Beatrice was treated differently, but we didn’t hold this against her. We didn’t envy her being shut inside our mother’s room or being hauled out of bed to meet some man who was a stranger to the rest of us and who I couldn’t stop blaming for everything bad that had happened. When Beatrice came back from visits with Bill, she was always quiet. Even after being treated to ice cream.

“I don’t like his hands,” she whispered to me one night when we were lying in bed.

“Whose hands?”

“Bill’s.”

“Why?” It disturbed me that she would say this. She’d crawled into my bed during the night, as she sometimes did, stepping across Ellen, asleep on the bottom trundle. She had snuggled in, facing me. She’d developed a habit of twisting sections of hair and looping them around her finger. We teased her that this was where her curls came from. Sometimes, without noticing, she did it to my hair when I was lying next to her. Marie said Beatrice was developing habits that displayed her worry.

“He’s missing parts of his fingers on one of his hands. They’re just fat and round at the knuckles.”

“Oh.” I paused. I didn’t like to question too much because Beatrice got upset when we started asking about her visits. Marie said it was messed up that our mom would force this secret on a child, tell her not to talk to her brother and sisters about it and drag her across the night to see someone she didn’t want to. When Dad died, Mom stopped meeting Bill for six or seven months. He didn’t phone our house, and she didn’t sneak away. But it was like she wasn’t there anymore. Marie and Thomas made our food, and Mom was either in bed or pulling a shift at the hospital, just sleeping and working and sleeping for months straight. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Grief is exhausting, Gwen, the counselor we’d barely gone to, said. I wanted to correct her. She had it wrong. Our mother had divorced our father. She’d chosen someone else, and she kept him a secret from all of us. While she was better now, and Bill was obviously back on the scene, it was like she couldn’t look at us anymore, the four older ones.

I tried to think whether there were any men we knew who had missing fingers. We didn’t think Bill lived on the mountain because Beatrice said that most of the time they drove the same way we did when we went to swimming with Thomas: past the Guernsey Cow, the clog shop and the party shop, way farther down that same road, past the people with the horses and buggies, which meant Route 30, heading through Pennsylvania Dutch country toward Wilmington, Delaware.