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need to be sitting in an actual truck to do it.
‘Look, Mary-Emma!’ And she would. It was a beautiful thing, having a little girl in tow. Why hadn’t my own
mother known’ Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins.
Mary-Emma would point toward the street sewers,lotro gold, seeing a raccoon scuttle in. ‘Cartoons down there!’ she
exclaimed.
Dwarf irises, bearded irises, and the first mosquitoes emerged simultaneously, each with their subtly striped
gray-violet plumage. Where were the bearded dwarves to add semantic meat to the flowerbeds’ Well, some yards
did have ceramic gnomes in their yards ‘ la Germany.
The strengthening light sparkled in the trees’ new leaves, and the thick bosomy smell of lilacs floated in waves
across our various paths. The humid spice of honeysuckle hung over the garbage cans. I even met the threesome
next door, who finally emerged after winter, looking very beautiful. The woman’I remembered her name was
Catherine’smiled at Mary-Emma. And Mary-Emma did not smile back but hid behind my leg.
‘She never says hi to me,cheap lord of the rings online gold,’ said the woman, Catherine. The two men had continued on ahead. ‘I hope it’s not
because I’m white!’
I stared at this crazy, Satie-playing woman. ‘A lot of people she knows are white,’ I did not say, ‘including her
parents,’ and so I said nothing but just watched as she trotted up ahead to be with her men.
In the Thornwood-Brink flowerbeds were the strangest blooms of all: tall leafless stalks crowned by purple
floreted globes. They looked like probes, or sentries, or gaslights, or wands,wow power leveling, the handsome goons of the garden.
Alium, they were called, and in actuality were giant mutant chives. Their bulbs were like onions, and squirrel-
proof, and they were supposed to be a kind of accent flower, but Sarah had planted them thickly all around the
house in a kind of fierce, orchardlike fence, as if to enhance TV reception.
‘Look at this!’ exclaimed Sarah at the front door, pulling a printed sheet of paper from her mailbox. ‘The plant
nazis are back! Apparently I have buckthorn and nipplewort in my yard and they would like me to get rid of
them pronto! You know, the thing with plant nazis is that theystart with the plants ?’
The dogs next door were wild with their games. In the sky the returning geese were winging over,runescape gold, their honking
alto bark like the complaining squawk of a cart.
‘Last year they were after me about the nap of the lawn! They said I was mowing in the wrong direction and it
disrupted the look of the neighborhood to have the blades of grass bent in a slightly different direction in one of
the yards! I was mowing this way?’and here she tipped her whole body?’when I should be mowing thattaway.’
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She tipped her body back the other direction. Indignation gave her a dancer’s energy. And the warming weather
caused her nervous thinness to emerge from beneath her usual thick sweaters.
One of the pictures Reynaldo took of Mary-Emma that I liked best showed her looking upward at the camera in
hope and joy, and I took it to Kinko’s and had it blown up and then I went to Walgreens with Mary-Emma
herself in tow and bought a shiny red made-in-China frame. The African-American cashier looked quickly at me

They wanted to know their babies would have all the things they hadn’t. And the babies would. They were cute;
they would be fine. The person who most needed adopting, it seemed to me, was Bonnie.
‘Oh, yes. There’s some interest,’ he added quickly. He could take a lawyer’s cues as quickly as Sarah. ‘But it’s
not like I’ve invented a killer robot or anything as glamorous as that.’ There was silence,cheap lord of the rings online gold, so he continued.
‘Unfortunately, artificial intelligence is very artificial. In my opinion.’
Sarah piped up awkwardly. ‘Here we are with my professional kitchen and his lab and despite all that chemistry
our bodies could never get anything cooked up between us.’ There it was again: adopted kid as default kid. In
nervous ingratiation Sarah had crossed some line’of privacy and sensitivity, perhaps even of honesty’though I
didn’t know it then. Edward gave her a sharp look. Nonetheless, Sarah continued. ‘Not a green thumb in the
house,daoc power leveling,’ she said. ‘Even invasive species won’t grow in my garden. I have the shyest vinca in the world.’
What did it mean to have the shyest vinca in the world’ It seemed sad but perhaps necessary, like the retirement
of an aged ballerina.
Bonnie began to shift in her seat and even her expressionlessness began to recede into the distance so that yet
greater expressionlessness could take its place.
‘Bonnie, do you have any questions?’
Then the sudden attention to her, which she had earlier seemed to want,cheap world of warcraft gold, startled her. Her face went red with heat.
Perhaps there was in fact a chemical found in nature that could prevent eye cancer, cancer of the tear ducts,
though I doubted it. I could see her eyes start to redden as well, and soon bright water was shining across them
like sunlight with no sun. Her hands moved slowly to her hair. The full force of what she was doing was slowly
coming to her once again.
‘I am only a hospital aide right now.’ She did not say the wordbedpan, but she didn’t have to. ‘I would like to go
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back to school.’
‘We can help you with that,’ said Sarah.
‘Uh, actually, that’s not allowed in this state,’ said Roberta. ‘But certain smaller gifts might be.’
‘I mean, we could help’in other ways. Advice and things.’ Sarah was both pathetic and game. You had to hand it
to her.
‘I just want the best for my little girl,’ Bonnie said firmly. ‘Will you raise her Catholic?’
‘Of course,’ lied Sarah, who leaned in generously to pat Bonnie’s hand. Because I was closer, I threw my arms
around Bonnie. I don’t know what came over me. But it seemed we all were a team. A team of rescuers and
destroyers both, and I was in on it and had to do my part. Bonnie briefly went to bury her face in my shoulder,
then pulled herself together and sat back up. Sarah gave us an astonished look.
‘Well,ro zeny, Bonnie,’ said Roberta, ’shall you and I go back into my office and discuss things?’
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. They got up and closed the inner door behind them, leaving the three of us standing with
Suzanne, who added, ‘I’ve seen a lot of heavy stuff in this room,’ and then busied herself with file folders.

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,
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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,