Chapter One: Wisteria Blossom Festival

A bildungsroman set in Frog Level, Arkansas (a small dry-county town near the Louisiana line) and Little Rock, April 1991-April 1993.

Chapter 1

Scene 1

The light is the color of skim milk. Pennie crosses the courthouse lawn with the Nikon already at her face, the dew coming up through the canvas of her sneakers in a slow cold soak. Behind the bandshell a man is testing the PA, one-two, one-two, his voice flattened by the speakers and thrown back from the brick of the courthouse a half-second late. The wisteria along the iron fence on the east side is fully out, the racemes hanging heavy and pale lavender, and the air under it carries the sweet wet weight that is the festival's whole reason for being.

She has been here since five thirty. The booth is up. Posie will arrive at eight with the painted plates and the watercolors wrapped in newsprint, which gives Pennie the hour and a half before that to herself.

She pushes a piece of fine blonde hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and works the lawn in widening half-circles from the magnolia at the center. The first frame is the banner. Two women in Methodist Women aprons are tying the corner of a vinyl banner to a post, and one of them has the cord between her teeth while she fishes a knot out of a tangle. Pennie waits for the cord-in-the-teeth and presses the shutter. She winds, and moves on.

The second frame is preserves. A vendor at the edge of the row is arranging Mason jars of fig and pear and muscadine on a card table covered with a checked oilcloth, lining the labels up so the writing all faces the same direction. The light is still soft enough to come through the jars and lay a row of amber and rose on the cloth in front of them. Pennie kneels, finds the angle where the jars line up against the woman's forearm, and presses the shutter.

The third frame is a child. He is asleep in a red Radio Flyer wagon at the back of a quilting booth, a folded quilt tucked up under his chin, his mouth open, one bare foot hanging over the side. His mother is two booths down with her back to him, untangling a strand of crepe paper. Pennie does not get close. She uses the long lens. The boy does not wake.

These are the photographs she knows how to take. She has taken a hundred like them. She knows their names the way she knows the songs on the radio in Lexi's car. They are not bad. She has won contests with photographs like these �" the Caldwell scholarship paper had three of them stapled to the back. She presses the shutter and winds and goes on.

The fourth frame stops her.

She has come around the south side of the magnolia at the lawn's far edge, the big one with the trunk like a gray pillar and the leaves still last year's leather, and there is an elderly couple sitting on the bench underneath. They have not bought anything yet. They are not looking at the booths. The wife is talking to someone Pennie can't see �" the angle of the bench cuts the third person off behind the trunk �" and her face is animated, delivering the punchline of a story she has told before and likes telling. The husband is not laughing. He is not looking at her either. He is looking at his hand on her wrist.

His thumb is pressed flat across the inside of her wrist where the skin is thinnest. The pad of his thumb sits on the place where you would take a pulse if you needed one, and that is what he is doing without doing it on purpose, the way a person leaves a hand on a sleeping dog's ribs to feel it breathe. His other fingers curl loose around the back of her wrist. Her wrist is small and freckled. The gold of her wedding band has darkened to the dull copper of a coin left in a drawer.

Pennie holds the frame.

She does not press the shutter. The wife is still talking. The husband's thumb does not move. A vendor two rows back drops something metal and somebody laughs and Pennie does not lower the camera. The light through the magnolia is breaking up across the man's shoulder in pieces the size of dimes. She is aware of holding her breath, and she does not let it go because letting it go will move the camera.

She presses the shutter.

She does not lower the camera. She keeps it at her face for another second, maybe two, looking through the viewfinder at a frame she has already taken, as if the looking is a different thing from the photograph and she is not finished with the looking. The husband's thumb does not move. The wife laughs at her own story. The third person, whoever it is, says something that comes around the trunk as a low murmur without consonants.

Pennie lowers the camera. She winds the film without looking at the counter and does not take frame five.

There is a name for what the first three frames were. She does not yet have a name for the fourth. She thinks for a second of the word stealing and discards it. The word is wrong. The man's thumb was already there. She only put a rectangle around it.

