Lillian said. For a moment I looked out the train window at the old blue hills rounded like shoulders hunching to the south, at the quiet little station with its fading paint the colour of rotting leaves, and at the dirt road leading up the rise away from the lot where no one waited but a thick man in a straw hat and dusty clothes, sitting high on his tractor. “Papa!” Lillian yelled through the opened window, and waved and laughed when he waved back, arcing his hat high over his head. I waved and laughed along with them, relieved to be there at last. As soon as the train stopped Lillian bolted from it like an unbroken horse while I collected the bags. I called after her to be careful, but she might as well have been that horse. “She’s going to drop that baby if she keeps running like that!” a matronly woman clucked behind me. She was encased in a woollen suit stiff as armour, and her legs looked as if they could support a piano. “It’s going to be our first,” I found myself saying.
