A family’s loyalty is put to the ultimate test

Kirsten Hammarstrom hasn’t been home to her tiny corner of rural Wisconsin in years—not since the mysterious disappearance of a local teenage girl rocked the town and shattered her family. Kirsten was just nine years old when Stacy Lemke went missing, and the last person to see her alive was her boyfriend, Johnny—the high school wrestling star and Kirsten’s older brother. No one knows what to believe—not even those closest to Johnny—but the event unhinges the quiet farming community and pins Kirsten’s family beneath the crushing weight of suspicion.

Now, years later, a new tragedy forces Kirsten and her siblings to return home, where they must confront the devastating event that shifted the trajectory of their lives. Tautly written and beautifully evocative, The Mourning Hours is a gripping portrayal of a family straining against extraordinary pressure, and a powerful tale of loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness.

The Mourning Hours

Paula Treick DeBoard

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my Tea Time friends, because I always said I would.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with the Author

prologue

October 2011

Just outside Milwaukee, I saw the lights behind me—Wisconsin Highway Patrol—and pulled over to the shoulder.

Even before the cop tapped on the window, I started fumbling in the shoulder bag I had been lugging around since that morning, since San Francisco. I had packed in a hurry—my cell phone, a tube of lip gloss, a stack of undergrad papers to be graded, a dog-eared copy of US Weekly.

While I searched for the power window button, I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass: wrinkled clothes, grease forming at my hairline, mascara from twelve hours ago smudged under my eyes like twin bruises.

“I know, I was speeding,” I said, even before the window came to a stop. The night was cold—was it really almost winter in the Midwest? I had been living in a mild haze of seasonless fog, and this chill nipped straight through my T-shirt. It was as if I had spent years walking on a treadmill and was just now finding my real footing.

“License and registration,” said the cop, an automaton. I peered out the window at him, but his face was hidden in a pocket of darkness, only his badge winking back at me, his stiff jacket collar standing at attention. From his waist, a radio crackled.

“I just rented this car at the airport,” I said, producing the plastic pouch from Hertz, full of shiny brochures and a contract that unfolded like a fan to reveal my sleep-deprived scrawl at the bottom. It could have been anyone’s signature, really.

He scrutinized the contract with his flashlight, more carefully than I’d studied it at the airport with a line of twenty people shifting behind me. I suddenly worried that with this, like most things in my life, I hadn’t taken the time to read the small print, to look for loopholes.

“Your license?” he asked.

“Yes, my license...” I dug in my shoulder bag for my wallet, where an empty space gaped at me from behind a plastic window. Credit cards, my Berkeley ID, a Starbucks gift card with a grand balance of fifty-seven cents. I could feel the cop’s eyes on me. To speed up the search, I turned my shoulder bag upside down. A dozen pens, the wad of Kleenex I’d cried into on the plane, a Life Saver clinging to a bit of aluminum foil—but no license. I started babbling away like a psychotic on a weekend pass. “I’m so sorry, officer. I’m usually a very cautious driver. But my flight got in late, and I was anxious to get going and there’s almost no one on the road....”

In the midst of my rambling, my right hand brushed against the ID carrier still looped around my neck. “Oh! Here it is!” Thank God. I’d been about to throw myself on the mercy of the Wisconsin justice system, which had never impressed me. Instead I handed it over, the driver’s license that expired on my next birthday: my tentative smile, the vital statistics I had improved upon slightly, adding an inch, subtracting ten pounds.

“California, huh?” he said. “I bet it’s a bit colder here.”

I laughed with relief, playing along. Everyone in California lives in L.A., after all. We’re all sun-bleached blondes who load our kids into shiny SUVs and cart them off to surf camp.

“They might drive faster there, too,” he said. “I clocked you going twelve over.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, twisting the hem of my T-shirt.

He ignored me and tapped something into the keypad of the radio receiver. The license plate—to see if it would come back stolen? My name to check for warrants or a skipped court date, a charge or possession or prostitution or burglary?

My name. I stiffened, a reflex for someone who has heard her name on the news, enunciated carefully by well-coifed reporters. I worried that the cop might feel my nerves, the way a dog can sniff out the presence of a cat. In California my name didn’t matter; it didn’t ring any bells the way it might here. The officer was old enough to remember the case, the name Hammarstrom on the front page of every Wisconsin paper.

He handed back the Hertz packet with my license balanced on top. As he leaned into the window, his face was visible—pale, mustached, his forehead topped by a receding brown hairline. “So, where are you headed?”

My eyes drifted back to the road. Highway 43 would take me past Port Washington, Oostburg, Sheboygan. Before Manitowoc, I would branch off onto 151, taking the various twists and turns through the country roads that would bring me to Watankee, to Rural Route 4, to the gravel driveway and the light over the back porch.

Except it would all be different now, since he wouldn’t be there to greet me.

Suddenly I felt the pull of the place, like the insistent tug of a magnet buried deep down, beneath the asphalt. It was something I had never been able to properly explain to my Cultural Geography undergrads, maybe because I’d never been able to explain it to myself. A sense of place. I smiled at the cop, at this stranger leaning in through the crisp evening air. Somewhere deep inside, where I’d been clutching my childhood in a tight invisible fist, I felt myself slowly releasing, releasing. Let it go, Kirsten. Let it go.

“Home,” I said, swallowing hard. At that moment it felt like the only truth, the deepest possible truth of them all. “I’m going home.”

one

1994–1995

Everything you needed to know, Dad said, you could learn on a farm. He was talking about things my mind, shaped by Bible stories and the adventures of Dick and Jane, could barely comprehend—the value of hard work, self-sufficiency, the life cycle of all things. Well, the life cycle—I did understand that. Things were always being born on farms, and always dying. And as for how they came to be in the first place, that was no great mystery. “They’re mating,” Dad would explain when I worried over a bull that seemed to be attacking a helpless heifer. “It’s natural,” he said, when the pigs went at it, when the white tom from Mel Wegner’s farm visited and we ended up with litters of white kittens.

Nature wasn’t just ladybugs and fireflies—it was dirt and decay and, sometimes, death. To grow up on a farm was to know the smell of manure, to understand that the gawky calves that suckled my fingers would eventually be someone’s dinner. It was to witness the occasional birth of a half-formed calf, missing eyes or ears, like some alien-headed baby. We couldn’t drive into town without seeing the strange, bloodied remains of animals—cats, opossums and the occasional skunk who had risked it all for one final crossing. By the time we got Kennel, our retriever-collie mix, we’d had three golden Labs, each more loyal than the last, until they ran away during thunderstorms or wandered into the path of an oncoming semi headed down Rural Route 4. When Dad had spotted him at the county shelter, Kennel had a torn ear, a limp in his back left leg and ribs you could spot from a hundred yards away—the marks of an abusive owner.

Even humans couldn’t avoid their fates. Sipping lemonade from a paper cup after the Sunday morning service, I weaved between adult conversations, catching little snatches as I went. A tractor had tipped over, trapping the farmer underneath. Cows kicked, and workers were hurt. Pregnant women, miles from any hospital, went into early labor. Machines were always backfiring, shirtsleeves getting caught in their mechanisms. This was to say nothing of lightning strikes, icy roads and snowdrifts, or flash floods and heat waves. This was to say nothing of all the things that could go wrong inside a person.

So we were used to death in our stoic, farm-bred way. It was part of the natural order of things: something was born, lived its life and died—and then something else replaced it. I knew without anyone telling me that it was this way with people, too.

Take my family, for example—the Hammarstroms. My great-great-grandpa had settled our land and passed on the dairy to his son, who passed it to Grandpa, who passed it on to Dad, who would pass it on to Johnny. Dad and Mom had gotten married and had Johnny right after Dad graduated from high school, leaving Mom to get her degree later on, after Emilie and I were born. I’d always thought it was extremely cool that our parents were so much younger than everyone else’s parents, until Emilie spelled out for me that it was something of a scandal. Anyway, when Johnny had been born, Grandpa and Grandma had moved to the in-law house next door, where Dad and Mom would someday move, when it was time for Johnny and his wife to inherit the big house. This was simply the expected order of things, as natural as the corn being sown, thinned, watered, fertilized and harvested. Everything that was born would die one day. I knew this, because death was all around me.

There was Grandma, for one. I was too young to have any concrete memories of her death, although I’d pieced together the facts from whispered conversations. She’d been standing in her kitchen, peeling apple after apple, when it happened. A pulmonary embolism, whatever that was. A freak thing. I couldn’t walk into Grandpa’s kitchen without thinking: Was it here? Was this the spot? But life had gone on without her. Grandpa stood at that sink every morning, drinking a cup of coffee and staring out the window.

The first funeral I remember attending was for our neighbor, Karl Warczak, who’d collapsed in his manure pit, overwhelmed by the fumes. An ambulance had rushed past on Rural Route 4, and Dad and Mom had followed—Mom because she had just completed her training as a nurse, Dad because he and Karl Warczak had worked together over the years, helping with each other’s animals, planting, harvesting, tinkering with stubborn machinery. By the time they’d pulled in behind the ambulance, Dad had said later, it had already been too late—sometimes, he’d explained, the oxygen just got sucked out of those pits.

Mom had laid out my clothes the night before the funeral—a hand-me-down navy wool jumper that seemed to itch its way right through my turtleneck, thick white tights and a pair of too-big Mary Janes with a tissue wadded into the toes. She’d always been optimistic that I would grow into things soon. During the service I’d sat sandwiched between Mom and Emilie, willing myself not to look directly at the coffin. The whole ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust thing made me feel a little sick to my stomach once I really thought about it, and so did Mom’s whisper that the funeral home had done “such a good job” with Mr. Warczak. It was incredible that he was really dead, that he had been here one minute and was gone the next, that he would never again pat me on the head with his dirt-encrusted fingers. There had been such a solemn strangeness to the whole affair, with the organ music and the fussy bouquets of flowers, the men in their dark suits and the women in navy dresses, their nude pantyhose swishing importantly against their long slips.

“It is not for us to question God’s perfect timing,” Pastor Ziegler had intoned from the pulpit, but I remember thinking that the timing wasn’t so great—not if you were Mr. Warczak, who thought he could fix the problem with the manure pump and then head inside for lunch, and not for his son, Jerry, who had been about to graduate from Lincoln High School and head off to a veterinary training program. The rumor had been that Mrs. Warczak’s cancer was back, too, and this time it was inoperable. “That boy’s going to need our help,” Dad had told us when we were back in the car, riding with the windows open. “It’s a damn shame.”

“Why did it happen?” I’d asked from my perch on top of a stack of old phone books in the backseat. I could just see out the window from that height—the miles of plowed and planted and fenced land that I would know blindfolded. “Why did he die?”

“It was an accident. Just a tragic accident,” Mom had said, blotting her eyes with a wad of tissue. She’d been up all morning, helping in the church kitchen with the ham and cheese sandwiches that were somehow a salve for grief. When we’d parked in our driveway, she’d gathered up a handful of soggy tissues and shut the door behind her.

“Oh, pumpkin,” Dad had said as he sighed when I’d lingered in the backseat, arms folded across my jumper, waiting for a better answer. He’d promised to head over to the Warczaks’ house later, to help Jerry out. “It’s just how things go. It’s the way things are.” He’d reached over, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze in his no-nonsense, farmer-knows-best way.

Somehow, despite all the years that passed, I never forgot this conversation, the way Dad’s eyes had glanced directly into mine, the way his mustache had ridden gently on top of his lips as he’d delivered the message. He couldn’t have known the tragedies that were even then growing in our soil, waiting to come to harvest.

