I sang badly.
Ruby seemed to find it funny.
In June, the gap between us on the bench was the length of a lunch tray.
By August, it was a folded blanket.
In September, Emily put Owen in my lap without being asked, and went inside to answer the phone, and did not come back for twenty minutes.
I understood that, too, was a kind of sentence.
By October, a year after I knelt in the gravel and picked a damp twenty out of the dirt, there was no gap at all.
We never talked about it.
We sat shoulder to shoulder, with a baby on each of our knees, and watched the sun go down over Loretta’s tomato plants.
She had started a bookkeeping business out of the parsonage’s old study, for the feed store and two churches and a dentist, and she kept the books the same way she did everything else.
