Jamie’s hands wrapped and locked around the top rail. “I want to stay. I want to stay and watch the fast horses.”

“I spect you do.” Leah unwrapping those hands finger by finger, closing one of her own hands around his as she freed it. “But we’re going home now.” Abby already trailing off toward the carriage shed, a long figure in a white dress tight at the waist and dropping close around her near to the ground, small ruffles at her shoulders like wings breaking through, the sleeves then skin tight down to the wrist. Leah steered the boy after his sister. She said, “Those horses’ll be back another day.”

She drove the team south back through the village emptied for the fair and on along the river another mile before turning off for the farm road, passing the scarred cellar hole where the Doton house had burned the winter Jamie was born. The hole was already grown up with sumac and black-raspberry canes, the big shade maples still standing and the burned-back lilac clump once again vigorous. She recalled the bent-over old woman who walked with two canes and who’d made no friendly effort toward Leah until the children, the two girls, had been old enough to pour down the hill and snare her with a child’s natural grace and ease. She remembered, too, the adolescent girls at her funeral service following the fire: Abby sitting erect, the only movement the slow glimmer of tears tracking one at a time down each cheek, and Pru hunched into the pew as if her grief were a thing dragging her toward the floor. Pru then and forever after held by abject terror of fire, the nightmares that followed only subsiding with time but never gone, not even when Norman placed sap buckets of water in the corners of the girls’ room and also beyond in the hall. And Leah driving home from the fair past the still-black foundation stones seeing this of her two girls as if holding a kind of photograph of each, some measure complete of each. Not an image as much as a sensation: each held not just as child or young woman but all of life, a totality of each. She could not say the same for the boy-child beside her on the seat, his hands over hers on the lines, his bow mouth chirping the horses on. It was not the simple definition of his years. She feared for him.