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‘You just stepped on my toe.’
‘What’
‘You just rammed into me a little and stepped on my toe.’
‘Sorry. I’m sure our car rental agreement covers it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Sarah, sighing. ‘Darling, remember when we murdered someone and American Express took care of
everything?’
That same joke! But Edward wasn’t smiling. A shadow passed between them. A sepia tinge came over Sarah’s
eyes. A horse-drawn sled jingled its harness bells off in the distance: this town would turn winter into a holiday if
it killed them. ‘The family that sleighs together stays together,’ Sarah murmured to me. Or, that is what I thought
I heard, though there was no levity in her voice. She took one hand briefly away from Mary to squeeze mine in
reassurance. Or in promise. Or in regret. Or in happy hope. Or else in some secret pact that involved a little bit of
everything.
Julie came back bearing a white plastic trash bag, which she jammed into the backseat with me, Sarah,age of conan gold, and baby
Mary. She got in the front, with Edward, and came with us,cov infamy, as she technically, as of the moment, was the
custodial parent.
Edward was fussing with the heater. ‘A car that controlled the outside weather as well’now, that would be
climate control,’ he was saying.
‘Hey, baby,’ Sarah kept murmuring. ‘Hey, baby, baby.’ She turned to me and in a stage whisper said,city of villains power leveling, ‘You know
at my age, your estrogen starts dwindling and you cannot speak to anyone in a civil voice. But then a baby comes
along and look how one speaks.’
Civil, but not civilized.
‘All the irritation is borne away,’ she added.
For now, I thought, like a scary dummy in one of those horror films in which the ventriloquist goes mad.
‘I’d like to keep Mary as her name?’
‘Mary,’ said Mary, brightening at the sound of her own name. It was the only name around her that stayed
constant. There were now once again all these new names of new people for her to learn.
‘But I’m going to add Emma to it. I’ve always loved the name Emma.’ I could see in Sarah’s face the look of a
chef taking charge of her own kitchen.
‘Mary-Emma?’ asked Julie from the front seat, her voice one of professionally maintained neutrality’barely.
‘Yes, Mary-Emma,’ said Sarah dreamily. ‘And then Bertha,warcraft gold, after my grandmother: Mary-Emma Bertha
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Thornwood-Brink. I’m afraid she’s going to be one of those children with too many names.’ I knew them from
my freshman year: the trainlike names that were like a bulletin board of parental indecision, obligation, genetic
pride, misplaced creativity, and politics of every sort. Even Murph had a legal name so long that her great-uncle
was stuck in there somewhere. Sarah was massaging Mary-Emma’s hand. Mary-Emma was dozing off in the

seven,ragnarok zeny, but by that time all sorts of weird things were happening. Perhaps he was really, completely on his own
until then, making stuff up and then immediately forgetting what he’d made up already. People were dying and
coming back and having babies and then not able to, so their handmaidens would instead. Then I slid into the nap
I knew the lunchtime milk shake would bring on if I just let it.
I awoke to a faint knocking on the door.
‘Tassie’ It’s Sarah. We’re going to go to the hospital for the baby’s checkup. Do you want to come?’
‘Yes, I’m coming,’ I said, then hurried to the door to open it, but it slammed into the brass slide lock
through which I peered, dazed, as if through bars, at a slim slice of Sarah.
My nap had not effectively rebooted me. Sarah was wearing her winter coat, but I could still see she was
shrugging beneath it. ‘The agency is switching foster families and they have an appointment this afternoon at the
hospital for our little girl.’ She was also wearing that hand-knitted hat with the ear flaps and pom-pom ties. Were
these back in style’ Had they ever been in style’
I had to close the door on her completely in order to undo the lock and open it again, this time wide. ‘Let me get
my shoes on,’ I said.
‘This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite,wow power leveling,’ she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.
‘Well, even presidents get shot,’ I said.
‘I was just going to say that myself,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I didn’t want to scare you.’
I didn’t know whether this was interesting’that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing’or even whether
it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin’s Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true,
that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep, private way’ Or was it just a random
obviousness shared between strangers’ The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It
seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet.An exfoliating narrative, my professors would
probably say. The paratext of the possible.
‘Sorry this is so beat up,’ she added.
‘It’s OK.’
‘Our bedspread is even more lurid than yours,cheap rs money,’ she confided. ‘Maybe hunters come here in hunting season.
We’re in the Packer Suite, which is green and gold with footballs on the wallpaper. I kept thinking they were
walnuts. The balls, I mean. Edward had to clarify.’
