He was in the Innisfail hospital for nearly three weeks, his leg in a heavy white cast. Then for the rest of the summer he made his way around on crutches, swinging noisily through the rooms of their house, forcing the younger children out of the way. He took no special notice of Marya but he was bossy, vain, irritable, self-important, swallowed down codeine tablets when the pain was bad but also drank a good deal of beer: almost as much as Everard, Wilma complained. Wilma prepared Lee’s special foods for him while he was on crutches, his special desserts, he’d tease her for acting so crazy when she found him in the garage, not having sense enough to try to jack the car off him, thinking right away he was dying, or dead—it’d take a lot more than that, Lee said, to kill him. (Though in fact Lee had gone into shock by the time the ambulance arrived and might well have died if the emergency crew hadn’t known what to do. Nobody knew exactly what “shock” was except it had to do with your blood pressure suddenly dropping.) “I wasn’t going to jack up that car,” Wilma said frowning, not liking to be teased yet liking her son’s attention, “Jesus, what if I’d only made things worse! This kind of thing happens so awful fast.”

Lee turned sixteen in August, which meant he could have his driver’s license as soon as he got off crutches and he and Everard had already picked out the car for him: a four-door Plymouth with extra horsepower, only a few years old. In the hospital his hair had grown long, curling past his collar, and he insisted upon keeping it that way. With sideburns razoring into his cheeks, slicked-back quills of oiled wavy hair. He was shaving now too. He looked older than sixteen, he looked good.

By the time the cast was removed it had turned filthy and was covered over in Lee’s friends’ signatures. The colored inks—blue, green, bright red—gave the cast a cheery air, and many of the signatures were those of girls: To Lee K., love Sue Ellen. To Lee, love Ginny. To Lee—Get Well Soon! love Fran. Alice signed it Love Always Your Sister Alice but Marya signed it only M.K. in ordinary blue ballpoint ink.

Three

THREE

By the age of thirteen Marya was one of the tallest girls in the eighth grade: not precisely big-boned, not stocky, but solidly muscular, with long legs and narrow hips and alert nervous mannerisms. Like a young horse, one of her teachers said to another in an aside surely not meant for her to hear, that hasn’t been expertly broken.