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It was our one big family laugh. The brisket itself, made with ketchup and one too many onion soup
packets’perhaps my mother had not seen that she’d already put one in’was salty and not her best. We all piled
condiments on top’cranberry sauce and a vegan relish we called ‘cornfield caviar?’then we drank a lot of water
the rest of the night.
At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I
became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness
drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time. When afternoon came, I tried to go for little walks’one should
always get out of the house by two p.m., my mother once advised’and I would sometimes take Blot, though once
we ran into the garbage truck still trawling the roads. Blot hated the garbage truck, feeling, I think, that the men
were taking away things that rightfully belonged to him, if not to all dogs in general. He barked wildly as if he
were saying,You bastards, we’re going to find out where you live and come take all your garbage and see how
?32 312163 3
you like that! I was often back by two-thirty,buy runescape money, returning to my room until dinner. I would come down,runescape power leveling, not helping
my mother, and find a foaming stew pot, vesuvial and overflowing, because with her bad eyesight she had put
baking soda in it instead of cornstarch, or once, I discovered, she had made little salads and put them in the
ceramic dog dishes.
‘Mom, these are the dog dishes,’ I said, pointing out the little dog heads printed on them.
Indignation tensed the muscles of her face, but she said nothing.
Once she shouted up to me and I had to come down and see what was the matter.
‘You and your fancy food,’ she said. She had taken the sushi I’d brought home on the bus and left it on the
counter, then accidentally knocked the wasabi onto the floor. Whereupon Blot had automatically lapped it up
and,flyff money, startled by the sensation, which he construed only as pain and heat, began to howl and tear up and run
around the house. He attacked his water dish so urgently that it too fell over, and so I took him outside, where he
ate snow’what little there was’and drank from a puddle. It took him an hour to settle down. The remark about
fancy food, however, lingered longer. I had once gone out to dinner with my mother and ordered cabernet
sauvignon, and instead of objecting that I was underage, she’d said,buy runescape money, ‘Oh, fancy, fancy.’
I read, flopped across my bed in my old room, its pink walls and white trim a comforting peppermint candy
womb, as snow at last did begin to pile up outside. Occasionally lightning flashed again in the middle of a
blizzard. What planet was this’ The sky purpled, and roaring bursts of light seemed briefly to set fire to the snow
as if it were the dusty landscape of a moon. Tree branches clawed into the soggy wool of the sky. I remained the
nerdy college girl under siege of the weather, my days full of books that were rabbit holes of escape. Christmas
music from the radio downstairs, playing through all twelve days of it, wafted up: ‘Rejoice, rejoice,’ sounded
like ‘Read Joyce, read Joyce?’and so I did, getting a head start on my Brit Lit. ‘Emmanuel ?’ I made my way

Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for itsplonk and plummet. I wanted to
say, ‘Remember the time ?’ But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I
would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it,aion power leveling, and Robert
?31 312163 3
would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with
him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable
to the talk, which is also effortless.
We found more stones and tossed them. ‘A stone can’t drown,’ said my brother finally. ‘It’s already drowned.’
‘You been reading poetry?’ I smiled at him.
‘I’ve just been thinking.’
‘A dangerous thing.’
‘A little goes a long way.’
‘A little’s a dangerous thing. But so is a lot. And so is none.’ I paused. ‘It’s all a minefield.’
‘Are you high?’ asked my brother.
I almost skipped a stone. It wanted to. I could feel it,rappelz rupees, the desire of the stone. ‘If only,’ I sighed. I threw a stone
way out left past the old fish hatchery, toward the tennis meadow. There was actually an old tennis court on our
property, built by the original owners of the house. It had long been broken up with reedy weeds,aion power leveling, had reverted
almost completely to ad hoc prairie, though if one walked through there were still cracked pieces of concrete
underfoot and on opposite sides two old chipped white posts for a net. In my lifetime no one had ever played
tennis here. It seemed a ghostly glimpse of an old affluence that once protected the place, a counter to the signs
of the old poverty’outhouses and stick pumps’that underlay most of the farms and houses nearby.
I threw another stone. And at that we headed back to the house. New snow fell silently through the sky until an
updraft whistled in and caused the flakes to go up, as in a shaken-up snow dome. Robert had worked as a camp
counselor for part of the previous summer and now began to sing. ?’I know a song that gets on everybody’s
nerves, everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves. I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, and this is how
it goes: I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves ?” We arrived back home damp and pink looking in the
vestibule mirror, though the mirror was petaled with my mother’s reminder Post-its, which made our faces look
momentarily like flowers in a kids’ play. My mother had baked a noodle kugel and instead of turkey had made a
Christmas brisket, and we all sat down to eat. She brought the hot brisket in on a platter from the kitchen and,
standing behind me, swooped it onto the table, barely missing my head. ‘Duck,’ she ordered me as she did this,
and I let my head fall to one side.
‘What is that?’ asked my brother.
I stared at him hopelessly.
‘You’re the son of a Jewish mother,’ said my dad,rappelz gold, ‘and you don’t recognize brisket?’
‘I do recognize brisket,’ he said. ‘But I thought she said it was duck.’

