Chapter One

Every summer Dinah was sick in this house she rented. She lay in the double bed alone, amid a jumble of Kleenex and the mail and the morning newspaper, and she did not change the sheets until she felt well. Sometimes two weeks, sometimes three. The light shot into her room in the morning, so that her eyes would ache, and then it shifted and faded as the day wore on, and through all these changes of light she drifted in a fog of sleep and waking and the children's bodies buffeting against her bed. Propped up on pillows, she could see her three children, through the tall branched shrubs beyond the windows, as they ran around playing or fighting. But she would lie dazed and sure that they could get through the day with only her occasional direction. David, the oldest, was always herding the other two, it seemed; when she closed her eyes, the red imprint of his ushering arms in motion shuddered through her mind as her thoughts drifted away from the actual image.

Her mother often stopped by on the way home from her office in nearby Fort Lyman and brought Dinah food from the deli or some other takeout place. Today she brought a barbecued chicken the size of a dove, and Dinah sat in her bed and ate it with her fingers, sucking the knobs of the little drumsticks like candy. Her mother sat on the vanity bench, at an angle not quite facing the bed, and talked desultorily, because the disarray in which Dinah wore out her illness dismayed her. It had always been assumed in Dinah's childhood household that illness was a weakness of character, a burden to the entire family, and, above all else, being ill was considered a sly trick. So Mrs. Briggs pushed her straw-colored ha

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