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hand from her elbow up to her shoulder while he talked about the Apostle Paul. The one time Emmy had tried to evade his lavender-smelling breath, Karin had lectured her for no less than a week on the shame of having a daughter who couldn’t show respect to a man of the cloth in God’s own house.
    The door below her opened again, and Ambrose stuck his head into the cold, smiling tightly up at her. “You’re blue,” he stated. “Come in.”
    Hearing his reined impatience, Emmy was startled to see that the Ambrose who stood at the bottom of the staircase was no longer the maypole that her childish imagination had wound itself around. Where once was a companion running, fishing, and hunting alongside of her, now there was a partner of a new sort: one whose lead expected a follow. His expression softened and he extended his hand with a coax of his fingers, a gesture whose familiarity pulled her away from Svenja’s romantic whisperings of more out there. Emmy turned the wheel of doubt back one click in Ambrose’s favor, took up the braces of her expected routine, and let the capricious notions of youth drift behind her in their gathering cloud.
    *   *   *
    “Are you nervous?” Birdie whispered to Emmy in the backseat of their father’s old Coronet. The seats were threadbare, and the heat was so paltry that the girls had to spread horse blankets both under themselves and across their shared lap, causing a prickling sort of nonheat that they suffered without complaint. Emmy slipped her gloved hand into Birdie’s and nodded.
    “Terribly,” Emmy said, looking out the window at the bleached monotony of the barren sugar beet fields. She swallowed hard against the dryness in her throat and took a deep, purposeful inhale, as though she were preparing to go underwater for an undetermined amount of time. Her parents sat on either side of her grandmother on the wide front bench seat, three bobbing heads in three different hats. As usual, Grandmother Nelson’s tiny frame was draped in layers of black fashion from the late 1940s, the absence of color or style marking her desire to be deep in the ground, next to her husband of fifty years. Emmy tried to imagine what that amount of time would feel like, how she would look at her grandmother’s age. Would she likewise shrink down like an apple-headed doll left for days in the sun? It was very possible that Emmy would outlive Ambrose, that she too would mete out her days in the middle of a son and daughter-in-law, being driven from one day to the next, and left to wander the rooms of an overlarge house with only the ghost of her dear dead husband to comfort her.
    A forlorn smile pulled at Emmy’s lips and she immediately fought it down as the car turned off the main road and onto the long, narrow drive edged with plowed banks of gravel-studded snow that led into the Brann farm. Towering skeletal oak trees marked the property on four corners, connected by stands of bushy spruce planted as protection from the relentless year-round winds that would aspirate fine layers of topsoil straight into any open window, impervious to screens and sometimes even silting its way right through solid windowpanes.
    At the top of the drive, the path curved into a circle around two tangled box elder trees, the spot where Emmy had spent many a warm Sunday afternoon, either on a sturdy, gnarled limb or in the shady grass below. She could almost picture her own children up in these trees, spying on pirates or Indians, or maybe even little green men from Mars. This thought helped with the notion that she might someday be the lady of the enormous white Victorian house looming before them, the neatly trimmed green shutters and bare front porch giving Emmy the same old feeling of a thing untouched by love. Christian stopped the car in front of the big white slope-shouldered barn across the circle from the house, and Emmy crossed her fingers and made a quick wish: Please let me be happy here.
    They were