‘Ha! Well, at least the water pressure’s good!’
‘Yes, well, we’ll wait for you in the car out front,’ said Sarah, turning to go. Was she trying to keep some
irritation out of her voice’ Of course! Once again I realized I wasn’t really supposed to go with them to this,warcraft gold, but I
had forgotten and in my sleepiness had said yes.
In the car they made small talk about the carseat they had just purchased at Sears. It was next to me in the back,
still with some plastic around it. ‘It looks safe,’ I said blithely.
‘They make them better now,’ said Sarah. ‘The kids are more securely locked in. Kids used to be able to leap out
in no time.’
In the hospital lobby, a new transitional foster care person was carrying baby Mary, who was now sporting a hat
and had been bundled into a pale blue snowsuit that was perhaps institutionally owned and intended for boys.

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,
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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, 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,

though to me it smelled less like coffee and more like a burning shoe. ‘I’d light the menorah,’ said my mother,
‘but remember what happened last year with the curtains catching on fire.’ The curtains had gone up in a blaze
and we had thrown a punch bowl of eggnog on them to douse the flames, and the eggnog had sizzled and cooked
into the fabric until the whole house smelled like a diner omelet.
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll light the menorah tomorrow for you.’ Though I would forget to do it. Every year it was
my job to clean it, scrape off the previous year’s wax with pins and a fork, so perhaps my forgetting was
convenient.
‘Thanks, honey,’ said my mom, who never called me ‘honey.’ Almost never. The television was on, murmuring
low and flashing its colors. My mother flicked it off with annoyance. ‘A grinch who stole Christmas?’ she said.
‘With all that’s going on in the world we should have to deal withthat?’
In the morning my brother and I came downstairs within ten minutes of each other. The Christmas tree this
year’or Hanukkah hemlock, as my mother still called it’was a pre-lit affair ordered online. The McLellans’
Christmas tree farm had recently gone out of business and my parents had resorted to an environmentally sound
plastic pine from Hammacher Schlemmer. Ornaments like blue fish and beribboned, clove-studded oranges were
clustered in the middle. Old dangly earrings that had lost their mates were hung on the more delicate branches.
My mother had placed at the top a large tinselly Star of David, angled rakishly, like a geometry problem.
Possibly, in late-morning light,cheap eve isk, this was just how all irony presented itself.
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My parents were at the kitchen table eating cold cereal but offering to make us latkes with applesauce or regular
pancakes or both, both being a holiday tradition. ‘I chopped the potatoes and onions up yesterday,’ said my
mom. Soon, I knew, she would get a skillet of oil going,buy runescape money, or fire up the stove griddle, and the house would fill
with slick oniony air, like the greasy spoon on Main Street,cheap lineage 2 adena, permeating our clothes and hair.
‘Thanks, maybe later?’ I said with the question mark our generation believed meant politeness but which baffled
our parents. Outside the morning was bright. I liked the holy,warcraft gold, rejoicing look of it: the many gray Christmases of
my childhood had depressed me. And apparently not just me: one year the holiday card my mother sent out was
an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that readThe children. In some dead leaves.
The light covering of snow on the fields out back and in the yard between the barn and the house was already
melting in the morning sun. Ochre grass was poking through in patches. Beyond, the incline part of the
acreage’which my father had sold off last year ‘for a pretty penny, or, maybe not pretty exactly, but a penny with
a great personality?’had been resold by the Amish to others and was already being developed into something
called Highland Estates. The weather was so warm that construction had continued into December. There were
two yellow backhoes jutting into the sky. The houses were going to be huge, my mother said, with treeless lots
and phony gazebos and turrets and patios to look back at us in mutual rebuke.
‘They don’t like trees because squirrels climb up them and get in their attic and chew on the exercise equipment
no longer in use. Now, without trees’ The squirrels’ll head elsewhere and the attic will fill up with moths and

II
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Christmas morning I slept in late. So did my younger brother,runescape gold, who had picked me up at the Dellacrosse bus
station the night before,warcraft gold, driving my father’s truck, the one with EAT POTATOES AND LOVE LONGER
emblazoned on the back. He’d stood waiting in the parking lot for me to get off the bus, sporting his cheap
brown parka and no hat, seeming glad to see me, as if he had something to share, though I didn’t really expect
anything: my brother rarely shared. He helped with my suitcase and with my electric bass (which I’d brought
with me), sticking both in the back of the truck, and he refrained from his usual remark about only boys playing
bass. The electric guitar had been invented fifty miles from here! I was always ready to counter, to no particular
person at all,star wars galaxies credits, as Robert himself was as steeped in the local myths about Les Paul as I was. I also had an acoustic
upright bass at home in my bedroom, with a satchel full of bows attached to its belly. It looked like a fat
abandoned archer in the corner, a quiver full of arrows gathering dust. ‘Ole Bob,’ Robert called it, lumping it in
with him and my dad. ‘At least you’re not lugging Ole Bob.’