She caps the lens. She walks back across the lawn the long way, not through the booths but along the brick walk on the south side, past the war memorial and the live oak with the iron bench around its trunk. The Nikon hangs from the strap at her sternum and bumps against her with each step, the body of the camera warm now from her hands and the morning coming up. She presses her forearm against it to keep it still.

By the time she reaches the booth the sky has gone from skim milk to the pale blue of a sheet that has been washed too many times. The Methodist Women have got the banner up. The PA man has stopped saying one-two. Posie's car is not in the lot yet. Pennie sets the Nikon down on the folding chair, sits beside it, and does not take the cap off the lens for the rest of the hour.

Scene 2

The day before.

By ten the carport is warm and Posie has the folding table set up across two sawhorses with the crepe paper unrolled along its length in a strip of dark watermelon pink. The yellow Niagara box sits on the concrete by her right foot. The booth framework �" four-by-fours Ben joined for her last spring with notched corners and butterfly hinges so it folds flat �" leans against the carport wall behind her, the wood faded to weak-tea brown where the rain has worked on it through two festivals. Tomorrow morning Ben will load the framework into the truck and drive it down to the courthouse square at six.

Out at the workshop a hundred feet behind the house Ben and Wayne have the door rolled up. Wayne is bent over the bandsaw with safety glasses on. Ben is at the bench with his back to the carport. The radio is on out there, faint, the country station out of Shreveport. Pennie sees them through the carport opening as she crosses from the kitchen door, and lifts a hand. Wayne lifts his without looking up �" he does not need to look up, he has known she was coming since the screen door slapped �" and goes back to the saw.

Posie has the scissors out of her apron pocket and back in three times before Pennie has finished crossing. She holds a length of crepe paper against the table edge, eyes the table, and cuts. She holds the next length against the cut piece, eyes them together, and cuts again.

"Take the other end of this," she says without looking up.

Pennie picks up the far end of the streamer where it dangles off the table and pulls it taut. The crepe is thin under her fingers and faintly cool, the kind of thin that wants to tear if you pull it the wrong way. She has taken the far end of a length of crepe paper for her mother every spring of her life that she can remember. Posie taught her how to hold it without teaching her �" both hands at the corners, fingers on the outside of the paper, no pressure on the middle.

"Up a little," Posie says. "Your end."

Pennie raises her end an inch.

"Other way."

Pennie lowers it two inches.

"There."

Posie measures. She does not use a yardstick. She uses the table. Two table-lengths is the front of the booth; one and a half is each side. She has done this enough times that the table is the unit. She cuts.

The bassets, Jake and Elwood, are out at the edge of the carport in the sun, Jake on his side with his ear flopped over his eye, Elwood up on his haunches looking interested in nothing. The pecan tree at the corner of the drive is leafing out late this year. The wisteria on the fence �" Sabrina's sinensis, though Pennie does not yet know that word for it �" is so loud with bees you can hear it from the carport without trying.

"Jeanette has signed up for the punch again," Posie says.

"Lime sherbet?"

"Lime sherbet. With the ginger ale."

"Mm."

"I have decided," Posie says, folding a cut length over on itself and pressing the crease with the side of her thumb, "that the Methodist Women's hell is mostly potlucks. And that Jeanette is in charge of the punch in hell."

Pennie smiles. The dimple goes in before she can stop it. "What's the punch in hell."

"Lime sherbet. With the ginger ale."

"That's just the punch on earth."

"Yes," Posie says. "That is the joke."

Pennie laughs. It is a real laugh, short, a laugh that comes up before she manages it. Posie does not look up but her mouth moves at the corner �" a quarter of a smile she gives only when nobody is watching for it.

Posie cuts again. The blades of the kitchen scissors flash once against the concrete light. She lays the cut piece flat on the table, picks up the next, and holds it.

"Hold this end up. Higher. There."

Pennie holds.

There is a thing Pennie has been carrying in her chest since yesterday afternoon, since the second floor of the dormitory and the floor plan and the word DARKRM in block letters, and it has not yet found a shape she could put into a sentence. It sits behind her sternum where the camera body sat this morning. She is aware of it the way a person is aware of a stone in a shoe before they decide whether to stop and take the shoe off. She does not stop. She holds the crepe paper.

