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the same thing in the bars.
    “Laya, why do people leave the top on when they open a bottle?” I took a swig of the soda. It was warm and fizzed inside my mouth.
    “It is good manners,” Laya said. “This way you know no one has poisoned your drink.”
    I widened my eyes and swallowed. The children laughed.
    “People do not poison each other anymore,” Laya said, smiling. “Now, it is just a polite custom.” She stooped and fed sticks into the fire.
    “It rained today!” I clapped and the children laughed again, clapping with me. They had spent nearly every day of the past month at my house, helping their mother. Because we had eaten so many midday meals together, they seemed comfortable with me, even though they must have thought me a strange creature. When children in the outer villages saw me, they usually did one of two things: ran up to touch my hands or skirt, or ran away screaming to hide behind their mothers.
    “Soon the mar will fill and we will have fresh fish to eat!” Laya said, referring to the crater of dry dirt at the edge of town.
    I didn’t see how there could be fish in a seasonal pond that eight months out of the year was as dry as my love life. But I would wait to see. Wondrous things could happen in nature.
    In the other corner of the courtyard, a younger woman with several children built her fire and swept her corner of the compound.
    “That is my husband’s second wife,” Laya said. “I am his first.”
    Polygamy had a bad name in the Western World, even among most modern-day Mormons. But in Africa, I had learned to consider polygamy as not such a bad thing. Women worked from dawn to late into the night just to survive. Wives helped each other with the labor-intensive preparation of food and caring of children. When one wife was nursing an infant, the husband left her alone and visited his other wives, giving her a much-needed rest. This way the mother did not get pregnant again right away, and the infant was able to breast-feed longer, greatly increasing the chances of survival for both baby and mother.
    Perhaps life in Idaho had been similar a hundred years ago when the Mormons practiced polygamy. My own great-grandfather had taken two wives in the days when Idaho was still part of the Oregon Territory. When it became a state in 1890, the Mormon Church changed the law and required husbands to choose one of their wives. My great-grandmother was his first wife. But my great-grandfather chose the younger wife and moved to Canada, leaving my great-grandmother and five children to fend for themselves.
    I doubted that would ever happen to Laya.
    A teenager at the time, my grandmother never forgave her father for leaving them. The older girls, including my grandmother, had to live with other families and work as maids. She held the Mormon Church responsible.
    Laya asked if I had news from my family.
    “Yes, a letter from my mother and father. Tout va bien .” I told her my brother was doing well, studying to be a doctor in California, and my sister and her husband still hoped for children but had been unable to conceive.
    Laya shook her head at such sad news and bent to fan the fire with a small mat. Though she had never said so, I knew she considered me, so near to her in age, old not to have my own family.
    I sighed. There had been a day in Vermont when, just before saying goodbye to Rob, I crossed paths with a young woman pushing a stroller through a parking lot. A dog trotted alongside. Contentment radiated from an infinite distance behind the woman’s eyes. Her happiness had stabbed me with such pain it had stopped me in my tracks.
    It wasn’t that I never wanted a husband and children. I just didn’t want to have to give up everything else to have them. At any rate, nobody was knocking themselves over asking for my hand. The sensation of falling backward into a pit hit me again.
    I sat quietly for a while, watching. I had learned from the old women in Liberia that visiting