Robert, it had often seemed to me, failed to apply himself’musically or academically. Perhaps having an
older sister had stymied him a little. He knew I was quietly nuts about my guitar. The Jewish part of us both sort
of understood that to worship God was to siphon off the worship of doodads’and we loved doodads (my
instruments were insured up the wazoo)’but it didn’t always work that way: sometimes God adhered to
something material and physical and earthly, and then all was a little misty for the holder and beholder of the
doodad. But my brother was nice to me about it all; in fact, when I thought back to our many years together, he
was, essentially, always nice to me, though he did gun the engine a little wildly as we pulled out of the parking
lot. To his friends he was known as Gunny, a name my parents hated.
On the ride back to the house he told me how he was doing, though I had to ask two times. Sometimes a stammer
came over him,fiesta power leveling, which made him hesitant to speak at all’I'm sure he felt that the slightly choked and garbled
voice did not accurately reflect his mind, though who knows, maybe it did. Sometimes you could see him trying
to pick up speed when he spoke, velocity smoothing things over and getting him to the end sooner. Gunny,
indeed.
On the bus I’d eaten nothing but some supermarket sushi, half a plastic tray of which was still in my purse, and
hunger made me a more eager listener. Every word seemed a morsel. He was in his last year in high school and
hated it. He had gotten four Fs and a D this past semester. His face showed no dismay in the relating of this.
Apparently my father, not always one for helpfully stern parenting, had stared at the report card and said, ‘Well,
Robert, what can I say. Four Fs and a D: it looks like you’re spending too much time on one course!’ My brother
chuckled drily, telling the story. Then we both fell silent, driving slowly toward home, the dark trees going by us
with their branches set in the soft mush of the night sky like wrens’ feet or a spiky brooch in a cotton-bedded
box. We passed the First Methodist Church and its spotlit plywood cr’che, where the expressions of the dozing
sheep were the least imbecilic in the scene. A sign out front advertised the title of the Christmas sermon: LOVE

‘Yes.’ Sarah looked at me searchingly.
‘In winter my brother and I actually used to shoot them out of pipes, with firecrackers,warcraft gold,’ I added, now in total free
association. ‘Potato guns. It was a big pastime for us when we were young. With cold-storage potatoes from the
root cellar and some PVC pipe. We would arrange little armies and have battles.’
Now it was Sarah’s turn for randomness. ‘When I was your age I did a semester abroad in France and I stayed
with a family there. I said to the daughter Marie-Jeanne, who was in my grade, ‘It’s interesting that in French-
Canadian French one says’patate’ but in France one says ‘pommes de terres,’ ‘ and she said, ‘Oh, we say
‘patate.’ ‘ But when I mentioned this later to her father’ He grew very stern and said, ‘Marie-Jeanne said
‘patate?’ She must never say ‘patate’!?’
I laughed, not knowing quite why but feeling I was close to knowing. A distant memory flew to my head: a note
passed to me from a mean boy in seventh grade.Laugh less, it commanded.
Sarah smiled. ‘Your father seemed like a nice man. I don’t remember your mom.’
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‘She hardly ever came into Troy.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, sometimes she came to the market with her snapdragons. And gladioluses. People here called them
‘gladioli,’ which annoyed her.’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah,cheap warcraft gold, smiling. ‘I don’t like that either.’ We were in polite, gratuitous agreement mode.
I continued. ‘She grew flowers, bunched them together with rubber bands. They were like a dollar a bunch.’
Actually, my mother took some pride in these flowers and fertilized them with mulched lakeweed. My father,
however, took even greater pride in his potatoes and would never have used the lakeweed. Too many heavy
metals, he said. ‘A rock band once crashed their plane into that lake,’ he joked, and though a plane had indeed
crashed, the band was technically R&B. Still, it was true about the water: murky at best from gypsum mining up
north.
It was strange to think of this woman Sarah knowing my father.
‘Did you ever travel into town with them?’ she asked.
