Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page A

to say her name, and he didn’t bother to say his. Nobody in Mount Mason was ever introduced to anyone else. Skip knew that her father had been in some peacekeeping force in Korea and had married Nadine there and brought his wife and kid over when he could finally manage to get them out. Skip knew that Craig Foster didn’t speak to most of his family because one of his uncles had said at a Memorial Day barbecue that Craigwas sleeping with the enemy and most all of the other Fosters had sided with the uncle, who, they said, didn’t mean any harm, and how come Nadine had to be such a bitch anyhow. Skip knew that Jennifer worked part-time at the hospital and went to nursing school at the community college, which surprised him a little, since she seemed like the kind of girl who could go to State, maybe even someplace better. Skip knew that she’d never had a serious boyfriend, and that that made the mothers of Mount Mason pretty happy because, as well mannered and pretty as she was, she still wasn’t white. She was more or less tan. In every way she was the opposite of most of the other girls he knew in Mount Mason, who got out of high school, got pregnant, and got fat.
    “Come right back!” Nadine called from the kitchen window, all the consonants flat in that funny way she had of talking, like a person who was deaf.
    Jennifer Foster didn’t roll her eyes exactly, but she raised her brows a little bit. She probably knew that Skip’s mother was dead. She probably knew that in high school he’d lived in one of those listing frame houses with the narrow front porches on Front Street with his aunt and uncle instead of in one of the brick ranches tented over by trees out in the valley with parents, like she had. And she definitely knew, by the way she was smiling so nicely but with a little bit of an edge in her eyes, about the stretch in the county jail.
    “She want you,” Nadine shouted.
    “First she sends me out here to give you some message about the barn. Then she yells at me to come back.” Jennifer Foster shook her head, then looked up. “Isn’t this a great tree? When I was a little girl I used to sit under it and read. If it rains you don’t even get wet, unless it’s pouring.”
    “You have to keep after it,” Skip said, putting the pruners down in the wheelbarrow. “The branches get too long, and then some of them aren’t really as strong as they need to be, and they can come down pretty hard if there’s a storm, and take the healthy ones with them. She’s sort of let them go. Mrs. Blessing, I mean.”
    Jennifer Foster smiled. “I know who she refers to around here,” she said.
    It was hard to believe, looking at her, that Jennifer Foster was Nadine and Craig Foster’s daughter. Together the parents looked like a sight gag. Craig was a huge man with narrow shoulders, a high pale forehead, brown hair fading to gray, and a mustache that somehow made him look silly, almost as though it were fake. Nadine was something else. She had the small and sexless body of a young boy, her legs slightly bowed, her arms muscled and bowed, too. Her face was flat, with an ugly mysterious scar across one cheek, part cut, part burn. All the times he’d seen her, Skip had never seen her hair any way but pulled tightly back into a ponytail, had never seen her wear anything but jeans and a man’s shirt. The only jewelry she wore was a digital watch that beeped every fifteen minutes and a wedding ring. “Be like beating your meat against a board,” Chris had said once when they’d seen the Fosters in town together.
    It was cruel even to picture Jennifer with the two of them. He couldn’t understand how two people who looked like that had produced one who looked like this. “Mongrels, Skippy,” Chris had said. “They make the best dogs.” Chris always had a mean mouth on him. One night in McGuire’s he’d bought Shelly a beer, when Skip had just started dating her, if you could call it dating, getting drunk