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sell the most raffle tickets, even more than Rupe’s ninety-day snow removal certificates, isn’t enough. Bleaching mud-crusted socks to snowy white and cooking a juicy pot roast that boasts no leftovers isn’t enough. Scrubbing toilets until the rust disappears, disinfecting wastebaskets, starching Rupe’s 100 percent cotton shirts until they are board-stiff, isn’t enough. None of it is. Not the plump Roma tomatoes that fill the vine, more plentiful than any of the neighbors, or the zinnias that burst with such color that most every passerby stops to comment. It isn’t enough anymore, probably never has been.
    Evie can’t blame it on Rupe. He’s tried to make her happy, given her everything he thinks she wants. She fingers the heart-shaped pendant dangling from the silver chain around her neck. It is the gift he gave her on her thirty-eighth birthday. Quinn and Annalise’s initials are inscribed on one side, Rupe and Evie’s on the other. It is a proclamation of love, a public display of affection from a very private man. Evie feels an immense, abounding love for her husband as she recalls how he shouldered the teasing from his brothers, ignoring their jests about “old fools” and “love birds.”
    And still, it isn’t enough.
    The changes in her have nothing to do with Rupe. He is a wonderful man. It is her. Evie Elizabeth Burnes. She is the one who is ready to burst from the inside out. Spontaneous combustion; one day there will be a big, black hole in the front lawn and neighbors will say, Yep, that’s where Evie Burnes exploded, blew up like a space shuttle on takeoff.
    Maybe she should talk to Doc McPherson, see if he thinks she might be going through the change. She won’t tell him about the combustion part, just the not sleeping and the restlessness. No, maybe just the not sleeping.
    Wanda’s been taking pills since Sara Beth was born, says it helps relax her, not worry about cleaning up after the kids, the dogs, Les. But Evie knows it’s more than that. Wanda’s mother’s been doing the “cleaning up” twice a week for the past eight years. The pills have to do with Les almost leaving Wanda and moving in with Brenda three years ago. In the end, he scooted back to his wife and some said his old man is the one who orchestrated, or rather, demanded that by pulling tight on the family’s purse strings.
    Maybe Evie just needs a little help getting over the rough spots, pushing past the disillusionment many women her age feel when they realize they aren’t going to do or be what they dreamed of at seventeen. Those idealistic hopes will never see light; never take hold anywhere, not even in their own imagination. Acknowledging this reality and accepting it aren’t the same. With acknowledgment comes other possibilities, to segue, massage, even manipulate facts to trick the mind. Yes, maybe, but— theories that permit the brain to continue to hope. But acceptance, that’s the killer, the final edict that declares defeat, engenders disappointment, and, inevitably, the ultimate demise.
    Evie harbored such dreams years ago, wonderful possibilities that would mature with time and opportunity. She believed. But she doesn’t believe any longer.
    She is a middle-aged woman with a husband and two children, who plucks gray hairs from her head and wears her husband’s jacket in the winter. She gives art lessons in the attic of her home after school and enters her watercolors in St. Michael’s annual silent auction, even though her oils are so much better. And she will never see the orange sun in Hawaii, or climb the craggy rocks along Maine’s shoreline, or walk among the artists in Niagara on the Lake.
     

Chapter 6
     
    Rupe heads down the road, his work truck dodging potholes, his eyes darting along the property on either side of him. Burnes land: acres and acres of it, developed and undeveloped. It’s been in the family for fifty-three years, from the time Burt Burnes bought his first strip of