GONE FISHING

a short story
by Janet Ference
 Gone Fishing
an excerpt from the novel
Riversbend Elegy for guns, sax, and harp

the author wishes to offer deep thanks to

her dear friend Lynn Park

Text copyright © 2011 Janet Ference

Cover photograph © 2010 Lynn Park

www.janetference.com
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Blue Fern Press

San Francisco, California
Gone Fishing Riversbend Elegy for guns, sax, and harp Janet Ference

The first place Nancy goes is to the church. Flying in from New York City, renting a

car in Indianapolis, driving to Riversbend in the white glare of a heavy snowfall on a dark

moonless night, Nancy has been thinking about church. She no longer believes, so she

doesn’t know why she’s driving to the church. She does know Tom never went to church

without a push. She worries he will be uneasy there tomorrow, when he’s carried into the

church in a casket, unable to argue.

Her nephew, Tom, was a gentle boy, generally slow to make decisions, always slow to

argue, but he had made the decision to fight this war without a doubt and against her advice.

He knew what he had to do, he said, and he did it, and now he is dead. Nancy finds it hard

to imagine him lifeless and impossible to think of him, as she has heard, mortally wounded,

with one arm blown off at the elbow, shrapnel lodged in his face and neck, chest an open

cavity, right lung collapsed and exposed, somehow surviving a terrible night in a hospital so

far from home, then dying before he could wake or wonder why.

She remembers an ordinary night fifteen years ago, on one of her too few visits,

when Tom recited the familiar children’s prayer to her, “If I should die before I wake, I pray

the Lord my soul to take.” He had been tucked into bed with his GI Joes and story books on

the nightstand. He was seven years old and counting. She can still see his boy’s eyes, as clear

as the creek they had waded together, shivering and laughing, that cold spring day. He had

said this prayer confidently, as she had done at his age, not knowing what the words meant,

she thinks now, not knowing what it meant.

When the Trade Towers fell, he was the first to call her on her cell phone. “Aunt

Nancy, where are you?” She was safe, but shaken, at her desk uptown, working early, working

late, always working in those days. These days she works less.

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He was there by eight o’clock. He had driven all day. He hadn’t told her he was

coming. He was just there. “Aunt Nancy, are you home?” She was home, alone, always alone

in those days, too busy for a boyfriend, too tired of too many men. These days, at thirty-

nine, childless, never married, she dates again, occasional men.

Tom slept on her couch six weeks that fall, when he slept, a nineteen-year-old hardy

volunteer, searching for life, sorting through death, coming home grayer than those many,

many ghosts, while she tried not to know that it was true, while she continued writing ads for

deodorant and shampoo. There was little for him at home in those days. He had left a

factory packing job without even giving notice. He had come to her to do what she couldn’t

do herself. She couldn’t face it.

When Tom went back home to Riversbend after that, he couldn’t find a job. He did

find love, though, and he made a baby. When he married the pregnant girl, Nancy worried

about his prospects.

When she heard he’d joined the Army, not from him, but from her brother, she

cursed the war and the world that had made him do it. She cursed her brother, who

approved of it.

Nancy has never liked her brother much. As kids, their Dad at sea with the Navy,

Dale, who was five years older than Nancy, seemed to think he was a man, succeeding in

creating a weird bond with their Mom and considerable conflict with Nancy. Dale will be

strong, she thinks, and she thinks that’s wrong.

When Nancy moved to New York City at nineteen, with little savings and no friends,

to put herself through school at NYU, Dale drove her there, loudly silent as he delivered her

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to her chosen fate. Whenever she considered giving it up, the big city, she thought of him

and stayed. She lives still in New York City because of Dale.

As she signals her exit from the interstate, heading around the ramp toward

Riversbend, she’s hoping that the tires on this compact rental car will have enough traction

to hold the curve she takes too fast.

Nancy is pulled under for a moment, drowning, not knowing she is crying, though

she’s gasping against the thick welling of unacknowledged tears in her throat. She skids on

the ice, but she turns into it like a pro, regaining control of the car to take the turn to

Riversbend.

The snow has stopped now. Her headlights shine down a quiet Main Street, decorated

for Christmas with large candy canes as old as Nancy is, hanging burdened by the snow from

ancient streetlights. The shops she knows are closed, some for the night, some forever, and

they hang no holiday lights in their windows.