‘No,runescape money, actually this year I’ve been part of a program that does deer-condom distribution.’
‘Excellent!’ I was working on a laugh that was more than my usual pleased grunt, but all I had right now was a
kind of blast that culminated in a bleat.
We continued walking on the edge of the icy road, past a stand of birches that in the distance looked like my
mother’s cigarettes stubbed out in the dirt, barely smoked. My brother’s boy’s life seemed lonely and hard to me.
He still had one snaggletooth that poked out of his smile. This was because there had been only enough
orthodontia money for one of us, so it went to the daughter, whose looks would matter (wasted on me! a
smileless girl I felt sure no man would ever desire’not deeply). I got the braces. He got the chores. The
expectations that he help my dad around the farm were so much greater than any that had been laid upon me, and
so I could see his life was a little harder than mine, though he was a good-looking boy, bright in a general way,
and with many friends. As a young kid his plans were entrepreneurial. Once, years ago, he’d drawn up a design
for a hotel chain,rs money, and believing his greatest competitor would be the Holiday Inn, he decided to name it in an
opposing,runescape money, competitive spirit: Normal Night Out. The Normal Night Out Hotel.
He had, however, the same loneliness in him that I did, though he had always been my mother’s favorite. Where
had that gotten him’ My mother’s love was useless.
We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths
terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had
never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the
surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future.
We hiked down past the copse of sycamore and oak (as children, animating some dormant urban fear, we had
witlessly shrieked, ‘The copse! The copse!’ and raced through the underbrush, thrilled by our own concocted,
dreadless terror). Now Robert and I weaved among the piss elms toward the old fish hatchery, which in winters
of the past we would have skated on; it was a former nineteenth-century mill pond that had long ago lost its falls,
though the old paddle wheel still leaned against a tree, coated with squirrel shucks. Sometimes we’d tobogganed
down the snowy trail all the way to the hatchery, where now there was no snow at all, just the matted hard grass
and dirt and the dried, icing stalks of angelica and milkweed and bee balm. My brother liked to fish at the
hatchery sometimes, even in winter, sometimes even in the stream, even if the fish were really now just trash
fish, and even though it was stupid to ice fish in a stream. But summers down this path I had always liked, and
when the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him,
the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpah movie I’d never seen but had read
about once in a syndicated article in theDellacrosse Sunday Star. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing
their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a
part y barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sunsetting
light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of Straw Dogs.
But bugs were the thing that drove us back.Flies as big as raping ducks! we used to say. Mosquitoes with tiger-
striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their
spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me,
concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets,buy warcraft gold, they were sinisterly contrapted; they
craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. Once I whacked Robert’s back, seeing a
giant one there, and killed five, all bloody beneath his shirt.

EverQuest 2 Brigand Guide

44 Desperate Thrust 61 Damage attack + def
346 melee damage
debuff + decreases self
Decreases def if target and
def
caster by 12.5
57 Re voke 78 Frontal attack + parry
383 – 63 9 melee damage
debuff
Decreases parry by 51
58 Desparing Thrust 79 Damage attack + def
522 melee damage
debuff + decreases self
Decrease target and self
defense
defense by 17.4

These are just misc. damage skills that can be used from any position. They are all pretty good damage and are a good example of why brigand is known for its quick and numerous attacks. As you can see, two of the skills are on seperate timers at Tier 5. In terms of usefulness, Waylay is by far the most useful with its 20 sec. recast timer and good damage and debuff. The other skill, Desperate Thrust is on a 30 sec. timer and it decreases both your defense and the targets defense. Waylay should be one of the first adept3’s that you get and you can hold of on the other two until you get some of your quick recast damage skills upgraded first. You should get Revoke adept3Atlantica Online Gold right at level 57 as well and most likely Desparing Thrust at 58 because you should have more than enough time to save up rares by this level.

