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a breezeway going straight through it from the front door to the back, four high square symmetrical rooms on the first floor, four identicalones above. The furniture, once considered very grand, is heavy, dark, and clawed, made in Grand Rapids forty years ago. Every available surface is covered with lacy things or little breakable figurines or pictures in curly gold frames.
    “Where’s Grace?” Crystal puts her overnight bag down on the settle in the hall.
    “Right here.” Grace’s small, shy voice comes out of the shadowed parlor. Grace is as thin and delicate as Nora is massive, smelling like lilac and old things as she hugs Crystal tight.
    “Crystal, you’re growing every time I look at you,” Grace says gently. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
    “I’m so glad to
be
here,” Crystal says politely, but it’s true, she is glad to be here, and she sits down at the big round table for Sunday dinner and looks down while Nora says the blessing. Crystal eats enough of everything to make even her aunt Nora happy. The food is good, all the vegetables right out of the garden, sweet corn on the cob, green beans cooked all day with slab bacon, chicken and dumplings, big round slices of tomato on a green glass plate. Everything is served in big bowls with steam coming off of them. Crystal eats and eats. She always eats things here she wouldn’t touch at home.
    A fly buzzes in from the kitchen. Nora slaps at it and it buzzes back out the door; no fly or anything else would dare to disobey Nora. Nora has surprisingly delicate table manners for such a big old woman, manners which are all that remain of her long-ago girlhood in Baltimore; she sits straight up and eats slowly, does not pile up her plate although she takes helping after helping of the food. Nora is in her sixtiesnow, but she has not shrunk up the way that Crystal has seen other old people do. Instead she seems to grow larger with the years, erect and strong behind her giant bosom, wearing the men’s shoes and shapeless dresses which vary in color but never in style. Nora’s gray hair is so long she can sit on it, and she wears it pulled straight back into a knot at the back of her neck. Nora wears her eyeglasses on her bosom on a long gold chain, but Crystal has never seen her use them and can’t imagine that she would ever have to, Nora’s eyes are so bright and so black. Her strong face falls down from chin to chin and into the neck of her dress.
    “How’s your father holding up?” she asks Crystal, wiping her mouth.
    “Not very good,” Crystal says. “He doesn’t get up much anymore at all.”
    “He never was a stout one, even as a boy. Took after Emma,” Nora comments, shaking her head sadly.
    Down at the end of the table, Devere eats slowly and placidly, lost in the process of eating. He is Grant’s younger brother and he looks so much like Grant that it sometimes makes Crystal cry to see him. Except that all the things in Grant’s face which have gone hard and haunted and hollow are full and smooth in Devere’s. There is a calm, baby look to his face. Devere dresses in a clean flannel shirt every day regardless of the season; he moves slow. There is nothing much wrong with him that Crystal can see. She knows that Devere fell off the foot log crossing Dry Fork when he was a little boy, and did something to his head. She knows that he was in a methane gas explosion in the No. 6 mine when he was not yet twenty. But he doesn’t seem retarded toCrystal, not like pictures of retarded people in books in the public library with their tongues all hanging out. Devere does odd jobs for people up and down Six-and-Twenty-Mile Branch and Dry Fork, he works in the garden, and he keeps his tools in the toolshed all shiny. He raises hunting dogs that people come from everywhere to buy. He will speak right back if you speak to him, although he never has much to say. Sometimes he just stands still like he’s listening to something far away. Once Crystal