Somewhere outside a car accelerates. Bird trill flutters through the window. Has she ever heard a bird before, inside this house? The family squelches all incoming signals, and now that the clamor has departed, the silence is delicate and pure and enormous. A dog barks, a hundred miles away. She stays in bed, though the sun is up. No one knocks. No one calls her to breakfast or asks her to help with the children or points to a bucket with a floating sponge or kisses her on the top of the head or asks her to get more honey from the pantry. No one tugs at her skirt or tap-tap-taps her on the arm, as Ruth has ordered the children to do when they want a grown-up’s attention, and no one cries when they fall down after jumping off the shed roof or gets their pants caught on the barbed-wire fence or are told, sternly, that they cannot keep the stray cat they lured home only to have Ruth chase it away, whipping stones at it in short, expert strokes. It will not be her night tonight.