Self-buffs
13 Street Smarts 1
Agi/Str Self buff Increases Str by 9.9
concentration
Increases Agi by 14.8
13 Rash Advance 1
Increase attack
Increases
concentration
/decrease defense
Pierce/Slash/Range by 5.6
Damage Proc
Decreases def by 3.9
30% chance to inflict 15
melee damageAtlantica Power Leveling and interrupt
17 Self Preservation 37 power Lower hateAtlantica Gold self buff Decreases attack speed of
caster by 10%
5% chance on attack to
decrease threat by 131
18 Fancy Footwork 0 Increase Parry and def /
Increases parry and def by
Decrease attack
5.1

no pfeffer-n’sse, no kringle from Racine’that I wondered why we had bothered. Perhaps my mother, the keeper
of ritual, had lost interest in this ostensibly Christian custom now that we had grown, and my father didn’t really
know how to take over. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt’ On the other
hand, my mother had given me a carefully wrapped present of a pearl necklace and watched, teary-eyed, as I
opened it. ‘Every woman should have a pearl necklace,’ she said. ‘When I was your age I got one.’ From my
father, I knew. And now,cheap warcraft gold, with no man in my life,cheap eve online isk, even though I was only twenty, she would be the one to bestow
this artifact of womanhood, this rite of passage, this gyno-noose, upon me. That I might in fact never have an
occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never
occurred to her. I think she saw it as a kind of ticket off the farm and out into the world, whereverthat was.
‘Thanks, Mom,’ I said, and kissed her cheek, which was simultaneously powdery and damp. I thrust the
velveteen box of pearls high, as if making a toast. ‘Here’s to Jesus,’ I said.
My mom looked at me from a great and concerned distance. Their present to Robert was a handheld instant star
and constellation identifier.
Another flurry of thunderclouds passed by overhead and hail came pounding down on our roof, and down the
chimney, crackling in the fireplace as if to mock the sound of fire and then bouncing out from the hearth onto the
wood floor. It was as if I had unstrung my mother’s pearls and just flung them around.
Afterward we sat around and watched TV. Only once do I remember our going to church on Christmas’the
Norwegian Lutheran church in town. My father had cast his WASP eye around at the stained-glass windows and
their bright, jellied scenes and designs,l2 power leveling, and then murmured, perhaps recalling his churchier past or struggling
against some ancestral Puritan pride, ‘I think that’s an original Koshkonong window. Or, wait a minute, let me
?28 312163 3
see, maybe it’s not?’ and my mother had whispered in a fond hiss, ‘Let’s face it, Bo: You know nothing about
the goyim.’
‘There’s lots of strange weather all around the country,’ my dad said now, sitting down to join us.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, a little frightened. Like a child,eve isk, I still trusted him to know all.
‘Well, there are a lot of storms in odd places and high winds?’he slowed down to subdue his own dark
report?’and eerie calms ?’
‘Eerie calms?’ I asked.
‘There’s a pregnant pause outside Kenosha that’s scaring the pants off ‘em.’
‘Dad!’ And I laughed, to please him.
At four o’clock, with the sun just about set, my brother and I went outside for a walk, and we slid around with
our shoes on the new ice. It had been sunny enough before noon so that my mother had put laundry out, and now
in the light wind it billowed from her clotheslines, snapping the ice from its threads like the sails of an arctic
whale ship. How many Christmases had we ever been out without boots’ Not many.
‘How are Mom and Daddoing?’ I asked my brother.

table. The food is ready.’
My father had more of a sense of humor than my mother. ‘Just because I’m hard of hearing,’ he said to her now,
smiling, ‘doesn’t mean you’re not mumbling!’ Yet it was his sense of adventure she had had to sign on for long
ago, good-naturedly,warcraft gold, and in reluctant love, and he had taken her on something of a journey, out here to the
country, to this farm. But she had been game. At least at first.
‘Oh, well, someday maybeI’ll open a restaurant,cheap star trek online credits,’ she said now, sighing brightly, which seemed about as happy
as she got’a sigh with some light in it. She then added a remark that typified the sort that filled me with loathing
for her. ‘You know, with the new year approaching, I’ve come to realize I’ve done nothing these past decades
but devote my energies to the interests of others. So, soon’ I’m going to start focusing on myself.’
‘Well, before you get started, darling,maple power leveling,’ said my father, ‘could you please pass the syrup?’
Once when I was a kid my father planted ten acres of corn and rye and then midsummer plowed just the rye,
?27 312163 3
making a graphic ribbon effect through the rolling fields. ‘This would be best seen by air,’ said my dad. The
whole reason he had become a farmer is that he thought it would be fun. And so he hired a guy from Minneapolis
to take an aerial photo of it, and we stuck it up on the fridge with little spud magnets. It looked beautiful’the gold
of the mown rye striping the green corn and both undulating through like a performing pair of lovebird dolphins.
This, I pretended, was a picture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had thought she was marrying a college
president’s son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she’d followed him. She stayed with him wherever the hell it
was they were going. She was like a stickleback fish caught inland as the glacier retreated and the rivers’the only
access to the sea’disappeared. She would have to make do, in this landlocked lake of love. I knew, as she had
mentioned it, that she’d thought there’d be money’he’d grown up in a house with columns’but she hadn’t
realized there was none: the house was owned by the college. Even when she and my father came to Dellacrosse
and bought our old brick house, with its falling-apart shed and barn but its flowerbeds gorgeous with pansies and
impatiens, she didn’t understand that those particular flowers were annuals, and so she waited for them to return
the next year, feeling dashed and betrayed when they didn’t. Another mirage! But eventually she learned to plant
her own. And for a while she was a pro. Until she got too tired. That was when she installed mirrors in the
flowerbeds, slowly learning the art of mirage herself.
After our late breakfast the winds picked up, and soon there was a thunderstorm, the sky yellowish and the
clouds filled with the crunch and rip of lightning. The leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden
downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was
so poor, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature
dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.
Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual’no hamentashen,buy sto credits,