All he could do was tell me to prepare myself, to buck up, to be ready—because the way the world worked, you never could see what was coming.

two

I would always remember the summer of 1994 as an unbroken string of humid days, the air thick and sticky late into the evening. It was the summer of the Fifth Annual Watankee Softball Tournament, and a summer I’d never forget. Mom had seen the announcement in the St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church bulletin on a Sunday morning and, looking for an activity to keep us from uninterrupted hours in front of the television, had signed us up by that night.

“It’ll be fun,” Mom said, urging us into action. “I can see it now—The Hammarstrom Hitters.”

Emilie rolled her eyes. “More like The Hammarstrom Quitters.”

We practiced on our front lawn, using tree trunks as bases and chasing Johnny’s powerful home runs until they disappeared into our cornfield. Johnny had been dying for action all spring, ever since he’d dislocated his elbow during wrestling semifinals and had been forced to sit in the bleachers at State, his left arm swaddled from shoulder to wrist. By June, Johnny’s arm had healed and he was ready to resume his status as a local hero.

We piled out of Mom’s Caprice Classic an hour before our first game at Fireman’s Field, Johnny leading the charge. Dad followed him, whistling, tossing a ball and catching it in his glove. Emilie slumped behind Dad, her hands in her jeans pockets. “This is going to be so boring,” she’d protested on the way over. “Almost as boring as staying home.”

Mom waited for me to free myself from my roost in the middle of the backseat and leaned over, shutting the door behind me. She pointed to the encyclopedia-sized book I carried, Myths and Half-True Tales. “You’re bringing that with you?”

I considered. I was too small for softball, too small for most things—I needed a boost from the top rung to reach the monkey bars and a step stool to see the top of my head in the bathroom mirror. It went without saying that I couldn’t swing a bat by myself, and that a fly ball would probably knock me down.

“What if I get bored?” I replied.

Mom and I walked toward the infield, where Bud Hirsch, captain of Hirsch’s Haybalers, waited with his clipboard. He took one look at me and, with his massive gut thrust forward, said, “You here to watch, shorty?” He chuckled as I sidled away, offended, and turned away to bark orders at the rest of the team. Johnny was going to start out in left field, Dad at first base.

Mom leaned down to me. “Never mind him. You can share my position with me if you want.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just watch.”

During the warm-up, I sat cross-legged on the bench in the dugout, leaning back against the chain-link fence. Bud Hirsch’s son, Raymond, was pitching slow arcing lobs to Sandy Maertz, a member of our church. Dad, Johnny and the rest of the men in the infield passed the ball back and forth, rolling grounders and tossing fly balls. Mom stood awkwardly in right field, waiting to be included.

The other team, Loetze’s Lions, was starting to arrive, and the bleachers on both sides were beginning to fill up. Someone unlocked the concessions stand, flipped the wooden door down, and raised the Watankee Elementary Academic Boosters Club banner. The money raised tonight would finance our school field trips to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and our less academic but equally inspiring annual visits to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

I tracked Emilie as she made her way up to the top row of the bleachers, her honey-blond hair swinging behind her. It amazed me how she moved, how much confidence she had. A year ago she’d been a clumsy eighth grader. Now she was ready to take Lincoln High School by storm. “I’m going to join pep band,” she’d announced to me proudly when we were lying side by side in our twin beds one night. A shard of moonlight had fallen through the curtains and cut her slim body in half—her hipbones and long legs on one side, the small buds of her breasts, like plum halves, on the other.

“Why do you want to be in pep band?” I’d asked, thinking of the few football games I’d attended in my life. The pep band was a group of shivering kids who took the field at halftime after the cheerleading routine, right about when half the stands decided they needed a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom. “Those kids never get to watch the game.”

“I don’t care about the stupid game,” Emilie had said, sighing dramatically. “I want people to watch me.”

Bud Hirsch called my attention back to the game with two toots on his whistle. “All right! Switch it up!” Our team started a slow jog through the infield to our dugout, and Loetze’s Lions took a turn at their warm-ups.

Panting as he came off the diamond, Dad gave me a high five—as if by staying out of the way, I’d performed some huge feat.

I slid from the bench. “Can I have a dollar?”

“Sure.” Dad dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of change.

“Stay close,” Mom said.

I could feel her eyes on me as I walked behind the batter’s box, my feet kicking up little swirls of dust that instantly coated my tennis shoes. I resisted the urge to hike up my shorts, Emilie’s from years before. Sometimes I hated the way Mom looked at me, like I was a medical specimen.

A dollar bought me a can of Coke and three blue Pixy Stix, the kind of pure-sugar pleasure I was never allowed at home. Clutching the soda in one hand and my book in the other, I scanned the bleachers for a place to sit. A few people from church smiled encouragingly in my direction, but I spotted Emilie in the center of a tight, whispering circle of recent Watankee Elementary graduates and changed course. A few of my own soon-to-be-fourth-grade classmates were sitting in the stands with their parents, but we glanced away from each other with summertime awkwardness, as if we knew we weren’t meant to connect again until the Tuesday after Labor Day.

I lugged my volume of Myths and Half-True Tales to a shady spot beneath the bleachers and opened to the dog-eared page on Atlantis. The game began and cheers erupted.

We were only a mile or so from our farm, but to hear Dad yell, “Hammer one home, Hammarstrom!” during Johnny’s turn at bat was to imagine that we’d been transported somewhere far away, like an island in the South Pacific. Dad was only here at all because he’d worked out a deal with Jerry Warczak: Jerry, who had no interest in softball, would cover Dad’s last milking on these nights if Dad and Johnny would lend him a hand on Saturdays with the chickens. This was typical of the sort of deals they worked out. “It’s just being neighborly,” Dad had explained to me, but it had seemed that he was being more than neighborly when he’d clapped Jerry on the shoulder and said, “He’s like another son to me.”

When the noise of the game finally faded into the background, I spent the next few innings reading about Atlantis and wondering how a city could go missing—poof!—just like that. What would happen if Watankee, Wisconsin, and all the people I knew were to fall off the face of the earth one day—a sudden crack, then a quick slide into Lake Michigan? How long until the rest of the world missed us?

I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the crack of the bat, the sudden burst of applause. I imagined the ball hurtling through a blue sky deepening into purple with the sunset. The tall grass under the bleachers prickled and dented the undersides of my legs, and a mosquito seemed intent on sucking my blood. I was swatting my ankle when a shadow covered me.

“Hey, you’re Kirsten Hammarstrom, aren’t you?”

I struggled to sit up. For a moment, it looked like an angel was standing over me, even though my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Keithley said there was no such thing anymore, unless maybe you were a Catholic. The voice belonged to a girl who wore cutoff denim shorts and a checked shirt with the tails knotted at her waist, so that just a teensy strip of skin at her stomach showed. I realized that what looked like a fiery halo on top of her head was actually just her red hair, backlit by the stadium lights.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m Kirsten Hammarstrom.” Suddenly I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught sneaking a sliver of pie before dinner.

“Your brother’s Johnny Hammarstrom, right?” she said, bending down to my height. Up this close, she was the loveliest person I’d ever met. Creamy white skin, a tiny bridge of freckles spanning her nose. A smile so wide and welcoming, she might have been pictured on a travel brochure.

“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly ashamed of my dirty hands, my teeth sticky with the residue of Coke. “Why?”

She smiled and held out a hand, poised as any church greeter. “I’m Stacy Lemke.”

We shook hands. Nothing drastic happened, no fireworks or a sudden crack of thunder, but somehow the moment felt significant.

Stacy’s hands were cool, her nails painted the softest pink, like cotton candy. If she noticed that my nails were ringed with dirt, she didn’t say anything. “Kirsten. That’s such a pretty name,” she said.

I smiled. “Do you know my brother?”

She laughed. “Everyone knows Johnny Hammarstrom.”

This hadn’t really occurred to me until I heard it said that way, so boldly, like a biblical fact. During wrestling season, Johnny’s name was a regular appearance in the sports section of the Watankee Weekly; whenever I was in town with Dad, someone always approached him to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the fall.

“I go to school with him, but we don’t really know each other,” Stacy said, smiling a little sadly. “I mean, I don’t think he would ever notice someone like me.”

I looked at her more closely. Her tiny freckles glistened under small bubbles of sweat, but I didn’t see any kind of defect—no eyeteeth or harelip or deformed thumbs. If my brother hadn’t noticed Stacy Lemke, he was either blind or stupid or both. “Why not?” I asked, blushing. “I think you’re really pretty.”

“Oh, you’re so sweet!” She gave me a quick touch on the knee and stood up, brushing invisible dirt from her legs.

“I would have noticed you,” I said, swallowing hard.

“Aren’t you just the cutest thing in the world!” She laughed, tossing her head so that her red hair briefly covered her face and then swung free again. “Well—it was nice meeting you.”

She started to walk away. I watched her until she got to the edge of the bleachers, where she stopped and did a little rubbing thing with her shoes in the grass, to toe off the dust. I was still watching her when she turned back to me, and I looked down, embarrassed.

“You know, maybe you could tell Johnny that I said hi.”

“Sure.” I smiled. She could have asked me anything, and I wouldn’t have said no.

When she smiled back at me, I could see a little tooth in the back of her mouth that was turned sideways and slightly pointed—the only thing about Stacy Lemke that wasn’t absolutely perfect. It made me like her even more.

three

The crowd dispersed, and the Hammarstroms reassembled in the infield, half of us sweaty and all of us satisfied.

“Watch out, shorty!” Johnny yelled, appearing from the dugout. I pretended to dodge his grasp, but he caught me by the arms and hoisted me to his shoulders. I shrieked while he ran the bases, my hands grabbing on to his neck for dear life.

“Be careful!” Mom called from somewhere, her voice lost in the darkness.

I screamed as Johnny gained speed, heading for home plate. I squeezed my feet against his chest, too terrified to look until he eased up and carefully deposited me on the ground. That was Johnny—rough and gentle at the same time.

It wasn’t until later, when we were gathered around the kitchen table dunking chunks of apple pie into bowls of soupy vanilla ice cream, that I remembered about Stacy. For a moment I hesitated to say anything, wanting to hold Stacy’s existence close, like a treasure gathered in my fist.

Johnny had finished giving Grandpa the play-by-play, and Grandpa was just about finished pretending to be interested in his analysis of Sandy Maertz’s triple, when I managed to get a word in.

“A girl named Stacy Lemke says to tell you hi,” I said.

“Who’s that?” Johnny asked gruffly, looking down into his bowl. His cheeks suddenly flamed pink.

I shrugged, trying to be casual. “Stacy Lemke. She has red hair and freckles.” She has creamy skin, the softest handshake in the world. She said I was adorable.

“That must be Bill Lemke’s daughter. He played for the other team tonight. Is she in your class, Johnny?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

“Sure you do,” Emilie piped up. “Stacy Lemke? She used to go out with what’s-his-name, the Ships quarterback.”

I smooshed my finger into a drop of ice cream. “She says she goes to school with you.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen her around,” Johnny said. He brought his bowl to his lips, trying to drain the last of his ice cream into his mouth. Mom cleared her throat pointedly, and Johnny set the bowl back on the table.

“Bill Lemke, the tax attorney?” Dad asked.

“O-o-o-h, someone’s got a crush on you,” Emilie teased.

Johnny clanked his spoon against his bowl. “Shut up, that’s not true.”

Dad said, “He’s the guy who helped Jerry hold on to some of that land after Karl died. Decent guy.”

Emilie sang, “Johnny’s got a girlfriend.... Johnny’s got—”

“I said shut up, already.” Johnny stood up and Mom sent Emilie a warning look sharp as any elbow. I had to hand it to Emilie; she wasn’t a coward. She was a master at pushing Johnny right to his very edge.

