“Half a day is bad enough,” Rachel answered in a scolding voice and began to cry harder. Louis held her, and Gage slipped an arm comfortably around each parent’s neck. When Rachel cried, Gage usually cried too. But not this time. He has us to himself. Louis thought, and he damn well knows it.

They waited with some trepidation for Ellie to return, drinking too much coffee, speculating on how it was going for her. Louis went out into the back room that was going to be his study and messed about idly, moving papers from one place to another but not doing much else. Rachel began lunch absurdly early.

When the phone rang at a quarter past ten, Rachel raced for it and answered with a breathless “Hello?” before it could ring a second time. Louis stood in the doorway between his office and the kitchen, sure it would be Ellis’s teacher telling them that she bad decided Ellie couldn’t hack it; the stomach of public education had found her indigestible and was spitting her back. But it was only Norma Crandall, calling to tell them that Jud had picked the last of the corn and they were welcome to a dozen ears if they wanted it. Louis went over with a shopping bag and scolded Jud for not letting him help pick it.

“Most of it ain’t worth a tin shit anyway,” Jud said.

“You’ll kindly spare that talk while I’m around,” Norma said. She came out on the porch with iced tea on an antique Coca-Cola tray.

“Sorry, my Love.”

“He ain’t sorry a bit,” Norma said to Louis and sat down with a wince.

“Saw Ellie get on the bus,” Jud said, lighting a Chesterfield. “She’ll be fine,”

Norma said. “They almost always are.” Almost, Louis thought morbidly.

But Ellie was fine. She came home at noon smiling and sunny, her blue first-day-of-school dress belling gracefully around her scabbed shins (and there was a new scrape on one knee to marvel over), a picture of what might have been two children or perhaps two walking gantries in one hand, one shoe untied, one ribbon missing from her hair, shouting, “We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Mommy! Daddy!