I fidgeted a bit. Having to draw on my past like this was not what I had expected, and summoning it, making it
come to me, was like coaxing a reluctant thing. ‘Not very often. I think once or twice my brother and I went with
them and we just ran around the place annoying people. Another time I remember sitting under my parents’
rickety sales table reading a book. There might have been a another time when I just stayed in the truck.’ Or
maybe that was Milwaukee. I couldn’t recall.
‘Are they still farming’ I just don’t see him at the morning market anymore.’
‘Oh, not too much,’ I said. ‘They sold off a lot of the farm to some Amish people and now they’re quasi retired.’
I loved to sayquasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. ‘I am quasi
ready to go,’ I would announce. Or, ‘I’m feeling a bit quasi today.’ Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-

‘Why, I remember your father very well. His Klamath pearls were famous. Also the yellow fingerlings. And his
purple Peruvians and Rose Finns were the first to be sold in those little netted berry pints, like jewels. And those
new potatoes he called ‘Keltjin duck eggs.’ I had a theory about those.’
I nodded. Returning from his English honeymoon with my mom, my father had actually smuggled a many-eyed
jersey royal straight through Chicago customs, and upon returning to Dellacrosse, he’d grown them in pots and
troughs in the barn in winter and in the ground in spring and sold them to restaurants as ‘duck eggs.’
‘I’d rush out to the farmers’ market at six a.m. to get them. Come April, I should put those back on the menu.’
She was getting dreamy. Still, it was nice to hear my father spoken well of. He was not really respected as a
farmer back home: he was a hobbyist, a truck farmer, with no real acreage, just some ducks (who every fall raped
one another in a brutal fashion we never got used to), a dog, a tractor, a website (a website, for Christ’s sake!),
and two decorative, brockle-headed cows of dubious dairiness. (They were named Bess and Guess, or Milk and
Manure, according to my dad,warcraft gold, and he would not let them trample the stream banks the way most of the farmers
around us did with their cows. I had once milked Bess, carefully cutting my fingernails beforehand, so as not to
hurt her; the intimate feel of her lavender-veined and hairy breasts had almost made me puke. ‘All right,anarchy online power leveling, you
don’t have to do that again,’ my dad had said. What kind of farmer’s daughter was I’ I’d leaned my forehead
against Bess’s side to steady myself, and the sudden warmth, along with my own queasiness, made me feel I
loved her.) We had also once had an ebullient pig named Helen, who would come when you called her name and
smiled like a dolphin when you spoke to her. And then we didn’t see her for a few days, and one morning over
bacon and eggs, my brother said, ‘Is this Helen?’ I dropped my fork and cried, ‘This is Helen’ Is this Helen’!’
and my mother, too, stopped eating and looked hard at my father: ‘Bo, is this Helen?’ The next pig we got we
never met and its name was #WK3746. Later we got a sweet but skittish goat named Lucy, who, sometimes
along with our dog, Blot, traipsed around the yard, free as a bird.
My dad was chastened down at the Farm & Fleet for having only a few of the props. His farm was a mere
kitchen garden that had gotten slightly out of hand’and only slightly. And he had painted his barn not the cheap,
blood-camouflaging red of the country (which against the green fields and shrubs reminded my mother too much
of Christmas) but blue and white like the sky, the silliness of which was spoken of often in the county feed
shops. (Though these colors pleased my mother, I supposed, with their reminders of Hanukkah and Israel, though
she professed to despise both. My mother’s capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.)
Plus, our farmhouse was too fancy by local standards’cream city brick mixed in with chicago to form a pattern of
gold and dusky rose, with the mansard roof of an affluent farmer, though my father wasn’t one. The dentals on
the soffits my father sometimes painted brown or orange or sometimes a lurid violet’he altered their color every
other summer. What was he, ’some pillow biter from the Minnesota Ballet?’ He sometimes pretended to be deaf
and carried on with his own sense of humor and purpose. He had added a family room by hand, in the green way,
the first in the county, and he mixed his own earthen plaster and hand-troweled it onto some wired bales of hay
stuffed between the beams. The neighbors were not impressed: ‘I’ll be damned. Bo’s gone and built a mud and
straw hut and he’s attached it to his damn house.’ The sills were limestone, but reconstituted, and so they were
just poured in. He was seldom deterred. He loved his old blue dairy barn with its rusty pails never thrown away
and its adjacent stream that could still cool milk and which ran down to a small fish hatchery. He had a woodlot
and few tillable fields. It was simple hill farming, really, but to the locals he seemed a vaguely contemptuous
character, very out-of-town. His idiosyncracies appeared to others to go beyond issues of social authenticity and