The First Methodist Church is the largest building downtown, far larger than City

Hall and the Courthouse, which she passes without turning her head. As she drives slowly

around the corner toward home, Nancy stops her windshield wipers to watch the church

appear, near the river, just before the bridge. Its square steeple, housing the bell that can be

heard as far away as her mother’s house, a mile past the river, is only lightly shrouded in

windblown snow, but even on this moonless night, it’s hugely visible, piercing high into the

dark heavens. As it grows closer, Nancy swallows pride and tears.

When she pulls her car into the parking lot of the church, she notices the lights are

lit. Stained glass shines on the snow, a kaleidoscope of colors. She hadn’t expected anyone to

be there. She had thought to sit in the car and stare up at the steeple. She had imagined the

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doors locked. Now she is alarmed. Who is there at ten o’clock at night? She pulls the parking

brake three times, setting it, setting it, and setting it again.

With her gloved hands, she pulls her chic coat closed at the throat. She adjusts her hat

to show more of her carefully colored and clipped hair. Nancy knows she is still a beautiful

woman, but she wonders how long her perfect pale skin will cooperate. She dabs at her face

with a tissue, her touch as delicate as her complexion.

She could go into the church, she thinks, but she stretches her driving foot in its

black leather boot, her toe just a tap away from the gas.

She should go away, she thinks, but she sits, grasping the car keys, counting them.

There are two, and a tag for the rental car company. “If lost, return to . . . “

Nancy is lost. When her Mom called to say Tom was hit, a suicide bomber took out

his truck, Nancy promised her she’d pray, and she prayed. Nancy hadn’t prayed in twenty

years, but she prayed that day, that night, throughout that long wakeful night. She prayed that

he would wake. He didn’t wake. He died.

It’s been a week already. These things take time with the Army. Everyday, at least

twenty times a day, Nancy has had to tell herself just that, “He died.” She keeps forgetting

that it’s true. Even making the plane reservations, planning the trip home, she has expected

to see Tom alive.

Nancy is hot. She opens the window. She drinks the harshly cold wet air into her

mouth and holds it there. Swallowing again, she remembers her lipstick. Lipstick is a sinner’s

friend, she thinks, making sin happen, making it okay. A woman has only to apply fresh

lipstick, and tears can no longer drown her. This is Nancy’s religion. The lipstick she wears

tonight is called, “Caught.” The maker is a little shop she knows where they mix them to her

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taste. This is her everyday color, deep bing cherry red with bronze highlights. It smells of

cinnamon. The pot, the brush, the mirror are a comfort. She knows she is seen in lipstick.

Fortified by body paint, she opens the car door. She steps into the fresh snow, feeling

relief to leave her tracks in it. She makes distinctive strides and solid steps, packing snow

beneath her pointed toes, crunching the cut of her heel straight to the asphalt. Her own

footsteps are all she can hear. No church bells call her here.

The doors of the church are unlocked. They are simple doors, not like those of the

grand churches in New York City, simple wooden doors on the face of a plain brick church.

She opens them easily and enters.

Nancy was confirmed in this church, her mother’s church, when she was fourteen. It

had been an ordeal. Nancy had refused. She had been pressed to attend the classes, three

consecutive sets of classes, other teens taking their places at the altar, confessing their faith,

after each of them. She had not uttered the Creed, though she had memorized it, though her

mother had insisted she do it. No, she had declined to believe.

She had argued vehemently against the plausibility of divine intervention, divine

creation, divine resurrection. It was preposterous, she had declared. She had read books to

prove it. She had recited from them. Nietzsche went too far, she had said, but Kierkegaard

knew a thing or two. Had her mother even read them?

Finally flouting her mother, gaining ground in the pitched battle, Nancy quit going to

church. It was settled, she thought, until Nancy’s father intervened. He himself never went

to church. He said her mother could see to that. Finally retired from the Navy, he worked at

the aluminum plant then, split shifts, extra shifts, overtime shifts, and he never had time. He

worked most Sunday mornings. He said his daughter ought to believe in something, though.

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When she asked him what, he didn’t know. He sent her to Mr. Madsen. Mr. Madsen lived

next door, and Mr. Madsen went to church. He taught Sunday School to little ones. He had

taught Nancy all the Bible stories.