"Lexi and Beau's mom is doing the cake walk again."

"Is she."

"The same coconut cake. Same plate. I do not know how the woman finds the time."

"She finds the time."

"She finds the time," Posie agrees. She measures and cuts.

Pennie watches her mother's hands. They are small hands, narrow at the wrist, the knuckles already starting to thicken as Posie's own mother's hands thickened, the wedding ring loose now and turned inward so the diamond sits against her palm while she works. Pennie has photographed those hands twice �" once at the sewing machine, once at the kitchen sink. Neither photograph was the fourth kind. Both were posed even when she had not posed them, because Posie composes herself for any room she enters, including the rooms her own daughter enters with a camera.

"What."

"What what."

"You are looking at me."

"I'm holding the streamer."

"You are looking at me while you hold the streamer. What."

"Nothing."

Posie cuts. She does not press. This is the rhythm Pennie has known her whole life �" the pull-don't-push rhythm, the one where Posie reaches for a thing and then steps back from it before Pennie can decide whether to give it to her. It is the closest thing they have to a peace. Pennie has come to understand, in the last year or two, that her mother is not as bad at it as Pennie used to think. Posie is in fact somewhat good at it, when she is good. When she is not good she is terrible. Pennie has learned to wait for the difference.

Out at the edge of the carport Elwood barks once at nothing. Jake does not move. A truck goes by on the road slow enough to be looking for a mailbox and then speeds up again.

"Did you bring the starch in or did I."

"You did. It's by your foot."

Posie looks down. "So it is."

She bends, picks up the Niagara box, and sets it on the table next to the cut crepe. She does not open it yet. She is making her way through her order. Cut first, starch second, hang third. There is a list she does not write down and does not deviate from.

"Bring me the staple gun off the bench," she says.

Pennie goes to the workbench at the back of the carport, picks up the staple gun from where Ben left it on Sunday, and brings it back. Posie takes it without looking, sets it beside the Niagara box, snaps a finished length of crepe paper taut between her two hands and holds it up against the booth framework leaning on the wall, eyeing the length against the height of the upright. She nods, once, to herself.

"That's the one," she says.

Pennie holds her end.

Scene 3

Just after lunch the Frog Level Banner is spread across Pennie's bed in three overlapping sections, the want ads on the top so the dirt will fall on the part Posie cares least about. Posie kneels beside the bed in her gardening apron with the wandering Jew in her lap, the lamb pot tipped on its side on the newspaper, the root ball already half out and trailing soil onto the obituaries.

The new clay pot sits on the dresser. Pennie put it there twenty minutes ago when Posie asked her to, and Posie has not yet looked at it, but she will, in a minute, when the roots are loose.

"Look at this," Posie says.

Pennie comes around to the side of the bed.

"It's pot-bound. See here." Posie turns the root ball so Pennie can see. The roots have grown around the inside of the lamb pot in a tight white spiral, the shape of the pot kept even after the pot is gone. "It's been holding its own shape for a year. Maybe two. I should have done this last spring."

"It looks fine."

"It looks fine because it is a wandering Jew. That does not mean it is fine."

She works her thumbs along the outside of the spiral, breaking the roots free in small dry tears. The smell that comes up is the smell of the back of the carport in summer �" peat and water and a green metallic note underneath. Posie's hands are quick. She has done this a thousand times. Her wedding ring has come around to the front of her finger again, the diamond snagging once on a root before she frees it.

The lamb pot is one Pennie has known her whole life. It is white ceramic, the lamb's face on the front with a chip out of one ear, a band of blue painted around the rim that has faded to a robin's-egg pale where the glaze has thinned. It sat on the kitchen windowsill for most of Pennie's childhood with a philodendron in it, and then a spider plant, and then for the last two years the wandering Jew. The lamb pot is the plant pot. It is not a pot Pennie ever expected to see empty.

"Stand back a little. I'm about to make a mess."

Pennie steps back to the foot of the bed.

Posie lifts the plant free of the lamb pot in one motion, and a shower of dry soil comes off the bottom of the root ball onto the newspaper. She holds the plant up at eye level for a second, considering it, the long stems trailing down, the leaves striped silver and purple and the new leaves at the tips of the stems still pale, almost translucent at the edges where the green has not yet come in.

