Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund

got her beer to nurse.”
    â€œHer beer bottle like a baby bottle,” Diane, her smart daughter, her oldest child, spoke up impertinently.
    â€œHuh!” Christine and Dee chuffed the word together. No need to scold anybody.
    Christine took a book of matches out of her purse. A waiter at Joy Young Chinese Restaurant had given her the matchbook. Christine had been impressed with him till he said, “How could I guess you had three—skinny woman like you?” She struck a match on the cover, opened the oven door, and held the flame to the pilot light. A swoosh of purple and red ran around the inert burner. “Get some foil out of the used, please, Diane.”
    Her little daughter slid from her place, opened the drawer in the cook table, and got out a foil sheet, crinkly with prior usage.
    â€œNow put the biscuits on that, and I sprinkle in a little water before you close it up.”
    â€œI want to sprinkle,” Diane answered.
    â€œYou might do too much. Make ’em soggy.”
    Christine glanced at her sister to try to invite her to talk, but Dee sipped her beer. Why didn’t Dee manage to say something? Not even “Good evening.” You didn’t have to get off your fanny to speak.
    Christine crossed to the sink, turned on the faucet, and wetted just the tips of her fingers; then she slung the water droplets into the foil nest of biscuits. “Close up the foil,” she told Diane, “and you can put ’em in the oven.” Her daughter moved purposefully, with confidence, to obey her mother.
    Christine pulled a ladder-back chair out from the table and sat down across from her sister. “How you feeling, Dee?”
    â€œI all right.”
    To make her sister speak again, Christine offered no reply.
    Eventually Dee asked, “How you tonight, Eee?”
    Something in her tone undermined the polite question, but she’d said Eee. Dee and Eee—that was their old language for each other. Eee for the last part of Christine.
    â€œI drew a picture,” Honey said. Her youngest, only three. His name was Henry, but he was the color of honey, and she called him that.
    He showed her a tan paper sack marked with a patch of random black lines leading in all directions.
    â€œThat’s good,” Christine said. She put her arm around her little boy. “What you draw, Honey?”
    â€œBlowed-up house.”
    Christine stared at the black lines. Planks. Lumber exploding.
    â€œWe heard it,” Dee said. “Over on Dynamite Hill, I reckon.”
    Like a small adult, little Diane turned from the oven. “I told her, it was just the steel mill.”
    Christine reached out for her daughter. “That’s right,” she said. “Not every boom an explosion happening. Might of been a car, backfiring.”
    â€œHuh!” Dee said. She looked at Christine through half-closed eyes. Dee reached up and unclamped her barrette. Smoothed her hair straight up like a rooster tuft and clamped it again. “Reckon I’ll go on, now you got home, Eee.” Christine’s own hair was straightened and oiled. Parted on one side, it fell in a beautiful stiff swoop, a pageboy just short of her chin. She tended it carefully.
    â€œYou don’t have to go so soon,” Christine said. “Stay and have a hot biscuit.” Suddenly she didn’t want to be alone with her children.
    â€œAin’t hungry.”

Engaged
    THEIR FEET RESTING ON THE GRASS BEYOND THE EDGE OF their towel, Stella and Darl sat close together, kissing each other on the cheek, the neck, the lips, turning their bodies more and more inward with each address. She had forgotten the discomfort of sitting on sticks in the grass.
    â€œLet’s get up a minute,” Darl said and started to stand. Stella got up but she was sorry that he had disrupted what she was enjoying so much. His voice was tight.
    They stood, and he shook out the towel, repositioned it so that it