Nancy’s Mom didn’t speak to Mrs. Madsen. Everybody knew that. Nancy’s father

ignored the wives, saying a neighbor is a neighbor. He took his daughter across the two

driveways separating the once matching houses. Nancy remembers carefully wending her

way through the frostbitten roses which marked the boundary between Mrs. Madsen’s

concrete and her mother’s gravel. Her father didn’t go around them. He walked right

through them, thorns catching his pants. He knocked on Mr. Madsen’s door. He asked him

to talk to Nancy. Then he went home and left her on the doorstep.

Mr. Madsen invited Nancy into Mrs. Madsen’s kitchen. Nancy was embarrassed by all

of this. The dogs were all over her, licking her legs right up to her shorts. She hadn’t been in

Mrs. Madsen’s house since she was a very little girl. She liked the idea of betraying her

mother, though. When she asked, Mr. Madsen said Mrs. Madsen was out shopping. Richie

Madsen, the cute boy that Nancy wished would ask her for a date, was at the movies with his

sister, Jane. She found herself alone with Mr. Madsen, who at that time was in his late

thirties, still had wavy blond hair, and looked a little bit like Richie, only a lot taller and even

more handsome. He was not a scary kind of guy, but he made Nancy nervous anyway. He

chased away the dogs, gave her some iced tea, and held the chair for her at the kitchen table.

He sat down and asked her what she wanted to know about it all. She said nothing.

He said that was good, because he didn’t know anything. He said she could just drink her tea.

She did, for awhile, just drink Mrs. Madsen’s unsweetened sun tea with fresh lemon, thinking

she didn’t know when she could go without making a big fuss about it. Meanwhile, he got up

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and looked in the freezer, rummaging through paper-wrapped packages, reading the labels.

Mrs. Madsen was certainly much more organized than her Mom. Then he found what he

wanted and took it out to thaw on a plate. He went to the hallway and picked up the mail

from the table. The Madsens got a lot of mail. He flipped through magazines and tossed

bills aside. Black and white pictures of Three Mile Island flashed at Nancy from the covers

of two of the news magazines. Nancy remembered it might be the end of the world soon.

That’s when Nancy asked him, “Why do you go to church?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“No, I mean, why do you? You don’t have to.”

Mr. Madsen didn’t answer her, but he put down the mail, and he looked at her. Her

shirt felt too tight. She wondered if he could see her bra. She was wearing an old bra, last

year’s bra, and it was too little. She bulged some over the cups. She shouldn’t have worn a

white shirt, or this shirt, today. She’d never guessed she’d be alone with Mr. Madsen, today or

any other day. What was she expected to do now?

She said, “You know, you’re grown up, and you’re a man.”

She stopped on that word, saying it too loudly, a little breathlessly.

When he steadied his blue eyes on hers, more gently than before, and more surely,

she resumed more confidently, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You

don’t have to go to church.”

“No, I don’t have to, Nancy. But, I do.”

“Do you believe in God, Mr. Madsen?”

“Sure I do.”

It was that simple?

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Gone Fishing Riversbend Elegy for guns, sax, and harp Janet Ference

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why do you?”

Mr. Madsen stood then, and turned away from her. He walked slowly to the kitchen

sink and stared out the window. Mrs. Madsen’s red gingham curtains framed something out

there that drew his eyes, but Nancy couldn’t see past his head. A geranium on the windowsill

was dying. Nancy’s Mom would know how to save that. Nancy thought it took an eternity

for Mr. Madsen to answer her question. Perhaps it did. Something shifted under her feet

when he spoke to her again.

“I just know. That’s all. When I go fishing, wading the rush of Downers Creek, after

the snow melts, there before it joins the river, and the sun is as bright as fire because the

leaves aren’t on the trees yet, and the water is so cold, my best hip waders can’t keep me

warm, and the look of it, that water, it’s almost blue where it pools in the crooks of that big

old crashing creek, and I look to the current when I cast my first fly, and something like a

smile flashes there on the water, not like a smile I can see, not like that, but like I feel it,

something smiles on the water, and I know. That’s all. I know.”

With that, Mr. Madsen turned toward her, dreamily, and his eyes were alight and his

smile was a small knowing mystery, but he looked directly at Nancy. He kept his eyes on hers

until she had to turn away in confusion. Nancy did not recognize this as a revelation, not

exactly, but it was a moment she remembered vividly. She could still describe those eyes of

his, those knowing eyes, on hers.

Nancy doesn’t remember another word being said. It was done. Her conversion was

complete for the moment. Two weeks later, she stood before the congregation and her

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friends and her family, and she confessed her faith in something, maybe Mr. Madsen, and so

in this way that day, Nancy was saved the trouble of refusing anymore.