"They lean toward the brightest window if you let them," she says. "Which is fine. But then they get lopsided and the back side dies off and you end up with a plant that looks like half a plant. So you turn it. A quarter turn each time you water. By the time you've gone all the way around, the new growth is even."

"A quarter turn."

"A quarter turn. Every time. It is not hard. People make it hard."

Pennie watches her mother's mouth at the corner �" the small set of it that comes in when Posie is teaching what she actually knows. It is a different mouth from the one that delivered the lime sherbet line at the carport.

Posie sets the plant gently on the newspaper and reaches for the new clay pot on the dresser. She looks at it for the first time. She turns it once in her hand and nods.

"This is a good pot. Drainage hole's a good size. You don't want it too big or the soil stays wet at the bottom and you get root rot. You don't want it too small or you might as well leave it where it was."

She sets the pot on the newspaper. She tips the bag of potting soil �" a bag Pennie did not see her bring in, which means Posie staged this morning in a manner Pennie did not catch �" and pours a layer of fresh dark soil into the bottom. She presses it flat with her palm. She lifts the plant and settles it down into the pot, holding the stems back from the sides with one hand while she fills around the root ball with the other, packing soil in with her thumbs in small firm presses around the rim.

"You water it good after a repot. Soak it. Let it drain all the way through. Then you leave it alone for a week. They sulk for a few days. Don't fuss with it. Don't move it around looking for the right spot. You picked the spot when you put it in the pot. You leave it."

"Leave it."

"Leave it."

She presses the last of the soil down and brushes her hands together over the newspaper. She lifts the pot �" the plant taller now, the new clay paler than the lamb pot, the stems already beginning to find the light from Pennie's window �" and stands and sets it on the dresser next to the empty lamb pot.

The two pots sit side by side. The new one with the plant. The old one with nothing in it, the lamb's chipped ear turned toward the wall.

Posie does not say anything about which pot is which.

Pennie does not ask.

Posie folds the newspaper around the spilled soil, careful of the corners, lifting the whole bundle by the four points like a kerchief. She carries it out to the carport without looking back. Pennie hears the screen door, the lid of the trash can, the screen door again. Posie comes back through the kitchen, washes her hands at the sink �" Pennie can hear the water �" dries them on the dishtowel that hangs on the oven handle, and goes down the hall to her own bedroom without coming back to Pennie's.

The wandering Jew sits on the dresser in its new pot. The lamb pot sits beside it, empty, the painted blue band catching the early-afternoon light from the window. Pennie steps closer. She turns the new pot a quarter turn so the longest stem faces the brightest part of the window �" the way her mother taught her in the same minute she gave her the plant without giving it to her. She does not move the lamb pot.

She stands at the dresser a minute longer. She does not know yet, at eighteen, that she will photograph this dresser before she leaves �" the two pots, the full one and the empty one, the chipped ear, the new translucent leaf �" and that the photograph will be one she does not show anyone for years.

She closes the bedroom door behind her on her way out.

Scene 4

The heat off the parking lot at three in the afternoon bends the air a foot above the asphalt. Pennie cuts across between two pickups with the keys still in her hand and feels the sweat start at the small of her back before she reaches the curb. April is not supposed to do this in south Arkansas, but it does. It will rain before sundown.

A football player with a duffel over one shoulder is coming out the side door of the dorm as she comes up the walk, and he holds the door open behind himself with his free hand �" a wide flat hand that takes the whole edge of the door �" and lets her pass under his arm without breaking stride or looking down at her face. The air inside the door is cold and smells of laundry soap and something fried from the cafeteria across the breezeway. Pennie says thank you to the back of his jersey and he does not turn.

The stairwell is loud. Two boys are going up ahead of her with a stereo speaker between them, arguing about whose turn it is to walk backward. She lets them get a flight ahead. On the second floor the hall is quieter, doors propped with whatever was nearest �" a textbook here, a high-top there, at the far end a single black football cleat wedged against the bottom of a door.

That door is Beau's.

