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you think?”
    “Better not borrow it without asking. And for heaven’s sake, don’t touch his telescope. He saved for a year to buy a real one—I mean, other than the homemade. Your friend Wilder’s family destroyed that one.”
    “Not my friend Wilder anymore, Mom. We broke up.” Emily swept out one more stall under her mother’s watchful frown. She was thinking about that girl at the Flint’s. Maybe they could be friends. She could use a friend—she’d dropped other girls while she was so thick with Wilder. And where did it get her?
    Okay, she’d interview old Glenna, type it up on the Selectric—when would her mother break down and get a computer?—and then go see that Bagshaw. She didn’t know much about him. She’d just heard he was crotchety. That’s what her conservative teacher said: “crotchety.” And he lived next to that new meditation center, or whatever it was. “Stay away from that place,” Mr. Morinelli had warned, like it was dangerous to sit and think.
    Maybe she would and maybe she wouldn’t. Her sister, Sharon, said there was a midwife who lived there; Sharon’s midwife had used her once as an assistant. Well, Emily was ready for new experiences at this point in her life. Honestly, she was getting sick of cows. Sick of this whole family situation.
    She ran to the door, leaping the cow patties, then turned and looked hard at her mother. “When are you going to call Dad?” she accused. “He’s always calling here first, and you never give him the time of day. Don’t you think he might come back if you’d give him an opening?”
    But her mother just went on doctoring the calf, her head in its Select Sires feed cap like an extension of the animal’s belly.
    * * * *
    Young Vic Willmarth watched his sister leave the house before he took the hawk into the house. It was a red-tailed hawk; he knew the broad blond wings and rounded reddish tail from his Scout work. He’d found the bird out in the east pasture. It had glared and hissed at him, but it couldn’t fly; it was down. Beside it, its mate had lain motionless. The wings, during the bird’s death throes, had left a feathery, four-foot-wide leaf angel on the field. The male—or was it female?—had flapped its wings furiously as Vic wrapped it in his coat.
    “I’m sorry,” Vic said, “I really am. But your mate’s gone and you’re still alive. And I’m gonna try and get you better.”
    But the hawk seemed to fall in a dead faint when he got it up into his room; it lay there with one unblinking eye fixed on him, accusingly. When his mother came in, before she could open her mouth to object to a nearly dead hawk on his clean quilt, or remind him he had chores in the barn, he said, “I know, Mom, I know. But I want it to live. Can you drive me to the vet’s. Mom, please?”
    The hawk made a noise then, a small pleading sound, and Vic told about its mate. “They mate for life, Mom; I read that somewhere. It’s sad. Can’t we help it?”
    She stood there a moment, looking down at the hawk, looking like her eyes might explode in her face, and then she said, “Okay. Get in the pickup. But we’ll have to leave it there, because I have work to do and I have to get right back.” Vic smiled, wrapped the hawk back in his jacket, and followed her out. His mother was a pushover when it came to animals— birds or cows. It was just with people she was tough. Too tough, he thought, thinking of his father. He had his own theories about why his dad had left.
    The vet, a woman, examined the hawk critically. It was a female, she said, explaining that the female hawk was actually larger than the male, its tail feathers redder. They’d have to do tests. “But my assumption is that it’s been poisoned. The way the eyes look, you know. It’s a healthy bird—good flesh—I can see that. It must’ve gotten into something bad.” She peered over her glasses at Vic’s mother, as if she was responsible, but Vic spoke up. “Mom