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the farm and the business simultaneously. He’d taken over the old cotton shed and extended the second story beyond the attic, along with electricity, air-conditioning, and modern plumbing. He’d moved the farm’s office of operations downstairs, and all the old watches and clocks found a new home upstairs. Then he’d added a small kitchen and bedroom, where he’d stay during the planting and harvest times, with their long days and short nights.
    The room had been paneled in a wood laminate, a guy’s interpretation of home decor, but even Bootsie wouldn’t interfere with Tommy’s self-expression, no matter how misguided. A basket of overflowing laundry sat by the side of the entryway, and I wondered if he now lived here permanently. The thought saddened me, not just that he lived alone, but that I didn’t know for sure. I used to wonder if Tommy had gotten married and if he had children. Then the disappointments in my own life had swallowed me, and Mark began prescribing pills to calm my nerves. After that, I discovered that I didn’t have to wonder or worry about anything at all.
    I stared out the dirty window, toward where Tripp and the other man crouched by the roots of the old tree. I looked back at my brother’s laundry basket, a sock with a hole in its toe floundering at the top. Itcreated a mental image of our lives, like derailed boxcars sitting alongside a track where we had no idea of how to flip the switches to get us running again.
    I walked past the large desk with stacks of papers spilled across the top, along with three half-filled mugs of cloudy coffee and a desktop computer that looked like it should be in a museum, then toward the stairs. The steps had been rebuilt when Tommy renovated the building, but the actual stairwell was not expanded, so the stairs were narrow and steep. Bootsie had said Tommy had done this on purpose to discourage visitors to his private sanctum, where he liked to be alone with all the antique timepieces that were sent to him from all over the world.
    I paused on the landing, suddenly aware of a bright light from above. I looked up and saw a clear blue sky through the ragged edges of a hole that had spread like kudzu across the wall and toward the back of the building.
    Hugging the side of the undamaged wall, I climbed the remaining stairs before stopping at the top to survey the damage. The wall and floor near the gash in the ceiling were dark with saturated water. Leaves and papers and tiny plastic bags with various watch and clock parts, their labels smeared by water, lay scattered around the room as if they’d been stirred in a pot and dumped out. Antique and contemporary clocks hung on the remaining vertical surfaces, their pendulums moving side to side and their hands pressing forward as if to remind us that time stopped for no one.
    When Emmett had owned his antique clock and watch shop downtown, I’d spent hours as a child studying the different faces of all the old clocks and listening to their incessant ticking, wondering about the other lives the old timepieces had measured and marked off with each tick. For a long time I’d believed that if we wound our clocks before they stopped their measuring, we’d live forever. And I couldn’t help myself from wondering whether, if I’d been here when Bootsie got sick, I could have kept her watch moving forward and stopped her from dying.
    My brother stood with his back to me at the large wooden trestle table that had once been in the Main Street shop, a small stack of plastic bags in front of him. A large domed overhead light dangled above him, making his reddish-blond hair—just a shade lighter than mine—glimmer.
    â€œHey, Tommy,” I said, taking in the slump of his shoulders as heattempted to sort through the pile. “Looks like you got lucky when that tree fell.” I continued to look around the room while I waved my hand in the air, as if to