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Ned gave most of the things to Ethel for her kids. It hurt Rose something fierce to see Todd’s shirts on another boy’s body, but Ned said she was being foolish and there was no sense in good clothes going to waste. “They’re just clothes, for God’s sake,” he said.
    She thought if she made a quilt with bits of her son’s clothes, maybe it would be a little like having something of Todd just for her, something that no one knew about and no one could take away. She’d piece it all together in little tiny stitches, so even and small it would look like she’d done it on the Singer, and maybe, sewing and piecing and putting it together in a pattern, everything would come to make sense to her.
    She was getting ready to tell Ned that perhaps she’d like to take that quilt-making class at the college when he came home wearing what he could have called a shit-eating grin and made his announcement. He’d enrolled her for creative writing, had even paid the tuition. Right then she could just see that quilt she never made fading away, disappearing just like the clothes that Ned had given to Ethel. It made her dizzy it slipped away so fast.
    But what was Ned thinking of? She had absolutely no intention of writing. She planned it in her mind so she’d go once or twice and then she would tell Ned that she’d tried, really, she’d tried, but writing just wasn’t for her. The professor—a man named Anderson Jeffrey, like somewhere along the line he’d gotten his first and last names switched—well, he never even gave her a chance to put this scheme into action.
    AT LAST THE PHONE STOPS RINGING. SHE WISHES SHE COULD put the whole business of Anderson Jeffrey out of her mind, or at least revise the details of it. She has listened to people alter the past, heard them reshape their memories to fit the way they wished things had been, but this is a skill she herself has never acquired. Her past is crystal clear, without one fact shifted out of order.
    She takes the sheets out to the line. In a month, the first snow will fall, early this year according to the
Old Farmer’s Almanac
, harbinger of a long, cold winter, but today is warm and sunny, and the sky stretches out in endless blue without a cloud, like this day the ocean has reversed itself and flooded the heavens. It is the kind of Indian summer day that always fills Rose with sorrow.
    Yesterday Ned mowed the grass when he came home from the station, and now the cut blades stick to her feet, staining her shoes green. Years ago, when they first moved into this house, Ned always raked the lawn when he finished up with the mowing. Later, when Todd got old enough to help, raking was his job. She can’t remember the last time Ned troubled with it. Still, he keeps the property up. The evening before, standing at the kitchen window, she watched while he crisscrossed the lawn, making grim patterns with the mower, his shoulders slumped in an old man’s posture, and she wondered why he bothered.
    Except for the clothesline, their lawn is absolutely empty of decoration. There is not a single lounge chair, barbecue, or picnic bench anywhere in sight. No skateboards or bikes lying in the drive in danger of being run over. Ned took the basketball hoop down years ago. If it weren’t for the narrow perennial bed behind the garage, and the laundry on the days she hangs, and the fact that Ned keeps the lawn mowed, the shrubs trimmed, you could mistake this house for a place where no one lives.
    A blast of noise from the Montgomery place startles her out of her reverie. She glances over and sees that Opal Gates person come out to the back porch carting a sleek black box that Rose immediately identifies as the source of the noise—that loud, horrid stuff young people mistake for music. Then the door opens again and the child comes tumbling out of the house—back door slamming behind him—and skips down the