Part 2 (1/2)

Judy frowns.

”Is Hattie coming to the cell tower meeting?” she asks, after a moment.

”Probably.”

Save her a seat?

Hattie shrugs-all right.

As for whether she can guess who's coming, though, Hattie just laughs again and declines to respond-to that, or to Judy's And Ginny has news!-she and Everett have news!, either. Instead Hattie focuses, a few minutes later, on the happy sound of Judy leaving. Can gravel crunch happily? It does seem so to her.

Judy nose full of beeswax.

She liberates her binoculars. Then it's down with her reading gla.s.ses and up with her jacket zipper-the metal a cold, hard press on her chin. A returning bittern flies on by; and there's the one-note warble of the winter-hardy hermit thrush. If she sits long enough she could just hear a veery thrush and a wood thrush, too-kind of a trifecta. It's happened before. And so Hattie listens as she paints, shutting her wandering thoughts out. Carter. Everett. Carter. Carter. Her stalks are rising fat but dry and light today-a bold shadowy vertical up the left side of her sheet. Not that she's chosen that, exactly. It's more by, the will of the brush. But there they go, in any case, with her hand's blind help, one segment after another. They grow clear up through the top of the page.

Town Hall was not made to hold so many. The lights of the suspended ceiling blink as if with surprise at the crowd, and up front, the cell tower people are blinking hard, too. They came during mud season on purpose, Hattie heard. Scheduled a meeting before the summerlings were back, so as to keep the turnout down. But look now how people keep coming-wave after wave of them, like something the lake's was.h.i.+ng up. Folding chairs are getting set up along the back and sides of the room, and there are extra chairs all along the front, too. Every last one of them squeaking as it's opened until the metal chairs run short. Then it's clatter you hear; those old wooden chairs do clatter. And there's the family that stands to make out like bandits, right in the first row. The Wrights. A moat of empty chairs all around them, though cozied up with them does sit-can that be right?-Hattie's walking group friend, Ginny. Who does not actually walk with the walking group-who actually only meets them later for coffee or lunch at the Come 'n' Eat-but never mind. Hattie feels for her distance gla.s.ses even as Judy Tell-All waves her over. And sure enough: There indeed sits a certain pink turtleneck with bleached-blond do-that artichoke cut always reminding Hattie of how Ginny's hairdresser does dog grooming, too. A versatile type. Maybe Ginny's sitting up front on account of her hip? How uncomfortable the Wrights might feel, in any case, were it not for her. How marooned on their very own folding-chair island. Instead, Ginny leans in, saving them. They nod and joke and guffaw-Jim Wright proving himself a wit, it seems. A born funnyman.

”When is a snake not a snake?” asks Judy as Hattie sits down.

”When she has G.o.d on her side?” guesses Hattie.

Judy smiles, but normally good-natured Greta, whom Judy has somehow managed to ensnare, too, is frowning. Her still-dark eyebrows all but meet over her straight, long nose.

”Though, well, why shouldn't Ginny sit with her relatives?” Judy goes on. ”Maybe she just feels sorry for them. And they are her third cousins twice removed, after all.” She winks.

”She wants something,” says Greta. Greta could almost be a Shaker, dressed as she is today in a handmade blouse and skirt, except that she brandishes the end of her braid like a police baton. ”Ginny wants something.”

”Do you think?” says Judy, innocently.

Hattie gives Judy a look.

”Well, hmm, let me think,” continues Judy. She's wearing a floral print, but the flowers are all black and gray, as if grown without chlorophyll. ”How about that new hip she needs?”

”But of course!” Greta's gray eyes flash. ”Her hip!”

”Do you really think they'd pay for a new hip?” Hattie waves at some people, wis.h.i.+ng she could remember their names-Hattie gone batty!-then realizes, disconcertingly, that she does.

”Maybe not, but they could help with health care, right?” says Judy. ”Being family? They could put her on the feed store payroll and get her the employee rate.”

Hattie stops waving.

”That's illegal!” says Greta.

”How creative,” says Hattie, after a moment. ”If it's true.”

Judy waves her hand. ”You'd be creative, too, if you were in her shoes,” she observes. ”If you had a hip like hers and were leaving Everett on top of it. You'd be creative, too.”

Leaving Everett?

”Giving him the heave-ho,” confirms Judy as Greta gasps. ”Dumping him flat. Get that!” Judy folds her program up into a fan; and indeed, what with the crowd, the room is getting warm. She looks at Hattie as she crimps the bottom into a handle. ”I told you Ginny had news.”

Hattie makes her own fan then, thinking. For what Everett put into Ginny's dad's place!-everyone knew it. Obliging man that he was. And that farm being the oldest of the family farms and worth it, in his view. As in the view of many: Even Hattie the newcomer's heard how the farm broke up when Rex died, and how something in the town broke, too. And now, for all of Everett's effort, this fine reward. Ginny leaving Everett!-and without a word to the walking group, either. The fluorescent lights blink. Hattie uncrosses her legs so she can recross them the other way-these old wooden chairs being designed, it does seem, to put you in touch with your G.o.d-given overhang.

Judy fans and smiles.

