seemed to be changing.
Inside the grocery store, every face was familiar. I knew each aisle and where to find everything on my short list. A man knelt to squeeze a loaf of bread on one of the lower shelves. Even from behind, I recognized his narrow head and the set of his shoulders. When I was a girl, his family had lived two streets over from Momma. His daughter had a gimpy leg from a fall off the shipping deck of the mill. She was Rosie’s age. Did she know my girls? Had she been at the funeral?
The floor under me seemed to dissolve. I put a loaf of bread in my basket and headed toward the cashier.
As I drove back to Adam and the girls, the pink and yellow light of the sunset shed an unnatural, deeply shadowed light on the houses and fields.
I’d never been a woman to need or keep intimates. I’d always thought of myself as something of a loner, as likely to take solace from the glissando of a mockingbird as from the laughter of friends or family. With the secrecies of being A.’s lover then wife, I’d come to understand how much I relied on the small graces of those I knew but was not intimate with. I had my place among the people of Clarion. Their familiar faces and multiple acknowledgments fed my need to belong as much as the land did. Who would we—me, Adam, and our children—be here in Clarion now, if we went everywhere surrounded by silent questions? Who was he to these people now that they carried the memory of his darker voice in their bones?
I pulled up near the back door and unloaded the groceries. A horse whinnied inquisitively from the stable. I heard Adam’s faint, muttered response. The mingled sounds of the girls—a guitar, the radio, and Sarah’s call to her cat—filtered down the hall as I put away the groceries.
When I’d finished, I took a small empty jar out of the pantry and a hand trowel from the barn. I knelt on the spot where I had found A. and, breaking up the packed clay, scooped a handful of it into the jar. His origin. The only certainty I had. The thing that set me apart from him and bound me to him.
I put the jar on our bedroom bureau among our combs, nail files, and pocket change, next to my bobby-pin box. At night, it was one of the last things I saw before I turned out the light.
Supper the next Sunday was just Momma, Daddy, and the six of us at our house. The meal was cordial, almost formal. No one mentioned Jennie or the funeral. The girls did not ask where their cousins, aunts, and uncles were.
Grief is a powerful river in flood. It cannot be argued or reasoned or wrestled down to an insignificant trickle. You must let it take you where it is going. When it pulls you under, all you can do is keep your eyes open for rocks and fallen trees, try not to panic, and stay faceup so you will know where the sky is. You will need that information later. Eventually, its waters calm and you will be on a shore far from where you began, raw and sore, but clean and as close to whole as you will ever be again.
Adam in his grief neither struggled nor floated. He took on weight and sank like a stone. His surrender was nearly total and his eyes went dead, the brightness of his gaze extinguished. At times, though, he would suddenly flash open, struggling as if grief could be gulped down entire in a single swallow. A puzzled, naked terror would streak across his face then, far beyond any consolation I could offer; he would stop where he was and weep.
I felt myself far downstream, tumbling along trying to keep the girls in sight. I could not reach him. For the first time since I found A. lying on his side in the mud, I felt alone. I did not know what to do.
I wanted him to hold fast to what was left—our four daughters and me—and not let go. I wanted us to stay afloat together. I saw his vacancy as a kind of desertion, as a deep disregard, not just for us, not just for the love that remained, but for life itself. I was afraid for him. I didn’t know what he was capable of