Chapter 1 — The Family I Married Into

My name is Mabel, and I was twenty-six years old when I married into a family that was already coming apart at the seams.

I did not understand that, at first.

When you are young and in love, you see the man in front of you and not the shape of the family standing behind him, and it takes years for the outline of that shape to come clear.

My father-in-law had died young, long before I arrived, and I never got to meet him.

What I inherited instead was the space he left behind — a widow, and four grown children, and the particular silence that settles over a family when the person who once held it together is gone and no one has stepped in to take his place.

My mother-in-law’s name was Fiona.

She had spent her whole life on farmland in rural Ohio, working corn and soybeans season after season, raising four children on what the land would give and not one dollar more.

She had never had insurance.

She had never had a real vacation.

And she had certainly never had a pension — the word itself would have made her laugh, I think, the way people laugh at things that were never going to be theirs.

She had worked, and she had raised her children, and she had grown old, and that was the whole of the arrangement the world had offered her, and she had never once complained about it in my hearing.

By the time I came into the family, that land was already gone — sold off, liquidated, folded up into the past — and Fiona was a small, weathered woman with hands that had done sixty years of hard work and had the knots and scars to prove it.

I looked at those hands the first time I met her, folded in her lap at a kitchen table, and I did not know yet that I would come to know them better than my own — that I would hold them, and warm them, and wash them, and feel them go still.

I only knew that she looked at me with a steady, measuring kind of attention, the way farm people look at weather, and that when she finally spoke she said only, “So you’re the one.” I never did find out what she meant by it.

I like to think, now, that some part of her knew.

Chapter 2 — The One Who Stayed

There were four of them, my husband’s brothers and his sister, and by the time I married in, they had all scattered into lives of their own — jobs in other cities, houses in other counties, families and schedules and reasons.