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servility that had characterized the very best servants of her childhood and youth. The cook here at Blessings had had it, and the head gardener, and the man who had tended the cows and taught Miss Lydia and Master Blessing how to pull down on the soft udders and aim right into their open mouths, so that the milk was warm and sweet on their lips. The maids in the city house had somehow never had it, but perhaps that was because of the way Father had treated them, brushing against them sometimes in the hallway, when he thought no one was looking, using the serving spoon sothat the upper part of his arm gently touched the curve of a breast beneath a white bib and gray cotton. How handsome he’d been, with his center-parted yellow hair and his mustache and his full bottom lip and bright blue eyes.
    When Nadine spoke to the new man Mrs. Blessing saw him jump slightly, answering Nadine over his shoulder as though he did not want her to see his face. He moved oddly, as though he were stiff, or hurt, as though he’d thrown his back out and couldn’t straighten up. Hard work never hurt anyone, Mrs. Blessing’s father used to say as he walked with her around the place, swinging his stick, although he’d never worked hard a day in his life.
    Nadine was walking back toward the house and the young man had resumed his raking. He’d learn, this one, Lydia Blessing thought. She had a feeling about him. She’d just have to remember to tell Nadine to remind him to straighten up. There was no point in having him throw his back out the very first month on the job.

 
    H e hadn’t been this afraid since his first week in county jail, when he was convinced that any minute some big guy was going to jump him. Or as tired, for that matter. A deadbeat dad who worked with him in the laundry finally took pity on him. “You can get some sleep, junior,” the man had said, stuffing sheets in the big top-loading machine. “The worst it gets in here is when somebody bodychecks somebody else during a basketball game.”
    “I don’t play basketball,” Skip had replied.
    “There you go, then,” the older man said.
    The rider mower was going round and round in a clean monotonous motion that was putting him to sleep. The windows of the house glittered in the sunlight so that it was impossible to see if someone was watching him. He hadn’t been this afraid since he sat in the parking lot at the Quik-Stop and watched Chris shout into the clerk’s face through the smoggy glass of the window. And at least then he’d known what crime he was committing, waiting with the engine running for someone with a cash register’s worth of dirty bills stuffed into a brown bag. He’d been afraid now for more than a week, but he wasn’t certain exactly what he was guilty of. When he looked into the bottom drawer of an old bureau he’d lined with a blanket at the baby, looking closely for any sign of life, he wondered whether this was kidnapping, or theft, or some sort of accessory thing. Maybe it was a parole violation of some sort, harboring a minor child. Mainly he wondered how long he couldtrim and tend two hundred acres of land with his spine curled around a baby strapped to his chest and an old woman watching him from the window.
    “She must think I’m the hunchback of Notre Dame,” he said aloud without meaning to speak, and the small downy head stirred slightly. “Please please please please don’t wake up,” he whispered. “Please.”
    He’d had a dog once, in that way he’d had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting. It had been a beagle-mix puppy of some kind, with a sharp bark and long incisors and a tail that swept knickknacks off low surfaces. One evening it tore open a bag of garbage left at the curb, scattering tin cans and pieces of waxed paper across the lawn; the next it soiled the thin beige wall-to-wall that was the jewel of his mother’s living room. “We gave him to a family with a farm, Son,” his