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sprouts.
    I remember:
    A copper pot: a wedding gift from my mother, presented to me covertly, so my father wouldn’t see. (“God help you,” she said, her last words to me.)
    A large saucepan, of blackened cast iron: a welt swelling on my thumb, shiny red and taut, like the head of a newborn.
    The window: open above the stove; the smell of chicken fat and oil. Blue columbine clung to the windowsill; the shadows outside were long and lavender.
    One shadow was longer than the rest and grew more quickly: this was Ed coming home.
    This is how it always was, how it would be for almost every day in the thirty-four years of our marriage, except for the years when Ed was away in the war. The shadows grew on the hill; the kitchen was hot and smelled, when money was good, like cooked meat, and when it was not, like old bacon fat and potatoes. One shadow grew longer than the others, like a slowly spreading stain, until it seeped into the doorway and became a man.
    “What’s for dinner?” Ed would say, if he was in a good mood, as he shrugged off his coat and sat down to unlace his shoes before wiping them carefully with the stiff-bristled brush he kept by the kitchen door.
    If he wasn’t in a good mood, if he’d been drinking, he would say: “What the hell have you been brewing in here?”
    But in the beginning it was always good. We had our own house, and the freedom to do what we wanted. After Ed’s first day at the Woolworths in Coral River (we furnished half our house with things from there—half on discount, the rest on credit—smells of wool and furniture polish; so many objects crammed together in memory, jostling for space), I gathered handfuls of Jacob’s ladder and leaves from the yard—burnt-edged and brittle, like ancient lace—and arranged them in the old stone hearth, which by then had been cold for twenty years.
    “What’s for dinner?” Ed asked, as he shrugged off his jacket. Ed Lundell was the most handsome man I had ever seen, and every time I looked at him, I could think only of my plainness and how lucky I was that he had chosen me. He had ink-black hair, a strong jaw, and walnut-colored eyes.
    “Chicken,” I answered. It was a joy to say the word. This was life, and being an adult: to respond this way to one’s husband about dinner. I was twenty and believed we would always be happy.
    We ate. We must have. I remember that Ed talked very little about the store, and a lot about the railroad. That was a favorite topic of his in those days. There were rumors that a train line would soon be laid between Boston and Buffalo, cutting within a mile of Coral River. It had been Ed’s big reason for buying the house, which was, at the time, remote: it was a two-mile walk to and from the bus that carried him the remaining two miles into Coral River, and at least a mile jaunt to its nearest neighbor.
    Once the train line came, Ed assured me, there would be houses cropping up and down the hills like mushrooms after a rainstorm, a forest of bleached white skeleton-houses, shingled siding, modern plumbing. We’d be the pioneers. He wouldn’t be surprised if the rail company offered to buy us out for three times what we’d paid or more—he’d heard of such things happening.
    In the end, the line never came; and the house remained as remote as ever—even more remote when Mr. Donovan, our closest neighbor, died in the war and his widow had to move in with a sister in Boston. That was when Ed began to lose his interest in progress, stopped saving up for the newest vacuum cleaner models, stopped exclaiming over the advertisements for electric kettles and televisions.
    That was also when there weren’t so many good days anymore.
    But that was all down the road. We had years to get through first—a war, winters of cold and hunger, Maggie’s birth, long, bitter seasons of silence. We couldn’t have known that the railroad wouldn’t come. We were kids and didn’t know anything.
    I overcooked the chicken. I