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rubble around the toolshed.
    When my relatives clear a table for the night, they do so carefully. They cover the food and wipe the table down. They leave the sugar bowl out, and fill the salt and pepper. Each small act is a gesture of confidence that there will absolutely be a tomorrow and tomorrow.
    In Kansas the night surrounds a house; it does not swallow the house, it does not turn the house to stone starting from the inside out, as sometimes happens in California. You can think of the Kansas night as a hand covering a flame. You can imagine the dusk as a fine, dark cloth being laid in a line over Mayetta and west toward Wamego and farther west toward Abilene and Great Bend.
    Though it is a sweeping, dramatic darkness, it is not black. In fact,I can see Katie sitting in the dark under the yellow and white canopy and I can already make out the strong line of her jaw and her thin, hairpin wrists. Like Katie, I am unable to properly name these bones.
    In Kansas in the dark, my sister is all softness and memory as she sits there rehearsing the silence that will steadily grow around her. Katie—the riddle of woods, the renderless garden. Not far away, I am looking at her, thinking of her. I am listening to the crickets shape and reshape this fierce world.

Chocolate
    I remember a birthday when there was hardly anything for me—a pair of blue mittens wrapped in a Husted’s Dry Cleaning sack, brown twine tied in a lopsided bow around it all. With her eyebrow pencil, Libby, my mother, had written on the package: To Janice, Our Angel. I sat with my arms folded and refused to move. I didn’t want to turn nine that year in the dull, beat-up world of Idaho and welfare.
    Besides pretending that it was ribbon fit for an angel, Libby used the brown twine to secure the lampshade on the lamp and also to tie the back door shut, which had no lock. “You want the whole world coming in?” she’d ask, her small chapped hands struggling to tie a box knot over the doorknob, but in fact, if burglars had ever come to our house, they would have looked around, pulled the stocking caps off their faces, and laughed. A chenille bedspread at our front window for drapes. An empty orange crate painted red as an end table.
    I was miserable when my mother laid that birthday package onthe table, the dry cleaning label face-up and taunting me, but then my father, Noel, arrived with chocolate. Not a box, but a sack with the assorted specialties from Selfaggio’s—Twin Falls’ best gift and confection shop, though Noel always said it “gift and affection.”
    We did not talk. We sat back with chocolate melting on our tongues and fell into the sugary comas that often mark the lives of the poor. My little sisters folded their hands in their laps and swung their feet—scuffed saddle shoes, penny loafers with the stitching popped, high-topped leather baby boots not fit for learning the art of walking in. Despite our outward circumstances, my parents believed that we were cultured, in a sense—could distinguish German from Swiss chocolate, a good hazelnut from a bad. They taught us how to savor, how to close our eyes and be romanced in the thick language of taste.
    Later that night I opened my gift. “Next year,” Libby said to Noel for my benefit, “don’t you think Janice will be ready for a bike next year?” For me, it was not that dangling promise which never came true, but the dark, rivery liqueur centers of the candy that made nine seem possible and, at least for a moment, even good.
    My past, in the most simple terms, was a series of awkward, shameful gifts, starting with those mittens, starting when the Twin Falls Mill closed and my parents discovered that they liked the shabby life of leisure. One year there was a pair of men’s scruffy, used downhill skiis for me. I never got boots or poles to go with them, was never once taken to a ski resort. Noel, I later learned, had taken