“If he did, she never let on,” Gertrude said. “I always wondered if he had another family on the other side of the river or if he just kept walking north until he got to Canada. My grandmother was a terrifying woman—the only time I asked her about my grandfather, she beat me until my legs bled, with a switch she pulled from that bush.”

Gertrude waved a hand toward the porch stairs, where a thick bush, stripped of most of its leaves by the fall storms, overhung the railing. The branches were about an inch around. Getting struck with one of those would hurt.

Cady Perec turned to me. “Disappearing grandfathers is a family theme. If I ever have kids, they’ll never know what happened to their grandfather, because I never knew what became of him—my own father, I mean. Gram never hit me with anything, but she doesn’t like to talk about him.”

Gertrude stretched out a hand to press Cady’s shoulder. “I’ve told you all I know, punkin.”

“Which is nothing,” Cady said.

“Even if I knew more about him, it’s nothing a stranger wants to hear.”

It was a warning signal, delivered with all the subtlety of a switch across the legs, but I ignored the hint.

“I want to hear things,” I said. “It’s how I sift out what I need so I can get where I want to be. And I never wantonly use the chaff.”

“Listen to you,” Gertrude Perec scoffed. “Sifting wheat from chaff. No one would ever guess you grew up in a big city instead of a farm.”

My cheeks burned, but I said in a tone of innocent inquiry, “I knew this was a university town, so I didn’t realize people who lived in it still farmed. Did the town grow up around houses like yours?”

Gertrude Perec’s brick house would have qualified as a mansion in the South Chicago of my childhood. I hadn’t been invited inside—we were sitting on a screened porch that faced northeast, toward the river that Gertrude’s grandfather had waded across—but it was a big Victorian, with maybe a dozen rooms on two stories. The sun had set, but the streetlamps shone across a few dead sunflowers, not wheat fields.

Cady laughed softly. “Gram grew up in this house, but we all know a little about wheat and corn, it’s so close to us. Everyone knows someone who works at the grain elevators or the fertilizer plant, especially us, because Grandpa Perec’s family used to farm south of town.”