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Deborah Schwartz Orrin in Exile |
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for Rebecca Dawn. The sky is thinning above the
mountains, but night still pools in the trees and rabbit brush. Jake's house
is dark between its sentinel cottonwoods, except for the kitchen window where
someone moves back and forth against the light. On the flat below, the
chicken pens look like bunkers in the gloom. Amanda is just tethering the
second test rooster in the long trials pen when Jake saunters toward her down
the slope of fescue. He’s barefoot, still in his bathrobe, and the mug of
coffee in his hands smells wonderful in the morning air. “Hey,” he says when he reaches the pen, “I
thought my boy was up first today.” “He was,” Amanda says, “but he tried to kill
me again today, and as far as I’m concerned he can rot in his pen. You’re not
paying me enough for hazardous duty.” Jake yawns and rakes his
hair back with his fingers. “Temper, temper.” It’s Jake’s favorite
rooster they’re talking about. He has it in for Amanda and came at her this
morning when she tried to get him out of his pen. “It would serve him right
if I slammed his neck in the door,” she says. She’d love to slam him in the
door, in fact, but he’s Jake’s darling, his best breeder, and all she can do
is hope for a fox in the night or an enterprising dog. “I don’t know what it is about you, Science
Girl,” Jake says. “It’s a good thing we’re not using you in this study.” His
robe bells out in the breeze, revealing the naked planes of his thighs and
the scar, like a kiss, from a spider bite that nearly killed him in the
Amazon. A “Not even for science?” Jake has her there. She’s as
dedicated to science as a nun.
“Science is my religion,” she told him once after too many beers at a
student party. She said it lightly, but science really is her religion.
There’s mystery there, awe, a beautiful order behind the apparent caprice of
nature that is all the god she needs. She’s taken
the stern exigencies of evolution as her creed, and is pursuing her Ph.D.
with such come-to-Jesus zeal it’s no wonder he calls her Science Girl. But Jake’s something of a zealot,
too, and no doubt that’s why he hired Amanda as assistant, rather than one of
his older, more experienced graduate students. He’s doing a mate selection
study, trying to determine what hens look for in a rooster—redder combs, for
instance, or larger wattles or longer tail feathers. Mate selection’s hot
these days. All over the world, biologists are studying female preference.
Amanda’s dissertation is a mate selection study, too, on acorn woodpeckers
nesting at a site she’s staked out in the mountains. She’s spent the last two
springs up there collecting data, and one of the things that keeps her going
during the long, lonely days is knowing she’s part of a communion of
scientists, all involved in the same mystery. If that isn’t a kind of
religion, she doesn’t know what is. This morning, Jake and Amanda are
testing how hens react to comb size. They’ve tethered two roosters in the
trials pen with a baffle between them. One of the birds, rooster five, has
his comb clipped back into a little buzz cut. The other, the substitute for
Jake’s best breeder, is unaltered. To run the trials, they’ll release hens,
one at a time, into the other end of the pen and watch from behind a blind to
see which of the males, if either, they solicit for copulation. Amanda puts the first hen into the pen
and the roosters go into their waltz display, performing tiny, circular steps
with one wing brushing the ground. Their eyes are bright with invitation. The
hen’s eyes are bright, too, and she raises one foot to assess the situation.
The altered rooster flaunts his comb, innocent of his inadequacy. The
substitute does, too, making urgent, supplicating cries. He’s a handsome
brute with glossy plumage and a big, red tumescent comb. You’d think he’d be
the dream of every hen, but for some reason they hardly ever choose him. Jake
and Amanda have begun calling him Disgusting. This hen, though, seems interested.
“Go, hen,” Amanda whispers. She has a weakness for losers and hopes
Disgusting will get lucky. Things are certainly looking good. The hen minces
toward him as if he’s the answer to all her prayers, and Amanda holds her
breath. Then, halfway there, she stops and seems to reconsider. Urk, she says. Urk. The opaque
membrane on her eye clicks down like a shutter, and the hen starts to peck
the dirt in the bottom of the pen. Trial 23: no selection, Amanda writes
in the trials log. She’s disappointed, but Disgusting takes it
philosophically. With so many hens, he seems to think, his luck is sure to
change sooner or later. It doesn’t, though. The next hen rejects him, too.
