Quiet again in the room. Quiet enough so through the raised windows Foster could hear the low rumble of town. He locked his hands in his lap and looked down at them. After a time, Connie spoke.

“In some ways, it could be, your father wasn’t so different from your grandfather. I’ve not thought of it this way before. But Norman was a quiet man. You didn’t know him, you’d find him silent, even severe. But he was not that way. I think two things, the war and his love of your grandmother, left him feeling he was best off at the side of life. I think he saw the farm as a refuge—a place where what world was made was of his own making.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I recall as yesterday the morning he walked back up to the farm at the end of the war with that dark-skinned girl with him. It was September and we’d been expecting him some time. Most of the men had come home by the trainload. We hadn’t had a letter from Norman since before the surrender. Mother was sick, worrying about him. Those men that came back, all we’d get from them was Norman had stepped up and asked to sign his mustering-out papers there in Washington D.C., that he wanted to walk the way home and see the country he’d just fought for. Now understand, Brother was the sort that had gone through the whole war with never a request of any sort, not even a complaint. When Father died he could’ve come home then, no one would’ve questioned it. But Norman was the type of man that once he took something up he saw it through to the end. So when he wanted to walk home, they honored that. I’ve no doubt there was men, officers certain but likely other men as well, that knew about your grandmother. But we didn’t hear the first word of her. Just that he was coming along. The way he wanted. And it hurt Mother wicked. All those men coming off the trains and Norman nowhere in sight. She would not speak of it but she’d read the paper and the lists of names and the accounts of the homecomings. And of course he knew that. Stupid in love he might have been but Norman Pelham was not the kind of man to forget what the rest of the world was up to. So when he walked up the hill that September noon with that dark-skinned girl Mother already someway knew he had made a choice that did not include her. She was just a widow woman with nothing but a fourteen-year-old girl, trying to hold everything together, waiting for him to amble on in. A mother”—Connie glared at Foster—“is nothing but a tortured creature.”

He returned her look. He said, “It must’ve been a terrible shock then. What she was.”