“Look, she’s just some girl.” Johnny turned away from us. His bowl and spoon landed in the sink with a clang, and the back door slammed a few seconds later.

Mom called, “Johnny! You get back here!” but Johnny was already gone.

“What’s got into him?” Dad demanded, his voice caught between annoyance and amusement.

Mom shrugged, getting up to rinse out Johnny’s bowl.

Dad stood then and stretched, the same stretch he did every night when the day was just about over. “I guess it’s time for me to make the rounds one last time,” he announced. “I could use a bit of company, though.”

This was my cue. I stood, following Dad to the door for our nighttime ritual. Kennel trotted behind us to the barn, where I dumped out some cat food for our half-dozen strays and Dad walked up and down the calf pens, whistling and cooing to the youngest, reassuring them. “Hey, now, baby,” I heard him say, and the calves responded by tottering forward in their pens, all awkward legs and clunky hooves.

I waited for Dad in the doorway of the barn with Kennel rubbing against my legs. From this perspective, slightly elevated from the rest of our property, it seemed as if all we needed was a moat and we would have our own little kingdom. Our land, all one hundred-and-sixty acres of it, stretched away farther than I could see into the deepening darkness. On the north side of the property the corn grew fiercely, shooting inches upward in a single day. Beyond the rows of corn was our neighbor Mel Wegner, beloved because he let me feed apples to his two retired quarter horses, King Henry and Queen Anne. In the opposite direction, our cow pasture joined up with what had been the Warczaks’ property, until Jerry had had to sell most of it to cover legal and medical expenses. These days, the bank rented him part of the property for a chicken farm. Sometimes, when the wind carried just right, I could hear the confusion of a thousand chickens pushing against each other. Other times, days in a row might pass without us seeing any of our human neighbors.

Our house, beaming now with yellow rectangles of light from almost every window, was set back from the road by a rolling green lawn that Grandpa Hammarstrom tended faithfully. Peeking behind it, closer to the road, was Grandpa’s house, newly remodeled to be in every way more efficient than ours. On the east end, our property ended in a thick patch of trees that started just about at one end of the county and ended at the other, a green ribbon of forest that more or less tended to itself. In the middle of it all was our barn, which Johnny had been painstakingly repainting, plus our towering blue silo, the sleek white milk tank.

“Ready, kiddo?” Dad asked, appearing behind me. He cupped his hand around the back of my head, and my silky, tangled blond hair fell through his fingers.

“Race you,” I said, suddenly filled with the night’s unspent energy, and started back. Dad was a superior racing companion, pushing me to go faster and farther, but never getting more than a step ahead of me. We arrived breathless at the back door. Mom was alone at the sink now, and she turned to grin at us.

“Another tie,” Dad announced.

When I thought about this day later, I wished I could have scooped up the whole scene in one of Mom’s canning jars, so I could keep all of us there forever. I knew it wouldn’t last for that long, though—the fireflies I captured on summer nights had to be set free or else they were nothing more than curled-up husks by morning. But I had always loved the way they buzzed frantically in the jar, their winged, beetlelike bodies going into a tizzy with even the slightest shake. If I could have done it somehow, I would have captured my own family in the same way, all of us safe and together, if only for a moment.

four

Suddenly, I was seeing Stacy Lemke everywhere. A few days after that first softball game, I saw her at Dewy’s, where I was sucking down a chocolate shake while I waited for Mom to place an order next door at Gaub’s Meats. The instant Stacy stepped through the door with two other girls, my heart performed this funny extra beat.

“Hey, Kirsten!” she called loudly, and everyone in the whole café turned for a second to look at me.

I beamed back at her. She put her arm around me in a quick hug, as if we had always known each other. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt, a denim skirt and sandals, and her reddish hair, hanging loose around her shoulders, smelled like gardenias.

She gestured behind her. “These are my sisters, Joanie and Heather.”

I smiled shyly into the whipped cream residue of my shake. Heather was in the sixth grade at Watankee Elementary, and I’d seen her on the playground, walloping a tetherball over her victims’ heads. She was basically a giant. Joanie, strawberry-blonde and shorter, was what Stacy would look like if she went through the wash a few times. We smiled our hellos.

“When’s the next softball game?” Stacy asked as her sisters stepped up to the counter to order.

“Next Tuesday, I think.”

She smiled that Stacy smile, wide and white. “Well, maybe I’ll see you then.”

My eyes tracked her as she placed her order, produced a folded bill from her skirt pocket to pay and made small talk with the girl behind the counter. I remembered what Emilie had said the other night, that Stacy used to date the quarterback of the mighty Lincoln High Shipbuilders. Even though what I knew about football was limited to helmets and “hut-hut” and touchdowns, I knew that the quarterback was a big deal. Everyone in all of Wisconsin knew who Brett Favre was, after all.

I saw Stacy only a few days later at the library, while Dad was down the street at the feed store. I was curled up in a bean bag, leafing through an encyclopedia and wondering for the millionth time why reference books couldn’t be checked out like anything else. It hardly seemed fair.

Suddenly, Stacy was squatting beside me, a book in her hand. “Oh, hey! I keep bumping into you!”

I beamed. It would be fair to say that by this time I was already half in love with Stacy Lemke. She looked happier to see me than the members of my own family did, even the ones I saw rarely. Only this morning Emilie had thrown a hairbrush across the room at me for losing her butterfly hair clip. Stacy would never throw a hairbrush at her sisters—you could tell a thing like that just by looking at her. I wondered if there was some way I could trade Emilie for Stacy, as if they were playing cards.

“So,” she said as she smiled, “how’s your family doing?”

I thought about mentioning that Emilie was in trouble for cutting five inches off the hem of one of her skirts, but figured that probably wasn’t what Stacy wanted to hear. I took a deep breath and said, “I forgot to tell you last time. Johnny said I should say hi if I saw you.” It was surprising how easily the lie had come to me, and how smoothly the next one followed on its heels. “He said he would see you at the game on Tuesday.”

“He did? Really?” She rocked backward on her heels and then straightened up, until she was standing at her full height. Her cheeks suddenly looked more pink, her tiny freckles like scattered grains of sand. I remembered what she had said: I don’t think he would notice a girl like me.

“Really,” I said. It wasn’t a lie if it was said for the sake of politeness, right? Didn’t we always compliment Mom’s casseroles, even as we shifted the food around on our plates without eating it? Besides, to repeat the truth would be rude: She’s just some girl.

Stacy grinned at me. “Well, tell him hi back.”

“I will,” I promised.

After she returned her book and left, smiling at me over her shoulder, I went to the checkout counter where Miss Elise, the librarian, was stamping books with a firm thud. “Can I check out that book?” I asked, pointing to the one Stacy had just returned.

“What, this one?” Miss Elise said, holding up Pride and Prejudice. “Are you sure? Might be a little hard for you.”

“I think I’m ready for it,” I said.

She smiled, handing the book over, but she was right. I wasn’t ready for it; I gave up after the first page. But I liked knowing that Stacy had held this very book in her hands, that her fingers with the perfectly painted nails had turned these very pages.

And, of course, I saw Stacy in the stands at every softball game for the rest of the Haybalers’ short season. At our second game, Stacy walked right up to where Mom and I were sitting, and I said, “Mom, this is Stacy Lemke. Remember, I was telling you about her?”

“Of course,” Mom said smoothly, standing. They shook hands politely.

“I go to school with Johnny,” Stacy explained.

The Haybalers took the field just then, and there was a general roar from the hundred or so of us in the stands.

“Well, I should probably find my seat,” Stacy said.

“Good to meet you,” Mom said a little dismissively. She turned her attention to the game, and Stacy winked at me. I winked right back, glad I had perfected the technique during a particularly long sermon last winter. It felt as if we were secret agents with the same mission: to get Johnny to fall in love with her.

With Stacy for me to watch, softball was much more interesting. She sat next to a friend or two, girls who seemed boring compared to her. I couldn’t help but notice how Stacy watched Johnny while she pretended not to, distributing her gaze equally among all the players, and then homing in again and again on Johnny at shortstop. When he was up to bat, she joined the crowd in chanting, “John-ny! John-ny!” She cheered when he broke up a double play at second and whooped with pleasure when he crossed home plate.

During the game, Johnny was all focus, an athlete’s athlete. He had always been a competitor, no matter what the sport. It was clear, watching him, that he had a natural talent—he could hit farther, run faster, field better, throw harder than anyone else. He also took failures more personally than anyone else, cursing when Dad dropped a throw to first, kicking divots in the dirt to shake off a bad swing. If he noticed Stacy Lemke watching him, it didn’t show.

It was Stacy who approached him first after that second game. I know because I was watching, holding my breath, clutching my fists to my side like the freak Emilie always said I was. If asked, I couldn’t have explained why their meeting was so important to me, but maybe it had something to do with ownership. In a way, I owned a part of Johnny Hammarstrom, who was star athlete for the Lincoln High Shipbuilders, but my own brother, too. And since I’d met Stacy first, since she’d sought me out under the bleachers that day, I felt I owned a part of her, too.

Stacy had walked right down the bleachers, not on the steps but on the seats, confident. She moved with purpose around the chain-link fence and out onto the field, her legs creamy white in her short shorts, a checked shirt pushed up past her elbows. She was headed right for him, and Johnny must have realized that at some point, too, because he froze, his cheeks flushed with sweat, his jeans filthy along the left side from a slide into third base.

I don’t know what she said to him and what he said back to her, but my mind filled with a million possibilities, talk of baseball and school and plans for the rest of the summer and deep dark secrets. Well, maybe not that—it was hard for me to imagine that Johnny, who most of the time seemed as complicated as a June bug, could keep any kind of secret. But something was being said, and something was happening between them. At one point Stacy gestured to the stands—to me?—and Johnny followed her gaze, scanning the crowd. Before she walked away, Stacy reached out her hand and touched him on the arm, just lightly, such a small and insignificant touch, but I reeled, gasping. This was flirting. This was something.

“What’s wrong with you?” Emilie asked, joining me in the stands.

I shook my head. Nothing. Everything. The way I was sweating, it might have been me out there, falling in love.

Mom turned from the conversation she’d been having with an internist from the hospital and studied me. “I think you’ve been having too much sugar, Kirsten.”

“No, I haven’t—” I protested, and by the time I looked back, Stacy was gone and Johnny was standing with the guys in the dugout.

It was like this at every game for the rest of the tournament. Bud Hirsch led the team in a cheer for the competitors, and the men worked their way through the line slapping sweaty hands: “Good game”...“good game”...“good game.” Then Stacy and Johnny began a slow, purposeful wandering toward each other while I held my breath. Even Mom had started to notice, and the two of us would watch them together, Mom shaking her head, and me grinning like an idiot.

With everyone else packing coolers and blankets and finding rides home, Johnny and Stacy stood in a little bubble of quiet, whatever words they said meant for each other alone.

“Don’t stare, shrimp,” Emilie nudged me once when I was lost in their romance. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, anyway?”

I followed her to the car, kicking against the grass with the toes of my tennis shoes. When I looked back, Johnny and Stacy were still talking, and his truck didn’t pull into our driveway until we’d been home for twenty minutes.

five

It was a hot, lazy Wisconsin summer. In the barn, flies descended by the thousands onto the backs of our cows, but it was too warm for them to protest with even the simplest flick of a tail. It was too warm in our house, too—upstairs, Emilie and I opened our bedroom window one day in June and didn’t bother to close it for weeks. We woke up sticky in the mornings, the humidity coating our bodies like fur. It seemed to me that the whole world was taking a break, holding its breath, waiting for Johnny and Stacy to fall in love.