He is at his desk with his back to the door when she comes in. He hears her and does not turn yet. He is finishing a line. He has the ruler down on the page and the pencil moving along it in a slow careful stroke, the kind of line he learned to draw in the drafting elective he took in tenth grade and still talks about. He sets the pencil down, lifts the ruler, blows once across the paper, and turns the chair around.

"Come here. Look at this."

She comes.

The page is a sheet of his graph paper turned long-side. He has drawn a rectangle and divided it. His lines are clean. His handwriting in the labels is the small block printing he uses for everything �" BEDRM 1 in the upper left, LIVING along the bottom, KITCHEN in the lower right with a little square for what must be a stove, BATH at the top right with two small circles he has made into a sink and a toilet without labeling them.

The second bedroom is in the upper right. He has labeled it once in the small block printing �" she can see the original word still there under the line he has put through it �" and over the cross-out he has written, in larger letters, harder pressed, DARKRM.

"Building's on Asher," he says. "Just past the stop sign at Pine. Two blocks from the field house. Second floor, on the east end of the building, so the bedroom side gets the morning light and the back gets the afternoon, which is what you want. I asked the guy. There's a window in this room" �" he taps DARKRM with the eraser of the pencil �" "but he said he'd block it for us. Plywood and weatherstripping. The bathroom's right there for the water. You'd have to share the tub for fixer trays at first but I figured we could put a sink in here eventually. I'd do the work. Wayne could help me on a weekend."

His hand comes to the back of her neck.

She does not flinch. She is good at not flinching. The thumb settles at the base of her skull, in the soft place where the skull meets the neck, and rests there with a small steady pressure that is not quite holding her in place but is also not not holding her in place. The other fingers curl loose around the side of her neck. The pad of his thumb is warm. He keeps talking.

"Lease starts August one. He'd let us in a week early to paint. I was thinking the kitchen yellow because you said you liked your grandmother's kitchen yellow. The bedroom we can do whatever you want. I don't care about that part."

She looks at the floor plan.

She looks at DARKRM.

She looks at the cross-out under it. She cannot read what it said before. He has gone over it hard enough to dent the paper.

"What did it say before."

"What."

"Under that. What did you cross out."

"OFFICE. I had it down as office and then I thought, no, that's stupid, she'd want the room. So I changed it."

"Mm."

"You like it."

She does not say yes. She does not say no. She makes a sound with her mouth closed that he can take as either, and his thumb moves very slightly at the base of her skull �" a small approving press �" and he turns back to the page and says something about the closet in BEDRM 1 being smaller than he wants but workable.

She does not remember walking out. She remembers the cleat against the door, and the boys with the speaker now down at the end of the hall arguing again, and at the foot of the stairs the sign-in desk with the RA behind it reading a paperback with the cover bent back.

The clipboard is on the desk.

She has signed it on the way in. Her name is the third line down, and the time, and Beau's name in the visiting column, and her own initials at the end of the row. There is a column for sign-out. The RA looks up at her and slides the clipboard across the desk without a word, and Pennie picks up the pen and writes the time and her initials and slides it back.

"Have a good one," the RA says, already back in the paperback.

The door closes behind her and the heat hits her face like a hand.

She drives home with the windows down because the AC in the Accord has been blowing warm since March and she has not told her father yet. She does not want him to fix it before she leaves. The road from the campus to Frog Level goes through cut hay fields and the smell coming in the windows is the smell of grass cooking. She does not turn on the radio.

The thing in her chest is the floor plan and the cross-out under it, and Beau's hand at the base of her skull, and the clipboard with two columns. She does not have the sentence yet. She drives the long way home.

Scene 5

Andy's truck comes up the drive at the end of the day with the headlights washing the carport ceiling once and then cutting out. The bassets bay once each, Jake first and Elwood after, the call and the response, and then they remember it is Andy and stop. The truck door opens. Two doors open. There is the small click and pause that means somebody is reaching across the seat to gather a bag.

"They're here," Seth says from the table where he has been sitting with his elbows on the oilcloth eating crackers out of a sleeve since four-thirty. He has been waiting for Andy to come home for the festival weekend since school let out at three.

"Get your elbows," Posie says without looking.

