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shelves held a greenware crèche in a cardboard box and interesting sponges and other tools for ceramics; and there were boxes of pastels and tubes of watercolors, brushes, fierce-looking scrapers with toothed edges.
    Peg herself sat on a stool in front of those shelves, reading the instruction booklet for the enameling kiln Brick had given her for their anniversary. She looked up, frowning. “They’re supposed to send me something else—this isn’t complete.” She waved the booklet in her hand. “Could you run down to the mailbox and see if it came?”
    Franny was relieved to be excused from helping with the housework—Peg had assigned the girls to the bathrooms that day—andshe smiled as she made her way down the hill and across the scruffy remains of the church camp’s baseball diamond. What grass grew underfoot there was dry nubs, no more than weeds mowed to within an inch of their life; still, Franny’s soles were tough from a barefoot summer, and she took pride in the way she could run on the stuff, run on rocks, on hot asphalt or burning cement.
    A meadowlark sang on top of the sign at the edge of the property: D ODGE B APTIST C AMP . She hardly knew that she knew the local birdsongs but they ran in her head—they were part of her days—and she smiled as the lark swooped away and across Lakeside Drive and soared over that dream sweep of green and brown—swaying cattails and meadow and distant, thumbnail-size steers—that rolled up to meet a sky that seemed a pearly excrescence of the land itself.
    A good day. Maybe she could slip away for just a quick walk through the Nearys’ swamp where the high grass looked continuous but, in fact, grew in little hummocks a person had to jump from, one to the other, or get her feet soaked. Or maybe she could take a walk along Lakeside. Walk to the west until Lakeside ran out and there was farmland on both sides of the road and the lake was no longer visible. Or to the east, past the ramshackle neighborhoods of tiny cottages—
    The big upside down U of the neighborhood’s shared mailbox wheezed when she tugged on the door. Aluminum against aluminum. It made her shudder. And she felt suddenly guilty at the realization that she toyed with the idea that a boy other than Bob Prohaski might glimpse her by the mailbox, and like her. Yes. Just now, though she appeared only to sort her family’s mail from the mail of the neighbors, she stood at the well, waiting for her prince to come, insert his reflection alongside that reflection of herself already held by the dark water.
    Not much mail. An issue of Life magazine, a letter for her mother, a flyer from the Hobby Shack with a penned note on the front:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Peg—Remind me to show you the reds I got in my last firing—xo—Cele
    Most of the bills and things went to Brick’s box in town, or to the law office.
    Did someone stare at Franny? If someone stared at her, she could almost always tell, and someone stared. She felt the eyes at her back, though she had heard no footsteps.
    We don’t do that, Franny , Rosamund had said at the marina, but you had to turn to know if you were in danger, didn’t you? Or if your prince had come?
    The Nearys’ bull. That was all. An enormous black creature—Aberdeen Angus, according to her farm-girl mother—the bull stood stolidly at the edge of its private enclosure. “Hi, bull,” Franny called, and waved the Life magazine the animal’s way, but that was bravura. She did not feed handfuls of the taller grass from the ditches to the bull in the way she sometimes fed the old horses that pulled Mr. Neary’s trash cart.
    A bull that looks like a bull.
    When the Wahls had first moved out of Pynch, they had gone to introduce themselves to the Nearys. The Nearys had merely stood silent in their yard and, finally, Peg pointed across