Aunt Julia rescued us on weekday afternoons, inviting us to cool off in her aboveground pool. Emilie and I traipsed the half mile down Rural Route 4 to her house, our beach towels draped over our shoulders. I lagged behind, pulling at fuzzy cattails and listening to mosquitoes swarm over the stagnant water in the ditch. Toss a stone through their midst and they would part like the Red Sea letting Moses and his people cross, then swarm back in a rush. Emilie marched ahead, preening for the service vehicles that lumbered past on the road.

Aunt Julia, older than Dad by almost twelve years, was my favorite aunt. Her husband, Uncle Paul, was a general manager for John Deere in Manitowoc, and their son, Brent, only a few years older than Johnny, was training to be a firefighter in Milwaukee. Emilie and I were the girls she’d never had. Uncle Paul had built them a fancy deck around a four-foot Doughboy, and she loved to serve us Popsicles and sugary glasses of lemonade and lay her wrinkly, too-tan body on the deck while we swam. Sometimes she smoked cigarettes, too, although about this we were sworn to secrecy. “I’m supposed to be quitting,” she had explained, although she never seemed to try all that hard.

“What’s new, girls?” she asked from beneath a broad sun hat.

“Unfortunately, nothing is ever new around here,” Emilie said, splashing dramatically onto her back. “That’s the problem.”

“Well,” I said, staying close to the deck, “I think Johnny has a girlfriend.” Suddenly Johnny had been asking to use the phone every night after dinner. On weekends, he showered after the last milking and disappeared in his truck.

Aunt Julia’s eyebrows rose over the tops of her sunglasses. “I think I’ve heard that myself.”

“Really? From Mom?” I asked.

“From everyone in Watankee, more like it,” Emilie scoffed. “He took her on the youth group rafting trip last weekend, and they’re going to a movie tonight. In Watankee terms, they are officially a couple.” She lifted her hands out of the water to put air quotes around the word.

Aunt Julia laughed. “So what do you think? Do you like her?”

Emilie made a sound like “ehh.” She wobbled her hand in the air in a so-so motion.

“I like her! She’s really nice,” I said. In Stacy’s defense, I splashed in Emilie’s direction, but the water landed a foot short of its mark.

Emilie laughed. “You don’t even know her.”

“I do, too! You don’t know who I know.” I did know Stacy. She had visited our house twice now, and each time she’d asked me about what I was reading, what I liked to do during the summer. She and Johnny and I had walked out to the barn, and I’d convinced her to let a calf suckle two of her outstretched fingers. She’d squealed at first and then got used to it and started stroking the calf behind its ears with her free hand. This felt like the most essential thing to know about a person.

There was a familiar hissing sound as Aunt Julia struck a match to light her cigarette. “What don’t you like about her, Emilie?”

Emilie considered for a moment. “She’s just so clingy, you know? She hangs all over him.”

Aunt Julia blew some smoke out of the side of her mouth and gave a little chuckle. “Seems like she’s the kind of girl who likes to have a boyfriend. Plenty of girls like that.”

“I think it’s pathetic,” Emilie pronounced. “She spent the whole past month just trying to catch his eye—”

“She did not!” I sputtered defensively. Of course she hadn’t. She’d only been at that softball game because her Dad was playing; she’d only talked to Johnny in the first place because I’d passed on her message. “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Emilie shrieked with laughter. She tipped her head backward into the water and came up again, her hair lying sleek against her head. “Oh, puh-lease. Plus, ask anyone at school. She was dating this guy last year and she just about drove him insane, she was so needy.”

I flopped onto my back, kicking my legs angrily in her direction. She skimmed her arms across the surface of the pool in response, serving up an impressive wall of water that splashed onto the deck.

“All right, girls.” Aunt Julia sighed, a gray strand of smoke curling out of her mouth.

“I’m only saying,” Emilie smirked.

“Well I like her,” I announced.

“I do, too, sweetie,” Aunt Julia said. “And I bet Johnny’s big enough to handle himself.”

Emilie rolled her eyes but let it go. “I’m going to start a whirlpool,” she announced, kicking off from the edge of the pool.

Aunt Julia laid her head back, closing her eyes, and I flopped back onto an inner tube, letting the momentum from Emilie’s vigorous one-person whirlpool spin me in lazy circles. Every now and then I splashed water onto the inner tube to cool off my legs. The sunscreen that had been slathered on me only an hour before had melted away with the heat, and I could feel my skin pinking from head to toe.

That night, with barely any warning, a thunderstorm rolled through on dark, menacing clouds that hung low on the horizon over our still-fragile cornstalks. It was still blazing hot, eighty degrees but dripping with humidity so thick that the air seemed to splinter and shape itself around us as we moved. Dad and I were coming back from the barn when the first bolt of lightning split the sky in two. We were drenched by the time we made it to the back door. Upstairs, Emilie and I sat on her bed, watching while rain swept the fields and battered the house. Suddenly, there was a crack; the oak tree on the front lawn had been hit by lightning. I screamed when a large branch hit the ground, shaking the house and all of us inside it. In the morning, Dad and Johnny dragged the limb across the grass to the side of our shed, where it lay like a carcass, its sad branches splayed to the side.

six

One night that August, Stacy Lemke showed up unannounced at our back door.

Johnny was in the living room practicing moves with some of his wrestling friends, Peter Bahn and Erik Hansen. Johnny was always conditioning—hefting feed bags and doing chin-ups at a barn in the hayloft, but he saw these nights as serious training sessions. Dad was there, of course, and Jerry Warczak had stopped by to talk with Dad about some new fencing he would need help installing. Grandpa took a seat in one of the out-of-the-way recliners and cheered at all the wrong times. Somehow, despite watching dozens of Johnny’s matches, he’d never figured out the scoring system.

Johnny’s coach was there, too; he liked to stop by from time to time to check in with Dad and throw around words like “scholarship” and “state title.” Coach Zajac was Johnny’s height but twice as wide, his shoulders straining the seams of the warm-up jacket he wore year-round, no matter the weather. His ears were puffy, bulbous even, like an early version of human ears, before God ironed out all the kinks. Cauliflower ears, Dad had explained to me once. “It’s just fluid that gets trapped in there.” But every time I saw him, I was reminded of the jar at Wallen’s Pharmacy, where people dropped their spare change to help end birth defects.

When Stacy arrived, I happened to be in the kitchen, helping myself to a glass of lemonade. I didn’t recognize the white sedan that dropped her off, but there was Stacy, striding across our lawn as if she’d done this a million times before.

“Oh!” Mom said, opening the door but standing in front of the doorway, as if she wasn’t going to let Stacy inside. “You know, this might not be the best time, honey. Johnny’s in the middle of some wrestling with the guys.”

“I know,” Stacy said, smiling sweetly. “I came over to watch.”

Mom didn’t respond; she just stepped out of the way. Stacy gave me a little wave, passing right through the kitchen into the living room, as if she belonged there. I saw Mom raise an eyebrow; she didn’t approve. It wasn’t personal, but as far as she was concerned, Johnny was too young to have a serious girlfriend.

I followed Stacy into the living room, noticing the way her jeans hugged her thighs, the way her hair floated over her shoulders. She didn’t fit in here, I realized. Everything we owned was shabby, from Mom’s hand-me-down furniture and the worn carpet that had been here since Dad was a boy and the peeling wallpaper we always meant to take down. Everything about Stacy was new and fresh, as if it had just been invented that day.

The men in the doorway stepped back to let Stacy into the room, and Grandpa looked up from the recliner. Dad looked from Stacy to Johnny and back, as if he was trying to figure out the joke. Only Johnny and Peter Bahn, wrestling in the middle of the floor, didn’t notice her right away. I said loudly, “Stacy’s here,” and Johnny froze, his glance drifting over his shoulder. Peter took advantage of the moment and flipped Johnny over, pinning him. Grandpa clapped. Johnny swore.

“Got you,” Peter said, laughing.

Johnny rolled out from under Peter’s grasp, his chest heaving. “Caught me off guard,” he panted. “That’s no fair.”

Peter shrugged. “Fair’s fair,” he said, pushing himself up to a standing position.

Johnny stood, too, scowling. He hated to lose.

“I didn’t mean to break anything up,” Stacy said, smiling uncertainly.

“What are you doing here?” Johnny demanded.

Stacy’s smile faded. “I just wanted to say hi.”

Johnny shook his head. “You could have just called.”

Dad cleared his throat. “Johnny, why don’t you introduce Stacy around.”

Johnny hesitated a long beat, breathing through his nose. Only after catching Dad’s eye did he relax. “This is Erik, Peter, Grandpa Hammarstrom, Coach Zajac,” he said, gesturing. Erik and Peter smiled, Grandpa gave a slight, confused nod of acknowledgment, and Coach raised one hand in a meaty salute. “And this is Jerry, who lives next door.”

Jerry reached out his hand a little bashfully, and Stacy shook it.

She turned to Johnny playfully. “And you are?”

“We were in the middle of something,” Johnny said, still not letting it go.

Dad cleared his throat again, trying to diffuse the awkwardness. “How about a breather?” he asked, motioning toward the kitchen. The men followed his cue and trudged off obediently, even Grandpa, who seemed to greatly resent having to move. I stayed in the doorway, nervous for Stacy.

“Really, I didn’t mean to break up anything,” Stacy said. She reached for Johnny’s hand, threading her fingers through his. Johnny was as unyielding as a plastic dummy. “Okay. Look, you’re right. I should have called first.”

“Yeah,” Johnny grunted, relenting. He locked his fingers with hers, bringing her hand to his chest. “We were about done anyway.”

I knew that wasn’t true. It was barely eight o’clock, and sometimes they wrestled past ten, until Mom started hinting about an early shift in the morning, and Dad drifted off to check the barn one last time. This was the power Stacy had over him, then; she could interrupt his wrestling night—that most sacred of Johnny’s rituals—and be forgiven.

“Are you sure?” Stacy gave him a playful smile. “You might need more practice. Looks like you were getting whipped right there.”

“Oh, yeah?” Johnny grabbed her by the waist. “That’s it, Lemke, you’re going down.” He scooped her up in his arms like she weighed nothing at all. I held my breath, trying to figure out if he was joking or angry. It was hard to tell from the way he handled her—swinging her around a little too fast, depositing her a little too roughly on the carpet. Stacy shrieked but didn’t struggle as he pinned her down, his knees on either side of her legs, his hands on her shoulders.

“Say that again?” Johnny asked.

Teasing, I thought, relieved. He’s only teasing.

“I said it looks like you need a little more practice,” Stacy said, smirking.

“You’re going to help me with that?” Johnny leaned over her, pressing his weight against her.

“You bet.”

Johnny brought his face down to hers and kissed her so hard that it made me dizzy. Stacy grabbed him around the neck and somehow they were rolling, her over him and him over her, not coming to a stop until they bumped up against the sofa. Stacy was on top, grinning.

“Looks like I win,” she said.

Johnny laughed. “This is only round one, Lemke,” he said, and rolled her onto her back.

I slipped into the kitchen, joining the men for a piece of pie.

By the time Johnny and Stacy came in, red-cheeked, all the men had left, except Grandpa, who was picking at a few last crumbs on his plate.

“Everyone’s gone?” Johnny asked, looking around.

No one answered. Mom was at the sink with her back to him, running water, and Emilie stood next to her, scowling, a dish towel in hand.

“I should probably go, too,” Stacy said. “Good night, everyone!”

“Good night,” Mom murmured.