In New York City, all this had seemed obsolete, though. Nancy had found that faith

in herself was more to the point, and she’d spent years now practicing that, trying to get it

right.

It’s warm in the outer vestibule. If this were Sunday, the doors would stand open and

it would be cold in here. Hot again, Nancy places her hat and coat and scarf on the coat

rack, near the end that’s crowded with lost things. As she does, she brusquely pushes aside

four coats, two umbrellas, one broken, three gloves, all unmatched, a red stocking hat, a

black ladies hat with a tired feather, and a badly knitted yellow scarf. She kicks the coat rack,

knocking the snow from her boots. She pulls off her gloves now and puts them over her

handbag on the table with the church bulletins from last Sunday. She sees Tom’s funeral

details printed in a heavy black box on the back of the leftover bulletins. It’s true then. They

will bury him tomorrow. She takes the car keys from her bag and starts to flee without her

coat, but she stops at the doors to swallow, and to breathe.

Turning, deliberately, keys in hand, she walks over and opens the inner doors to the

church. She wants to see it before tomorrow, before the flowers arrive and the casket, as it’s

always been, she thinks now, hollow.

She is ready to confront the new minister. She doesn’t know this one, but they are all

the same. They believe in preposterous things like resurrection. This one will bury her

nephew. This one will preach and pray over Tom’s mute coffin. This one is better met now,

alone and face to face.

Nancy is startled to see it’s not the minister at all.

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“Mr. Madsen?”

He’s pacing the aisle. He’s grown shorter, but his hair has never thinned. He’s never

thickened at the waist. He’s still Mr. Madsen. His movements are a jazz. They always have

been. Tonight it is a wild Coltrane.

“Who’s there? Nancy McBee?”

“Yes.”

When he sweeps his still clear blue eyes up the length of her, Nancy shivers. She

usually knows the yes or no that’s required in her eyes in reply to this question from a man,

but she doesn’t know which answer she’s giving Mr. Madsen. It’s urgent that she leave now,

she instantly knows, but she stays.

He looks away and says, “Damned if I know what to say tomorrow. Why in the hell

would they ask me to do the eulogy?”

Nancy knows a lot of reasons Mr. Madsen ought to do it. Mr. Madsen’s

granddaughter, Sue, is now Tom’s widow. Mr. Madsen taught Tom to fish. Mr. Madsen leads

the band. Mr. Madsen is something of an icon in Riversbend. Tom played alto sax in his

band. Mr. Madsen taught Tom to love music. Mr. Madsen never taught Tom to believe,

though, much as he might have tried. So maybe Mr. Madsen shouldn’t do it.

He certainly shouldn’t be here now, stealing her sorrow, confusing her to her toes. She

wants to ask him what he thinks he’s doing here alone this time of night. Instead, she just

asks him, “What will it be like? The funeral? Military honors, what does that mean?”

“They’re going to do two ceremonies. The first is here tomorrow afternoon. Then the

military funeral is the next morning in Marion at the National Cemetery. Your Mom had a fit

about that. Tomorrow it’s a Methodist funeral by the book, no surprises. In Marion there will

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be a flag draped over his coffin, and an honor guard at the gravesite. They’ll bring a bugler,

for God’s sake. A bugler. And, of course, the guns.”

Nancy is looking at the creche. Mary is as impossibly alert and erect as ever, gazing at

the newborn baby. Nancy has seen her sister, Alice, with new babies. Alice never looked like

that. Alice was exhausted. Mary doesn’t smile. She frowns at the child. New mothers always

smile at their babies. It’s genetic. Joseph stands with the wise men, just one of the guys. In

that bed of tired straw is the same old wooden baby. She thinks there’s more chipped paint

this year, at his elbows. He’s always been naked. Once it was a controversy, the naked baby,

but it passed. He outlasted his nay-sayers. Sometimes someone places straw strategically over

his tiny penis, but not this year. He’s an anatomically correct male infant. Nancy is glad he’s

naked. If there had been straw over top of him this year, she thinks she would have moved

it.

Mr. Madsen has followed her eyes. He’s grown quiet, as she has. When he speaks, it’s

gentler now.

“They had a vote. You know that? A god-damned vote. Decided to put the creche

out, in spite of the funeral. It was evenly divided, I hear, yea and nay.”

