morning.”
“Thank you.”
Abruptly he turned and walked back to the truck. There appeared to be a woman in the driver’s seat. I waved, and she returned it with a vague wave of her own. The boy climbed in, and she followed the half-circle drive around before going back down the road in the direction from which she had come.
A folded note taped to the top of the aluminum foil fluttered in the breeze. I opened it and read the handwriting.
Dear Olmsteads and Powells,
Our sincere condolences at the loss of your son and brother. While it has been years since we last saw Elias, we grieve with you just the same. He brought honor to our family. Without regard to our past differences we would like to extend the offer of any assistance you might need in this time of grieving. Lucia and I hope you won’t hesitate to call on us. God’s blessings on your family.
I peeked under the foil on my way into the house. Cookies, mostly chocolate chip, but also sugar and molasses, with a loaf of banana bread in the middle of the arrangement. It crossed my mind that this was the family Dodge had been openly threatening to us for months now, but in the weeks since Elias’s death he had dropped the subject entirely. I had assumed that he must have seen Randy at the funeral and realized the man bore his family no ill will; and while Dodge would never admit to being wrong, it made sense that Randy’s show of respect had shamed Dodge into silence. Whatever the reason, I was glad to have that particular worry gone, and pleased at the prospect of their mending the rift. In the kitchen I handed the plate over to Candy, who regarded it with suspicion.
“A kid dropped by with all this,” I told her. “Junior or Brent, I suppose.”
She raised an eyebrow, then opened and read the note. Without hesitation she opened the cabinet door under the sink and began dumping the contents of the plate into the trash.
“Whoa, hey,” I snapped at her. “Hold on. I think it was pretty nice of her, don’t you? Did you read that note at all?”
“Sure I did.”
She kept shoveling cookies into the trash. The plate was much too large for her to maneuver into the space, and the beagles snuffled around eagerly, gulping down cookies that missed the trash can. I slid around her and slammed the cabinet door shut, and she stood up straight to cast a dark glare on me. Her shoulders were as wide as Cade’s. Her long curly hair fanned behind them like a cape. I lifted my chin and held her gaze, willing myself not to let her call my bluff.
Leela came around the landing and into the kitchen. “What’s the—oh, my. Candy?”
I could feel Candy’s breath against my forehead. “Randy Olmstead’s family brought by some cookies,” I explained. “Candy’s not happy about it.”
For a long moment Leela said nothing. Then she said, “Well, Candy, if Jill wants the cookies, let her have ’em.”
“Can’t imagine the moment when we’d ever need their kind of help,” said Candy. “Somebody’d have to be dead or dying for those people ever to cross this threshold.”
“Somebody
“Not on my watch.”
I looked to Leela, who shrugged. A wave of frustration rippled through me, and I wished for Cade to be there so he could talk some sense into these people. He didn’t seem to bear his uncle’s family any particular ill will. But he wasn’t home, and if I had learned one thing by living there so far, it was that Cade’s family held a kind of sway over him that dwarfed his otherwise strong will. I wouldn’t be wise to test it.
Instead, I wrote a thank-you note to Randy’s family and put it in the mail the next day. I signed only my own name to it, but it was something, at least. A declaration that I was above the rest of the family’s squabbling. It felt good to write it—liberating—and it seemed like the reasonable, sane thing to do in the face of Candy’s erratic behavior and Leela’s stony silence. Sanity seemed like an especially valuable thing right now, one I ought to store away in case of a family shortage, like evaporated milk or Potato Pearls.
The ax broke. That was the problem that led me into the shed that day. It was a frigid morning and I couldn’t get warm; the furnace, I suspected, was failing, doing little more than blowing around the air heated by the living- room fireplace. For a long time I sat in front of the fire, watching TJ bat around toys on his play mat rigged with arches that suspended his rattles above his head. Since the night before, he had been tugging at his ear, the now- familiar sign of an impending ear infection.