“Good night, Stacy!” I called, and she gave me a little wink.

“Umm...Stacy’s going to need a ride home,” Johnny announced, jiggling his keys. “I’ll be back in a half hour.” I watched the two of them head down the sidewalk together, with both of her arms wrapped around his waist. Johnny opened the passenger door of his truck and escorted her inside with a flourish.

“It doesn’t take half an hour to get to the other side of Watankee and back,” Emilie observed drily.

Mom gave Dad a look—the look.

“I don’t think we were ever like that,” he said, giving her a playful nudge with his foot. His sock, I noticed, was worn thin at the heel.

In the moment before the interior light in the truck was extinguished, I saw that Stacy had scooted across the bench seat, so she was riding with the left side of her body pressed up against Johnny.

“No,” Mom said, refusing to take the bait. “I don’t think we ever were.”

I never learned where Stacy had seen Johnny for the first time. Maybe it was between classes and he was shelving books in his locker, or maybe he was standing in line at the cafeteria, but I liked to believe that she first saw him when he was wrestling, crouched in the stance perfected on all those long summer nights, a number on his back, battling his way through the bracket and coming out, just about always, on top.

seven

After that evening, Johnny’s wrestling nights became rarer and then tapered off for good. There was something a little awkward about being around Johnny and Stacy, something that made everyone else feel like a third wheel. They couldn’t stop touching each other, and they practically sat on top of each other on the couch, even though, as Mom liked to point out, there was plenty of room to spread out. On warm-weather weekends, Johnny’s friends used to congregate in our driveway, their Fords and Chevys idling, finalizing plans for cliff jumping in Manitou Park or riding their bikes down Clay Pit Road to the old quarry. But once Johnny and Stacy were officially dating, the guys Johnny had known his whole life—guys he’d played with since elementary school—basically disappeared.

Stacy’s sixteenth birthday coincided with Labor Day weekend, our last truly free moments of life before school began. Stacy delivered the party invitation herself, her hair swinging in a thick French braid.

“It’ll be small, just family and a few friends,” she said at dinner. She’d become a regular fixture in our lives in a short span of time. “My parents just want to meet everybody, you know, officially.” She grinned at Johnny, and he smiled back at her.

“Well, that sounds very nice,” Mom said with a tight half smile she generally reserved for the women she didn’t like at church, or the times when Grandpa invited himself over and didn’t seem inclined to leave. “Doesn’t that sound nice?” she continued, looking around the table. “Please tell your parents we wouldn’t miss it.”

Later, Emilie made a valiant effort to plead for freedom. “When you said we wouldn’t miss it, you meant you and Dad, right?”

Mom stiffened her jaw. “We’re all going,” she said, throwing her gaze onto me.

I tried to shrug casually, but it was no secret to anyone that Stacy Lemke had become my idol. When I was alone I tried to imitate the way she walked, with just a little slouch to her shoulders. I loved how she parted her straight hair right down the middle and had tried it with my own, wetting my hairbrush under the faucet. Emilie had studied the end result critically. “What happened to your hair? You look like a drowned rat,” she’d pronounced.

As it turned out, the Lemkes lived less than two miles from us, on the south side of Watankee, not far from the juncture at Passaqua Road. I noticed right away that their white house looked neater than ours, as if it were standing up a little straighter in its frame. Half a dozen kids were bouncing on a huge trampoline on the lawn—the sort of thing Dad would never approve of because it killed the grass. Behind their house, tucked between a row of evergreens and a three-car garage, the yard was set up for Stacy’s party. Crepe-paper streamers twisted from surface to surface, and bouquets of helium-filled balloons floated from the backs of folding chairs.

“I thought this was just a small thing,” Mom said as we pulled into the driveway, which was lined with parked cars. Johnny’s truck was already there, behind a shiny burgundy Buick.

Stacy, wearing a white dress with eyelet trim and red sandals, rushed over to greet us, followed by her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Lemke, tall and tanned, might have been siblings. If they were cookies, they would have come out from practically the same cutter. I couldn’t stop staring at Mrs. Lemke; she looked pretty enough to be on television. Her hair was sprayed upward and rode on her head like a reddish-blond helmet. She wore a pink shift dress with platform sandals, and her fingers glittered with rings. Mr. Lemke wore a bright Hawaiian shirt with white pants and navy deck shoes. They were as polished as a pair of Kennedys.

“Looks like they’ve come straight from the country club,” Mom muttered under her breath. But she smiled broadly; a second later she held out a hand to shake with Stacy’s parents.

“Oh, homemade potato salad, Bill!” Mrs. Lemke exclaimed, taking the dish from Mom, followed by a conspiratorial whisper in Mom’s direction, as if she were revealing a state secret, “It’s his favorite, and I just don’t have time to make it from scratch anymore.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” Mom said. Without the salad bowl to hold, she clasped her hands in front of her stomach awkwardly.

I set our gift—a soft white cardigan with tiny pearl buttons that Mom had picked out and Emilie had judged “too fussy”—on a card table already heaped with presents, and then stood uncomfortably in the middle of a circle of strangers. Emilie spotted a group of teenagers that included Joanie Lemke and wandered over, perfectly at ease. It wasn’t difficult to spot Heather Lemke; even in a sundress, she was just as fearsome as she was on the playground. She was giving a piggyback ride to a little boy about half her size, who wobbled on her back like an oversize doll. I made my way over to the drink table, where my parents stood uneasily, sipping out of plastic cups. I reached for one of the massive plastic ladles but was redirected by Mrs. Lemke.

“Oh, no, Kirsten. Have some punch from this bowl,” she said and laughed, steering me by the shoulders to a bowl floating with lumps of orange sherbet.

Sipping the too-sweet punch, I joined my parents, who were in the middle of a polite set of introductions.

“John’s a farmer and Alicia works at the hospital in Manitowoc,” Mrs. Lemke announced to the group. “Can you believe that? She’s a lot tougher than me, working around blood and guts all day long.”

Dad and Mom grinned and nodded, looking as out of place as I felt. We had dressed carefully, with Mom ironing out our wrinkles, but in this crowd of linen dresses and polo shirts, we might have been the Beverly Hillbillies. I spotted Johnny and Stacy coming out of the house holding hands and marveled at how comfortable Johnny looked here, as if he belonged.

“And over there, that’s their daughter Emilie, and this is Kirsten.” Mrs. Lemke leaned down to me with a wide pink smile. “And Kirsten will be starting...?”

“Fourth grade,” I said loudly. Mom gave me a little nudge from behind, which I knew meant—Be polite.

Mrs. Lemke wrinkled her pretty face inquisitively, as if there was a joke she didn’t understand.

“She’s just a little small for her age,” Mom said quickly.

I looked around for Stacy and saw her standing with some of the other high school kids. Then Johnny came up behind her and dropped something down the back of her dress, and she screamed, swatting him away. She wriggled an ice cube free and tossed it playfully after him.

“Who wants the grand tour?” Mr. Lemke asked, and Dad and I, not sure what to do, followed him. Mr. Lemke led us into their rambling house, pointing out the upgrades such as the finished basement with a pool table and the master suite addition, which he joked had cost “an arm and two or three legs.” Everything looked bright and new, down to the dozen red pillows on the white living room couch. A white living room couch? Between Mr. Lemke’s white pants and Stacy’s white dress, I was beginning to believe that dirt didn’t exist here.

When we got to Stacy’s room, I lingered behind, giving the open door a slight nudge. Inside, the walls were a pale yellow, and the furniture was white, from her nightstand to her headboard to a double chest of drawers. I pinched myself: I was inside Stacy’s bedroom. There was a massive “Shipbuilders” banner on one wall and a bouquet of red roses on the nightstand, which I guessed were from Johnny. Her room was so white, so clean and sterile, it might have belonged in a hospital. Emilie and I had filled about every inch of our room with our junk—where were Stacy’s bunched-up socks, her bottles of perfume, the paper fans folded from church bulletins?

I peeked into the hallway, but Dad and Mr. Lemke had continued on without me. I stepped farther into the room, cautiously. Stacy slept here, in this very bed, I thought as I ran my finger along her pillow, over her crisp pillowcase. I scanned her bookcase. A King James Bible, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a set of pristine leather-bound classics. Through her filmy white curtain, I could see kids bobbing up and down on the trampoline, their heads coming in and out of view. I sat gently on the edge of her bed, and slid open the top drawer of her nightstand.

I wasn’t looking for anything exactly—just evidence of the girl I knew in this too-perfect room, or maybe evidence of how much she loved Johnny, and me, too. But right on top was a picture of Stacy and someone who wasn’t Johnny. His arm was tight around her shoulders, and she was grinning so widely that I could see her one pointed tooth. Someone had drawn a heart in red marker around their heads—and then, more recently I suspected, the boy’s face had been blacked out with a ballpoint pen. I ran a finger across the snapshot, imagining Stacy wielding the pen, digging the deep hash marks across his face until it was gone, obliterated. She had pressed so hard that she’d almost poked a hole through the back of the picture. He didn’t matter anymore, but Stacy was still there, beaming.

I dropped the picture as if it was on fire and slid the drawer closed, my heart pounding. Standing, I straightened the edge of the bedspread to erase my presence. Maybe Emilie was right—Stacy had loved someone else before, as intensely as she loved Johnny now.

“We spent the most money in the kitchen, of course,” Mr. Lemke was saying when I caught up to them. “You know how these old farmhouses are, with the outdated plumbing and electrical.”

Back outside, Mrs. Lemke removed a store-bought cake from its pink bakery box and poked sixteen candles through its stiff loops of white frosting. We sang a wild rendition of “Happy Birthday,” with Mr. Lemke holding all the notes too long and stretching out his hands dramatically, as if he was performing for the back row of a crowded theater. Mrs. Lemke clapped excitedly when Stacy blew out all the candles in a single shot.

“No candles left? You know what that means, don’t you?” Mr. Lemke bellowed. “No boyfriends!”

Everyone laughed, and Johnny pretended to look offended. Stacy leaned over to give his cheek a loud smack. “One boyfriend,” she clarified. My cheeks burned, thinking of her in the picture with the other boyfriend, scratched out of existence. Mom forced a polite smile and excused herself to the bathroom.

Mrs. Lemke stepped up to cut the cake, and Heather and Joanie came forward to pass out plates and forks to the guests.

I picked at my slice, slipping a red rose of frosting into my mouth and holding it on my tongue until it dissolved. The adults, finding it difficult to balance their drinks and their slices of cake, found their way back to the folding chairs. I sat cross-legged on the grass, my own plate in my lap.

The frosting had melted in my mouth, sickly sweet. I felt a little bit like throwing up, whether from the sun or the sugar, or thinking of Stacy with a boyfriend she had loved as much as Johnny.

One of the ladies, passing by, said under her breath, “They’ve sure got their hands full with that one.” I turned around, trying to pinpoint who she was talking about, but got only a sharp glare of late-afternoon sun.

Suddenly Mom was standing over me, her shadow like a soft blanket. “Did you save any cake for me?”

I held out my plate. “You can have the rest.”

I lost count of how many boxes Stacy opened, carefully working her finger under the wrapping paper and gently separating layers of tissue. Instead I was watching her carefully, looking for any hint that Stacy was somehow less than perfect, not the angel I’d thought. She cooed over each sweater, shirt, skirt, necklace, bracelet and earring, holding it up for our appraisal. When she got to our gift, she said, “Oh, I love it! It’s perfect. Tell the truth—who picked this out? It wasn’t Johnny, was it?” Everyone laughed, Johnny loudest of all. I was irritated with him then; he looked like a buffoon, like just another big, dumb guy. “And now, the best for last,” Mr. Lemke said, setting a huge box in front of Stacy. “Go ahead, baby.”