Nancy looks at Mr. Madsen now. When she learned he was a chronic philanderer, it

was an ordinary Sunday, outside church. She was twenty-nine then, visiting home after a

break-up with a married man. She’d told only one old friend from Riversbend about that

affair, just one. That Sunday Mrs. Madsen was out sick with walking pneumonia. Nancy

remembers the ice was just melting. There was dirty slush at the curb as she walked to her

car. “He’s killing her.” Mrs. Stevens, a long-time member of the church council, was talking

to her. Nancy stared back at her. “That neighbor of yours, the fine Mr. Madsen, he cheats on

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Brenda Madsen all the time. I bet you didn’t know that. Women like you don’t think about

the wives.”

From a woman wearing a Persian lamb hat, Nancy learned she was a woman like that.

To this day, she is not sure which troubles her more, that she herself is fallen, or that Mr.

Madsen isn’t at all what he seems. Nancy has always worked hard to prevent the memory of

that day in his kitchen and the memory of that other day outside the church from colliding

inside her head.

Standing here, though, five feet away and closing, alone with him in church, Nancy

feels the collision crashing now behind her eyes. She closes them. She sees Tom, sitting on

her couch in New York City, asking about all the men, how many men there had been. Even

he had heard about her.

Tom should not be dead, she thinks. She should be dead. It’s wrong.

She holds her breath too long, holding that thought. She doubles over, clutching the

silk of her slacks. She bends her knees until she’s falling, sitting herself down on the floor

like it’s forgiving. It’s not. It’s polished hardwood. Her sculpted hips hit it with a smack of

regret.

“Nancy?”

Mr. Madsen comes to her.

“God damn it,” she whispers.

He sits down beside her, like he knows what he’s doing.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asks him.

“I’ve been here for hours, praying, asking what to do, what to say, how to say it. But

there’s no answer.”

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“You think God will actually answer you?”

“He usually does.”

“Why in hell would He answer you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you ask your wife? Does He answer her, too?”

With that, Mr. Madsen shrinks from her. His shoulders round. He bends.

After a very long while, he whispers, “My Sue, a widow at twenty, a widow with a

baby. She just looks at me. Granddad, is all she says, just Granddad. I don’t know what to

say. How can I help her?”

Mr. Madsen is leaning back against a pew. It’s the Johnson’s pew. At Christmas, four

generations spill from that pew. If half of them weren’t in the choir, they’d need two pews.

The pews are thirty feet each, and that’s a lot of Johnson’s. Nancy doesn’t know why she’s

thinking that at this particular moment, but it seems funny. She laughs.

Looking stunned, Mr. Madsen shoots at her, “How in God’s name can you sit there

and laugh at me?”

“I don’t believe in God. I never did.” This seems like the most hurtful thing she can

think to say to Mr. Madsen. After she says it, she stops crying. She knows that she’s been

crying, now, and she stops abruptly.

Then Mr. Madsen leans toward Nancy, pulling out his handkerchief. He doesn’t

simply hand it to her. He wipes her face with it. She takes it from his hand too slowly. It

smells of the musk of his pants pocket.

“You can’t seduce me with a handkerchief.”

He seems startled she has said this.

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She stands, dropping her keys from her hand.

He collects her keys, and he stands, too, moving easily to his feet despite his age.

“You should say he didn’t believe in all this. That’s what you should say. He would

hate this. And, the flag, for Christ’s sake. God and the flag.”

“He loved the flag. And the way he loved his baby boy, you can’t tell me he didn’t

believe in God. How do you know what he believed? A man’s at war, he believes. He’s got to

believe. It gets him through.”

“It didn’t get him through. He died, Mr. Madsen.”

It’s a shock when Mr. Madsen throws her keys at the door. When they strike, they hit

like spit.

“I’ll say we believed in him, then. We believed in Tom. He was young and good and

strong, and we believed he had a future. We believed he’d raise his boy to be a good man,

too. We believed in him, and we thought that would get him through. God damn it. That

should have been enough to get him through.”

Nancy’s toe is tapping. It’s her driving foot, ready to hit the gas again.

Suddenly, Downers Creek is crashing behind her eyes. She turns to look hard at Mr.

Madsen, wanting to believe again.

When Mr. Madsen looks at Nancy, his eyes are alight with anger and shame.

Nancy thinks about his wife.

