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computer, had read things that made her worry.
    â€œA stupid crapshoot,” she had said.
    â€œA stupid crapshoot,” he says now. Meaning not just the brain drug, but life. Although he reminds himself over and over that he got dealt a fairly good hand. Not great, but good. He could do without this disease, and he could do without a dead daughter, but the rest has been a fairly good hand.
    â€œWe sure helped a lot of things be born.” He says this when he walks into the kitchen, to his wife and daughter. They both turn and smile at him. Beautiful smiles in a warm kitchen. By god if he’s going to gut his wife and daughter like a fish.
    But he needs to hurry. He can feel the slip now, fast as a dam breaking and the sudden onslaught of water.

II.
    Â 
    â€œMy tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else
    my heart concealing it will break.”
    â€” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
    The Taming of the Shrew (act 4, scene 3)

RENNY
    S he feeds the chickens, who are as annoyed with the winter as she. They have quit laying eggs nearly altogether, as if in protest, and eye her as if she’s responsible for the short days and bad weather. She scowls back. None of this winter is her idea. She’s done what she can to mitigate and help. She’s even put in a light that flicks on at four in the morning, and she’s given them extra vitamins, and their egg production should not, in fact, be so low. She does try, she does. Just as she feeds Ben. She does lather his face in the mornings, she does do his laundry, she does show him how to turn on the radio, she does drive him somewhere at least twice a week to get him out of the house. A thousand acts of kindness each day, for Ben and the chickens and the donkeys and the horses and she does do so much.
    And no one loves her, not even the chickens, and no one notices, and no one cares.
    â€œGive me an egg or two, girls.” She murmurs this to them in the cold-echo air of the cement-block chicken house, and in response, a mouse runs along the baseboard of the floor. She slides her hand under each chicken, each sitting in her own nesting box, and they gently peck her hand in protest. Fat Girl has one under her; Penny does not.
    She stares at the globe in her hand. E-G-G. It should stand for something. Or maybe not. All the stupid acronyms in the world. People and their stupid need for letters. The Department of Corrections, DOC. Average length of stay, ALOS. Provisions of section 18-1.3-406. Colorado Murder in the Second Degree. The SORL1 protein. The NIA, National Institute on Aging. The NHGRI, the National Human Genome Research Institute. She wonders if Carolyn and the kids should get tested. They could let their hopes sink to the depth of the sea, where they belong. They can have their hearts be broken now, and get it over with. There is, in fact, some sense in that.
    Perhaps someone in this family has it. Jess, probably. All that she has in common with him. Please let them not share that. Please, no.
    One of the chickens near the end of the row lets out a cackle of egg-laying, and so she stands there, in the cold, waiting. Life is about efficiency. This chicken is the one that Jess once named Oh-Beetle-Beetle, and she hardly pecks at all. Not like Floppy, who can bring tears.
    The beta-amyloid proteins. The presenilin 1, or PS1, genes and how they affect lysosomes, how they get mutated. She’s never been stupid. She’s kept books and invested well and guessed correctly when to cut the hay. She had a degree in animal sciences, but she was born in the wrong era—she just got married, without thinking about it—and she should have gone on to be a vet or a scientist. But she was good at thebusiness side of the ranch, and she kept the books, and she made up her own useful acronyms or codes. She wonders if she could ever tell a friend—perhaps Zach?—about all this. How her love for the ranch was manifested by making it work . By knowing all