Stacy ripped off the paper and opened the box—only to find another wrapped box inside, and another inside that. She tossed the wadded-up pieces of paper at her dad in mock frustration. Finally she came to a tiny velvet jewelry box in the middle, and opened it to pull out a single key. She screamed. “Oh, my goodness. You didn’t! You didn’t!”

“Follow me, everyone,” Mr. Lemke said, and the whole party trooped behind him to the shed, clutching cameras and glasses of punch.

Stacy squealed at the sight of what was plainly a car shrouded in white sheets.

“Nothing but the best for my girl,” Mr. Lemke said, whipping off the sheets to reveal a shiny red Camaro. Everyone gasped and applauded, as if he had just pulled off a daring magic trick.

“I can’t believe it!” Stacy cried, tugging open the driver’s door.

“Not bad.” Johnny grinned, running a hand along the hood.

“We needed a way to get her to and from school,” Mrs. Lemke explained, her cheeks pink. “She’s getting so independent now, always needing to go somewhere.”

I caught a glance between Dad and Mom that was half smirk, half eye-roll. Maybe their look was in reference to our own 1985 Chevrolet Caprice station wagon, which was fast approaching the ten-year mark, or Johnny’s ’69 Chevy, dubbed the Green Machine, which he’d inherited from Dad when he turned sixteen. We’d all figured Dad would buy himself a new truck at that point, but instead he’d come back from Manitowoc with an even older model, one that was so stripped down on the inside, Mom refused to ride in it. “It runs fine,” Dad had said, shrugging.

After the grand unveiling, Stacy’s party fizzled out. One by one, we wandered back to gather the plates and napkins that had scattered in the breeze. Dad and Mom moved silently, helping to stack folding chairs against the side of the garage. There was another round of handshakes before we left, with Mrs. Lemke insisting we simply had to get together again soon, and Mom answering, “Of course!”

The next time we would see each other, Stacy wouldn’t be there. The next time we would see each other, the Lemkes and the Hammarstroms wouldn’t even pretend to be friendly. But that afternoon, we all smiled and said polite goodbyes, and Johnny announced, “Think I’ll stick around and give Stacy a driving lesson.”

“Don’t be too late,” Mom said automatically, which was funny, because Johnny had been coming home later and later, and no one seemed to know what too late was anymore.

When we were at the end of the driveway, Emilie and I craned our necks to look back at them. “Look at them—they’re like a magazine advertisement,” Emilie marveled.

Even from that distance, we could see Mrs. Lemke standing on a folding chair, unpinning a row of streamers. Mr. Lemke was scraping down the grill with a long-handled brush. As we straightened out of the turn heading onto Passaqua Road, we got a clear view of the Camaro behind the shed. Stacy was sitting on the hood, her arms wrapped around Johnny’s neck, her legs hooked around his thighs. He was standing, his body pressed tightly against her in a way that was—well—

Mom cleared her throat suddenly, and all four of our heads swiveled on our necks, facing the road in front of us once again.

“I’ll bet he teaches her how to drive,” Emilie whispered, but I knew better than to laugh.

eight

Fourth grade wasn’t much different from third grade, with its spelling tests and vocabulary words and the maps of Wisconsin we traced diligently from our social studies textbook. In gym class, my teacher seemed to plan our activities around things a small person simply could not do—shoot baskets, break through the chain in Red Rover. It was shocking how tall my classmates had grown over the summer. Mom resisted my constant pleas to write a note that would excuse me, permanently, from gym. In retaliation I lugged several of her old medical books to the hayloft and spent my afternoons trying to pull off a case of rheumatoid arthritis or intestinal polyps.

Emilie, with her hordes of friends, fit in perfectly at the high school. She was one of only two freshmen chosen to play clarinet in pep band, and she already knew that she wanted the lead in the spring musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

And Johnny—well, Johnny had wrestling and Johnny had Stacy. “You should see them at school,” Emilie told me one afternoon, pointing a finger down her throat in a fake gag. “It’s disgusting. I’m so embarrassed to know them.”

After only a month of school, Johnny’s English teacher called to report that Johnny hadn’t yet turned in his Macbeth essay—hadn’t, for that matter, seemed to have read a word of Macbeth. Mom repeated the conversation to Dad in the kitchen while I eavesdropped from outside the kitchen window, where I was brushing some burrs out of Kennel’s coat.

“This is his senior year,” Mom said to Dad. “He only has a few classes left, and all he has to do is pass them. Instead he’s spending all his time with that girl—”

I paused, midstroke. That girl.

“I’ll talk to him about the essay,” Dad offered. “He’s going to have to keep his grades up if he’s going to be eligible.”

They lowered their voices, but I could tell they were arguing. Then the door slammed, and Dad came down the porch steps. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, spotting me. Kennel jumped up, abandoning his brushing to follow Dad, whose long legs seemed to cover the distance between our house and the barn in only a few steps.

Whatever talk Dad had with Johnny did prompt a slight change in Johnny’s behavior. He spent more weeknights in his room, presumably catching up on homework—although in reality he seemed to be doing nothing more challenging than throwing a bouncy ball against his bedroom wall and catching it with a loud clap. Throw, clap, throw, clap, until I thought I’d go insane.

One night after dinner, Emilie ran into our bedroom and thrust her hand over my mouth. “Ssshh!” she hissed.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” I protested into her hand. At the moment I was nose-deep in The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. I’d skipped ahead to the pictures, fascinated by Bonnie’s tiny, gun-toting, cigar-smoking figure. When they were ambushed and killed in Louisiana, Bonnie had been twenty-three years old. She was four feet, eleven inches tall and officially my hero. I wondered if she had been routinely chosen last for P.E., and if her classmates regretted that later.

“Listen,” Emilie said, still holding me around the neck.

“You’re hurting me,” I seethed back.

And then from downstairs, I heard raised voices—Mom’s and Johnny’s.

Emilie loosened her grip on me long enough for me to whisper, “What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”

She whispered back, “He went over to Jerry’s for something. I guess Mom found a note from Stacy.”

Uh-oh. I knew this could be bad. Stacy was the queen of writing long notes—it was what she did instead of homework on the nights she came over, a math book open on her lap, bent over pages of dense writing in purple ink, with tiny hearts to dot her i’s. Plenty of times, at the end of the night, she’d fold the note into an ingenious little package and pass it over to Johnny.

“We could hear better from the stairs,” I suggested. For once, Emilie paid attention to me. She released my neck, which had started to cramp at that point, and we crept halfway down the stairs, stepping carefully to avoid creaks, and wedged ourselves onto the same step.

Johnny’s voice was raised, easily traveling across the kitchen, through the closed door and up the stairs. “I don’t understand. You were going through my stuff?”

“I was not going through your stuff,” Mom clarified, her tone deadly. “I was simply doing the laundry like I always do, and part of doing the laundry is to empty all the pockets.”

“Okay,” Johnny huffed. “But you didn’t have to read it. That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Emilie let out a small wheeze, a stifled laugh.

Mom laughed, too, a hard laugh, the kind I knew better than to cross. “Invasion of privacy! Do I have to remind you that I’m the parent and you’re the child?”

“I’m seventeen! I’m an adult.”

“Not yet. Not an adult—yet.”

“I’m old enough to get a letter from my girlfriend without you—”

“This isn’t just any ordinary letter, Johnny!”

I heard a rustling of paper.

“You’re going to read it?” Johnny’s voice was incredulous.

“First it starts with how much she loves you. She probably says that a dozen times. Then, ‘The whole school could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I was just looking at you. I would have kept staring at you until my hair was singed and the skin started to drip from my bones...’”

“Whoa!” Emilie breathed into my ear.

Ick, I thought.

“Give it back to me!”

“And here she says that she might as well be dead if she can’t be with you....”

Johnny bellowed, “You have no right!”

“I have every right! Later on, and I quote, ‘It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.’”

I didn’t realize how clenched my body was until I bit my tongue sharply and tasted warm blood in my mouth.

“All right! You’ve made your point!”

“No, Johnny. I haven’t. The point is, this isn’t just puppy love. It’s getting way out of hand. Stacy is just getting way too obsessed—”

“She’s not obsessed! What are you saying?”

“She says in this letter that she can’t live without you. She says if she can’t see you every day, she’ll kill herself. It’s not normal, Johnny!”

I shivered, remembering the picture in Stacy’s nightstand again, with the boy’s face obliterated, the pen almost wearing through the paper. Had she felt like that with him, too, that she would kill herself if she couldn’t see him?

Johnny’s voice was quieter when he spoke, as if maybe with Mom reading the note he’d heard Stacy’s words for the first time. “She’s not being serious, though. She’s only trying to say...”

“Johnny.” Mom’s voice was lower now, more controlled. “I’m worried that you’re spending so much time together. You’re not seeing your friends, you’re not keeping up with your grades. The things she says in this letter—they’re not things a sixteen-year-old girl should say. You’re both very young to be so serious.”

“Oh, no,” Emilie said. I felt her grip on my arm, tightening like the blood pressure cuff in the doctor’s office.

“We’re too young to be so serious? I’m too young?” Johnny’s voice escalated with each syllable. “You know, that’s really rich, coming from you!”

“Here we go,” Emilie whispered.

I pinched her arm. “What? I don’t get it.”

Emilie pinched me back, hard. “I’ll explain later.”

Mom’s voice had escalated again. “Johnny, you have no right to say that. It was a different time, a different situation!”

Johnny’s laugh was mean. “I can’t believe you’re using that on me. Somehow you’re going to make even that be my fault.”

“Johnny, that’s enough!”

It occurred to me that somehow Johnny had never learned to be submissive, to roll over and give up like Kennel when we caught him gnawing on one of Dad’s work boots. Emilie and I might push the boundaries from time to time, but we gave in just before getting ourselves in trouble. Johnny didn’t stop, and that’s what made him tenacious in the ring. But it also made him act impulsively, and earned him more than his share of punishments over the years.

“So it was okay for you, it was okay for you and Dad, but it’s not okay for me? Stacy’s ‘obsessed,’ but you were just, what? A normal teenage girl in love? You must not have been so pure and innocent, because—”

A slap—a sound so vivid that I could almost see Mom’s palm connecting with Johnny’s cheek. He must have stumbled backward; there was a thud as his body connected with the table. Emilie gasped. I winced, as if it was me who had been slapped.

“Never mind,” I whispered to her. “I get it now.”

Mom’s voice was shaky. “You apologize for that. You apologize right now.”

Johnny didn’t say anything. There was a scraping sound, as if a chair was being dragged across the linoleum, followed by a heavy thud. Emilie’s fingernails dug little half-moons into my arms.

“Johnny!”

But the screen door was already slapping behind him, and before Emilie and I made it to the kitchen, Johnny was down the porch stairs and getting into his truck.

“We’re not done!” Mom yelled, but the Green Machine had already shuddered to life, stirring up a spray of gravel before roaring away on Rural Route 4. I didn’t have to be a genius to know that he was going to see Stacy.

Mom’s words lingered in the kitchen like an ugly bruise. Looking around, I saw what had caused the crash. Johnny had thrown one of our heavy kitchen chairs against the wall; it lay toppled on its back, one of the spindles hanging loose.

Mom tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and, without saying a word, righted the chair. With a little pop, the spindle slipped back into its place, and she slid the chair under the table.

