picture Candy standing at that rabbit hutch with her back to me, the suppressor on the .22 reducing each shot to a distant firework. Maybe I thought if I was cool to Lindsay, she’d soon enough be safely on her way.
It was the season when both of my sons went away and then came back. Cade went off to college that fall, and Elias had been away at basic training and infantry school. It had taken him an extra month. He had written to me that he got “recycled,” which is the army way of saying you couldn’t do enough push-ups or run fast enough, so they make you train all over again. But when he walked in that door after all of that—more than four months after last I saw him—he looked ever so much better. Hardly had any stomach on him at all, and his arms looked strong. It was like I could finally exhale—after all those years of reassuring him he was just fine the way God had made him, finally God had granted him a reprieve from being a butterball.
As soon as Cade got home, too, the two of them went out together to meet some old friends down at the quarry. I guess they had a snowball fight, because when they got back both of those ninnies were covered in snow, with big splotches of it on their backs. I made them turn right around at the door and come in through the back porch. Once they shook off their coats and wraps, they came inside laughing, with hands and cheeks rose-red from the cold. Candy and Lindsay were sitting at the table with their coffee, and Candy jumped right up to pour some for the boys. She poured lots of sugar and milk in Eli’s, the way he liked it, and he reached for that mug like he was holding his hands up to a campfire. Even though he looked like a soldier now, I could still so easily see the little boy in him. He’d rather have a cup of cocoa and we both knew it, but he was a man now and it would be coffee for him.
Candy was bustling around the coffee machine, and when I looked at Lindsay I saw she was staring right at Elias, smiling in this shy, surprised way. She was a plain-looking girl, with a heart-shaped face and hair that had never been cut, and she wore those smocky flowered dresses like Candy and the other church women. Elias didn’t seem to notice. He was still bantering with Cade, the two of them joking over who had gotten in the best shots of the snowball fight. Lindsay Vogel was his same age, had lived up the road all his life, but her family had homeschooled her and so he hardly knew her at all. When I saw the look she was giving him I thought about Piper, with her straightened hair and model figure, her made-up eyes, and I thought Lindsay might as well march that notion right back out of her head as fast as it had come in.
Candy turned around with the coffeepot and opened her mouth to ask her friend if she wanted more, but stopped before a word came out. She looked from Lindsay to Elias and back again. Then, with a noisy clatter, she set the pot down and called her children over to say hello to their uncles. John was just a baby, pushing his cereal pieces around on the high-chair tray, but the other two came barreling over and threw themselves at their uncles’ knees. Lindsay took a lemon cookie from the plate at the center of the table and waved it in front of John’s face, playing with him a little before she let him have it. I went upstairs after that, and so that’s the way I remember seeing Lindsay Vogel: waving that cookie around for my grandbaby, maybe—or maybe not—putting on a show for Elias of how nice she was with babies. And she was a nice girl, even if she never would have been his sort of girl. Anyone could look upon Elias then and see that now he was turning into the type of man who might be able to get a Piper Larsen to give him a second or a third look. And Lindsay—well, she only had three days left in this world. So whether or not she caught Eli’s eye didn’t really