Andy steps over Jake and Elwood at the welcome mat without looking down. The bassets have been stationed there since the first warm afternoon a week ago, planning ahead for the air-conditioning leaks of summer, and have not yet given up the post even though the mornings are still cool. Andy comes through the carport door first with his duffel slung over one shoulder. The woman behind him looks down before she steps. She is smaller than Pennie expected and more at ease in a strange kitchen than Pennie expected. She has dark hair down her back in a loose braid and a thin chain at her neck with a clear stone the size of a thumbnail hanging at the hollow of her throat. Her bag is a soft cloth bag in deep eggplant, with the phases of the moon embroidered in white thread along the strap. As she passes over the dogs she reaches down and scratches the top of Jake's head once, not breaking stride, and Pennie watches Posie from the stove watch this happen.

"Mom," Andy says, dropping the duffel in the hall, "this is Sabrina."

Posie has the wooden spoon in one hand and a dishtowel in the other. She turns from the skillet and looks at Sabrina, and Sabrina says hi, Mrs. Byrd, in a voice that is quiet and unhurried and does not ask for anything, and Posie says hi back in the careful tone she uses for women she has not yet decided about.

"Smells good in here," Sabrina says.

"Pork chops," Posie says. "Ben."

Ben comes in from the den where he has been watching the news with the sound low. He kisses the top of Pennie's head as he passes her at the counter �" "hey there, dummy" �" and goes to the stove and takes the wooden spoon out of Posie's hand and the dishtowel off her shoulder in the same motion he has used most nights for twenty years, and Posie steps back from the burner and lets him. She wipes her hands on her apron. She looks at Sabrina again, longer this time.

Sabrina has wandered to the back door. The screen is still in. She is looking out at the yard where the wisteria along the back fence is in full bloom, the racemes hanging down through the chain link in long pale-purple cones, the bees up in it loud enough to hear through the screen.

"That's a lot of wisteria," Sabrina says.

"It is," Posie says.

"Sinensis."

Posie's head turns half an inch.

"Chinese," Sabrina says, still looking out the screen, not turning around. "You can tell from the racemes. They're shorter than the Japanese. And they bloom before the leaves. The native one �" frutescens �" blooms after the leaves are out and the racemes are stubbier. This one's pretty, but it'll pull the fence down in another ten years if nobody cuts it back to the trunk now and then."

The kitchen does a small thing it does not often do, which is go quiet for one beat while Posie decides.

"Is that right," Posie says.

It is not a question. It is what Posie says when somebody has handed her a piece of information she did not have and that she cannot dismiss. Pennie has heard her mother say it perhaps four times in eighteen years. Once to the man who told her the foundation crack on the east side was settling, not structural. Once to the woman at the nursery in Magnolia who corrected her on a hydrangea.

Posie turns back to the stove and Ben, without looking, hands her the spoon back, and she takes it, and she stirs the green beans once and sets it down again.

"Sit down, all of you," she says. "Andy, wash your hands, you've been driving. Seth, get the elbows off."

They sit. Ben brings the platter of pork chops to the table and Posie brings the green beans and the bowl of rice and the basket of biscuits she made at four because she has made biscuits at four every Saturday Pennie has been alive �" and on the night before a festival, too, because there will be a houseful tomorrow and Posie will not have the time. Sabrina sits across from Andy and beside Pennie. The crystal at her throat catches the kitchen light once when she leans for the pepper.

"So tell me," Andy says, reaching for a chop with his fork, "what'd I miss."

"Booth's done," Posie says.

"Crepe paper went up clean," Pennie says.

"Jeanette's bringing the punch again," Posie says.

"The lime sherbet?" Andy says.

"The lime sherbet."

"With the ginger ale?"

"With the ginger ale."

"Mom," Andy says.

"I have decided," Posie says, sharper this time, telling the joke better the second time, "that the Methodist Women's hell is mostly potlucks. And Jeanette is in charge of the punch in hell."

Andy laughs his single laugh, the one that is one sharp ha through the nose, and Sabrina laughs lower, at the back of her throat, and reaches for a biscuit. Pennie does not have to perform. The laugh comes up out of her on its own �" a laugh she did not have to manage.