She rejects both roosters, in fact, and so does the
next hen and the next and the next. “The girls just aren’t in the mood today,”
Amanda says. Jake looks toward the chicken pens,
where the morning sun is just touching down. “They
would be if you had my boy in there,” he says. “I’ll grab some breakfast and
bring him over. Then we’ll see some action.” Amanda sighs. She hates to admit it, but
it’s true. The hens go wild for Jake’s best breeder, fluttering their wings
and begging for it in a way that makes her ashamed for her sex. When Jake comes back he’s in his summer
uniform: cut-offs and flip flops and no shirt. His naked shoulders are
burnished from the sun, and the mat of hair on his chest gleams like golden
armor. He’s holding the best breeder
in his arms, and it’s hard to say whose plumage is flashier. When Jake
tethers his boy in the pen, it’s no contest. The hens practically jump out of
Amanda’s hands to throw themselves at him. Behind the blind, Jake and
Amanda watch the hens crouch in invitation, noting how they shiver when the
best breeder mounts and the little satisfied shake they give their feathers
after he hops off. Their heads in the morning sun are only inches apart, and
the light breeze stirs against their skin. The air smells of grass and dust
and rabbit brush. It smells of sex. But the words they use when they talk
about the trials are scientific: sperm,
mount, cloaca, copulate. Amanda’s boyfriend, Todd, has other words.
Chicken sex, he calls the study. Live sex acts. “Mandy gets paid to watch
chickens fuck,” he tells everyone and threatens to nominate Jake for the
Golden Fleece Award. He doesn’t
understand that mate selection is a window into the mechanics of evolution,
that the traits females select for over the centuries are what determine the
characteristics of the species. “I
wouldn’t put up with his shit for a minute,” Amanda’s friend Amy says over
lunch at a Mexican restaurant near campus. She scoops up salsa on the point
of a tortilla chip and snaps it off in a quick, sharp bite. “If a guy did
that to me, I’d dump him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him.” “I’m
sure you would,” Amanda says. Amy is always dumping men, terrific men, the kind most women would give their eyeteeth for. “You
don’t put up with anything. One false move and the poor guy’s
out the door. One of these days you’ll run out of men. Then what will you
do?” Amy chews thoughtfully on a mouthful of
refried beans. “Well, for starters I’ll quit shaving my legs and toss the
bras. I’ll load up on chocolate and ice cream and fart and belch.” She grins
wickedly. “I rather like the idea of being a fat, farting old maid with boobs
like potato sacks. And it’s certainly better than living with a man who
belittles you.” “Todd
wasn’t belittling me. He meant it as a joke. I think he’s a little jealous
that Jake and I are always talking sex, even if it is only chicken sex.” “Should
he be?” “What?
Jealous?” Amanda sniffs and wipes her nose. The chile
verde is so hot it’s doing a number on her sinuses.
“Don’t be silly. Jake’s old enough to be my father. Well, almost old enough.
And he’s married. And he’s my advisor.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s strictly off limits—even if I were attracted to
him. Which I’m not.” “Mmm-hmm.” “No,
really. It’s not an issue. I love Todd.” “Oh
yes. Todd.” Amy probes her enchilada with a fork, as though she might find
something distasteful—Todd, perhaps—hidden inside. Amanda watches a fly mine spilled salsa on
the next table. She and Todd have been together since their first year in
college. They applied to the same graduate schools so they could stay
together. How can Amy, who’s such a spendthrift in love, possibly understand
the pleasures of their long relationship? The comfort. The security. “He calls me Doctor Mandy,” she
tells Amy, as though that explains it all. “But
you hate being called Mandy.” “Well
yes, but with Todd it’s different.” With Todd, a lot of things are different. He
isn’t a scientist like Amy and Amanda, and he thinks Amanda’s passion for
biology, where jobs are scarce and salaries are low, is crazy. His field is business. He’s working toward
his MBA, aiming for a job in finance with a six-figure salary. Though it
wouldn’t be quite fair to say that money is Todd’s religion, there’s no
denying it’s important to him. He has a part time job with a big investment
firm, making cold calls to potential clients. Day after day he speaks with
total strangers in terms of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and
just thinking of all that money arouses such a hunger in him he’s like an
alcoholic in a distillery, like a monk at a bacchanal. Amanda understands Todd’s hunger. In some
ways it’s like her own—her appetite for problems to resolve, her greed to
understand the puzzles of the natural world. With his famished eyes and
sharp, craving cheekbones, Todd is her Heathcliff,
her dark love. Now, she sighs and scrapes up the last of
the guacamole with a finger. “There’s no explaining love,” she says. “You can say that again.” In Jake’s mate selection study they can
control all the conditions, so collecting data isn’t difficult. Getting the
data in Amanda’s field study, though, is an entirely different matter. Up on
her mountain, she’s at the mercy of weather and season and the vagaries of
the birds themselves, who elude the mist nets she sets out so she can catch
and band them or decide, for no reason at all, not to mate or die before they
can. And those that do survive and mate build their nests thirty feet up in
the trees so Amanda has to use to use a telephone linesman’s belt and spurs
to reach them. It’s hard work. Solitary work. Her camp is
rudimentary: a small tent, a backpacker’s stove, a folding table, a camp
stool. Her pantry’s a box in the back of her truck, and she washes her
clothes in a big soup pan and hangs them in the trees to dry. She’s up with
the birds—literally—and, like them, hunkers down as soon as it gets dark.