‘Is there an echo in here?’ I said.
‘Well, tell us,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t just sass us to death.’
?26 312163 3
‘It hasn’t really begun. It’s a babysitting job. But there isn’t a baby yet.’
‘Oh, yes, one of those,’ said my father, amused.
‘What do you mean, no baby yet?’ asked my mother, who looked puzzled. My father was grinning ear to ear, as
if to say,buy silkroad gold,Now here’s a how-de-do.
‘Therewill be one. Or should be. In January,’ I explained.
‘The mother’s pregnant?’
‘Well, the birth mother is pregnant, and the woman I’m working for is going to adopt the kid.’
There was silence all around, even from my dad,cheap rs money, as if this were a situation to be considered for all its various and
deep sadnesses.
‘It’s a good thing,’ I added. ‘This girl’she could never be a good mother. And the lady who’s hiring me’ She’s
kind of neat. She’s nice and pretty and she owns a fancy restaurant in town.’
‘That’s why she needs you,’ said my mother, concerned. ‘She’s too busy for a child.’
I was about to try to defend Sarah when my father asked with unfeigned interest,wow power leveling, ‘What restaurant?’
‘Le Petit Moulin,’ I said.
My mother turned and made a knowing face. ‘Afineschmecker running a place for other fineschmeckers.’
My father smiled broadly. ‘Oh, I remember her. Very nice woman.’ My mother turned her back to us, flipping
the flapjacks and throwing the latkes into hot oil, refusing to let go of her skepticism regarding the whole matter.
My father continued. ‘She would come and check out those potatoes as if they were diamonds. But she would
sometimes take the ones with a bit of rot in them anyway, knowing that once the rot part was cut out the rest of
the potato would be sweeter than most. Smart lady.’
‘Why can’t she have her own children?’ asked my mother,maple story mesos, continuing in her doubt.
‘Mom, I don’t know. I can’t ask. I hardly know her.’
‘What about her husband?’
‘Whatabout her husband?’
‘Who is he?’
It was a little surprising even to me that I knew so little about him. ‘I think he’s probably a professor of some
sort, but I’m not sure.’
‘Hmph,’ said my mother. ‘Academics.’ Now she was muttering. ‘They all shoot from the hip. And the hip is
always in the chair.’
‘What did you say?’ asked my father.
‘Nothing,’ said my mother. ‘Keeping a safe distance never keeps one from having an opinion, is all. Having no
dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats.’ Then she added, ‘Pull your seat up to the

the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade, our
homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly,
Eileen turned red and said, ‘I would rather not say.’ This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming
salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street’Stan the Shoe Man,buy maple mesos, my mother affectionately called him. But
his daughter had absorbed some disappointment’his, or her mother’s’and did not want to speak of how he earned
his living.
Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.
‘So your classes then,’ said my father. ‘Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about
the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?’
‘Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?’ I asked brightly.
‘That’s how he got his name,’ said my father. ‘Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the
Fine.’
‘Bo! Sheesh.’ My mother shook her head.
A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle
built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel
wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the
kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.
‘It’s OK to sit while you help,’ said my mother to me, ‘but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup
them into thick shapes.’
I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.
‘Next term?’ he asked.
‘I’ve registered for another literature survey’Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930′Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a
music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.’ The
Sufism did not throw him.
‘Dating rocks?’
‘I need to learn!’ I said, laughing.
‘Don’t let them kiss you,’ he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious
direction. I’d left out my PE requirement,runescape money, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course
called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.
Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, ‘They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.’
‘Wine tasting?’ He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.
‘I need a gut course, to make the others go better,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things
were too intense.’
‘But aren’t you underage?’
‘Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course,maplestory mesos, so I guess they let you.’
‘Will you make dean’s list again?’ asked my mother.
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Well,cheap star trek credits, you have to be careful which dean,’ said my father. ‘You don’t want to get on the wrong list!’
‘Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.’
‘You got a job?’