"Tell her about the dome light," Seth says. "Tell her the dummy story."

"She doesn't want the dummy story," Pennie says.

"I do," Sabrina says. She is buttering the biscuit slowly and not looking at Pennie. "I want the dummy story."

Ben sets down his fork. He looks at Pennie across the table, the small smile coming in at the corner of his mouth that he gets when he is about to tell on her.

"She was four," Ben says. "Maybe four and a half. I'd been working on the truck out under the carport all morning, the hood up, Posie and I had been at it about something I don't remember, and Pennie had been quiet for too long, which usually meant something. She comes around the corner of the truck with one of her mom's biscuits in her hand. Cold biscuit from breakfast. She holds it up to the engine and she shoves it down in there between the fan and the radiator like she's feeding an animal, and she pats the hood and she walks off."

"She thought it was hungry," Posie says, from the stove, where she is not sitting yet. Her hand has gone still on the back of her chair.

"She thought it was hungry," Ben says. "And I went around and I said, don't break it, dummy. And she stopped right there in the doorway and she turned around and she put her hands on her hips and she said, I'm not the dummy, you're the dummy. Four years old. Eyes like she was about to tell me where to put it."

"And she never once cried about it," Posie says. Her shoulders have come down a quarter of an inch from where they have been sitting all day. The wooden spoon is on the counter beside her. She is holding the back of the chair and not pulling it out yet.

"Never once," Ben says. "Been calling each other dummy ever since."

Sabrina is laughing into her biscuit. Andy is shaking his head. Seth is grinning the cat-grin he grins when somebody else is the subject of the story for once.

Posie pulls the chair out. She sits.

When the iced tea comes around Sabrina takes her glass and she does not drink from it right away. She lifts her two fingers and touches them lightly to the rim of the glass, once, in a small unhurried gesture, her lips moving without sound, and then she drinks.

Seth's mouth comes open. He looks at his mother.

Posie sees it. Pennie watches her mother see it. Posie picks up her own glass and takes a sip without comment and sets it down and reaches for the rice.

"Pass the green beans," Posie says.

The table is loud the rest of the meal. The pork chops are good. The biscuits are good. The wisteria along the back fence is loud with bees still even at dusk, loud enough that you stop hearing it after a minute and then hear it again when somebody pauses. Pennie laughs three more times before the plates come up, and not one of them is a laugh she has to manage on the way out of her mouth.

Scene 6

By nine the dishes are done and Sabrina has gone with Andy to the den to look at the photo album Posie keeps on the bottom shelf, and Seth has gone to bed, and Ben is out on the deck off the carport with the bassets.

Pennie comes into the living room in her socks with the lamp at the end table the only light on. The television is off. The house is doing what it does after a loud meal, settling slowly back into its own creaks and clicks, the refrigerator coming on in the kitchen and going off again, the air conditioner clicking in the hall.

She sits in the recliner without putting the foot up. She slides down a little. She tucks one foot under her thigh.

She does the count.

The Wisteria Festival is the second Saturday of April, which this year is tomorrow, the eleventh. Andy's lease in his apartment near the base ends the last weekend of August, the same weekend her father will pull the truck up to the carport at six in the morning to load her boxes. The last Sunday of August is the thirtieth.

She does the arithmetic she has been doing since February, when she pinned the calendar above her dresser. From the eleventh to the end of April is nineteen days. May is thirty-one. June is thirty. July is thirty-one. August up to and including the thirtieth is thirty.

Nineteen and thirty-one is fifty. Fifty and thirty is eighty. Eighty and thirty-one is one hundred and eleven. One hundred and eleven and eight is one hundred and nineteen.

One hundred and nineteen days.

She does it again because she does not trust the first answer even when she has gotten the same answer eleven times in a row over six weeks. Nineteen, thirty-one, thirty, thirty-one, thirty. Fifty. Eighty. One hundred and eleven. One hundred and nineteen.

She does not write it down. She has not written it down once. The notebook in her dresser drawer has the Caldwell paperwork in the front and a list of what she wants to take in the back, but the count is not in the notebook and will not go in the notebook. She does it in her head in the recliner and at the kitchen sink and in the car at red lights and lying in bed before sleep, and the doing is the thing.