While she works, she keeps a loaded a rifle close at hand—just in case. The
nearest civilization is a small town forty miles away where she goes for
supplies. There’s not much there: a grocery store, a bar called The Gusher, a
few derelict houses, a gas station with a public phone. It’s an unfriendly
town, a male town where loggers and oil men gather after work to drink. They
whistle when Amanda walks by and catcall out the windows of their trucks. “Biology’s
no place for a woman,” Amanda’s mother, Sylvia says, as though her daughter’s
chosen field could be located on a map. She worries about fractures and
concussion and snakes and bears and vagrant men. She thinks Todd should stay
up there with Amanda. “What kind of man,” Sylvia asks, “leaves the woman he
loves alone in the wilderness for months on end?” A man like Todd, Amanda might say. A city
man, who’d be bored so far from lights and CDs and cappuccino. But she only
says, “Stop worrying, Mom. I’ve got a cell phone and a rifle, and I’m a
deadeye shot.” Sylvia’s a deadeye, too—but with words.
She’s a writer and always hoped Amanda would follow in her footsteps. “I
didn’t raise you to be a lumberjack,” she laments. Amanda only smiles and pats her knee. “I’m
okay up there, Mom. Really.” Actually, she’s more than okay. Up there in the
spring she undergoes a kind of sea change, hundreds of miles from any sea,
and she likes the woman she becomes: strong, self-sufficient, elemental. A woman Todd might not recognize. A woman
he might not like. The mate selection trials grind on into
August. To relieve the end-of-project tedium, Jake and Amanda begin betting
on the outcomes. There’s no real money riding on the bets, but they wager
with the avidity of racehorse touts. “Five
hundred he gets lucky,” Jake says. The best breeder’s up today and Jake always
bets on him. It’s not really fair, but Amanda doesn’t complain. “The
bastard’s all yours,” she says. “Look what he did to me today.” She shows him
the gash the best breeder raked in her arm when she reached to get him out of
his pen. Jake grasps her wrist and examines the
wound. “Aww, it’s just a little love bite.” “A
love bite? Hate bite is more like it.” “Try
using psychology on him, Science Girl. Try a little seduction.” Jake grins. “Us boys just love to be seduced.” Jake’s hold is warm. There’s a voluptuous
tension in the air, an uneasy sweetness, and Amanda jerks her hand away.
“What I’d like to try on him,” she says when she’s sure she can trust her
voice, “is an axe. A nice sharp one.” Jake laughs, and it’s over. But not quite. His touch clings like memory
to her defenseless skin. The hens are hotfooting
it straight to the best breeder, and Jake can’t help gloating. “That’s my
boy,” he crows after every win. It’s pissing Amanda off, and when, finally,
one of the hens gives the best breeder the cold shoulder, she does some
gloating herself. “Well. At last, a girl with a little sense.” Jake, though, is crushed. He takes the best
breeder’s prowess personally. “Women!” he says, and rolls his eyes at Amanda.
