Emaline boiled water for tea and sat at the kitchen table paging through an old issue of National Geographic, gazing at pictures of erupting volcanoes in the South Pacific and the pyramids in Egypt. Jim had every issue going back to 1919. She loved to look through them, to travel the world from his kitchen. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps he subscribed because of the photos of half-naked women in the Congo or Tahiti that were in almost every magazine, but she pushed that to the back of her mind as a scandalous and uncharitable thought.

She listened to the wind, felt the chill of it through the cracks in the frame house, even with coal in the stove and the fire lit. There were only three rooms in the house, so she slept on a cot next to Bobby, with Jim snoring on the other side of the curtain that divided the one narrow bedroom in two. It was three miles to the nearest farm. On winter days when you couldn’t be out in the garden, there was little to do but sit in the house and listen to the wind howl, the wind that never stopped blowing on the High Plains. An entire winter of this and she would go mad. They would find her in the springtime, the way they used to find pioneer women who had lived in sod houses with dirt floors, or in dugouts that were no better than caves. The poor things would listen to the wind all winter long, until they could bear it no more. Then they would go down to the root cellar, find a length of old rope, tie it to a rafter. They would stand on a pickle barrel and fashion a noose the best they knew how, put the noose around their necks, kick the barrel away. The last sound they would hear would be the howling of the prairie wind.

Velma had sat day after day exactly as Emaline was sitting now, in this chair, drinking tea and listening to the wind. But she had never complained. She would be busy at something, not idly turning the pages of a magazine, gazing at pictures of the world and wishing she could be somewhere else.

Life goes on. Velma used to say that. Life goes on. Sometimes, that’s the saddest part of all. Emaline had talked to Charlie Naudain to tell him she needed to take a week off from her job slinging hash at the Arrowhead Diner so that she could sort Velma’s things, but the truth was she just needed time to cry. Charlie told her to take all the time she needed. Business was slow in these hard times. Calla Plessman could handle things until Emaline was ready to come back to work.