from a local client with a mind for the picturesque; but it had been mean from the first, even more so after its mate had stumbled, sick, into the next field two winters ago and been kicked at and trampled by a spooked horse. Knox had tried to mourn along with the survivor—swans mated for life, she knew—but it took to croaking at her in staccato bursts every time she looked at it sideways. It would scream and lift its outrageous wings for emphasis, so that all the exposed water seemed white with their reflection, and Knox had to force herself to sit calmly until the ritual was done and the swan moved away, its webs bright in the murk, scissoring.
When the last dregs of coffee had gone cold in her cup she dressed and drove the twelve miles or so into town, where she parked at the literacy center. During the school year, Knox worked with people of all ages who were learning to read; in the summers, she taught dyslexic children, many of whom commuted from other counties and boarded during the week in a small dormitory down the block. She spent the morning in tutoring sessions, rubbing the backs of T-shirts and repeating sounds:
“Guh, guh, guh.”
“Huh, huh, huh.”
Her students rubbed block letters and repeated after her, tracing a G, an H, that Marlene had covered in sandpaper, hoping to make the tactile memory of it more vivid. They tried to distract her.
“I totaled my four-wheeler so bad this weekend.”
“You did?” Knox would say. “Guh, guh, guh.”
“Your hair looks good today, Miz Bolling.”
“Thank you, Brooke. After me—huh, huh, huh.”
She worked through lunch, serving the potato salad family style at her assigned cafeteria table. She worked until her break time with Marlene, and then headed back into the bald fluorescence of her classroom, where she worked with the middle school and olders for the rest of the afternoon. She moved from desk to desk as the students labored through movie reviews, descriptions of their houses, whatever pieces of paragraph Knox could convince them to devote their attention to long enough to keep composing sentences, forming words. Words looked warped to them; letters misbehaved on the page. Even spoken sentences could reconstitute themselves in midair and be rendered nonsensical for the ones with auditory problems, so Knox often found herself beginning again with an explanation or command. She guided each of them toward the letter table when they needed to take a break from their compositions to reestablish the curvature and sound of one of the ABC’s, make their pencils push through a letter as if for the first time.
At four o’clock or so, Knox would close the door of her classroom behind her and head home. She took the rural route home instead of the highway. This tacked an extra twenty minutes onto her drive, but she preferred to avoid the subdivisions and access roads that were lapping up against the town boundary like so much dirty water. The route she took soothed her. She drove through the corridors near the city center that delineated the older, more established neighborhoods, then past the college campus, the modest rows of houses where groups of students—she among them, once—clustered, marking their presence with mismatched porch furniture, too many cars in the stunted drives. She passed Rupp Arena, the looming Baptist church, the courthouse, and the handful of high-rises and shopping courts that made up the haphazard and dying downtown, then sped over the viaduct and into the open country that she recognized as much by feel as by sight. Knox could remember lying on the backseat of their mother’s car, Charlotte beside her, and guessing where they were by the sensation of the road as it curved and dipped, and the blur of treetops she could just make out through the top of the open car window. “We’re at Middlebrook Farm now,” Knox would say, and Charlotte would sit up and look, say, “You’re right!” her dark hair lifting in the breeze. Then she’d lie back down, cover Knox’s face with her hands, count to twenty. “Now where are we, Knoxie?” How sweet it was to answer “Train tracks, coming up,” without thinking, then bump over them while her sister laughed, bracing herself against the jolts the worn shocks of her mother’s car couldn’t quite absorb.
The road ran east to west. Knox often had to flip the sun visor down on her drive home, but in the warm weather she liked