Chapter 1

      AT NINE O’CLOCK that morning, Claudia sat in the office of Amos Townsend, the minister of the Haddington Church of the Brethren. Haddington, a town of three or four thousand people, sat only eleven miles from the much larger college town of Jonah. The two places shared so little they might have been in different states, or in different states of being. Jonah had public housing, a strip of chain stores three miles long, a campus with eighteen thousand students and a clutch of Ph.D.’s. Haddington still held a harvest carnival, and ponies grazed in the field bordering the east end. It had been a charming place when Claudia was growing up, but one of them had changed. Now the cars and trucks parked along the sides of the main street were decorated with NASCAR bumper stickers and Dixie flags. There were more hunters, and fewer deer. And one by one the beautiful farmhouses (now just houses) had been stripped of every pleasing element, slapped with vinyl siding and plastic windows. Eventually even these shells would come down, and then Haddington would be a rural trailer park, and who knew if a man like Amos Townsend or a woman Claudia’s size would be allowed in at all.

      Amos tapped his fingers on his desk, smiled at her. She smiled back but didn’t speak. The crease in her blue jeans was sharp between her fingers. She left it, and began instead to spin the rose gold signet ring on her pinkie. It had been her father’s, but his interlocking cursive initials, BLM, were indecipherable now, florid to begin with and worn away with time.

      “Can I say something?” Amos asked, startling Claudia.

      “Please do.”

      “I talk to people like this every day. I spend far more time in pastoral care than in delivering sermons. That—podium time—is the least of my job. So I’m happy to hear anything you have to say. Except maybe about the weather, since I get that everywhere I go.”

      Claudia nodded. “It’s going to snow.”

      “Sure looks like it.”

      What did she have to say? She could tell him that she spent every morning sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the English gardening cottage her father had built for her mother, Ludie—stared at it through every season, and also at the clothesline traversing the scene, unused since her mother’s death. She could say that the line itself, the black underscoring of horizontality, had become a burden to her for reasons she could not explain. The sight of the yard in spring and summer, when the fruit was on Ludie’s pawpaw tree, was no longer manageable. Or she could say that looking at the gardening shed, she had realized that the world is divided—perhaps not equally or neatly—into two sorts: those who would watch the shed fall down and those who would shore it up. In addition, there were those who, after the fall of the shed, would raze the site and install a prefabricated something or other, and those who would grow increasingly attached to the pile of rubble. Claudia was, she was just beginning to understand, the sort who might let it fall, love it as she did, as attached to it as she was. She would let it fall and stay there as she surveyed—each morning and with a bland sort of interest—the ivy creeping up over the lacy wrought-iron fence on either side of the front door, a family of house sparrows nesting under the collapsed roofline.

      “I suppose I have a problem,” she said, twirling her father’s ring.

      “Yes?”

      “It has to do with the death of my mother.”

      Amos waited. “Three years ago?”

      “That’s right.” Claudia nodded. “I can’t say more than that.”

      Amos aligned a pen on his blotter. Even in a white T-shirt and gray sweater he appeared to Claudia a timeless man; he might have been a circuit rider or a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, with his salt-and-pepper hair, his small round glasses hooked with mechanical grace around his ears. “I met your mother once,” he said.

      “I—you did?”

      “Yes, it was just after I moved here to Haddington. She and Beulah Baker showed up at my door just before noon one day and asked if they could take me to MCL Cafeteria for lunch. They were very welcoming.”

      “I had no idea.” It had happened a few times in the past few years that Claudia would find a note in her mother’s secretary, or the sound of Ludie’s voice on an unlabeled cassette tape, and it felt like discovering in an attic the lost chapter of a favorite novel, one she thought she knew.

      “Salt of the earth. I liked her very much.”

      “She and Beulah were friends for a long time. Though I didn’t see much of Beulah after my mother died, of course.” She didn’t need to say because Beulah’s daughter and son-in-law died, and there were the orphaned daughters; Amos knew all too well. “I started coming to your church because of her, because she had spoken highly of you from the beginning.”

      “Are you close to her again?”

      “No—I—I find her unreachable.” What she meant was I am unreachable. “She’s friendly to me, but so frail she seems to be, I don’t know. In another country.” That was correct, that was what she meant: the country before, or after. There was Beulah in Ludie’s kitchen twenty-five years ago, baking Apple Brown Betty in old soup cans, then wrapping the loaves in foil and tying them with ribbons, fifty loaves at a time, to go in the Christmas boxes left on the steps of the poor. Beulah now, pushing her wheeled walker down the aisle at church, nothing and no one of interest to her but the remains of her family: her grandchildren; Amos and his wife, Langston. Nothing else.

      “There is something missing in my life,” Claudia said, more urgently than she meant to. “I wake up every day and it’s the first thing I notice. I wake up in the middle of the night, actually. Sometimes the hole in the day is big, it seems to cover everything, and sometimes it’s like a series of pinpricks.”

      Amos leaned forward, listening.

      “I’m not depressed, though. I’m really quite well.”

      “Are you”—Amos hesitated—“are you lonely?”

      Claudia nearly laughed aloud. Loneliness, she suspected, was a category of experience that existed solely in relation to its opposite. Given that she never felt the latter, she could hardly be afflicted with the former.

      “Loneliness is fascinating,” Amos said. “I see people all the time who say they are lonely but it’s a code word for something else. They can’t recover from their childhood damage, or they’ve decided they hate their wives. I don’t know, I had lunch with a man once who kept complaining about his soup. It was too hot, it was too salty. I remember him putting his spoon down next to the bowl with a practiced…like a slow, theatrical gesture of disgust. The soup was a personal affront to him.