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imagined the card one day tumbling from the pocket of his blazer when some other girl dropped off the dry cleaning.
    I carried the lamp into the room that had been my mother’s painting studio, where there was a cot set up in the corner, piled high with blankets, wheeling my black suitcase, Magpie at my heels. The cat watched with her head cocked as I unpacked socks, underwear, and T-shirts and put them in the battered wooden dresser, no doubt a remnant from a long-gone New Hope resident. I came across my Swiss Army knife in my toiletry bag, among the tea tree oil shampoo and avocado body scrub—I had stuck it in there at the last minute when I realized I wouldn’t be allowed to carry it on the plane. About the only things I ever used it for were opening wine and slicing cheese at impromptu picnics, but I am a woman who likes to be prepared. I considered locking it up in the sharps drawer in the kitchen, but finally tossed it into my purse.
    Suddenly, I was exhausted. Not by the unpacking but by the whole afternoon. By being home. More than anything else, it was the guilt I felt seeing how much my mother had changed, slowly slipped away, while I held on to my careful little life back in Seattle—my life of electric appliances and halogen spotlights—oblivious, thinking she couldn’t be that bad, thinking the phone calls from Raven were exaggerated.
    I set the oil lamp on the bedside table and lay down on the cot to rest for a few minutes. Magpie joined me, purring like a lawn-mower. My mind was racing and my body thought it was barely suppertime, much less bedtime—I could easily foresee the sleepless night before me, soon to be followed by a blurry-eyed day. What I needed was a drink, preferably something hot, with spiced rum. Then I remembered the locked box of drugs in the kitchen and made my way to it, keys jingling. Now, I am not a person to indulge in the casual use of pharmaceuticals, but one little Ambien never hurt anybody. To be on the safe side, I took two.
    While I waited for the drugs to take effect, I studied the shadows of my mother’s paintings as they glowed in the lamplight. They were still lifes mostly, the one on the easel half finished: a bowl of fruit in somber shades of gray. It was an underpainting, a scene stripped of its color, only a shadow of what it promised to become.

Late April, 1971
     
    R ON M ACKENZIE WAS OUR BUS DRIVER back in the fifth grade. He was a bulldog of a man with a thick neck and beady, watchful eyes. He always wore a black knit cap and worked his jaw as he drove as if he were chewing on his own tongue. Looking at him, you would have thought he had always been driving school buses, but the truth was that once he’d worked for NASA. He’d tell the new kids on his route this, letting them think he must have been an astronaut or something, and only when they pressed him did he admit that he had driven trucks and forklifts, not lunar landers. He had moved rocket parts around. Ron Mackenzie had gotten to touch metal that blasted off into space. He moved from Cape Canaveral back home to Vermont because his wife’s mother got sick, and that’s when he started driving buses and working down at the town garage.
    On good days, Ron called us his chickadees. When he was angry, when one of the kids had disappointed him in some way, we were monkeys, and you could tell from his tone that monkeys were, in Ron’s mind, a pretty low-life thing to be.
    “I’ve had just about enough from you monkeys today!” he’d say through clenched teeth when the noise on the bus got too loud or when kids switched seats while we were moving.
    Del and I caught Ron’s bus each morning at the bottom of the hill by her mailbox. Three of her brothers rode the earlier bus that took them to the Brook School, where grades six through twelve went. Nicky, the crow assassin, was fourteen. Her twin brothers, Stevie and Joe, were seventeen, seniors in high school. Mort was nineteen. He had never graduated and