Mr. Madsen begins to cry, soundlessly and simply. He doesn’t seem to try to stop. He

doesn’t wipe his eyes, and they burn more brightly with this pain. Nancy slowly reaches out

to wipe the tears from Mr. Madsen’s face. When she does, the question comes again from

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him. This time it’s the flickered proposition of a man close enough to smell her scent, and

Nancy knows which answer she’s giving Mr. Madsen. This man will taste her lipstick tonight.

Again, Nancy thinks about his wife, and her toe taps, telling her to go now, quickly,

alone.

Looking down the aisle toward the door, she sees what she has come here to see,

Tom’s casket coming toward her. Borne by soldiers, draped by the flag, it crowds past her,

pushing her aside, on its way to its place by Mary and the baby, where it will rest for too

short a time before they carry it away.

It’s a vivid imagining of red and blue and white, white, white. It lights the church with

a terrible glare, and Nancy can’t bear it.

She moves swiftly toward the door, and Mr. Madsen follows her, as she knows he

surely will. At the inner door, she hesitates. Mr. Madsen opens it. She forgets to stoop for

her keys, but in the outer vestibule, she does collect all her other things.

When Mr. Madsen locks the church, Nancy sighs.

It’s okay then.

She follows Mr. Madsen to his car. She follows him to a motel that he knows too

well. She follows him to a room he finds too easily. She watches him open and close the

door. When he places the key on the dresser, she picks it up, counting, one. When she takes

off her sweater and slacks, she folds them over a chair, counting, two. When she drops her

earrings into her bag, she notices her car keys are missing. She dumps out the contents of

her bag on the dresser, counting all of the items, sixteen, once, twice, three times, before she

remembers they hit like spit. They’re lost then.

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She’s fourteen when she turns to him, unhooking her bra, twenty-nine when he slips

off her panties, and thirty-nine when they lie down in bed together, where Nancy learns Mr.

Madsen’s trick. He calls to her, ever so quietly saying her name, Nancy, just Nancy,

repeatedly, as he brings her along. She follows his lead in this dance, recognizing the jazz of

his rhythm. This is Mr. Madsen. It’s okay then. When a woman’s in bed, she believes in the

man. She’s got to believe. It gets her through.

Making love to Mr. Madsen, Nancy thinks again of Downers Creek, the creek she

crossed with Tom, the creek Mr. Madsen fishes, the cold water in the creek that never quite

goes to ice, because in the rush of it, over the rapids, it’s moving too swiftly.

In her dreams that night, lying beside her mother’s neighbor, another woman’s

husband, she cradles fish like babies, and they’re not cold, and they’re not crying, they’re

nursing in her arms, and she’s the river then, and flowing, and something smiles in the river,

in her belly, something smiles at the baby in her arms. When she wakes, she imagines that

she’s pregnant. For a good week, she thinks that she’s carrying a child, Mr. Madsen’s child,

and she thinks that she knows, like Mr. Madsen so long ago, she just knows. She believes in

something again, in Riversbend.

This peculiar calm blessedly lasts through the funeral. When Nancy walks into the

church, she sees the casket already in its place. It’s smaller and grayer than she imagined,

covered only in a purple pall. She sighs and remembers Mr. Madsen saying her name over

and over again. When she hears Mr. Madsen’s stammering eulogy, she forgives him the slight

slur in his speech. In Marion, looking away from the red, white and blue on the coffin to the

steel gray sky, she breathes in the remembered musk of Mr. Madsen along with the damp nip

in the air. When the military honor guard folds the flag and presents it to Sue, who clutches

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Gone Fishing Riversbend Elegy for guns, sax, and harp Janet Ference

it and collapses, it’s Nancy who catches her. Even when the gunshots and the bugle break the

peace, Nancy remembers Mr. Madsen’s shining eyes, and she believes. It gets her through.

Through a week of family gatherings devoid of Tom’s constant deep laughter, Nancy

rests her hand gently in her lap, comforting the baby. When her mother gathers the family

for church on Sunday, she joins the others easily. Even when her brother, Dale, falls apart,

refusing to leave his son’s bedroom or take any of the food offered to him, it’s Nancy who is

able to enter that room, sit on that bed, say that child’s prayer, and cradle her gray brother’s

head until he sleeps, wakes, and eats. Still, she believes.

The next week though, back at work in New York City, when the blood flows, late,

like a creek that runs slow, Nancy will grieve the child she will never know. She will mourn its

small knowing smile, the smile of a child saying simple prayers, and she will lose faith in Mr.

Madsen, and she will count the many, many keys it takes to lock her door, and she will not

know what she believes anymore.

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