Back upstairs, I lay on my bed, facing the wall, staring at nothing. Maybe Mom was right—Johnny and Stacy were getting too serious. I blushed, remembering how Johnny had pinned Stacy to the ground, the breathless way her chest had heaved beneath his. Did she really think of Johnny as a drug, that she needed to keep coming back for more? Would she really kill herself if she couldn’t see him every day? I pulled my quilt over my head, feeling suddenly as if I knew too much.

nine

That fall, tension in our house lurked around every corner. Stacy still came over sometimes, but she didn’t always come inside. Instead, Johnny went out to meet her, and Emilie and I would spy on them as he leaned her back against the Camaro for one of their long, passionate kisses.

Mom would watch from the kitchen window, flicking the porch light on and off, like some kind of Morse code: I’m watching you. I see what you’re doing.

Each night was its own battle, but the afternoons were generally quiet and peaceful, with Mom still at work and Johnny and Emilie at one sort of practice or another. When the bus dropped me off from school, I’d run down the driveway to check in with Dad in the barn, give Kennel a hundred kisses, fix myself a peanut butter sandwich and curl up in my own secret fort—the back of the hallway linen closet.

This was one of the few benefits of being short, I’d discovered—I could squeeze my body into unexpected places. When Johnny and Emilie used to play hide-and-seek with me, I was always the winner. I could slide into the narrowest of cracks behind an open door, climb into dresser drawers and stand upright in a vacuum cleaner box with inches to spare. Then a few years ago, I’d discovered the hollow at the back of an upstairs closet. It was just a narrow space behind the closet shelves, about four feet high and two and a half feet deep—too small to bother sealing, too awkward for storage, and perfect for me. It was a great place for reading; all I had to do was move our guest towels out of the way and I was in.

With a couple of Grandma’s old quilts and the flickering light of a Coleman lantern, my hiding place was as neat and comfortable as any hobbit hole—and no one could bother me. I could spend uninterrupted hours with books of true crime, or my new favorite obsession, the Guinness Book of World Records. I marveled at the world’s tallest person, who had reached eight feet, eleven inches and only lived to be twenty-two. Eight feet—I couldn’t imagine. He wouldn’t have survived long in our house, where his head would have brushed the ceiling and smacked against every doorway.

One afternoon, when Dad was up in Green Bay and I was up in my hideout studying a photo of Kara Gordon, the world’s shortest person at twenty-three inches tall, I heard the back door bang open. I heard the unmistakable sound of Johnny hammering his boots against the door sill, a habit Mom had drilled into each of us, and then faintly, Stacy’s laugh. This surprised me—since Stacy was only welcome in our house if Mom or Dad were there. And even then, she wasn’t truly welcome.

Straining, I could hear the winter undressing sounds associated with snow—hats and scarves and gloves peeling off with a whack, coats unzipping, feet working their way out of boots. Then two sets of footsteps on the stairs. I held my breath.

“Shh...shh!” Stacy’s hissed whisper.

“We don’t have to ‘shh.’ No one’s here,” Johnny said, whispering anyway. “Mom’s at work, and Dad’s out of town for the day.”

“What about your sisters?”

“Emilie’s at band practice and Kirsten’s probably in the hayloft or something.”

“Are you sure?”

Johnny laughed. “Are you kidding me? If Kirsten were here, she’d be hanging all over you by now.”

That was mean, I thought, my cheeks hot. But not as mean as Stacy’s laugh of agreement. I would have expected her to protest, to say that I wasn’t a pest, that she loved talking to me.

Instead, she hollered, “Hello! Helllllloooo! Emilie and Kirsten! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

They laughed as if this was the most hysterical thing ever.

Quietly, I folded my legs and brought my knees to my chin. I heard Johnny’s bedroom door squeak open, then thunk as it caught on something, a pair of shoes, maybe, or a football.

“God, your room is such a sty,” Stacy said. “No wonder you’ve never let me in here before.” She laughed again, and I remembered Stacy’s bedroom from her party: the white bedspread, the neat line of books on her shelf.

“Jeez, Lemke. Let it go.”

There was the sound of metal coiling, and I realized they were on Johnny’s bed. My little hideout was situated between the linen closet and Johnny’s bedroom; I might as well have been perched in his closet. Listening to Stacy’s giggles, my hearing suddenly felt very sharp. I plugged my ears and counted to twenty, then unstopped them and listened to their quiet sucking sounds. This was kissing—real kissing, late-night TV kissing, not the short pecks my parents planted on each other’s cheeks on their way out the door or the dry forehead smacks Mom gave us when we professed to have fevers, kisses that were more thermometer than affection. Once, Emilie had shown me how to practice kissing, and we had sucked on the insides of our arms until they were covered with purplish hickeys. It had taken a full week for mine to disappear, and Mom had frowned, noticing my arm as I got ready for bed. “You must be playing too hard in the barn,” she said. “You’re all bruised up.”

Now I imagined Johnny and Stacy burying each other’s bodies in hickeys, a more private version of what Mom termed their “make-out sessions” when Johnny walked Stacy to her car. I wondered if her pink lip gloss, which she reapplied constantly from a little tube that bulged in her back pocket like a strange tumor, had transferred onto Johnny’s mouth, his neck, leaving sweet raspberries on his skin.

I’ve got to say something now, I thought, make some noise, get myself out of here. I had a basic idea of what was happening—anything from necking to going all the way, which I’d learned about from Katie and Kari Schultz, twins in my grade whose college-aged babysitter had filled them in on everything from periods to where babies came from.

Then I heard something else—a zipper?

“What are you doing?” Johnny groaned, loud and low.

Stacy laughed again. “I thought you might like that,” she whispered, a throaty sound that didn’t sound like Stacy at all, but more like an actress in a love scene the moment before Mom changed the channel.

What would happen if someone came in now, like Grandpa with one of his shirts to be mended, or Mom, released from her shift early?

“You are such a tease,” Johnny moaned, and Stacy laughed again.

“Good?” she asked.

“Mmm...”

I started to count in my head again, just wanting this to be over. One, two, three... Something soft like a sweater smacked against the wall, and then there were more sounds, like someone tugging off a pair of jeans. Were these, I wondered, the pale blue jeans with heart-shaped appliqués on the back pockets?

All of a sudden, the sounds stopped, and Johnny said, clear as anything: “I don’t know about this.”

Fifteen...sixteen...seventeen...

“I told you, I’m ready,” Stacy whispered.

“But I just—I don’t want you to think you have to—”

“I don’t think I have to. I know I want to.”

“You’re sure about this? I mean, really sure?” Johnny’s voice was husky, too. All of a sudden I realized it was a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.

“I told you, yeah. I’m sure. What can I do to get you to believe me?” She laughed then, and Johnny groaned.

“But what about...?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be careful.” She gave him a light smack, her voice teasing.

“Everyone always thinks they’re being careful.”

“I never thought I’d be the one who had to convince you,” she said, sounding almost annoyed for a second. Then she switched back to her throaty, teasing voice. “I mean, most guys wouldn’t mind...”

Johnny’s voice then was husky. “All right, you’ve convinced me.”

There were more kissing sounds, the bedsprings creaking. Even if I wasn’t hiding in the linen closet, I would have heard this. I started again. Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... My cheeks burned. The bed frame rattled against the wall.

Katie and Kari had illustrated the process for me in a notebook, behind pages of multiplication tables. It didn’t make much sense until I equated her drawing with bulls and heifers. “So the man puts this—” a crude mushroom-shaped object “—into this—” a petal-shaped fissure I only vaguely equated with my own body “—and the woman gets pregnant,” Katie had told me.

“And then her breasts get really big because they’ve filled up with milk,” Kari added. I suspected they were missing a few steps in between, but still, I was unnerved to realize that this scene from the animal world in our barn translated so closely to human life. It shocked me to think that this happened all around me, to my parents, to my married cousins, even to people from church.

Johnny and Stacy were panting now, and it was as if they were breathing directly into my ear. I got stuck for a second: Seventy-one, seventy-one, seventy-one...

“Ouch!” Johnny’s voice. “Did you just bite me?”

Stacy laughed. “Go ahead, bite me back.”

Eighty-six... There was a rhythm to the bed creaking, the groans. I could hear—or was I imagining it?—two pairs of lungs, breath heavy, in sync. I hit one hundred and started working my way down. Ninety-six, ninety-five...

“Oh, Stace, Stace, Stace,” Johnny said, his voice high-pitched and rapid.

What if I stood up, announcing my presence right then? I wondered if I could sneak out of the closet, down the stairs, out the screen door and then in again with a slam, the world’s smallest superhero, here to save the day. I’d come charging up the steps and bang on Johnny’s door, yelling, “Stop—or you’ll have a baby!”

Seventy-five, seventy-four...

It was suddenly quiet, their bodies still. I felt as if I was going to suffocate in my hideout, I was so warm. If I moved, they would hear me. I had no choice but to stay still, breathing in the stale closet air until there was no more oxygen and I passed out. They would find my body there days later, and Johnny and Stacy would feel horribly guilty for what they’d done. I counted all the way down to zero and sat, listening to their silence. I imagined them together on Johnny’s bed, skin against skin, and felt a warm flush on my neck.

“Shit,” Johnny said suddenly, his voice startlingly close. “Look at the clock—it’s after five. We’ve gotta get moving.”

Stacy giggled. “Nah, I think I’ll stay here.”

Johnny was getting up—the bedsprings protesting, his voice moving farther away. “I don’t think so.”

“Why? Because your mom wouldn’t approve?” Stacy laughed her lilting laugh. “Come on, Johnny. I’ll be really quiet. I could camp here for a few days, and no one would even notice.”

“Very funny.”

I could hear Johnny moving around the room, dressing.

Stacy continued, her voice wistful, “If you want, I’ll explain it all to them. I’ll say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hammarstrom, I know you don’t really like me, but I’m moving in with your son.’ I’ll tell them that we love each other and that I’m already physically your wife.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Johnny said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “Put your clothes on. Let’s go.”

Stacy’s voice was smug. “Nope—I told you. I’m not leaving. I’m going to have a little talk with your parents when they come home, mister.”

She seemed pretty pleased with herself for coming up with this bizarre plan. I tried, and failed, to imagine a world where my parents would let Stacy Lemke live in my brother’s bedroom.

“Stacy, come on.” There was an edge to his voice now, something I’d heard often enough as his sister. I remembered how angry he’d been when Stacy interrupted the wrestling night, that breathless moment when I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking, when it could have gone either way. Stacy had won that match, but I knew she wasn’t going to win this one.

Again she laughed. “Sorry! No can do. I guess you’re just stuck with me, Johnny Hammarstrom.”

“I’m serious.” Johnny’s voice was level, but there was an edge to his calm. If Stacy got up right then, everything would be fine. If she didn’t...well... “Any second now my sisters are going to be here, and we need to be gone.”

“I’m perfectly serious, too,” Stacy purred. “I’m just going to lie here on your bed, all stretched out, deliciously naked....”

“Stacy—now!”

They were both alike, I realized. Johnny never knew when to stop being the aggressor, and Stacy didn’t know when to stop egging him on.

Stacy ignored him. “I’d be like your own little princess in the tower, catering to your every whim. And I’d be good to you. I’d be so, sooo, soooo good to you. Come over here, we have time for more—”

There was a slapping sound, as if Johnny was batting Stacy’s hands away. “What are you, crazy? Get dressed! You’re going to get me in trouble!”

I’d been holding my breath for so long that I felt dizzy.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.” Stacy sounded hurt, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t moved yet.

Johnny sighed, trying to be patient. “Are you going to get up?”

“I don’t know,” Stacy said simply.

