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feeling well and came home, he needs to talk with his mother, needs to know if it is all right for him to dream.
    â€œDo you ever think about living somewhere else?” he asks.
    Maureen is slicing apples for the pie she is making. When she hears Ansel’s question, her hands start trembling, but whether from fear or joy she does not know.
    â€œWhy do you ask?”
    â€œJust asking,” Ansel responds laconically, wishing his mother would tell him what she thinks for once rather than asking a question to answer his question.
    â€œYes,” she says so quietly that he almost does not hear. “Yes, I do,” she adds, a little more loudly.
    Ansel’s heart is beating so fast he is afraid it will run out of beats and stop. “Where would you live?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know. Miss Esther thinks there’s no place in the world like Cambridge up in Massachusetts.”
    â€œSo why don’t you go live there?”
    â€œI wouldn’t be any good in a place like that. Too big. Too many people. And what would I do? I don’t know how to do anything except keep house and take care of my husband and my son.”
    Ansel is silent for a long time. He wants to ask her the most important question he will ever askanyone, but what if she gives him the answer he does not want to hear? Or thinks he doesn’t want to hear. What then?
    Then it occurs to him. What if she says what he wants her to say?
    That is even more frightening.
    â€œMa?”
    She turns from the kitchen counter and looks at him for the first time. She hears a tremor in his voice. She knows what is coming.
    â€œDo I have to take over the store when I grow up?”
    There are moments in which one word can bestow life or abort it.
    A mere word, one syllable from a parent to a child has the power of a commandment from God.
    Maureen does not hesitate. “No.”
    Ansel does not have to wonder about her answer because her voice is loud and strong.
    Her answer surprises him so much that he feels like he is trying to find his balance on the knife edge of the future she has just presented to him.
    â€œWill Papa be mad if I don’t?”
    Maureen looks into the face of her son and seesthere the fear of and elation at a world of possibilities.
    â€œYes, but it’s your life, Ansel. Being a failure at living your own life as best as you can is better than being a success living the life somebody else says you should live.”
    The silence returns. Maureen turns her attention back to the pie, which will turn out to be the best one she has ever made. Though mother and son do not move, they embrace each other in the silence that embraces them.

Friday
    1.
    It is evening. The sun has exited from the sky but forgotten to take the stifling heat of the day with it. On the unpaved, dusty streets, the heat settles into every corner and every crack of the houses.
    In these days before air conditioners, the heat inside the houses is greater than that outside.
    Everyone knows it will be at least midnight before it is cool enough to go to bed. So people sit on their porches, waiting with the patience that comes from knowing that it does no good to complain about what one cannot control.
    Around the town square, white men sit on benches beneath the ancient oak tree.
    Clouds are gathering in the southern sky, andthere are flashes of lightning and an occasional distant rumble of thunder. Even if the storm comes that way, and the old men around the square are sure it won’t, it wouldn’t necessarily cool things off. More often than not, a rain in August didn’t do much good for the crops and only made the air hotter.
    Bert and Ansel are closing the store. Bert locks the door, and father and son start walking slowly to the car, which is parked off the square, next to the church cemetery.
    â€œThanks for helping me fill out the orders,” Bert says. “I started learning things like that from my papa when I was