“There’s just no pleasing them.” There’s certainly no pleasing Jake’s wife
Monica these days. She’s pregnant and ten days overdue, and the wait is
making her cranky. One morning while Jake is out of town giving a paper,
Monica picks her way down the slope to the trials pen in the spraddle-legged gait of late pregnancy. Except for the
taut ball of her belly, she’s gotten terribly thin. Her nose is a bitter
triangle in her hollow face, and her clavicles push up like roots in the open
neckline of her blouse. “Ah,” she cries, “Amanda Mouse, working while the
cat’s away.” Amanda only nods and releases the next hen
into the pen. She never knows quite how to respond to Monica’s mocking ways. Monica’s carrying a mug of
coffee. She drinks coffee all day long, even now she’s pregnant, and refuses
to stop smoking. She lifts the mug and takes a sip, then pulls a face and
spills the rest out on the ground. “Oogh, cold. It
cools off fast, Amanda Mouse. Like marriage.” “You
shouldn’t drink it, anyway. You know the stats on caffeine and pregnancy.” Monica’s laugh is a sharp, short bark. “Oh
yeah, I know them all right. Low birth weight and all that.” She turns and
flaunts her belly. “So how do your stats explain this?” Even for full term,
Monica is huge. Bouncing Betty, Jake calls the baby. Giant Babe. It’s going
to be a girl. It’s really none of her business, but Amanda
can’t shut up. She thinks Monica should take better care of Jake’s baby.
“Well, even so, it makes the fetus jumpy.” “Jumpy?” Monica looks
thoughtfully into the distance where fat white clouds drift
like Zeppelins across the summer sky. “A jumpy fetus. Jake’s jumpy fetus.” Amanda wants to grab her shoulders and shake
some sense into her. Instead, she focuses on the pen, where the hen, who
seemed so eager a minute ago, is scratching in the dirt as though sex is the
furthest thing from her mind. Amanda gives the bird a minute to get
interested again, and, when she doesn’t, steps out from the blind to get her.
Before she can, Monica pushes past and grabs the hen instead. “Smart girl,”
she says, holding the bird up and making a little kissing sound. “They’ll just knock you up. Then where will
you be? “It
was Jake’s idea,” she says, handing Amanda the hen. “The baby, I mean. I
didn’t want it, but,” she runs her hands over her belly, “here I am.” Her
breath is freighted with coffee and cigarettes—and with something else, the
acrid odor of her discontent. The hen is warm in Amanda’s palms, her
heartbeat strong and resolute. It’s simple for her, Amanda thinks. When she
finds a rooster who meets her criteria, she mates without a second thought,
playing the hand that evolution dealt her. It should be simple for humans,
too, but it’s not. Their hands are more complicated. There are too many ways
to screw up.
“When are you and Todd getting
married?” Monica asks in the silence that falls between them. “Oh.”
Amanda shifts to her other foot and looks toward the chicken pens. She still
has twenty trials to run today. “I don’t know.” They’ve never really talked about it,
actually, though it’s always seemed implicit. “After we graduate, probably.” “Probably?
You don’t sound too positive.” “Well,
I mean, yes. Once we’re done, we’ll get married.” “You going to have kids?” “Yeah,
probably.” That, too, has always seemed implicit.
Monica fishes a cigarette and
lighter out of her pocket and turns away to shield the flame. “There’s no
probably about it, Amanda Mouse,” she says, exhaling with a quick upward
thrust of her chin. “Once you’re pregnant, it’s definite. Definitely
definite.” Her back is to Amanda and her voice is thin and indistinct, as
though she’s speaking from a distance, from the far side of marriage and
disillusion. Todd is waiting at the door when Amanda gets
home. He’s put on the suit he bought for interviews and the silk tie she gave
him for his birthday. “I’ve got a job,” he cries. “A terrific job.” He does a
buck and wing across the living room. Amanda’s tired. Her thighs are cramped from
squatting and there’s chicken poop on her left cheek. “A job? But you haven’t
even sent out resumes.” “I
know. Isn’t that great?” It’s a job in venture capital, a real job in He pulls Amanda to him and kisses her,
sweat, chicken poop and all. “The salary’s indecent,” he whispers in her
hair. “Obscene. We’ll get an apartment in town. We’ll toss out this Salvation
Army junk and replace it with real furniture. And you can quit that
chicken-shit job with Jake and concentrate on finishing the
dissertation.” Amanda rubs at her cheek, but only smears
the chicken poop around. She looks like an Indian widow ready for
suttee. “But “Yeah.
The décor at Les Ortolans
is spare, stark, elegant. The tables wear starched
white linen with a single stalk of freesias in a silver vase, and the clients
all come in pairs, even the businessmen with cell phones ready by their
forks. It’s like Noah’s The prices are outrageous, but Todd orders
caviar, anyway. He orders Chateaubriand, and, after consultation with the
sommelier, a pricey French red. He orders without consulting Amanda, as if it
doesn’t occur to him she might not want what he does. It’s all right, though.
