The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett Page A

with nutmeg, three kinds of pie. Even with the whole family eating steadily, all five brothers and sisters along with Sally’s and Helen’s husbands and babies, the food left on the table when they were done would have fed another household. Eudora cooked, served, ate, cleared, washed and dried dishes and put them away as if she didn’t have a job of her own; as if she were still a girl.
    In between chores she talked with Ernest, home from New York for the holiday, and with Sally, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks. By the time she finished in the kitchen everyone had moved toward the sofas and armchairs, preparing for the naps that followed her family’s holiday feasts as reliably as dessert followed the roast. One by one they nodded off, until the house felt as dead as the Northview Inn, which was slumping into the ground. Once every few months her parents would open the inn’s main door, look at the flies and the holes in the floors, bite their lips, and then do nothing with what they’d inherited. When Eudora’s father, who’d known the place in its heyday, spoke about the guests with their guns and their guides, his uncle presiding over a dining room filled with sportsmen from New York and Boston, it was as if not thirty but a thousand years had passed.
    When her father woke—he was snoring now—he would, she knew, return to his taxidermy workshop, hinting how much he could use her help. She’d give in and sit with him, watching the whole night disappear as the day already had. Rebelliously, she hopped on her bicycle and headed away from the lake and her family, toward Mrs. Martin’s house. Naomi might, she calculated, have finished serving dinner herself and be free for an hour or two.
    It was colder outside than she expected; she’d forgotten her gloves. She passed Eugene’s garage, the firehouse, and the telephone exchange where, in an unused room two floors above her, the amateur historian wrote the pages from which we were always absent. She passed the library, the theater, two of the churches, the bank, and the electric light company. Climbing the gentle slope of the hill, she passed the rows of cottages, each tier larger and more elegant. At Mrs. Martin’s house, which was near the top, she stopped and dismounted, leaning her bicycle against the tall hedge.
    Up the neatly tended pathway, up the steps to the paneled door. She tapped a brass dolphin against the plate and considered the enormous wreath, dripping with gilded pinecones and berries and gold bows stiffened with wire, that had just been hung. Stuffed chickadees with bendable wire legs and feet—her father’s work, she saw, as clearly his as the owl in the solarium at Tamarack State was the work of Uncle Ned—dotted the branches. What would it be like to live where her family wasn’t in evidence everywhere? Again she dropped the dolphin against the plate.
    To her dismay, Mrs. Martin herself opened the door, with the discouraging news that Naomi was in the kitchen, making cinnamon rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast and busy—absolutely busy—for the rest of the day. Stepping outside and pulling the door shut behind her, she added, “But it’s just as well; I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Cold, isn’t it?”
    Then why not ask me in? Eudora thought. Gesturing toward her bicycle, she said, “The exercise keeps me warm.”
    â€œGood,” Mrs. Martin replied. “Because I know it’s convenient for you to accept a ride home with Naomi on Wednesday evenings, when she’s bringing Mr. Fairchild back from the sanatorium, but I was hoping you could get home under your own power for a while.”
    â€œOf course I could, but—” Eudora said, and then stopped, realizing that Naomi hadn’t told her mother about their driving lessons.
    â€œI want Naomi to have some time alone with