The Mourning Hours

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.