She’s not hungry. Besides, it’s Todd’s show tonight. Amanda watches him mound caviar and chopped
egg on a piece of toast and bless it with a squirt of lemon. He’s seems
different in his suit and tie, glossy, confident, like a man who belongs at
Les Ortolans. He’s fledged, she realizes—and she’s
still in the nest. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “Maybe I could commute.” “Commute?”
Todd stares at her through the freesias.
“Between here and “Well,
why not? I’d come down for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and even for long
weekends now and then if we could afford it, but—” “Mandy.”
Todd reaches across the table and takes her hand, turning it palm up like a
fortune teller. “Doctor Mandy. I need
you. It won’t be any fun if you’re not there.” Amanda should say,
I need you, too. Instead she says, “I’m not finished here yet, Todd. I still
need Jake’s lab to run the DNA. I need at least another season at my site. I
need—” She feels bereft, like a child who wants everything to stay the same. Todd waves her needs away. “No problem. You
can fly back next spring and rent a van, something better than that trashed-out
pick-up truck of yours. And there must be a lab in the Bay Area where you
could run the DNA— “But—”
Her work’s has no value for him, Amanda sees. It’s only good for cocktail
party talk, a little hobby to keep her occupied while he does the real work
of the world. “But
what?” “But
what about Jake? I can’t just walk out on him in the middle of the study.” Todd drops Amanda’s hand.
“Yes. What about Jake? Is that the real problem, Mandy? Jake?” Amanda leaves her hand where it fell, on its
back with the fingers curled, like something dead on the tablecloth. “Don’t
be silly. Of course not. At least, not in the way you mean. But I made a
commitment. I can’t let him down.” “Nonsense.
He’s got other students who could help him finish up.” “I
know, but—” There’s a spiral of laughter from the
divorcees’ table, bawdy laughter, slightly tipsy. Todd frowns, though whether
he’s frowning at the divorcees or at Amanda isn’t clear. “No more buts,
Mandy. It’s our life together we’re talking about here. The beginning of our
real life.” Amanda doesn’t answer, and luckily the
waiter brings the Chateaubriand just then. For the rest of dinner, they
concentrate on food and talk of other things. Perhaps because he took her silence for
assent, Todd snugs Amanda against him when they
step out into the night. The sky is a transparent Prussian blue washed with
summer stars, the trees like paper cutouts against it. “You’ll love it there,
Mandy,” he says, brushing her hair with his lips. “You’ll see.” Happiness
vibrates through the crisp fabric of his suit; his heart beats confidently
against her arm.
The divorcees have left ahead
of them and are flocking on the sidewalk. There are hugs and touches of cheek
on cheek and kisses in the air until, finally, they murmur perfumed goodbyes
and flutter off to get their cars. They’re losers in the mate selection game,
and they just don’t give a damn. On the last day of the trials, Monica brings
the new baby down to watch—over ten pounds of baby they’ve named Felicity.
The baby’s colicky, quite possibly from all that coffee, and Monica looks
tired. Her hair droops around her face, and the puckered skin below her eyes
is tinged deep violet. She stations herself by the trials pen, rocking
Felicity with little bounces from foot to foot. There’s a cigarette hanging
from her lips. Jake notices and frowns.
