Oh, hell! Yes, he’d forgotten that after work he was supposed to pluck and gut the goose a neighboring farmer had given them for his sister Beata’s birthday dinner on Saturday. The send-off party for Joe at Murphy’s had been spur-of-the-moment and initiated by his boss. Brad hadn’t telephoned his mother that he’d be late because he’d intended to stay for only a short while, but one pint had led to another, and the time had slipped away.

“I’ll get to it tonight,” Brad said, hoping he stayed drunk enough not to mind the numbing task of picking the feathers from the bird, downward so as not to tear the flesh, then the bloody business of pulling out the innards—heart, gizzard, windpipe, liver—until water ran clean from the stomach cavity. They could have managed a dressed goose from Shreve’s grocery, but Joanna Bukowski Hudson was never one to turn down a gift of local game. She believed that money for store-bought meat and fowl could go toward something else, and their neighbors knew Brad couldn’t raise a gun against creatures of land or air. Two-legged animals guilty of the atrocities in Europe, yes—he’d have no problem there—but hunting for sport or food was not for him.

“I’ll help you clean it,” Bobby volunteered as they started toward the house.

“You’ll be doing your homework, young man. School’s not over yet,” Brad said, laying a hand casually on Bobby’s neck, as a father would his son, or a big brother a younger sibling. Bobby did not pull away as he would have done when he and his younger sister, Margie, first came to live in the Hudson household. It had all come about when Brad had discovered them alone, starving, and shivering on the banks of the White River in 1938. Orphaned by a house fire that had killed their parents, the kids, then aged eleven and nine, had run away when they learned they were to be placed in an orphanage. The children’s uncertainty of their welcome had lasted a month after Brad rescued them. Then gradually, like stray animals eventually coaxed to eat from a human hand, they came to trust the kindness of the people who had taken them in. His mother called them a blessing, a gift dropped unexpectedly into their lives. Yes, they were extra mouths to feed, but Bobby proved an extra hand, seeing to chores Brad could not tend to when he went to work full time at Cramer’s, and Margie became company for Beata, who no longer cried herself to sleep from missing her father. Bobby and his little sister were now as integrated into the family as if they’d been born into it with nobody in a town that minded its own business questioning the sudden expansion of the Hudson household.