up with an A minus at the end of the term. It would have been a solid A if not for that first bad month.”
“Tommy aced bio?”
“Not Tom. Edward.”
I would have thought she was confusing my two brothers, except that that was impossible.
“I think maybe I just spoke out of turn. Obviously Edward was an excellent all-around student.” She paused. “But not as good as you are, I don’t think.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” I said.
“I was so glad to hear that your brother Tom came back safe from the service,” she said. “Your mom and dad must be relieved.”
“They are,” I said, which was sort of true and sort of not.
“I always thought Tom was an untapped resource.”
“I’ve definitely never heard that before.”
She stood up, and so did I. I knew that soon she would give me harder textbooks, extra-credit work, college catalogues, contest entry forms. I was beginning to know the smart-girl routine.
“Eddie almost failed bio?” I said that night after dinner while my mother and I were washing the dishes.
“Never you mind,” said my mother.
“What else don’t I know?” I said.
“You should assume you still have a lot to learn, Mary Margaret,” said my mother, and then she dried her hands on a dishtowel and said, “Although not as much as some.” It was the closest my mother had ever come to paying me a real compliment.
“Mrs. Farrell wants me to go to some summer program at State,” I said to my father next morning in the barn while our breath froze in front of us.
“Oh, Mimi, that’s a tall order,” he said.
“I said I couldn’t.”
You can tell time by a farm, a day’s worth of time, a year’s worth. There’s a particular kind of quiet on a farm in the morning, which isn’t really morning the way other people think of it. It’s still dark, with just the smallest idea of black sky getting lighter around the edges, and unless there’s a moon the only light comes from the bare bulb hanging like its own moon from the center of the barn ceiling. It’s a place where it’s just as easy to feel lost as it is to feel contented. I felt lost most of the time now, but I never said so, even to myself: in that same way I knew it was odd for a grown woman not to leave her own home, I knew it was odd for a teenage girl to feel like there was a big rattly empty space between her stomach and her heart. But it made me wonder whether other people felt the same way without showing it, whether Tommy felt the same now that he was back in town, whether my father felt the same way when my mother gave him a hard time about not taking the reservoir plan seriously, or about kicking Ruth out and moving Callie and Clifton in. I helped my father out in the barn some mornings at least as much to make sure he wasn’t feeling sad as to cut down on his work time.
It was always warmer in the barn than it was outside because of all the cows crowding together, breathing and snorting and farting, making a fug that hung in the place like cigarette smoke over the poker game my father used to have once a month in the dining room, before my mother told him he needed to stop smoking and move the game to the VFW. Cows at dawn are different than cows at dusk. A farm in winter feels different than a farm in summer. The whole year passed in front of me on the farm. The cornstalks with yellow edges that meant summer was over and the classroom getting ready to close around you. The pumpkins of October that squatted where the yellow flowers sprouted on the vines in August. The mornings when you could hear the cattle complaining like a bunch of old men with tobacco throats and you knew, you just knew, that it was February and their water trough was frozen solid and you were going to have to go out there with an old shovel and beat a hole into the ice until it fell apart like a broken window.
The one constant all year round was the sound of my father, in the foggy mist of summer or the dry-ice mist of winter, taking care of business in the barn. My father liked to whistle while he worked in there. He