My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki

Bobby Joe groaned, “Oh, Lord,” she reached toward a pearl-studded barrette, fingered it, then slipped it into her pocket. Bobby Joe’s voice shook with his muted pain, then broke free and soared.
    It was all Akiko could do to keep from singing along with him.

GRACE
    Grace yawned and stretched her toes, squeezing the last bits of physical pleasure from her afternoon nap. It was warm, but there was a breeze blowing, and the room was filled with a soft dappled light that filtered through the leaf-covered window. Something in the moment, some fleeting conjunction of the senses, of light and air, of warm and cool, of smell and sound and memory, made her shiver with the irrepressible life of it all. It was like a sexual feeling, only self-contained, immaculate.
    She could hear Vern in the kitchen with some of the kids. That was nice too. Elvis was there for sure, she could hear his booming voice, and since he was there, so was Chelsea. If they were cooking, Page would be helping also, with Duncan, and if there were scraps to eat, then Joey would be begging for them. Emily May would be reading on the porch. Vernon Junior was away at college. Newton was at football practice. Cici was at cheerleading. Jake was at band. Was that everyone? No, Joy. Joy would not be in the kitchen. Joy would be in Alison’s cottage, lurking by the baby.
    A few days after the baby was born, Alison had found Joy next to the crib in the middle of the night. It frightened her, and she had complained to Grace the next day—she didn’t want her child to imprint on this image of Joy’s pierced face looming over his horizon like a cloudy harvest moon. Grace told her to relax. The kids had all been older when they were adopted, so newborns were a bit of a novelty, and Joy was at that age when it was natural to find infants fascinating. But privately Grace worried. Maybe it was Alison’s choice of words, comparing Joy to the moon like that, but it reminded Grace of all the trouble they’d had.
    This was the problem with trying to prolong naps, she thought. You let in one single thought, even a pleasant one, and the rest all tumbled in afterward, and soon they started crashing into each other and worrying you and it was hard to recover your napping composure. Sometimes, though, you could get it back if you thought about something pleasant, something completely different....
    The TV shoot had been fun and unexpectedly constructive. It suddenly occurred to Grace that the kids had probably never spent time with an Asian adult since coming to Askew. Certainly there weren’t any Asians among her or Vern’s friends. They knew lots of African-Americans, but of course that wasn’t the same. She had never thought about race when she was growing up, and now she saw that she’d been blind to it. The colors had been all around her, endlessly complex, with shades as variegated as the genetic spectrum could permit. Joy told her that Elvis was hanging out with the black kids at school, lobbying to have the Civil War memorial on Cherry taken down. That was good. Change was good, and Elvis had a peer group, and his stability was rubbing off on Chelsea. Alison was settling in nicely, and despite Grace’s reservations, she had to admit it was nice to have an infant around. No, it was Joy she was worried about. It always came back to Joy.
    The fragrant smell of fried chicken wafted up the stairs from the kitchen. Vern was experimenting again. Grace smiled. Ever since the shoot, Vern had been obsessed, researching the various uses for kudzu and perfecting recipes for food and herbal remedies. He had taken to loading all the kids into the minivan on the weekends and setting them loose in the countryside to harvest kudzu roots. They would come back at the end of the day, dirty and exhausted, with their back-packs full, and process the roots into starch. The kids were happy because Vern was paying them an hourly wage. He had high hopes of winning at the state fair with his