called Miller’s Valley but the real valley was just outside it, a deep pocket with steep stony hills rising around it and a divot at one end that led to the winding road that led to the town itself.
“My grandfather says there’s a problem with the aquifer.” Donald said the word aquifer as though he liked saying it but might not really know what it meant.
LaRhonda spun her dime on the card table. You could tell she didn’t think much of the water as an issue. Neither did I. Sometimes mud oozed down the hill during a downpour and wound up on our porch and my mother had to chase it out again with a push broom, and sometimes the basement flooded, which was why we had kept all the important old stuff, like my mother’s nursing school diploma and my father’s Army uniform, in the attic. Sometimes our water was brown and my mother boiled it and put it in an old Hi-C bottle in the refrigerator, and twice our well had failed and the well diggers had to go farther down. My brother Eddie stood there the first time, saying to our father again and again, “How can there be so much water sometimes, and then not enough?”
Eddie was the glory of Miller’s Valley. He was at the state university, on a Rotary scholarship, studying to be an engineer. He wanted to be called Ed now. He belonged to the national science honor society and had a girlfriend named Debbie, whose father was a lawyer in Philadelphia. When she came to stay I got the couch and she got my room. It smelled of Jean Naté bath oil after she was gone, like warm lemonade. Eddie was ten years older than me, and he didn’t exactly seem like a brother, not like Tommy did. He was more like a friendly visitor.
“Can I get some corn?” yelled Mr. Brown, who lived down the road, as though he’d been waiting forever even though his car had scarcely stopped moving. Twice that one summer he’d come back the next day with one of those odd ears you get sometimes, the ones where the kernels don’t run in a straight line, like somebody with bad teeth. “I want my money back on this one,” he’d said. My mother came out of the house the second time. “We’ll be happy to give you a refund, Bob, but if we do it’ll be the last time you buy corn from us,” she said.
Winston Bally didn’t stay long. “Nice talking to you,” he said to my father as he came back to his car, but you could see the feeling wasn’t mutual. My father was standing in the doorway of his shed with his arms crossed on his chest and his chin down.
“I’m going,” said LaRhonda, getting on her bike. Her father’s diner was only two miles away, and she’d get a ride home from there. When I went in there with LaRhonda we could have anything we wanted free: a cheeseburger, lemon meringue pie, Mason Mints from the candy bin by the register. It felt rich.
“I don’t know why she calls me Duckface,” Donald said, fingering his upper lip. I would have felt sorry for him except that he was so good-natured that lots of times he didn’t even recognize meanness when it was coming right at him. Plus when I looked at how tall and square-shouldered he was turning out to be, I thought he might be one of those guys in high school who played a couple of sports. No matter what those guys were like, things went okay for them.
I stayed at the table for two more hours, coloring some more napkins, reading Nancy Drew, and watching a green caterpillar do tricks on a strand of shiny silk from a big oak branch above my head. Sometimes I went out into the cornfield and walked between the rows with my eyes closed, pretending I was blind, feeling the stalks reaching out to brush me like a pat on the back. But it was too hot for that. LaRhonda swore there was one summer when it got so hot the corn started to pop in its silk, and Donald said that was a lie, and I didn’t say anything. You couldn’t pay attention when LaRhonda said things like that.
My mother opened the side door a little after five o’clock. “Anybody who’s buying corn for dinner bought it already,” she said. She was