One hundred and nineteen.

She thinks about what is in the one hundred and nineteen and what is not.

In it: the festival tomorrow with the booth and the crepe paper and Posie's watercolors of the wisteria leaning against the back of the table, three for ten dollars, five for fifteen. Final exams. Lexi's wedding the second weekend of May. The summer at Smitty's, the produce shift, the long heat. The fourth of July at the lake. Sabrina, possibly, again, more than once if Andy keeps her. Beau. Beau on weekends. Beau when he is not at the field house. Beau and the floor plan, which he will bring out again and which she will have to find a way to set down without breaking it.

Not in it: the apartment on Asher with the window in the second bedroom that he would block with plywood and weatherstripping. The kitchen yellow like her grandmother's. The shared tub for the fixer trays. The lease that begins August one.

She knows this. She has known it for some time. She has not yet said it to anyone, including herself, in those words. But she has counted the days.

One hundred and nineteen.

Out on the deck one of the bassets shifts, the small thump of a dog repositioning a hip on a board, and Ben coughs once, low, and a moth somewhere is throwing itself at the lamp Pennie is sitting under and she watches it go around and around the shade without intervening.

In the kitchen Posie is running water.

The water runs for a long time. Pennie counts that too without meaning to. The water runs and runs and then it stops, and after it stops there is a half-second in which Pennie expects to hear the dishtowel on the oven handle, and she does �" the small soft slap of cotton against metal �" and then there is nothing.

The kitchen light goes off. The hall light goes on, and then off. The bedroom door at the end of the hall closes, not loud.

The house gets quieter still.

Pennie reaches up and turns the lamp off.

She sits in the recliner in the dark. The recliner faces the front window. Through the sheers she can see the yard and the road and the pecan tree at the corner of the drive and the young pin oak where the Accord is parked, and the porch light on next door at the Cathcarts'. The bassets are quiet now out on the deck. Ben is still out there.

In her bedroom on the dresser the wandering Jew is leaning by a quarter inch already toward the window where the streetlight comes in. The lamb pot sits beside it, empty, the painted blue band black in the dark, the chip on the ear turned toward the wall. The Nikon is on the desk with the lens cap on, loaded with a fresh roll of Tri-X for tomorrow.

One hundred and nineteen days.

Pennie does not go to bed. She sits in the dark in the recliner with her socked feet up and the count going behind her eyes, and the count is the last thing she is doing when she hears Ben come in off the deck and step over Jake and Elwood at the welcome mat and turn the bolt on the carport door, and the count is still going.

Author's Note

I'm going for the warmth of Ellen Gilchrist.

Reviews

[lauren]

Hi!
I just read your story, and I’m obsessed! Your writing is incredible, and I kept imagining how cool it would be as a comic.
I’m a professional commissioned artist, and I’d love to work with you to turn it into one, if you’re into the idea, of course! I think it would look absolutely stunning.
Feel free to message me on Discord (laurendoesitall) if you’re interested. Can’t wait to hear from you!
Best,
Lauren

[Elsa 123]

Hi there!

I just came across your story, and I have to say it instantly pulled me in. The way you describe your scenes makes them feel so vivid and cinematic, like they’re just waiting to be brought to life visually. That kind of storytelling is rare, and it’s exactly what inspires artists like me.

I’m a commission artist specializing in eyecatching book covers, expressive character illustrations, and immersive visual storytelling. I’d absolutely love to collaborate with you and turn your world into stunning artwork that captures its full essence.

If you’re ever interested in elevating your story with custom visuals, feel free to reach out. I’d be excited to create something truly unique for you. You can find me on Disc0rd (elsaa_uwu) or In$tagram (elsaa.uwu) to check out my work or chat anytime.

Looking forward to hearing from you!
Best regards,
Elsa

[tunwizyna]

I came across your story and checked the Synopsis. it impressive there are a few things reducing its perceived value before a reader even gets to chapter one! Want me to point out what I noticed? reach me on: WhatsApp: [phone]| Email: [e-mail]| Instagram: book_blaze04| Discord: book_blaze2