“I’ve asked you not to smoke around the baby, Monica. I don’t want her
exposed to second-hand smoke.” Monica inhales deeply and scissors her
fingers around the cigarette to take it out. “She’ll live,” she says in a
spurt of smoke. Then she puts the cigarette back and takes another deep,
satisfied drag. Jake starts to say something, then thinks
better of it and clamps his lips shut. He’s tired, too. His skin is pallid
beneath the tan, and he’s moving like a space man. He’s been doing night duty
so Monica can sleep, and he spends hours walking the baby in his arms or
driving her through the silent neighborhoods until she falls asleep. Amanda
thinks of her acorn woodpecker fathers, who incubate the chicks at night, and
the image of Jake incubating Felicity, with the baby’s head nestled in the
golden brood patch on his chest, makes her feel tender toward him. She thinks
he’s a wonderful father. She thinks Monica’s a bitch. Monica rocks the baby. She drags on the cigarette. The
ash flares and grows, flares and grows, and when,
inevitably, it breaks off, it falls onto Felicity’s blanket and narrowly
misses her pursed pink mouth. “Damn it.” Jake swats the cigarette from Monica’s lips
and grinds it in the dust with the toe of his sandal. “She could have been
burned.” For a long minute the two
of them face off like Sumo wrestlers circling for a hold. The skin whitens
over the Waiting by the trials pen with the next hen
in her hands, Amanda tries to be invisible. Finally, Jake lets out an
explosive breath and gestures to her. “Okay, let’s get on with it.” Amanda
sets the hen in the pen and slips into the blind with Jake. Monica moves in
behind them, still rocking Felicity. Her feet grate in the dirt. The baby
bubbles in her sleep. The best breeder’s the pen again, and he’s
looking splendid. His feathers are brilliant in the sun. His comb’s a vivid,
sexy red. You can almost see the
testosterone rocketing through it. With an ardent cluck, the hen heads
straight for him. “Atta girl,” Jake whispers. “Go for it. You know he’s got
the goods.” As though she heard, the hen picks up her
pace and in a minute she’s getting ready to crouch for copulation. “Yes.
Yes!” Jake lifts both fists in celebration and turns to grin at Monica. “The
girls just can’t resist my boy.” “Oh,
for Christ’s sake.” Monica jumps out of the blind and gives the pen a vicious
kick. Her violence wakes Felicity, who starts to scream. Her lungs are not at
all impaired by second-hand smoke, and the hen freezes. “Shit!”
Jake jumps out and grabs Monica’s arm. “What is it with you these days?
You’ve disrupted the trial.” “Well,
your brat’s disrupted my trial. She is my fucking trial, in fact.” Monica
brandishes the baby like a weapon. Still in the blind, Amanda feels the tension
between them in her shoulders and in the locked muscles of her jaw. There’s a
long, ugly moment. Then Monica shoves the baby at Jake and scrambles away up
the slope. “You wanted her,” she screams over her shoulder. “You take care of
her.” Felicity’s shrieks escalate. Her
cheeks are scarlet. Perspiration dimples on her brow. Jake’s cheeks are scarlet, too. “Grow up,
you bitch!” he shouts at Monica’s back. He hoists the baby to his shoulder
and pats her rhythmically. “Okay, sweetheart. It’s okay.” But it’s not okay.
Felicity cries and cries, and finally, giving Amanda a sick, whipped look, he
carries her back up to the house. Amanda can only stand there. The sun sears
the top of her head and she feels as though she might faint. She crouches in
the small slice of shade from the blind and hangs her head between her knees.
Finally, she feels better and gets up to check the pen. The hen has moved to
the far end, leaving the roosters languishing in their tethers. Amanda picks
her up and looks her in the eye. “Well, girl, did you or didn’t you?” It’s
quite possible she went ahead and mated anyway, immune to human passions in
the urgency of sex, but there’s no way to tell and the trial’s a wash. Amanda wishes she were immune to human
passions, too. She doesn’t know how she’ll be able to face Jake when he comes
back down. If he comes back, that is. But even if he doesn’t, she’ll have to
face him sooner or later. There’s still data to analyze, the paper to write.
It was something she’d been looking forward to—the intimacy of collaboration,
the shared insights, the productive give and take, the jokes, even Jake’s
teasing. Now she dreads it. The scene this morning will join them at the
table like Banquo’s ghost, impossible to exorcise,
impossible to ignore. The hen clucks and struggles in Amanda’s
hands, eager for the freedom of her pen. Amanda takes her back and locks her
in. The she shades her eyes with her hand and stares into the distance. The
land looks exhausted now at the end of summer, the grasses brittle, the brush dry and leached of color. In the distance the
bony peaks of the mountains shimmer in the heat, and the trio of turkey
vultures above them hangs motionless against the hard blue sky. There’s a
profound Up on the rise, Jake’s house is silent, too.
The doors are shut, the shades drawn against the sun. The only movement is
the cryptic scroll of clouds reflecting in the front room window. Finally, Amanda turns. Wearily, she walks to
one of the other pens and slips the pin out of the metal ring that holds the
door. The hen backs into the shadow, reluctant to leave, but Amanda pulls her
out and heads for the trials pen. There’s still work to do, and no reason she
can’t do it by herself. |
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