Just about everyone is here. Not only the rest of the walking group-Grace and Beth and Candy-but other townsfolk, in addition. Jill Jenkins and Jed Jamison, among others, and a lot of the farmers from the far side of the lake, too. Old-timers Ginny and Rex would have probably known forever, but that Hattie knows mostly by the way they talk: quick and with a lot of oors and ahhns, as if, spending as much time around it as they do, they've picked up the sounds of their machinery. They're the real thing, people say, not like the hippie farmers from the commune-people like Belle Tollman with the parrot and her husband, Paxton, with the dreadlocks. Who are keeping a low profile today, though what with their torn clothes and low-concept hair control, they'll bother some people anyway. Ginny, for instance-they'll bother Ginny. Hattie herself is more bothered that she didn't think to bring along her new neighbors-Chhung and family-even as she thinks, Those eyes. That jitter. That knife. And despite her best efforts not to think about it: Pol Pot. The killing fields.

It's the world come to town, Joe would have said. As it will, you know, as it will.

”It's not that Everett's not Christian,” Judy is saying now. ”He's just not the right kind.”

”Eastern Orthodox, you mean?” says Greta. ”Because of his father?”

Judy nods, readjusting her waistband. ”Meaning baptized at birth.”

As opposed to born again, apparently he promised to recommit years ago but never did, etc. So that finally the Lord told her, Enough! That he was like the rock that had to be rolled away before Lazarus could even do something about his bandages! An obstacle!

Not exactly the story as Hattie knew it, but never mind.

”And how exactly did the Lord tell her?” inquires Greta.

”E-mail?” guesses Hattie.

Judy just fans, her s.h.i.+rt sleeve falling back from her henna-tattooed arm.

As for who's going to bring in her firewood when Ginny can barely walk: ”That's why the Lord's helping get her hip done. So she can bring in her own wood,” says Judy. ”Hey, look, there's Lukens!”

Hattie throws her gaze left, using her peripheral vision. It's the way she used to teach kids how to spot shooting stars-their rod photoreceptors picking up the low light, their retinal ganglion cells, the movement. And sure enough, there he is, a tall man with something of the look of a cell tower himself. Lukens, the big-deal retired judge, scratching his chin in the shadows.

”And look over there!” whispers Judy again.

For here comes huge Everett, his cherub cheeks rising incongruously from a camouflage s.h.i.+rt. And right behind him-more hidden by the camouflage than its wearer-the middle son great professor. Hattie lowers her distance gla.s.ses.

Carter, denuded!

She drops her fan.

He looks a little as though someone has pulled a white hula skirt over his head, only to have it get stuck around his ears. Which in one way is no surprise-Carter's father, too, had a notable egg. And how shocked should Hattie be to behold Carter beardless in addition, when she did glimpse the shave ten years ago, at Dr. Hatch's burial? She must not have filed that face away, though, because Carter's features seem not only repositioned-as if they have slid south in some Great Facial Drift-but caricatured: Everything is more plainly itself. The fine nose and high cheekbones of his youth are like line drawings redone in marker; his mother's egret neck has gone a bit pelican. As for his father's eyes-those preternaturally blue eyes-can they really be even brighter than they were? Maybe they just seem so, set off as they are by a now predominantly pink face, as well as by what appear to be shadows-hollows-around his eyes. Which could just be the lighting. But then again, maybe not. For Hattie knows this man well, or did once; and this is a studiously unhaunted Carter who strolls down the side aisle in a chamois s.h.i.+rt and jeans, his limbs loose. Carter holding on to himself as if on to a kite.

Carter, looking a bit like her poor denuded, post-chemo Joe.

He shoots a smile and a wink at her, then goes to stand, in provocative fas.h.i.+on, on the other side of the room. Talking with such apparent sincerity to this one and that, even as he affords a fine view of his profile, that she can't help but laugh a little. For she remembers this game, of course-the neural pathway is still there. And-as he no doubt intends-it renders her, for a moment, seventeen again. She is not usually aware of her age, any more than she is aware of the number of steps she walks in a day, or the number of times she pulls down her gla.s.ses. But now, somehow, she feels it-how she's been living shoulder-to-shoulder with time. It is not so much on account of her white hair, or two sets of gla.s.ses that she feels it-Hattie six eyes-shocks to Carter that those things must be. It is not even the fact that when the word energy occurs to her now, it is mostly in reference to herself, rather than to a reaction or an equation. No, it's the mark of experience she feels most keenly-how much she would like never to have seen Joe yellow with bile once his liver failed. How much she would like never to have watched him itch himself until he bled everywhere. How much she would like never to have heard Lee rant the way she did, toward the end-her gumption still there but come heartbreakingly unhitched. Time's marched Hattie hard. And as for Carter, Time's reminder-Carter who brought so much before and after, in his day-is this Carter even Carter? Isn't Carter the man who changed others more than he himself changed? A catalyst. A man she would have thought outside time, if anyone was. And yet Carter was still Carter in being unable to simply say h.e.l.lo. Anyone but Carter would have simply said h.e.l.lo.

(Next to her, Judy watches and fans.) Carter, though, always did disdain convention; he was like Hattie's parents that way. You should try a new hat every day, he used to say. Think out of the box. It's the way every great thing gets made.

Modest as they were, the Hatches did focus on achieving things about which to be modest.

But, well, who cares now? Who was modest, and about what-Hattie lifts her chin. All that is decades behind her now. Detaching herself, rising above herself-da gun-Hattie turns her attention to the meeting, which is focused on questions like what can be seen from whose kitchen, and which has a greater effect on property values-one's view sitting down or one's view standing up. Greta tugs on her arm.

”This is so dysfunctional. You have to say something,” she whispers. ”You do.”