The Quickening by Michelle Hoover Page A

He’d aged a great deal in the last few months, heavier in his steps and late to rise, the hair at his temples white. My mother often found him asleep in his chair. She had to call his name more than once to wake him. My father had lived in this house since the day he was born, my mother joining him when she was seventeen. Now they had four grandchildren, two more on the way. With Frank next to me, I couldn’t think they’d ever been strangers to each other. “Eddie has a hand in everything on this farm,” my father went on. “She can heft the grain and birth a calf, lead a plow with the best of them.” Hat in his hands, Frank listened with the new glass of lemonade empty at his feet. “She’s a different kind of girl,” my father said. “She won’t be spending a lot of time in front of the mirror with curlers and what not.”
    Frank scratched his ear after my father finished and seemed to stew awhile. Through the screen, our grandfather clock chimed the hour. The sun fell behind the clouds. My mother and father looked at him, expectant. “That’s just fine,” Frank said at last. “That’s all the better.” He opened his hands and shrugged. It was then I saw that easy way in him that made marrying and all the rest as simple as closing your eyes when you grew tired or eating when you felt the hunger for it. “I must say I’m partial to her,” he added. My parents had to lean in to hear him.
    My boy, you may not believe it, but the second time I thought I found you in town, I remembered my Frank the way he’dbeen that morning in the barn. There you were, trailing after some woman, and she kept reaching back to take your hand. You would give it to her for a moment, but slowly let your hand slip. You would have been eight then. This boy must have been close to the age himself. Mountains! your mother wrote in another of her letters, from Colorado this time. So high a person gets headaches walking the streets. There are plains too, but they’re nothing like home. Too dry for growing much . November fifteenth. I have marked the day your mother was due on my calendar for years. When you turned seven, I went so far as to fix you pancakes for your birthday dinner, just as your mother liked. I used plenty of butter in the pan so the edges would crisp. I kept them in the oven, piled on a warm plate. Waiting for you, I must have fallen asleep in our sofa chair. When I woke, it was early morning and the sweet smell had turned sickly. I opened the oven and the edges of the cakes were dry as boards, the middles a soggy white. Still, I thought those middles must be worth saving and I ate them myself. Fifteen cakes as wide around as the reach of my pinky and thumb. I’ve never liked food to go to waste, but those cakes put me in a bad way for a week.
    But birthdays aren’t what I wanted to write about. At least not yet. When I saw that boy in town, I thought he could be you. You, if only he’d been longer in the legs and narrower in the mouth. Breaking from the woman’s hand, he scrambled after a dog in the street. He never knew it, but he ran right past me, pressed close as I was to the side of the old meeting hall. When the dog got away, the boy stopped close enough for me to hear him humming. It wasn’t even a tune. No melody I could follow at least. But there he was,breathing hard through his nose to get the notes, making them up as he went. For a moment, I was back in my brother’s barn. I was with Frank, with his slow gaze and his easiness, the way nothing seemed to rumple him or take that grin off his face. And I believed that I might be more than imagining. That the boy I saw before me might just be you. But when I looked again, he was gone.
    I spent many a rag cleaning the floor of that kitchen once I was out of bed. I could never quite trust it. For months, Frank worried about my taking on heavier work, and the days turned long and terrible. When once he found me nodding off with a pair of his good