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

“Down at the Sunoco,” Colleen said, emerging from the short hallway with a fresh coat of lipstick on her thin mouth, the red looking harsh and wet against her powdery gray skin. “Getting kerosene for the heater in the garage. He said the pipes under the bench were sweating.”

“They aren’t sweating,” Marguerite said, her hands motionless in her lap. “They’re dry iron. There hasn’t been water in that garage since the quarry company shut off the auxiliary well in seventy-six.”

Colleen shot Marguerite a sharp, ugly look—the look she used to give her over the milk pails when their father had favored Marguerite’s butter yield over hers. “Paula, she’s been like this all afternoon. Mumbling about Arthur. Mumbling about the well. If you don’t get her into that clinic in West Reading for the assessment, Dale’s going to lose his temper. He works fifty hours a week, and he comes home to an old woman who looks at him like he’s a sheep-killer.”

Paula didn’t answer. She walked to the sink, turned the tap, and held her wrists under the cold water. She let it run until the pipes in the cellar hammered—three long, hollow thumps that traveled up through the cast-iron stack.

“Dale’s trying,” Paula whispered, her face turned toward the dark window. “He’s got a plan for the spring, Mom. He said we can add the dormer over the back room so you have your own toilet. You wouldn’t have to use the steps.”

“I don’t mind the steps,” Marguerite said. “The steps have eleven risers. A woman my age ought to know how many risers are between her and the ground.”

The headlights of Dale’s Dodge swept across the ceiling—two pale, yellow eyes that cut through the spruce trees by the drive, slid over the Formica, and vanished as the engine died with its familiar, dieseling rattle.

The screen door didn’t slam this time. Dale opened it with his shoulder, his hands full of a greasy cardboard box containing three quarts of motor oil and a roll of blue shop towels.

He was thirty-eight, twelve years younger than Paula, with teeth that had been straightened by an orthodontist in Lancaster when his father was still running the feed store. He had the thick, square neck of a middle-linebacker who had stopped running twenty years ago and started drinking draft lager before four o’clock.

“Smells like grease in here,” Dale said, kicking the cellar door shut with the heel of his boot. He set the oil box on the floor by the coat hooks. “Paula, did you pick up that certified letter from the bank?”

Paula turned from the sink, drying her hands on a tea towel. “I didn’t have time, Dale. The shift ran over forty minutes because the floor nurse couldn’t balance the narcotics count.”

Dale’s mouth flattened. It was a very small movement, just the corners of his lips drawing back until the skin over his chin dimpled like an orange peel. “I told you that letter had to be in the box before five, Paula. The escrow won’t clear until the verification comes back from the township.”

“It can wait till Monday, Dale,” Paula said, her voice small, the nurse’s authority falling off her like water off an oilcloth. “The bank doesn’t open till nine anyway.”

“It’s not the bank, Paula,” Dale said, stepping past her to the refrigerator, his shoulder brushing hers hard enough to make her shift her balance. “It’s the title search. If the title search flags that old easement on the west orchard, we lose three weeks on the permits. You think the county’s going to wait for us? They’ll run the ditch through the lower meadow and leave us with an eight-foot ditch and sixty feet of dead gravel.”

Marguerite watched him from her stool. Her fingers stayed inside the slit pocket of the chambray apron.

“The lower meadow hasn’t had a ditch in it since sixty-three, Dale,” she said.

Dale didn’t turn around. He took a bottle of beer from the door shelf, popped the cap against the edge of the latch, and let the crown drop onto the floor. It rolled twice, coming to rest against the toe of Paula’s white nursing shoe.

“Go to bed, Marguerite,” Dale said. His voice was very quiet, the tone a man uses when he’s talking to a dog that’s already been kicked three times for barking at the gate. “We’re having dinner. Then Paula’s got papers for you to look at.”

“What papers?” Paula asked, looking between them.

“Just the routine,” Dale said, taking a long pull from the brown bottle. His throat moved—three heavy, rhythmic gulps that made his larynx jump under his soft, white collar. “The agricultural assessment. The county needs an affidavit that the property’s not running more than two head of stock so they don’t bump us into the commercial tax tier.”

“I’m not signing an agricultural affidavit,” Marguerite said.

Dale stopped with the bottle three inches from his mouth. He looked at her through the yellow steam coming off the roaster. “You’ll sign what Paula tells you to sign, old woman. You don’t even know what year the tractor was titled.”

“I know the year,” Marguerite said. “Nineteen-fifty-four. International Harvester, wide-front, three-point hitch. Arthur bought it from his cousin Pete after Pete broke his wrist on the hand-crank of the lime-drill.”

Colleen cleared her throat—a dry, rattling sound like paper bags being crumpled in a drawer. “Marguerite, don’t be difficult. The roast is getting cold. Let’s just sit down and eat like decent people.”

“We aren’t decent people,” Marguerite said.

She stood up.

Her hip clicked—once, loud enough that Dale’s eyes dropped to the seam of her skirt. She walked past the butcher block, her walking stick held three inches off the floor so it didn’t make a sound, and reached for the black tape recorder sitting on the microwave shelf beside the salt-cellar.