EverQuest 2 Brigand Guide

19 Distracting Blade 19 Flanking attack + interrupt
74 C 123 melee damage
enemy
Interrupts target
32 Shank 63 Flanking attack + DoT 175 melee damage
42 damage
DoT by 84 every 5.3 sec
33 Bum Rush 31 Flanking attack + interrupt 138 C 231 melee damage
Interrupts target
46 Shiv
63 Flanking attack + DoT 155 – 258 melee damage
DoT by 112 every 4 sec
47 Gambit 43 Melee attack + interrupt 212 C 354 melee damage
Interrupts Target
60 StabAtlantica Gold 82 Flanking attack + DoT 229 C 383 melee damage
DoT by 166 every 4 sec

Our flanking attacks contribute a good portion of damage, especially the Gambit line because of its 10 sec recast timer. The dotAtlantica Power Leveling on Shiv also makes it extremely useful as it ends up doing three extra ticks of damage. I highly recommend upgrading Gambit to adept3 because of the good damage, quick recast, and the fact that you will not get an upgrade to this skill in T6. You should also follow byAtlantica Online Gold getting a Shiv adept3 soon after for T5. You will not get a T6 flanking attack until level 60 but when you do get Stab, it is more than worthwhile to upgrade it to adept 3 as well.

Misc. Attacks
15 Gouge 23 Frontal damage attack +
78 C 130 melee damage
Parry debuff
Decreases Parry by 10.7
29 Vicious Stab 41 Attack + parry debuff 160 C 2 67 me lee damage
Decreases parry by 25
43 Waylay 59 Attack + Parry debuff 252 C 4 20 me lee damage
Decreases parry of target by
37

table. The food is ready.’
My father had more of a sense of humor than my mother. ‘Just because I’m hard of hearing,’ he said to her now,
smiling, ‘doesn’t mean you’re not mumbling!’ Yet it was his sense of adventure she had had to sign on for long
ago, good-naturedly,buy final fantasy xi gil, and in reluctant love, and he had taken her on something of a journey, out here to the
country, to this farm. But she had been game. At least at first.
‘Oh,cheap rs money, well, someday maybeI’ll open a restaurant,’ she said now, sighing brightly, which seemed about as happy
as she got’a sigh with some light in it. She then added a remark that typified the sort that filled me with loathing
for her. ‘You know, with the new year approaching, I’ve come to realize I’ve done nothing these past decades
but devote my energies to the interests of others. So, soon’ I’m going to start focusing on myself.’
‘Well, before you get started, darling,’ said my father, ‘could you please pass the syrup?’
Once when I was a kid my father planted ten acres of corn and rye and then midsummer plowed just the rye,
?27 312163 3
making a graphic ribbon effect through the rolling fields. ‘This would be best seen by air,’ said my dad. The
whole reason he had become a farmer is that he thought it would be fun. And so he hired a guy from Minneapolis
to take an aerial photo of it, and we stuck it up on the fridge with little spud magnets. It looked beautiful’the gold
of the mown rye striping the green corn and both undulating through like a performing pair of lovebird dolphins.
This, I pretended,ffxi gil, was a picture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had thought she was marrying a college
president’s son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she’d followed him. She stayed with him wherever the hell it
was they were going. She was like a stickleback fish caught inland as the glacier retreated and the rivers’the only
access to the sea’disappeared. She would have to make do, in this landlocked lake of love. I knew, as she had
mentioned it, that she’d thought there’d be money’he’d grown up in a house with columns’but she hadn’t
realized there was none: the house was owned by the college. Even when she and my father came to Dellacrosse
and bought our old brick house, with its falling-apart shed and barn but its flowerbeds gorgeous with pansies and
impatiens, she didn’t understand that those particular flowers were annuals, and so she waited for them to return
the next year, feeling dashed and betrayed when they didn’t. Another mirage! But eventually she learned to plant
her own. And for a while she was a pro. Until she got too tired. That was when she installed mirrors in the
flowerbeds, slowly learning the art of mirage herself.
After our late breakfast the winds picked up, and soon there was a thunderstorm, the sky yellowish and the
clouds filled with the crunch and rip of lightning. The leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden
downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was
so poor,cheap lord of the rings gold, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature
dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.
Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual’no hamentashen,