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ran away to the North Woods to get married..."
    "...and decided to take a romantic boat ride together first, to declare their love for each other on the lake...,"Ada adds wistfully.
    "...and maybe he reached out over the water to pick some pond lilies for her...," Frannie says.
    "...and the boat tipped and they fell out and he tried to save her, but he couldn't. She slipped from his grasp...," I say.
    "Oh, it's so sad, Mattie! So sad and romantic!" Ada cries.
    "...and then he drowned, too. He gave up struggling, because he didn't want to live when he saw that she was gone. And now they'll be together forever. Star-crossed lovers just like Romeo and Juliet," I say.
    "Together forever...," Frannie echoes.
    "...at the bottom of Big Moose Lake. Just as dead as two doornails," Cook says. She has ears on her like a jack-rabbit and is always listening when you don't think she is. "You let that be a lesson to you, Frances Hill," she adds. "Girls who sneak off with boys end badly. You hear me?"
    Fran blinks. "Why, Mrs. Hennessey, I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she says. She is such a good actress, she should be onstage.
    "And I'm sure you do. Where were you two nights ago? Round midnight?"
    "Right here, of course. In bed asleep."
    "Not sneaking off to the Waldheim to meet Ed Compeau, by any chance?"
    Frannie's caught. She turns as red as a cherry. I expect Cook to scold her soundly. Instead, she takes Fran's chin in her hand and says, "A boy wants to go somewhere with you, you tell him to call on you proper or not at all. You hear?"
    "Yes, ma'am," Fran mumbles, and from the look on her face, and Ada's, I know they are as unsettled as I am at seeing signs of softness from Cook. I feel even worse when she brushes at her eyes on her way to the cellar stairs. "Weaver!" she bellows down them. "You fetching that coffee or growing it? Hurry up!"
    I look at the thin gold ring with a chipped opal and two dull garnets on my left hand. I've never thought it pretty, but I'm suddenly glad, very glad, that Royal gave it to me. Glad, too, that he always calls for me at the Glenmore's kitchen door, where everyone can see him.
    I go back to cranking the ice cream and embellishing my romantic and tragic story, writing it all out in my mind. Carl Grahm and Grace Brown were in love. That's why they were here. They were
eloping,
not
sneaking,
no matter what Cook says. I see Carl Grahm smiling as he reaches for the pond lilies, then I see the boat capsize and him struggle valiantly to save the woman he loves. I don't see Grace's tearstained face anymore or the tremble in her hands as she gives me her letters. I don't wonder what's in them or why they're addressed to Chester Gillette, not Carl Grahm. I start to think that maybe I never heard Grace Brown call Carl Grahm
Chester
at all, that I only imagined it.
    I end my story with Grace and Carl being buried next to each other in a fancy cemetery in Albany and their parents being so sad they ever stood in the young lovers' way. I decide that I like it. It's a new kind of story for me—the kind that stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling and makes me feel placid instead of all stirred up. The kind that has a happy ending—or at least as happy an ending as is possible with the heroine dead and the hero presumed so. The kind of story I once told Miss Wilcox was a lie. The kind I said I would never ever write.

mis • no • mer
    Nothing on our entire farm—not the balky hay wagon, not the stumps in the north field, not even the rocks in the lower meadow—was as unyielding, as immovable, as adamant and uncompromising as Pleasant the mule. I was in our cornfield trying to get him to pull the plow. "Giddyap, Pleasant! Giddyap!" I shouted, snapping the reins against his haunches. He didn't move.
    "Come on, Pleasant ... come on, mule," Beth wheedled, holding a lump of maple sugar out to him.
    "Here boy, here mule," Tommy Hubbard called, waving an old straw hat. Pleasant liked to eat