Foster looked back at her. After a minute he said, “No. I can’t do that. But I can add to it. I already am.”

She pushed off the table to stand upright. “Well,” she said. “Good for you.”

Prudence had a pair of tin lard buckets filled with scraps for the dogs. He followed her into the woodshed entryway where they paused as she lighted a lantern and stepped out of her carpet slippers and into one of the pairs of gumboots lined against the wall and he followed her out into the yard.

He set the lard buckets on the roof of the car and let the dogs out. Glow raced in and out of the lantern light. Lovey came down off the seat slowly and stepped up to Prudence and sniffed at her and Prudence held down a hand and spoke to the dog and Lovey relaxed, letting her head be stroked. Foster whistled for Glow and set the buckets down in the circle of light and the dogs ate.

Prudence said, “It was Sister mostly who raised your father. After Mother died we were still a family but it was an odd little bunch, at sixes and sevens most of the time it seems now, looking back. It was Sister who worked so hard to make things as normal as she could for that little boy. Played games with him like a girl half her age. And later, when because of the fighting and torment we took him out of the school, it was her that did his lessons with him. Her that planned them out and kept up with them. Father would set him to parse sentences and then forget all about checking the work to see it was done right. It wasn’t bad intentions; it was that after Mother died Father did not pay attention to things the same’s he’d done before. But because it was Abby mostly who raised your father it hurt her bad when he ran off. Without telling anybody where he was going or why.”

“I could see that.”

“There was some bitterness in it too. She’d had some disappointments as a young woman and then, just at the time when she might of gone off somewhere, done something else with her life, she was suddenly left with a grieving father grown old and a wild little boy needed mothering. And so whatever ideas she ever might’ve had about anything else, they all got swept away.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I never saw or wanted anything than to stay right here on this farm and work it like a man. I’ve done just fine, thank you.” Her face wrinkled in the orange lantern light, serious.

He grinned at her. “I believe it.” Then asked, “You said disappointments. That Abigail had? What were those?”

“The usual sort. Boys. She was some right sort of beauty as a girl.”

“Still is.”