Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen

full-time during the summers. I’m saving money for college.”
    “Well, I guess I have to respect that. Where are you thinking?”
    “State, I guess. It’s cheaper than anyplace else except the community college.”
    She nodded. “I don’t think you need to think about the community college, although I’ve had some fine students spend a year or two there. I’ve got some thoughts about other places and about scholarship opportunities, but it’s early yet. You want to take physics next year?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “The advanced section? It’ll be pretty small, and it won’t be easy, even for you.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Can I talk to your mother?”
    “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know anything about physics,” I said, and Mrs. Farrell smiled.
    “I wouldn’t put anything past your mother,” she said. “When your brother was struggling with bio she came in here one day, sat down, and said, ‘Tell me how we fix this.’ And we did. He wound 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