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wedding: the bumblebees under the arbor, the overlong bridal procession as Lily and her father made their way beneath that avenue of trees while the guests sweltered in the garden.
    It had never crossed Lucille’s mind to imagine the impossibility of finding sixteen mature, matched catalpa trees growing randomly out in the country, much less the hopelessness of the task of transplanting them. But had anyone confronted her about her misrepresentation of the events surrounding Lily Butler’s wedding, Lucille would have shrugged it off, discounted it, been sorry to have a grand story ruined, and Agnes would have been disappointed as well.
    In Lucille’s house it was in relation to her that her parents and sisters warned one another—sometimes with a slightly supercilious air—that little pitchers have big ears. And that was because even as a young child Lucille had been prone to repeat the most outlandish details she overheard, repeat them to utter strangers with a blunt and rather contentious insistence. She had been forced to make sense of fragments of whatever stories she happened to interrupt; she snatched up scraps of conversations here and there. As the youngest of four daughters, she was always faced with people ending sentences midway through when she appeared, or turning away and speaking in a hush, adopting cautious expressions of restraint and, Lucille thought, an air of smug superiority. It was maddening, but by necessity Lucille had developed a strong intuition and a remarkable imagination.
    Agnes and Lucille had become good friends almost as soon as they met on their first day at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. Each one instinctively relied upon the other, because the world Lucille described to Agnes was so much more fraught with eventfulness than Agnes, as the oldest child in her family, ever discerned on her own. And for Lucille’s part, she was nearly always eventually relieved when Agnes turned her pragmatic attention toward some notion of Lucille’s that was getting dangerously out of hand and, in Agnes’s oddly appealing, steely little voice, deflated Lucille’s wildly spinning, free-floating fancy to the essential flat facts of its ordinariness. Agnes generally had difficulty recognizing drama even when she was in the middle of it, while Lucille had a tendency to invest the most everyday event with extravagant import, and they were useful to each other in managing between them to find a reasonable interpretation of the world.
    The Claytors, Dwight and Catherine, and their four children, lived out Newark Road, where Dwight Claytor’s grandparents had farmed comfortably, mainly growing corn but also running a good-size dairy. Dwight eventually joined his father’s law practice in Zanesville, although he kept his grandparents’ place and managed the dairy, which, by the time Agnes started school, was only about three miles or so north of Washburn, since the town had grown so much.
    But even before Agnes was born, the majority of that vast, slightly rolling acreage had been given over strictly to the growing of corn for a mass commercial market. Her father had built a new house farther from the road under the shelter of a nice stand of walnut trees that shaded the southern-facing rooms in the summer. By the time Agnes left lower school and began to attend the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, the Claytor farm was so extensive that the Claytors were never really thought of as farmers.
    In fact, her father had hired a manager for the property and become deeply involved in state politics. He had been pressed to run for and had been elected to the state assembly on the Democratic ticket to represent Marshal County in 1913, and he had worked hard to ensure the reelection of Atlee Pomerene to the U.S. Senate in 1916. He was often in Columbus for weeks and sometimes more than a month without a visit home. And when he was at home, a great deal of time was taken up by people who came and went to