“What the fuck, Stacy!” Johnny exploded suddenly. There was a thunk, like he’d kicked something—an open dresser drawer or his bed frame. He swung his bedroom door open, banging it against the wall, and took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom of the stairs, he called back over his shoulder, “I’m going to be in the truck, and if you’re coming, you’d better get moving.”

Slowly, too slowly, Stacy stood up. She seemed to be muttering under her breath while she gathered her clothes. I pressed my ear to the wall, trying to pick out her words. But, no, she wasn’t muttering. She was humming—as if she had all the time in the world.

Johnny’s voice carried up the stairs, dangerously. “Stacy...”

“All right, I’m coming,” she called finally, starting down. “What’s the hurry, Hammarstrom? Got another girl to visit before dinner?”

When I heard the back door slam behind them, I unfolded myself from my hiding spot, taking in fresh gulps of air like a deep-sea diver coming to the surface. I rushed to my bedroom window, careful not to disturb the curtain as I peeked out. Johnny had already started his truck. Hands on the steering wheel, he stared straight ahead. Stacy only had one leg inside when he gunned the engine. As they made the half turn in the driveway, I saw her reach unsteadily out with one hand and, straining, pull the door shut.

ten

There was no way I could tell anyone about that afternoon. Mom and Dad would yell loud enough to be heard in three counties. Emilie would use the information as a bargaining tool in the future.

Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure how to describe what had happened. The sex wasn’t even the bad part, not really. There was sex in just about every movie on TV, even though Mom cleared her throat pointedly and Dad changed the channel before anything got too detailed. Sure, Pastor Ziegler said every single Sunday that “sexual impurity” was explicitly forbidden by God, but the act itself didn’t seem that strange. My parents had done it, and their parents before them, and even, presumably, Pastor Ziegler and his wife. It didn’t seem all that crazy that Johnny and Stacy would give it a try, too. No, what I kept replaying over and over in my mind was their argument afterward: Stacy refusing to leave, Johnny kicking his dresser, then gunning the engine of the Green Machine.

And of course, I couldn’t say anything to Johnny. I’m not sure what I would have said, even if I had dared, but the thing that kept coming to my mind was that I was sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked to Stacy that day under the bleachers. I shouldn’t have given her message to Johnny. I shouldn’t have encouraged her. Up until that afternoon, I’d been obsessed with Stacy myself. Now she scared me—she was too intense, too demanding. The further things went between Stacy and Johnny, the worse things got at home with Mom, the more I felt the heat of guilt creeping up my skin and sinking low in my stomach.

But if Johnny had been bothered by Stacy that day, he quickly forgot it. That very weekend, they went to a concert with friends in Green Bay. The next week she came over for dinner, and they held hands underneath the table. Their kisses, with her back pressed against the Camaro, were just as passionate as they had been before.

By mid-October, Johnny’s mind was more or less occupied with wrestling, anyway. His schedule was packed with predawn runs, after-school practices and weekend scrimmages. Mom and Dad agreed that this would be a good distraction for him, and things seemed to be settling down. There had been no more notes in the wash—either Stacy had stopped writing them or Johnny had become better at hiding them, and after a while, Mom started to soften toward Stacy, encouraging Johnny to invite her over on weeknights to study. “Better to keep them under our noses,” she’d say to Dad.

Stacy stopped by now and then in the evenings that fall, when Johnny was newly showered from practice, wet hairs still curling on his neck. She and Johnny “studied” in the kitchen, their feet entwined beneath the table, while Mom banged dishes noisily in the sink. They “studied” on the living room couch, textbooks balanced on their knees, Stacy’s head fitting perfectly into the crook of Johnny’s neck, while Dad snoozed in his recliner. Watching them, it seemed to me that they were drawn together like barbed wire to cow magnets.

I kept a close eye on Stacy at all times, half in love with her, half scared of what she might do. Sometimes it felt as if I’d imagined the whole scene in Johnny’s bedroom, the bedsprings squeaking, her protests that she wasn’t going to leave.... Sitting on the couch next to Johnny, she seemed as sweet and harmless as a slice of apple pie.

I couldn’t help watching her stomach, too—to see if it began to pooch out the way it happened with the married women at church. First it was a rounded blip, then a tight waistline, and before you knew it we were gathered in the church basement among streams of blue or pink crepe paper, discussing stretch marks and twenty-hour labors.

If it happened to those women at church, it could happen to Stacy Lemke, too. I spied on her whenever I got a chance, peeking at her stomach around the edges of my history textbook. I tried to imagine slender Stacy with her belly button protruding, her hands gripping the sides of her stomach, lowering herself carefully to sit. And what would Johnny be like as a father? Proud? Embarrassed?

It was funny because this—or something like this—was what I’d wanted last summer, when my heart had done a lopsided somersault every time I’d bumped into Stacy Lemke in town. I’d wanted Stacy for Johnny so that I could have a bit of Stacy for myself. But somehow, I thought, it had all gone wrong.

“Let me braid your hair, Kirsten,” Stacy coaxed on one of those fall evenings.

I considered, then shook my head slowly.

“Aw, come on,” Stacy said, reaching for me playfully.

“I don’t know.”

She reached for me anyway, her hands gathering a mess of hair at the back of my neck. Last summer I would have loved this. I would have melted into a puddle at her touch. Now I remembered the way she and Johnny had laughed at me, and I pulled back. “I don’t want to.”

Stacy sank back into the couch, frowning, her arms folded across her chest.

Johnny sighed. “Don’t you have some homework to do, pip-squeak? Something upstairs?”

I slipped off the couch and plodded to my room, where Emilie was engrossed in this month’s Seventeen. The cover read, “Thirteen Ways to Wear this Skirt.” How could there be thirteen ways to wear a skirt? I could only think of one.

“Do you think Johnny and Stacy will get married in our church or her church?” I asked.

Emilie gave me a look of disgust and went back to her magazine. “They’re not getting married, dummy,” she said. “They’re just dating, that’s all.”

“But if they really love each other—”

Emilie dog-eared a page of the magazine and set it aside. “Let’s put it this way. If they get married, it’s because she’s pregnant. If she gets pregnant, her parents will kill Johnny, then her. So there won’t even be a wedding to worry about. Capisce?” That was her new word, picked up from TV.

I sighed. “Capisce.”

Even after careful watching, I really couldn’t tell if there was a difference in Stacy. Johnny, on the other hand, had become suddenly gaunt. He had gone on the wrestler’s diet like he did every fall, shedding the weight he’d gained during the spring and summer. It wasn’t unusual for Johnny to hit 190 pounds in the off-season, although he wrestled in the 160s. In the past, he’d eaten egg-white shakes for breakfast, ran laps around the barn, jumped rope, sprinted up the bleachers, lifted weights in the gym. Sweated, then sweated some more.

But this year, he’d lost much of the weight without even trying. I didn’t notice it when he was bundled up in sweatshirts and warm-up pants, but when he sat across from us at the kitchen table in just a T-shirt, his arms looked positively scrawny, his chest sunken. Any sign of a bulge on his stomach—Aunt Julia’s lingonberry kuchen, Mom’s beef brisket—had completely disappeared.

“Are you trying to drop another weight class or something?” Dad asked one night when Johnny refused a second helping of Mom’s turkey tetrazzini.

Johnny shrugged. “I ate something before practice.”

Dad sat back in his chair, studying Johnny carefully. “Does Coach want you to drop more weight?”

Johnny looked back at him. “I’m not dropping weight.”

“Sure looks like you are.”

Johnny shrugged again. He brought a spoonful to his mouth slowly, as if in rebuttal. “Well, I’m not trying to.”

“But you are,” Mom said pointedly. “Are you feeling sick?” She reached across the table for his forehead, but withdrew her hand when he pulled back.

“I’m fine,” Johnny insisted. “You’re making too big a deal out of this.”

Later that evening, Dad called Coach Zajac, and Coach recommended less running and more weight lifting, more carbohydrates and fewer vegetables. “Coach says we’ll get him back on track,” Dad said, hanging up the phone. “Although he might not be a bad wrestler in the 150s, if it came to that.”

Mom pursed her lips together, shaking her head. “You two wouldn’t care if Johnny was a skeleton, so long as it gave him an advantage.”

When I dreamed that night, it was of Johnny on the mats, a skin-and-bones cadaver performing some strange, macabre dance. In the stands, Stacy was watching him, her hands folded beneath her belly.

eleven

Winter, which had only been flirting with us up to that point, made a serious appearance in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Overnight, everything green disappeared beneath thick white snowdrifts. Mom dragged the boxes of our heaviest winter sweaters down from the attic, and we began listening to the local news each morning, praying for a snow day. It was so cold that Kennel was allowed inside the barn, where he terrorized our farm cats, essentially treeing them in the hayloft. One Saturday, Dad and Jerry cut down a fir from the woods behind our property and lugged it inside our house, then left it to Emilie and me to decorate with looping strings of tinsel and uneven rows of blinking lights. Mom brought down boxes from the attic, and we dug out our favorite ornaments—the clothespin reindeer Grandma Hammarstrom had made for us when we were little, the palm-print casts from our years in kindergarten, Johnny’s palm then as big as mine now. I ate almost as much popcorn as I strung.

We hosted Christmas dinner, complete with too-dry turkey and Mom’s creamy green bean casserole. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia were there, as well as our cousin, Brent, and his fiancée, and a few of Mom’s cousins from northern Wisconsin. Jerry joined us, helping to cut the turkey with slow, precise strokes. “This man knows his way around a bird,” Dad had announced, clapping Jerry on the shoulder. With an apron tied around her neck and pot holders for hands, Mom was in her element. Grandpa gave horse rides on his knee to the toddlers, and Stacy stopped by, too, after the Lemkes’ family meal. Through it all, Johnny picked at his food like a fussy toddler.

It snowed every day of our Christmas break, and once the excitement of our presents had worn off, Emilie and I were mostly cooped up. She practiced the clarinet for hours on end, until even Dad requested that John Philip Sousa be confined to the basement, please. A friend rescued Emilie for a day of shopping in Milwaukee, and Mom took me ice-skating at the indoor rink in Waukesha with Katie and Kari Schultz and a few other girls from school, but otherwise, the weeks passed in a blue chill of boredom. Even as we watched TV or read books or played marathon games of double solitaire, it seemed our whole family was holding its breath for Johnny.

We didn’t miss a meet that season. Piled into the Caprice, we followed the Ships’ bus to tournaments in Kiel and Fond du Lac and Menomonee Falls, then spent entire Saturdays in the bleachers waiting for Johnny to wrestle, standing every so often to stretch our backs or relieve our behinds. Even Grandpa came along, although he complained that the car ride was too long and we sat in the bleachers too long and it took too long to make it all the way through the brackets.

Stacy was at every tournament, too. During the long lulls between Johnny’s matches, she sat in a corner of the gymnasium with the other kids from Lincoln High. The girls took turns braiding each other’s hair or passing around homework to be copied; they snapped gum and sucked lollipops and leaned close, heads together, for a whispered conversation that ended in a bout of hysterical laughter. Stacy carried a thick binder that was completely covered with doodles. Stacy and Johnny. I love Johnny H. Stacy Lynne Hammarstrom. It made me feel funny, to see her trying on our name for size.

She always crossed the bleachers to say hello to us, to chat about how Johnny was doing or how Johnny was feeling or who Johnny was up against. She had become a wrestling expert overnight. “See that one there, in the green sweatshirt? That’s Crowley, he’s in the 160s, too. That’s Johnny’s toughest opponent of the day,” she would say, bent into our airspace. From her necklace dangled the gold heart locket that Johnny had bought her for Christmas, with the money he’d saved from doing his chores and other odd jobs around our farm.

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