I hid a baby monitor in my daughter’s kitchen three weeks ago and I have listened to my son

Here, there were no horses. There was only the dull, grease-trap hum of Route 222 two miles south, and the sound of the forced-air furnace kicking on every seventeen minutes with a dry, metallic shudder that rattled the registers.

She climbed the six wooden steps from the laundry room into the back utility porch. Her knees made their dry, gravelly complaint, but she did not let her shoes scuff. She had learned to walk without heel-strike forty years ago when Arthur’s heart had begun to fail and every sudden creak in the house would bring him upright in bed, his fingers clawing at his sternum.

In the kitchen, the air was warm and smelled of onions roasted in bacon grease.

A five-pound chuck roast, studded with garlic cloves and gray around the edges where the salt had drawn the blood out, sat on the yellow Formica counter in an oval enamel roaster. Dale liked his meat cooked until the fibers parted like wet hemp rope; he said anything with pink in it smelled of the slaughterhouse floor.

Colleen was standing by the double window over the sink, holding a bone-handled butter knife. She had already peeled four russet potatoes, dropping the thick, brown skins into an old newspaper spread across the drainboard.

“You’re up early,” Colleen said. She did not turn around. Her reflection in the greasy window pane was narrow, yellowed by the afternoon cloud-cover. “Paula said you’d be sleeping off that cough syrup till four.”

“Cough syrup’s water and sugar,” Marguerite said, leaning her cane against the edge of the refrigerator. “Doesn’t do anything for a chest that’s full of furnace dust.”

Colleen dropped a potato into the cold water. It went plop, splashing three drops against the floral wallpaper. “You ought to stay off your leg, Marguerite. Dale says the township’s going to salt the road tomorrow. You slip on that incline by the mailbox, and we’ll have to put you in the county wing before the ground even freezes.”

“Dale thinks about my legs a great deal,” Marguerite said. She pulled the heavy iron skillet off the cold rear burner and set it onto the front ring with a solid, leaden ring. “More than Arthur ever did. Arthur only cared if they could carry forty pounds of mash from the grain-house to the calves.”

Colleen’s shoulders stiffened under her pearl-gray knit cardigan. The knit was fine, wool-blend, bought from the shop behind the hotel in Reading where the lawyers’ wives had their luncheons. She had three like it, all different shades of slate, all kept in plastic bags with cedar chips.

“Arthur’s been in the ground twenty-eight years, Marguerite. You talk about him like he’s still out behind the barn scraping the spreader.”

“He is,” Marguerite said. “Some of him’s under the clover by the well-head. That’s why the clover always grew twice as high on the north rise. He had too much salt in him.”

Colleen turned then. Her eyes were small, set deep behind gold-rimmed bifocals that made her pupils look like lead shot dropped into oil. “You’re talking wild again. Dale told Paula last week that the doctor in Boyertown needs to look at your memory. You forgot to turn the burner off under the tea-kettle twice.”

“I didn’t forget,” Marguerite said, her fingers finding the salt-crock. “The element’s cracked. It doesn’t break circuit when you turn the knob to the stop. I told Dale three weeks ago. He said he’d bring a screwdriver from the shop. He hasn’t.”

Colleen laid the butter knife down on the newspaper with a faint, greasy rustle. “He’s busy, Marguerite. He’s carrying this whole family on his shoulders. The mortgage on this place is eleven hundred a month, and the dispensary cut Paula’s overtime after the new hospital group bought out the board. You think this meat just falls out of the sky?”

Marguerite looked down into the oval roaster. The beef was cold. A pale, gelatinous ring had formed around the bay leaves where the tallow had separated.

“No,” she said, her voice dropping into that low, flat hollow that Arthur used to call her ‘settling voice.’ “Nothing falls out of the sky, Colleen. Not even the dirt they throw on you.”

Paula came home at five.

Her nurse’s shoes—thick, white leather with wedge soles that squeaked on the linoleum—sounded tired before she even cleared the vestibule. She carried her lunch cooler by its plastic strap, her winter coat already unbuttoned, revealing the turquoise scrub top with the faded gold-thread embroidery: P. VANCE, LPN — GERIATRIC CARE.

Her hair was coming out of its plastic claw clip, strands of dull brown lying wet against her neck where the damp air had curled them. She was forty-one, but the skin around her nostrils was pinched, and she had the same faint, chronic twitch in her lower left eyelid that Marguerite’s mother had developed during the winter the bank took the timber lot.

“Mom?” Paula stopped in the pantry doorway, her nostrils flaring slightly. “You’re cooking? I thought Dale was going to pick up a bucket from the chicken place.”

“Your husband doesn’t have chicken money today,” Marguerite said from her stool by the breadbox. She had not turned the overhead light on; the kitchen was illuminated only by the greasy yellow glow of the range hood bulb. “He’s got four hundred dollars in a cashier’s check in his coat pocket for the clerk down at the courthouse, but he doesn’t have twenty dollars for chicken.”

Paula dropped her cooler onto the vinyl chair. “Mom, don’t start. Please. I had four transfers today, and two of them were non-ambulatory. My lower back feels like someone’s driving a wedge into the sacrum.”

“You shouldn’t lift alone,” Marguerite said.

“There isn’t anyone else to lift! The state ratio says one aide to eight, but they’re running us at one to fourteen because the agency temps didn’t show up from Allentown.” Paula pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, her wedding band—a thin, brushed-white-gold strip that Dale had bought from a catalog—catching the dull light. “Where’s Dale?”