behind you.” I take the two-track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty-foot

“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat

Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

Joe, who never lied, could lie fluently when it was necessary.

Duke had been right, the place had a peace that made a person want to stay. I had never thought about a cemetery that way before, and it helped me.

and we decide that whitefish is today’s answer to the eternal question of dinner.

This is an uncomfortable point on which I have meant to be evasive, but since I have lied I decide to let the lie stand. I have staked out a single day of privacy in the light of this merciless interrogation.

His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits.