Fox Loses Three Times - Second Place, San Francisco Writers Conference Fiction Contest 2019

Fox Loses Three Times

Fox did not like visiting his grandmother because she frightened him. He was just one of her many, many grandchildren, a younger son of a younger daughter, and he wasn’t even sure she knew his name. She lived in a two-room shack that his older brothers had complained smelled of mildew and something burned, at the end of a long, rutted dirt road pockmarked with red-tinged mud puddles. It ran along empty fields fenced off with modern strands of barbed wire that gave way to collapsing split rails and finally became stone walls, all of them seeming to guard nothing, for there were no cows, no wheat, no hay.

Grammy Renders didn’t have a telephone, so Fox wasn’t sure how his mother knew he had been sent for. “You must go,” she had told him, her voice as always gentle but firm, looking him straight in the eyes for once instead of at the dishes or at one of his siblings or out the window, smoothing his too-long hair out of his eyes. That rare meeting of her soft brown eyes with his created a demand he could not challenge. He would have done anything for more of these moments, so he nodded and trudged along after school on a cool day in October, carrying his satchel of books and slate, his feet pinching and chafing in his boots that had grown too small.

At the base of a tall fir, he stopped to rest, eating a windfall apple that wasn’t so bruised, forgotten in the yard of one of the last houses he passed. The fir had gnarled, protruding roots, and he sat on one and unlaced his boots, eyeing a dark hollow place under the tree. If there wasn’t anything in it, he could tuck his boots in there and they’d be safe until he came walking back this way tomorrow.

He didn’t know Grammy Renders well enough to guess whether his dirty bare feet would bring down her wrath. The two other times he’d gone to her house, his mother had driven all of them, each time dropping off an older brother.

The old woman had come to the door the first time, large and shapeless in its frame, her dress as gray as dust, her hair a messy bun the color of old snow. Warren, his oldest brother, had hopped right out, carefully taking the pan of sheet cake his mother had baked and frosted, and Fox, sitting in the back seat among his two sisters and brother Verne, had watched it go with some envy and bitterness. Sheet cake didn’t come as often as he’d have liked, and he’d helped with the making of it. Warren most likely was going to get to split it with Grammy Renders. Fox imagined a tall, cold glass of milk on a table where Warren would sit alone with their grandmother, no one kicking him underneath or reaching across it and knocking his glass over. Sunshine pouring in the window. Maybe some old-timey music on the radio station playing in the background.

His feet were sore by the time Fox turned off the road onto the stony path that led to Grammy Renders’ front porch. Her house squatted in the middle of a bare dirt yard, a Ponderosa pine looming over it to the north, an oak with thick limbs spreading like so many giant elephants’ trunks to the south. There was no fence around the property, and no flowerbeds, but Grammy kept a truck garden full of pumpkins, pole beans, big heads of cabbage and a few stalks of corn. Fox surveyed them with an admiring eye, wondering that deer hadn’t stripped every vine. And no weeds for her to send him out pulling. Beyond the rows of vegetables, a heap of still-green raspberry briars. There might be a few berries left even this late in the year. Beside her front walk a row of old truck tires lay on the ground, each one filled with earth and converted to a planter, herbs growing in them. Fox recognized basil and garlic and rosemary. Maybe she’d cook him a good dinner.

Verne had made his pilgrimage here two years after Warren, driven here and dropped off like his brother, but without any cake. And like Warren, he had walked home with his head down, his shoulders slumped, unwilling to talk about his visit, except to mumble a few words about the smell of the place and the moth-eaten army blanket he’d slept under. “I swear she made me beat that rag rug for an hour,” he complained in the dark of their shared attic bedroom.

From his far corner under the eaves, Warren’s cautious voice, deeper now that he was grown and just weeks away from going into the navy, asked, “Did she make you drink the tea?”

“Shhh,” Verne hissed. “She said not to talk about that.”

“Fox is asleep, isn’t he?” Warren reasoned.

Fox closed his eyes tight and let his mouth fall open as he felt Verne turn over next to him and loom for a moment. “Yeah, he is. But I don’t want to talk about it anyway.”

A long time passed, and Fox really was almost asleep when Warren’s voice once more disturbed the quiet. “She said I was going to die young and so I was of no account.” This was said almost blandly, but Fox caught the quaver in the word “die.”

Verne heaved a long breath. “Old hag. That’s a terrible thing to say to your own grandson.”

“What about you?” Warren sounded almost desperate. “She say you was going to die?”

“Yeah.” Verne shifted a little. “An old man with money and a big family.” He coughed out one soft laugh. “She said I would waste my life licking the boots of rich men because I wanted to be one so bad.”

“Old bitch,” Warren pronounced, and then Fox fell asleep to a strange dream of cake clogging his throat, of swallowing bitter tea to wash it down.

Now it was his turn. He was twelve, and he was good at school. He did his homework and he liked to read, even his math and history books. As he stared up at Grammy Renders’ porch, he wondered if his mother had told his grandma that, or if she had even talked of him at all.

In the morning before school, Loralee had complained, “How come the girls don’t get to go to Grammy Renders?” She was almost fourteen but still wore her hair in two long braids. She had strong skinny legs and ran everywhere. She didn’t like dresses and she didn’t like the girls who wore dresses.

“Because you haven’t been asked.” His mother wasn’t inviting any argument. “And be glad of it.”

Loralee went running upstairs to the girls’ bedroom with a slam of the door.

Verne gave the staircase a smirk. He was in his senior year now and already had a job sweeping the sidewalks in front of the single street of brick-faced businesses in Myrtle Point. “Grammy Renders doesn’t care about girls. She said Renders girls is good for babies and that’s it.”

“That sounds about like her, all right.” Their mother put bowls of hot cornmeal mush on the table. “Though Loralee’s not a Renders. She’s a Ramsey like her father, and like the rest of you too.” She put the sugar bowl on the table. “Don’t put butter on it. And no more than one teaspoon of sugar. We’re about out of both and I can’t afford to go shopping until Saturday.”

The mush didn’t taste like much, but Fox ate it all because that was all there would be until he opened his paper bag at lunch and got his sandwich and his apple and his carrot.

His mother put her hand on the top of his head. “My, but that’s a rusty color, my little fox,” she leaned over and whispered.

Fox wanted to lean against her but he was twelve now so he just sat a little straighter and said, “That’s what you get for chewing old nails when you were expecting.” It was his father’s joke, but it came out sounding just as good from Fox.

His real name was Vaughn, after an uncle on the Ramsey side, but no one had ever called him that, the one redhead at a table surrounded by blond boys and brown-haired girls. Their dad, Ed Ramsey, was where the blond came from, although he was mostly bald now, and their mother had real dark hair like everyone in her family. He’d heard them speculating that the red hair came from some great-grandma of their dad’s.

Still smoothing his hair, his mother kept speaking in that low, soft voice, leaning over him. “Now don’t you be afraid of her. She can sound mean, I know, but she’s just your grandma.”

Verne snorted.

Her voice continued, soothing and slow, as if Verne hadn’t said anything. “She likes to think she has something important to say to her offspring. It’s just the once.”

Just the once, but now it was happening and he wished it wasn’t. He wished he was home doing anything else, even chopping kindling. Fox had been walking in bare feet for what felt like an hour, and the sun was heading toward the treetops covering the hillsides lining up behind him. He stood at the foot of the wooden steps leading up to her porch, four wide steps that would be good to sit on and take in some afternoon sun. The screen door whined and Grammy Renders appeared in the doorway looking down at him with a tight line of a mouth. “You. Huh.” She spoke slowly. “Well, come on in.”

He was suddenly ashamed of his dusty feet as he climbed the steps, and he checked to see if she was looking at them.

But she had her back turned to him already, and the screen would have slammed in his face if he hadn’t caught it.

Inside, the house – a shack, really, with just the one room – was as clean as a person could make it, no dust or cobwebs anywhere. He didn’t smell mildew or anything burnt, and the woodstove was blacked and free of any chips or sawdust at its base. A kettle sat on it, steaming. Just looking at it put the bitter taste of tea in Fox’s throat.

Grammy was sitting down in a faded floral-printed chair next to it. She had a side table stacked with Reader’s Digest books next to her and a pair of glasses laid on top of them.

“There.” She nodded her chin at a matching chair at the other side of the stove, angled to face the one she was in.

Fox sank into it, trying not to stare at her.

Something was wrong with her legs. They were swollen up so big that she didn’t have any ankles, all like a sausage from the knee down and stuffed into unlaced Keds. They looked painful, putting him in mind of his own bruised feet.

She had a dark face with dark gray bags under her eyes, dark creases around her mouth. Around her neck were a lot of strings of light blue chips of stone. He couldn’t put the name to these stones but he had seen their like before. Sometimes they were big, worn in belt buckles and earrings and rings. This necklace was the brightest thing in the room. Her dress was cotton and faded like the chair. He remembered her from before as being a big woman, with a shelf of a bosom resting on a big round belly, but she must have shrunk down some. She was just normal-sized except for her legs.

Her hair was the same though, all gone white and wrapped up into a full bun at the back of her neck, tendrils escaping and hanging down on either side of her eyes like crepe paper streamers forgotten after a party, still a little twirling. She was watching him all this while, with a hawk’s shrewd black glare.

“So you like the ladies?” She raised her white eyebrows, almost smiling. “Even the old ones.”

Fox crossed his feet beneath the chair to hide them and scratched at the side of his jaw as he considered what to say to that. Finally he decided on just, “I’m Fox, Grandma. Well, really I’m Vaughn, but they call me Fox.”

She hadn’t looked away from him. “You’re the best of them, I see. Not that that’s saying much.” Her crackly voice was matter-of-fact. “The oldest, it ends so soon that it doesn’t matter, and the next, he’s no better than his cousins. You’re the one.”

Behind her on the kitchen wall was a calendar page saved and tacked up like a picture, of a beautiful Rhode Island Red rooster, shiny green saddle, plume-like tail of blue-black feathers gleaming with colors like an oil patch. Grammy Renders caught his gaze and nodded. “You got an eye.” Then she pointed at the kettle. “Take that to the sink and add more water.”

Her faucet still had an iron pump handle, and he worked at it, bending forward and straining because he wasn’t tall enough to get any leverage. He knew to let the rusty water come out first before filling the kettle, but he didn’t waste the water, using it to wash his hands, drying them on a dish towel hanging by the sink before he hefted the copper kettle and carried it back. The stove was hot, but he opened the kindling door and threw some sticks in from the scuttle, using the poker to drag the mess of flame beneath the kettle.

When he sat back down, he perched at the edge of his chair. The water in the kettle was heating for tea, and what would come of that? His leg wanted to bounce nervously but he forced it still.

“The pot’s on the counter, and the strainer’s right there,” she said, watching him with intensity. “The tea’s in the blue canister. Put a couple of spoonfuls in.”

When the kettle whistled he took care of it, filling the pot first, then stirring in the tea leaves. They smelled dark and serious. He hoped there was milk and honey or sugar to cut it as he looked around for cups. On the oak kitchen table was an inlaid wooden tray, and on it was a flowered china sugar bowl and two matching cups, one chipped.

He wiped a little dust out of them with the dish towel. “How long do you let it steep?”

She was getting up. “Oh, I like it strong.” She moved painfully, he saw now, holding to the back of her chair, but she straightened with a grunt of determination as she crossed the room. He pulled out a kitchen chair for her and she sat down, and he sat to her left.

“No, get back up,” she told him. “Fetch the biscuits. And there’s milk in the icebox.”

He found the biscuit-keeper full and the biscuits tall and flaky. She didn’t take one but pushed the container toward him. “Have two. You’re a bit runty.”

They were good, and there was raspberry jam in a little glass jar. This was going a lot better than Verne and Warren had given him any right to believe. She poured nut-brown tea into their cups and watched him. He took the chipped cup, knowing he ought to say something, so he swallowed his bite of biscuit and managed, “Mom makes them like this. But I don’t get more than one.”

“Three boys and two girls, if I remember,” she murmured as she stirred sugar into his tea. “Vivian had that Renders’ luck with babies.” She used his mom’s name just like they were any two people having a regular old conversation.

And how would he contribute on his end? “Loralee said she wanted to come see you,” he dared.

Grammy Renders stared down into her teacup as if she saw something fascinating there. “She said that?” She pursed her lips. “She’s the oldest girl, isn’t she? She like fancy things?”

“She won’t wear the stocking hose Mom bought her,” he revealed, feeling a bit like a tattletale, then added, “She won’t comb her hair down like the other high school girls neither.”

Grammy Renders nodded. “When you get home tomorrow, you send her to me.” She blew into the steaming tea. “But warn her this: if she comes, she’s got to stay a week. She’ll miss school.”

Fox nodded, pleased for Loralee who didn’t like school anyway. He took a cautious sip of his tea, but as soon as it hit the back of his throat, the urge to cough it out came on so strong that he had to slap his hand over his mouth and force himself to swallow. It burned, and he fought the need to gag.

Grammy Renders watched him as if she had never seen anything so interesting. “Doctor it up to your taste.” She pushed the china sugar bowl toward him. “Your brother Warren spit that tea out right on my table. I knew then what the leaves would say.”

“The leaves?” Fox could picture Warren spitting, the shame of it, and wished he could do something to let his brother know he understood. But Warren was in the Navy now. Maybe when Fox got home, he could say something casual to Verne, like, “Nasty tea, wasn’t it?” He lifted the top of the sugar bowl and saw it was almost empty, probably due to a long line of boys stirring sugar into their tea to take away the bitterness. He didn’t want to take the last little bit. He forced himself to drink more anyway, hoping she wouldn’t notice his grimace.

But she was sipping her tea with her eyes closed, her head back like she was tasting something that needed all her attention. A long shaft of afternoon sunlight was coming in her kitchen window, illuminating her cheek, all the criss-crossed lines and faint peach fuzz of her skin, the deep crease beside her drooping nose. She was swirling the tea around in her mouth.

After a few more sips, she peered down into her cup and nodded. “Just as I thought.” She looked up at him. “You longing for love, and so many losses. There’s where you’ll see your failures.”

“Failures?” Fox repeated, his voice going squeaky.

“Three times you’ll lose the woman you love,” she decided, examining the bottom of her cup with her head cocked, one eye closed so she could focus better with the other one. “Three times she’ll leave you. First time, you’re deserted. Second time, you’re neglected. Third one, you’re bereft. No children issuing from you.”

His belly knotted up as she spoke. He wanted to protest, to tell her she was wrong. Bereft? What did that mean? It connected up with the idea of empty in his mind, and empty was what he felt as she spoke, or maybe it was the fear of emptiness.

She smiled at him, showing a bad denture. “Fox, boy, it’s not all terrible.”

“It’s not?” He wanted to push away from the table and run from the room.

“Look at you. You got a good heart and you notice things. That’ll get you farther than most. There will be some sugar in your bowl.”

She shooed him outside while she made dinner, and he sat on the porch steps and took in the late sun, thinking about her pronouncement on him. Why did she believe a few tea leaves could predict his future? Like she was magical. What gave her the right to spell it out to him, damning him? Damning his brothers?

And his cousins too – they’d been sent, one by one, all the boys, to Grammy Renders’ shack to spend a night. When he felt too full of dark hurt to sit another moment, he rose and went out to her garden and picked two ears of corn and shucked them. Thinking of her denture, he carried them into the kitchen and used her paring knife to cut the kernels off the cobs.

Dinner was some potatoes sliced and baked in cheese in a Dutch oven on the stove, the rest of the biscuits and a rainbow trout he boned for her and dredged in flour to fry. He looked at the pattern of flour and salt and pepper on the plate and wondered who’d caught the fish for her, wanting to make a smart remark about seeing the fish’s future in it, but he sat next to her at the too-quiet table and ate. Even though the food was good, something was missing. Still, he complimented each dish, trying to say something true. “Crunchy crust on this fish,” and “Mom’s potatoes don’t get done as good as these are.”

Grammy Renders nodded wordlessly with each statement. At the end of the meal, she wiped her mouth with a soft old napkin and said, “I cooked your cousin Donald a venison stew and he said he didn’t like deer meat. Said it was too gamy.”

Donald, whose dad was a logger, had been eating venison his whole life, Fox knew. Maybe he’d hoped for a change. “He’s moving to Medford, I hear,” he offered.

“Ah,” said Grammy Renders, as if that explained it. “He’s out of the picture for good.”

“The picture?”

“I can’t see farther than to about Camus Valley,” she told him, so casual she could be talking about how far a car might go on a tank of gas. “Or too far in the future. You, until you’re thirty or so. You get that far, and then it’s too dim for me to see. Still, can’t say so much about everybody.”

That long-ago conversation in the attic pricked at him. “So you saw it to the end with Warren,” Fox filled in, his hand and arm goose-pimpling up with a chill as he scooped up the last of his corn, acting like it was any other meal.

She got quiet enough that he could hear her breathing, a little whistling through the nose, and they both finished eating without saying any more.

“Do up these dishes, will you?” Grammy Renders rose from the table, but not before he caught upon her face a look of regret.

He filled the washtub with cold water and heated it from the kettle, and after the kitchen was clean he sat next to Grammy Renders and tended the fire and read to her from one of her Reader’s Digests, a story about a revolutionary war battle. It was pretty good. He did the voices of the captain and his lieutenant who was killed by a cannonball, dramatically and speeding up at the exciting parts.

She had a little trundle bed under her own bed that she pulled out for him. He slept there restlessly, listening to some sort of animal climbing around in the fir outside as the logs in the woodstove turned to ash and collapsed with a soft sound. Grammy Renders snored for a while, waking him briefly.

Then he was up and given a jam-coated biscuit to take to school, rays of golden light coming through the windows above the kitchen sink, and as she walked him to the front door, the old woman put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t bother fetching those boots. You’ll have some better soon enough.”

Halfway back to town, Fox paused at the tree and looked at the hollow but considered that trusting her about the shoes might be a good test of her ability to tell the future.

His own house was not on the way to school. He had to take a four block detour just to walk past it, and from the far side of the street he observed it as if strangers lived there. It was tall and narrow, the paint good and the yard tidy, laundry flapping on the line in back, a bent bicycle frame propped upside down under the myrtle tree. He’d never before seen his home from this perspective, and a pang of longing for it struck his chest even though he’d only been gone one night.

A week later he got Verne’s still good work boots when Verne bought himself a pair of black wingtips and walked into a job at the bank at sixteen years old.

Fox put them on and found they fit well enough, with a little room to grow. He sat on a kitchen chair, bent down over the boots, folded into himself, thinking about the future Grammy Renders had predicted for him: three women he’d lose. No love for him. It couldn’t be true, could it?

He wasn’t going to let himself believe it. Someone should tell him not to believe it.

His mother was at the sink, singing along with the radio, her hair up in a red bandana. She hadn’t asked him about Grammy Renders, but she’d fixed his favorite, chicken with dumplings, when he got back. He stared at her back, willing her to tell him that none of it was true.

When she finally turned, her eyes looked right past him, her mind elsewhere.

That same morning Loralee went to stay with Grammy Renders and didn’t come back for two weeks, and even then, it was just to pack her things in two paper grocery bags. Her arms full, she looked around their kitchen as if she couldn’t wait to leave it. Fox, following her gaze, could maybe see that there were cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, that the linoleum on the floor needed a good scrubbing and the counters were buried under everyone’s school work and old drawings and broken radio parts and such.

“You’re too young to be making such a choice.” Their mother sat across the kitchen table from him. Her mild voice didn’t match her words. “What does she want with you? She didn’t want any of your cousins,” she reasoned, mending some underthings for Loralee to take with her. She bent over the needle for a long moment of quiet, then said, “You can always change your mind. I don’t care how long it takes.”

“You won’t even miss me.” Loralee was talking to her mother but looking at Fox. “You have Vicky to help you. She’s more than happy to get the bed to herself.”

Vicky was untying her hair from the rags she’d rolled it up in, testing each one to see if the curl bounced. She was ten and the youngest. Fox wondered if she would miss Loralee, and how long it would be before his sister came back. His chest ached.

“First Warren and now you. I swear this house is just emptying out.” Their mother looked around, her eyebrows knitted. “I’m down to three kids in three beds in two rooms. Maybe you even all like it that way.” A little judgment hung about the words.

Loralee leaned over Fox and plucked a piece of toast off his plate. “Enjoy them while you can, Mama. Grammy Renders says . . . .” She looked around, her eyes wide for a moment. The unfinished statement made Fox slide out of his chair and sidle close to his mother and put his arm around her.

His mother clutched back at him. “What does she say, Loralee?” she almost whispered.

But Loralee shook her head, braids sliding over her shoulders. “I promised I wouldn’t.” She picked up her bags, looked around the kitchen again.

Fox didn’t want her to go. Inside him was a whole speech, but all that came out was, “Wait.”

She looked at him expectantly, eyebrows lifted.

He went to the cupboard and pulled down the big coffee can that held the sugar then found a paper sack. Carefully he poured a white stream into the sack. It made a soft sound, like someone telling him to hush. Rolling down the top, he handed it to Loralee. “Give this to Grammy Renders.”

She took it. At the door she leaned forward and hugged Fox awkwardly with an arm that dangled a suitcase. “Love up Mom and Dad for me,” she murmured in his ear.

Fox followed her to the door. As he watched Loralee going down the walk, something wrenched inside him, like the rusty gate that led out to the sidewalk, clanging closed at the end of their childhood together as she walked out of it. She’d been the one to protect him from Verne, to make sure he got a turn on the tire swing. She’d taught him to make molasses crinkles. He wanted to wrestle that gate back open and call for her to turn around. He took a fast, gulping breath and made himself face back inside.

He didn’t speak for a while, mulling over the way things in his house were changing. It had always felt like the center of the world. Now he took a tour through the living room, studied the Italian landscape over the fireplace to reassure himself that it was still there, and so was the bookshelf and the coatrack and the braided rug. And Warren would come home for Christmas and see his girlfriend Francie. Loralee would come home then too.

It seemed a long time to wait.

After Loralee left, Fox’s brother Verne got restless. He wore nicer clothes now and took pains to iron them every night and to wash his hair every week. He traded in his old cap for a smart-looking hat that he wore everywhere. It was gray tweed with a black band and a crease down the top, and it looked exactly like what the men wore in the movies.

Their dad, Ed, was foreman of the swing shift down at the lumber mill. So many mill-workers had gone to join up and fight that he worked until after midnight six days a week and was packing his lunch and getting ready to leave by the time Fox got home from school.

On a day in mid-November, he took Fox outside. He put a big hand on his son’s shoulder. “You’re still a little guy, I know. But with Warren and Loralee gone and Verne working, you’re going to have more chores. I’ll need your help to cut down the dead oaks beyond the field in back and saw them into logs.”

Fox looked up at his dad’s ruddy face and nodded. He wasn’t too little. It was just that Warren had been clumsy and Verne hated outdoor work. “I’m strong enough. I can do it.”

He knew how to chop kindling. How hard could working a saw be? But it was hard, and he cut his arms and hands over and over before he got the hang of it and learned how to lean over the cross-cradle and use his back.

“You do that good,” his father observed one Saturday morning as he helped stack the logs against a tree for a winter of seasoning. “Better than Warren, and a durn sight better than Verne.”

Fox liked the sound of the saw through the wood, the last moment before the log broke off, and the soreness in his arms and shoulders. He helped Ed clean gutters, repair the fence pickets, fix hinges, and replace the wiring and light switches when they upgraded to the new type of electricity all that fall. He guessed he was becoming a man.

Then Christmas came and Warren arrived home looking taller, tough with new muscles and a buzzed haircut, and Fox was just a kid after all. Warren’ts return brought Francie back into the house. She’d been Warren’s girlfriend in high school and was waiting for him to get back out so they could get married.

Fox liked the look of her, there in the living room, dainty and girly, her hands lively as she talked, sitting in Warren’s lap in her dress with the little cherries all over it. She helped clear dishes and she laughed at everything Fox said, which made him try to be funny. He used a radio announcer’s voice and pretended to be telling the news. His mother shook her head at him as if amazed, but she smiled and took their father’s hand.

Christmas Eve, and he waited for Loralee to come in from the cold. Ten weeks it had been since he’d seen her, and maybe she wouldn’t come back at all. Still, he hung her stocking next to Vicky’s, and went up to his bedroom to sort through the little pile of things he had to put under the tree: bell- and star-shaped cookies he’d frosted and wrapped in wax paper with green and red ribbons, and a candle he’d made in art class, shaped like an angel for his mother.

He heard the door downstairs bang shut. Before he could think, he was leaping down the stairs.

Loralee stood in the kitchen with her arms full of holly and cedar boughs, her cheeks bright and her hair braided in a crown on top of her head. She smiled around at all of them and put a loaf of something on the table. “I didn’t want to miss seeing you, Warren.” Her voice was full of feeling, and were those tears standing in her eyes?

Fox had never seen her hug Warren like that, and then their dad. His mother got back out some of the supper things and warmed them for Loralee, who ate as if she hadn’t had anything all day.

She stayed two nights. All of them, even Verne, even Francie, played card games at the kitchen table while rain sheeted down outside, and Vicky read Nancy Drew aloud afterwards as they sat around the living room.

That was the last Christmas they were all together.

Warren took the Greyhound back to his base, then shipped out to serve on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. It was bombed by the Japanese in the early days of that January.

The telegram was delivered by the Western Union clerk himself. They read it and reread it, each of them taking a turn, but because Warren was gone anyway, it didn’t feel real.

Their mother cried. Fox could hear her through the floorboards of the attic. He and Verne just stared at each other, looked away, came back around to check in again with another look. He didn’t want to tell Verne that he’d listened in on that long-ago bedtime conversation about Grammy Renders.

Later a naval officer in his dress whites came to visit. On a Monday morning he sat in their living room just where Warren had bounced Francie in his lap. Fox and Vicky were called home from school and Verne from work so he could tell them that Warren’s ship had been lost with over three hundred sailors onboard, and that Warren Ramsey and the others were all heroes.

Fox slept that night next to Verne in Warren’s bed, thinking to himself that the pillow still smelled like his dead brother and wondering how that could be when he would never see him or hear him again. He wasn’t going to let himself think about Grammy Renders being right about Warren. He didn’t want her to be right about anything.

His mother wasn’t the same after that. She didn’t ask him about school or help Vicky sew. She sat with her coffee cup and sighed a lot, all that winter.

In the spring their father was electrocuted in an accident at the mill. A live wire fell into a pool of water flooded on the concrete floor after a heavy rain while Ed Ramsey was standing in it. The way the men told it, even after he lay unconscious, none of the other workers could step in and help him, and by the time the electricity was turned off, he was dead. The undertaker advised a closed casket, so Fox never saw his father’s body. He was just there one morning and not there afterward.

Fox was clapped on the shoulder by some of the millworkers at the funeral as they told him about what a good man Ed was and how they’d taken up a collection. Loralee was there, looking different and strange with her brown hair chopped off chin-length. She escorted Grammy Renders, walking slow, shoulders stooped, through a gaggle of watching men. He felt his heart go stony when Grammy caught sight of him, peering at him with her hawk’s bright eye. She pointed. “There’s the one.”

Everyone turned slowly to look at him.

She leaned toward Loralee. “He’s the one, right? That sent the sugar?”

“That’s him, Grammy.” Loralee smiled at Fox. The other men seemed to let loose their breath and turn away, resuming their talk. Grammy and Loralee came over and flanked Fox at the very moment he overheard one of the mill workers make a low remark about the smell of Ed’s dad cooking in the pool of water, how it reminded him of a pot of stew, and at the same time the same sound came from his sister’s and Grammy’s mouths, a little hiss of disapproval that anyone should say such a thing.

Some of the men went wide-eyed and quiet and somebody nudged the fool with the mouth into silence. It hurt though, a sledge hammer to his heart, and only the warm presence of his sister let him start breathing again.

Fox tried hard after that to step up. It seemed like he was always waiting for his father to come home, and the house had to be ready for him to come in and inspect it. The days weren’t so different, just an empty span after school, since his father had been gone every afternoon anyway.

But in the mornings the memory of his father’s voice ghosted through the kitchen, and Warren was almost there in the turn of the staircase, the crowd of coats and boots by the kitchen door. Worst of all was Loralee, not fighting with Vicky, not singing while she did dishes, not drawing a hopscotch path on the front walk.

Their circumstances, Verne said, were reduced. He helped with money, but the paycheck from the mill was gone. Two days running there was nothing but macaroni for dinner.

On a sunny May morning following one of those dinners, his mother got herself dressed up nice with make-up and her hair pinned neat, bustling through the kitchen so that Fox and his sister Vicky leaped up from the table in surprise. She came home that evening with a job at a beauty parlor, sweeping up and writing down the appointments. Soon enough, Vicky went there most days all summer and got trained to become a beauty operator. By the time school started, she was wearing make-up and had plucked her eyebrows out and got a permanent. Meanwhile their mother stopped dressing her own hair or putting on lipstick and her same old dresses looked more and more old-fashioned, like all the pretty in the family had gotten sucked away by Vicky.

Most nights his mother fell asleep listening to the sounds of far-away music on the radio, with no more than a word or two for Fox no matter how hard he tried to get her talking. He sat on the floor by the fireplace, doing his math homework, missing his mother even though she was right there. He couldn’t remember the last time she had smoothed his hair and called him her little fox.

By the time he graduated from high school, Fox was working nights at the bakery in town, helping with the bread and doughnuts. Verne was engaged to a girl named Anne whose dad owned the big dairy in Coquille. Loralee came home once or twice a year, for Christmas and to celebrate their mother’s birthday in April, always bringing a big bouquet of daffodils and lilacs picked along the way. Fox would make her cake himself, two layers and pink icing with white roses piped around the edges.

The best year, when he was seventeen, their mother came in from the beauty parlor and found them all gathered around the table, Verne and Anne, Loralee, Vicky and Fox, and somehow they were all laughing and talking, singing along to a Bing Crosby song on the radio. They ate a roast chicken and the older kids each had a beer. The cake was nothing but crumbs by sunset.

“Mom, open your present from me,” Verne insisted, and set a big wrapped box on the coffee table. She smiled a little as she opened it and held up a new dress, rayon with a white collar and cuffs, big red flowers on a blue background, and Fox thought he had never seen anything so ugly in his life. He looked across the room at Loralee, her eyes shiny in the lamplight, unable to tell if she was trying not to laugh or trying not to cry. She looked different. He couldn’t say how, but it was there in her shoulders and her neck and the way she held her head, not straighter or more bent but more filled with something, the weight of the world, some caution.

The next morning when Loralee left to go back to Grammy Renders’ place, she kissed her mother on both cheeks, a tender sort of extravagance to it that had Fox feeling worried. He followed his sister down the front walk and stopped her at the gate.

“She’s not doing well at all,” he began, but saying it aloud gave his heart that sledgehammer feeling again, and saying it to the sister who was leaving him again felt like sweeping those broken chips of heart into a dustbin. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go, Loralee.” He found himself whispering. “I can’t leave her.”

Loralee picked up his hand and studied it. “Come out and see us,” she suggested.

Just the once, that was what the boys were all told about visiting Grammy Renders, but it felt different now that Loralee was living there. This time Fox drove himself down the rutted road in the old Packard and it seemed to take no time at all. He craned his neck for the tree where he had left his shoes five years earlier, but he didn’t recognize it.

He parked at the end of the road and took in the setting. The shack stood in a misty hole cut into forest, surrounded by hills, set apart like Grammy Renders had needed to be kept away from people.

Had the house always been this small? This gray? What was it that Loralee got out of living way out here? He walked past the same herbs in the tire planters, noticing new-planted cabbage and corn sprouts in the truck garden. Same worn steps up to the front porch. Fox took them two at a time and risked a knock at the door.

Loralee opened it with a smile. “Grammy’s still in bed, but she’s looking forward to seeing you.”

The room was cool and dim, with a breeze stirring the kitchen curtains. A pile of cornbread sat on a plate on the table. Fox put his basket of muffins next to it, wishing he hadn’t gone to the trouble, but Loralee took the jar of peach jam from his hands with a pleased grin, saying, “Oh, good. We just now ran out of preserves, and can you believe Clarence showed up last week empty-handed?”

Cousin Clarence was about twelve years old. So she was still at it with the prophesying.

Grammy Renders was struggling to sit up in the bed in the corner. Her hair was gone thin and wispy, her eyes clouded over. She coughed some in a wet way, spat into a Mason jar, and eyed Fox. “You’re the one.”

“That’s right. I’m the one that loses three times.” Fox tried to make his voice sound jaunty, but his words were iced in bitterness. He looked around, noticing the little things that Loralee had changed. The trundle bed moved to the far corner. A couple of calendar pages tacked up above it, one of an ocean beach at sunset, another of an ancient Asian temple way up on a mist-shrouded mountain. He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down next to Grammy Renders, looking the sick old woman over, knowing he couldn’t ask for Loralee back. “Verne has gotten himself a promotion at the bank. He’s moving to Coos Bay to become a loan officer.”

The old woman didn’t seem interested in meeting his eyes. “He’s still in the picture,” Grammy nodded. “But he’s not the one.” She took his hand in her gnarled old fingers. “You’re meant to be there.”

Where? he wanted to shout. He shook his head, biting back his anger.

She let go of him like he was hot. “Go home, boy. I have nothing for you. You know too much already. You keep waiting for people to love you, you’ll feel nothing more than the want of it.”

The shack closed in on him. He glared at Loralee as he aimed for the door. There was nothing here for him. He’d come for no reason at all.

Fox drove home seething. He wanted to go warn his cousins off Grammy Renders. Seemed like soon enough she’d die, but still he wondered what curse she’d laid on little tow-headed Clarence with his jug ears and his love of basketball.

A few weeks later, on a cold gray day of unbroken clouds, he looked up from sliding a tray of doughnuts into the pastry case at the bakery to see Loralee standing in the doorway.

“Grammy Renders is dead.” She let out a long sigh and plopped down at one of the little tables by the front windows, her overalls patched, her hair a little snarled, looking sad and dowdy.

Fox took her a cup of coffee and a doughnut and sat next to her. Even as he patted her hand, he was relieved that the little boys of his family would no longer have to trek out to Grammy’s house and get told about the bad things coming, their deaths or their shortcomings or the love that would elude them. And Loralee would come home and everything would be all right.

The funeral was held in a church full to bursting, with a reception after in the meeting hall, its tables so crowded with pies and casseroles and salads that Fox wondered if the food was meant as an offering against bad luck. Loralee stood by the coffin and accepted condolences and told everyone she’d be staying out there and taking care of Grammy’s place.

Fox couldn’t believe it. She’d get lonely soon enough. She’d come back. Trying not to scowl, he took his turn helping out, scooping up servings of his apple crumble to a line of talkative relatives until it was almost gone.

A girl about his own age stood in front of him with an empty plate held out. She had light brown hair that shone gold in the overhead lights. “I don’t suppose that last bit there is earmarked.” Her voice was playful and she didn’t even look at the pan between them.

Fox scooped up the crumble carefully, wishing it didn’t look so bedraggled, and plopped it onto her plate. “Which one are you?” The question came out all wrong. He meant to say that if she was a cousin, he didn’t recognize her.

She dipped a finger into her dish of crumble and licked it. “I’m Gloria. I’m here with Rich and Jackie.”

Fox was transfixed by her finger sliding out between her lips. “Cousin Rich? I thought he enlisted.”

She tilted her head. “Call me a sucker for a boy in uniform. He’s home on leave. I was working the breakfast counter at Dee’s Café in Coquille and he talked me into coming along here with them.”

Then his tall cousins Richard and Jackie swooped down on her and bore her away, joking and laughing, before Fox could think of anything else to say.

Day after day Fox waited for Loralee to turn in the gate, come through the door. In the morning he made breakfast for his mother and Vicky and they all went off together to work and school. In the evening he came home to his mother sitting silently in the echoing house and he’d make her supper. Vicky had a second job now at the bowling alley and ate meals there at the bar and grill, usually with her boyfriend, Doug or Howie or whoever it was now.

Two years younger than Fox was, and she’d had a steady boyfriend since she was fourteen.

Grammy Renders had said he would lose at love, but every time he thought about it, Fox set his jaw and felt a hard knot growing inside his chest. Saturday morning rolled around. Instead of making breakfast, Fox left the house without a word and drove the Packard nine miles to Coquille, parking in front of Dee’s Café.

Gloria was at the counter, her honey hair tied up in a ponytail that swayed as she turned to see him. With a sly smile, she poured him a cup of coffee. “I remember you. Rich’s cousin?”

“Fox,” he told her, noticing now that she had eyes the color of river water. She was wearing pink lipstick that matched the ruffled apron with the Dee’s Café lettering across the front.

“Are you anything like your cousin?” It sounded flirty. Her pale green gaze pinned him and made him want to do something stupid like dance a few steps, and it also dried up every word in his throat.

He had to say something, but he wasn’t sure if he ought to be like Rich or as different from him as possible. A stranger’s voice came out of his mouth. “That depends. Can Rich make apple crumble?”

She laughed. “He might just, if he gets enough KP.” She leaned over the counter toward him, resting on her crossed arms. “He promised to send me postcards. You think he will?”

Rich had dated every cute girl in his high school class at a rate of about one every two weeks. Gloria didn’t know him at all. Fox nodded as if it were a sure thing. “You bet he will.”

He took Gloria to the movies and they saw Going My Way. He started well, holding her hand as they walked in, putting his arm around her partway through, but the story caught him up and he forgot to try to kiss her until the credits rolled. Everyone in the audience was rising, turning to each other with conversation while he secretly wiped tears.

“Are you crying?” Her voice was incredulous as she shrugged into her sweater.

His denial died unspoken when he caught sight of her, tears running freely down her face. With no thought that she might refuse him, Fox pulled her to him and kissed her.

And it was all there, in the smell of her hair, her back firm against his hands, her giving lips, her eyes still closed when he finally dared peep through his. This, he thought. He was so hungry for this.

The next week they saw Lost in a Harem with Abbott and Costello. He laughed until he cried, an unexpected relief, and afterward, they made out in the Packard. Gloria let him slide his hand over the soft mound of her bra while they kissed, but kept it from going underneath the fabric. Over the next several weeks, they dated regularly but he didn’t get any further than kissing and touching her above the waist. He brought her cookies from the bakery and once a little bouquet of wildflowers that he picked from the field behind the house. She was lovely, with her sly smile and green eyes and shiny hair, and full of teasing jokes. When they walked anywhere together, she swung their clasped hands and leaned toward him, blinking up at him, playful.

He took her out to meet Loralee. They picked raspberries in the rising heat and listened to the tiny birds in the brambles calling to each other.

“He’s so serious.” Gloria perched on the porch steps as she watched him sort the twigs out of the berries. Her voice was pitched low, and he didn’t think she meant for him to hear her.

Next to her, Loralee cocked her head. “He’s not so bad.”

“We’ll see.” Gloria crinkled her eyes at him.

He felt claimed, possessed, hers.

And Grammy Renders was dead.

He planned. When the weather got hot, he would take her to the secret swimming holes along the Coquille River, see what her legs looked like in a swimsuit. Lying in bed at night in his solitary room, he tried to figure out how soon he could save enough for a ring, what he’d say to her during the proposal with him down on one knee, and the way this house would change with her in it.

She was not behind the counter at Dee’s Café when he went to pick her up as usual. It was a Saturday in early June, the sun hot enough finally that the river water might be tolerable. He had a hamper full of sandwiches and sodas in the car, and two towels he’d stolen from the bathroom.

Dee was there behind the counter, stumpy and jowly in her faded pink apron. “I suppose you’re looking for Gloria,” she said in a raspy voice heavy with disapproval when she saw him.

Fox stood at the cash register, confused. “Where is she?”

“Went running off with a soldier boy came in the door half an hour ago,” Dee harrumphed. “He climbed right over the counter after her.”

There was no looking for her. No chasing after Gloria and Rich. He wouldn’t make himself a fool. He wouldn’t. Fox drove home and spent the rest of his day nailing new siding into place on the back side of the house, trying not to think of Gloria, of what she might be doing with Rich right now.

In the night he heard sirens.

In the morning the newspaper headlines read, “Two killed in drunken collision on North Bank Road.”

Fox stood shaking on the front porch. He dropped the newspaper, his head roaring, and walked back upstairs to his bedroom, lying atop the spread, speechless even when Vicky came to check on him. There were no words in the roaring that the sledgehammer had let through. He couldn’t even cry.

Gloria would never hold hands with anyone again, never swing them, clasped, between her and himself or any other boy. He stared at his own hand and its emptiness and wished and wished that he’d somehow held on harder.

On Tuesday he drove out to the cabin he still thought of as Grammy Renders’ and didn’t bother to knock.

Loralee was sitting at the table drinking tea with a little boy who looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. They both startled when Fox burst in the door, but Loralee recovered herself and told the boy to go out and pick some blueberries, handing him a bucket.

When the boy had jumped down into the yard from the porch, Fox got out through gritted teeth, “What do you think you’re doing?” The first words he’d spoken. The first words that had formed in his head at all.

She pulled in a deep breath and half-laughed. “Getting to know our Cousin Melvin. He’s a sharp kid.”

“You think you’re some new version of Grammy Renders?” He hated the idea that she might be piling doom on a new generation of Renders boys.

But Loralee folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t invite him. He came on his own. And, Fox, I know how to watch people. How to read the tea leaves. I do believe I have inherited her talents and skills.”

“Oh for god’s sake.” Fox threw up his hands. “You want to tell me that Gloria died because some old bat said I wasn’t ever going to find love?”

Loralee gasped and her face paled. She stood slowly, covering her mouth with her palms. A few seconds passed, and she got out, “I’m so sorry. So sorry, Fox. I didn’t know.” She clenched her fists, seemed to be pushing an idea around, then with a shake of her head, let it out. “But you know she wasn’t for you. She was never going to be yours.”

A howl of anguish escaped him. Fox raked his fingers through his hair, desperate, then turned and slammed out the door. He stumbled down the porch steps, the boy among the blueberry bushes wide-eyed and gaping as he passed. He could hardly see to drive.

And at home, he matched his mother’s silence until Vicky looked back and forth between them one evening and announced them both as good as dead already.

In the months after, he took on extra shifts at the bakery, getting up to make bread dough at four in the morning, baking the cookies and doughnuts for the store opening at six, making all the deliveries to the restaurants, then working the cash register and serving customers until the bakery closed twelve hours later.

He came home in time to cook dinner for his mother and little sister and fall into bed, leaving himself no time to think or do anything else. In this way he managed to make time pass.

The day after his twentieth birthday, his mother did not come home from work. He went to the salon and learned from one of the operators that she had collapsed on the floor an hour earlier and been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Coquille. She died two days later of heart failure at the age of forty-eight.

In the evening after the service, they sat around the table, Fox and Vicky and Loralee and Verne too, and decided that the house would be put in Fox’s name.

Vicky still occupied a bedroom, though he almost never saw her. The house was his, and he was alone. He let the dust cover everything and had to remind himself when garbage day came. At night sometimes he’d hear Vicky come in and open the door of the refrigerator, take something out, the scrape of a kitchen chair. Sometimes he’d find her curlers in the bathroom sink.

She came into the bakery one day with a stranger, a tall woman with very good posture. They sat down at one of the little tables, laughing and gossiping over coffee while Fox looked them over.

Vicky was wearing a lot of makeup and doing her hair in one big swirly curl on top of her head. She had dyed it a red much brighter than Fox’s rusty shade and was wearing a dress with its top buttons open, showing a lifted-up bosom like two yeasty dinner rolls.

Her friend was more poised, sitting with her back straight as a dancer’s and her ankles crossed beneath her. She lit up a cigarette and smoked it coolly, staring back at Fox.

“This is Sharon,” Vicky said while he refilled their coffee.

Up close, he could see that she was a little older than he was, well into her twenties, her face set in a fixed but distant smile. Her hair was colored that shade of platinum the movie stars made fashionable, and her nails were long and crimson red to match her lipstick. Fox thought her beautiful but determined to seem superior, which was a little sad since she had landed in Myrtle Point, Oregon, population 2100, if you counted the outlying farms.

“Fox.” He held out his hand and she took it with just her fingertips like she was a princess.

“You like making cookies and bread?” Her voice was deep for a woman, sort of a Lauren Bacall flavor to it although she looked more like Jean Harlow.

He surprised himself by saying, “I’m very good at kneading things.”

She laughed and took a drag from her cigarette, exhaling with flare, watching him. “I’m not much of a one for sweets.”

When they left a few minutes later, he overheard Vicky saying, “I told you he was cute.”

Sharon and Vicky came by the bakery two or three times a week, sometimes with other men, once with his cousin Robert. She let the men light her cigarettes and sat there looking faintly bored as they tried to impress her.

One day Fox looked up from wiping down the display case to find her standing on the other side watching him as if he were a horse up for auction. She was alone.

“I don’t usually like men with red hair,” she told him. “But you’re actually rather handsome.” She trailed one finger along the top of the counter, sauntering down its length. “Do you make good money at a bakery?”

“Not really.” He wasn’t sure if he liked her. He had overheard her call Vicky the bowling alley floozy, and whether that was true or not, he didn’t appreciate her poor taste in saying it.

“I don’t suppose you’ll ever leave here.” She put a dime on the counter to pay for her coffee and her untouched cookie. “You’ve got that house and all.”

He thought about the house, and about Myrtle Point, the low green hills, some grassy, some thickly forested, Coquille valley with grazing so good the dairy cows were famous, and his one visit to Coos Bay, thirty miles off. “Why would I want to do that?” He said it nonchalant, but he half-hoped she’d give him a good reason to go.

The bakery was empty save for the two of them. Sharon came around the counter and slid in close to him, raising her arms to cross behind his neck. She kissed him smokily. His hungry mouth fell onto hers, and they went at each other until he felt like he had to do something or burst. He led her in the back, to the little cubbyhole he called his office, and to the chugging of the giant dough mixer, he lifted her onto the desk, pushing up her skirt, yanking down her silky panties. She wriggled out of them and wrapped her legs around him, still in stockings with her garters holding them on like sausage casings. He pushed into her with a groan of relieved triumph, holding onto her hips while she groped at the muscles in his shoulders and gasped over and over.

Sharon left as soon as he was finished, stopping for a moment in the little bathroom, and didn’t come back in for a week. She wasn’t alone, but had brought along one of the suit-wearing bank clerks and shared a sandwich with him as if there were nothing between her and Fox. Her gaze traveled over him unseeing.

He wondered if he had done it wrong. There was no one to ask. When she came in, which she continued to do regularly, he felt invisible. His big forearms trembled as he wiped down the counters and wrung out the rag, and his cheeks burned with shame.

But she was there one predawn morning when he arrived to open, waiting in the darkened doorway, stepping out to the moonlit sidewalk as he parked the car.

“Well, Fox, you’ve done it,” she said with a nervous smile as he walked up to her. “And I hadn’t planned to stay here, either. But we’ll have to get married, I guess.”

He knew right away that he didn’t love her. She married him before the justice of the peace and moved into the house with three suitcases and two boxes to her name, and all of it clothes and cosmetics.

She explored the house with an air of ownership that set his teeth on edge, opening cupboards, pulling out the lace tablecloth that had been tatted by his father’s mother and putting it on the dining table even though it was supposed to be saved for special occasions. Down came the pictures of fishing boats and landscapes that had been up on the walls as long as he could remember. Somewhere she found and brought home a painting of a matador and a bull that Fox thought was just awful. The house stank of her cigarette smoke. She moved them into her parents’ old room and ordered a new bed on credit. One evening he came home from work to find the Packard gone. In its place was a two-year-old Ford and a bill for $900. When the baby came, she fed it from bottles and the house acquired an additional smell of curdled milk and over-filled diaper pails, a combination of bleach and shit.

Grammy Renders had said he’d have no issue. So she’d been wrong. And that meant she could be wrong about Sharon, too. It made him determined to win her love. He brought her bouquets of flowers, let her pick out a new sofa, took her to Coos Bay to the Thunderbird Lodge for a steak dinner, even though the baby cried the whole time, all the way there and back.

She named the boy Grant. He had blond curls and blue eyes, and at first she wouldn’t let Fox touch the child. But a year later she was going out at night, to bars where she sat and smoked in a circle of strange men, and he was home with Grant. Again and again he found her there, little Grant hoisted on one hip, fretting tiredly as he tried to fetch her home, ignoring the men who smirked at him.

“Run along, Fox,” she would say, waving dismissal with the backs of her fingers.

And he would go.

He waited up one night for her, wanting the warmth of her body, but when she finally stumbled in sometime after two, almost colliding with the crib, she pushed away his hand. “I’ve already done all of that I want to tonight.”

He wished he cared more than he did.

Eventually they fought one too many times and she said it. “He’s not even yours.” She pointed at Grant. She was laughing, her face mean. “I only picked you because you had better prospects than any of the others.”

Fox looked at Grant, wearing the little sunsuit he’d dressed the boy in, and felt nothing but relief. All the love he’d tried to show the boy, the songs in the night and the baby swing he’d rigged in the tree outside: they couldn’t make up for the holes in this cardboard family.

Two days later she was gone, along with the child and everything in the savings account. A year passed without word. He was still making payments on the things she’d charged when he was mailed a divorce petition from a law firm in Portland. “Desertion” was listed next to her name, so she at least was taking the blame. He signed it and mailed it back, wondering idly if Grant would have a new daddy now.

On his twenty-fifth birthday Fox drove all the way to Coos Bay, twenty-six miles, to walk along the beach and smell the ocean and listen to gulls cry. He brought his own cake with him and watched Verne’s kids smear frosting all over their clothes. He slept on Verne’s couch and drove home the next day. It was a green drive, with stands of forest and marshy sloughs, and he enjoyed it, but he was glad to be going back to Myrtle Point. He didn’t have much of a life there, but it was his, and he had settled into it. He spent every waking moment of his days at the bakery, owned the place now, lived alone in the house and filled his empty hours helping out at the library.

There were bright moments in the years that followed. He was invited to join the Rotary. He sponsored a Little League team. Vicky married a millworker named Tommy who sometimes took Fox fishing. They had two red-headed girls who would race into the bakery, screaming “Uncle Fox!” as he held up their sugar cookies.

Along with them, one day, came Vicky’s friend Patricia, there to help with the children.

He had known her forever.

Back in the days of his childhood, before Grammy Renders, she had been there, playing house, when he was the daddy to Loralee’s mommy and Verne and Warren descended upon them whooping and wearing slashes of lipstick across their cheeks. Patricia, an only child, loved coming over to play with Vicky, but she didn’t follow anyone’s orders. She insisted on devising her own roles. She was the brave little girl that fought back, the ones the Indians had to kill before they could kidnap little Vicky. As a reward, she got a dramatic death scene, which got longer every time they played.

He'd known her in school, seen her chasing around on the playground, danced with her once or twice in the auditorium after football games.

Patricia was thicker in the waist now, still unmarried even in her late twenties, but she had a cheerful look about her, tying colorful scarves around her throat, pinning her hair up with bright clips, little bows or flowers on her dresses.

He sometimes spotted her wandering through the stacks in the one-room library where he volunteered in the evenings. She began to volunteer too.

One afternoon, Loralee, looking like a hillbilly in an old pair of men’s overalls, actually came into town and had lunch at the bakery with Vicky and Patricia and the little girls. She lingered after the other women had left, eying Fox. “Patty sure has a crush on you.”

He boxed up the day-old doughnuts for Loralee. “Back in high school, maybe,” remembering Patricia hanging around the coatroom, and once he’d found a Valentine tucked into his jacket pocket, something silly with cartoons. “Huh,” he said. Patricia was still hanging around, just like way back then, only he hadn’t really noticed.

Loralee smirked at him. “You could do a lot worse. You are doing worse.”

Fox handed his sister the bakery box. “The pot is calling the kettle black. You live alone too.”

Her smile went mysterious. “I have my callers.”

He sneered. “If you like’em twelve.” But he closed up to drive her home in the rain.

They pulled up in the yard of the ramshackle house. She put her hand on the door and spoke quietly. “It’s not the same. The boys, the nephews and cousins, and even some girls too. When they come to see me, they don’t walk away with bad news. I wouldn’t do that to them.”

Fox rolled down his car window and wiped away the condensation. “Well, there’s that,” he gave her. “Too late for the rest of us, but there is that.”

Loralee gave him a look. “Did Grammy Renders tell you how far she saw into your future?”

He rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it enough that I’m The One?”

Loralee burst out laughing. “The one? Fox, every single boy that came into that house was The One, according to her.” She studied his face, sobering. “All this time, you believed that?”

He drove home in shock. What did he actually believe? He’d never told anyone about the day he’d drunk tea with Grammy Renders, when she’d told him he’d never be lucky in love.

Myrtle Point didn’t get much snow in winter, just rain and more rain. On a wet Thursday the bakery door jingled and Patricia came in drenched from a downpour. It was early December. She put a flyer on the counter, her gloved hand damp. It showed a winter scene, dancers with fur-trimmed dresses and snowflakes. She looked scared and defiant all at once. “Not once have I been to the winter dance, Fox Ramsey. I’d like to go. Won’t you ask me?”

He glanced up from the flyer and into her eyes. They were shiny with hope, with daring. He searched through all of his feelings. Your third will leave you bereft. He could still hear Grammy Renders’ voice, but Patricia’s pleasant face, her full cheeks and pretty mouth, stirred nothing in him.

It wouldn’t be love then. Just friendship. It would save him from being emptied any further.

He took her to the dance. A lot of his former classmates were there, older now like he was, but settled and happy, dressed up for the evening in suits and nice dresses. They greeted him warmly, looked from him to Patricia with calculation, made too many jokes. He fetched her punch and tried not to step on her toes. She wore white gloves and had bought him a little boutonnière, a red carnation. He’d forgotten to get her a corsage.

At the end of the evening, when Fox drove her back to her parents’ house, he parked in the driveway like a teenager and turned to her. She would expect to be kissed. It might make up for the corsage.

Patricia sat frozen in the front passenger seat, her hands clutching her little red purse.

“Are you all right?” He got the feeling that she was afraid of him, after a whole evening together.

She pulled in a fast little breath, glanced at him quickly, and looked away again. “It’s just that . . . I’ve never been kissed before.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t entirely surprised, and a little rush of pity filled him. “Well, would you like to be kissed now?”

She squeezed her eyes tight shut. “Fox Ramsey, I’ve been waiting for you to kiss me since I was eight years old. I never wanted anyone else.”

He felt himself flooded with embarrassment and overcame an urge to fling open the car door and run. He’d known she liked him. Fox let his thoughts clear while rain pounded the windshield of the Ford. In the dim light from the porch, he studied the woman beside him, her bare shoulders looking vulnerable, and decided that it wouldn’t be so bad, kissing her.

Patricia seized onto him with the back of her hand while they kissed until he felt like he was drowning in her and he had to wrench his head away.

She opened her eyes and grinned. “Now that was something.” It sounded a little forced. He walked her to the door and drove home filled with foreboding.

She came into the bakery the next day and placed a folded piece of stationery on the counter, fleeing before he could read it. Feeling like he was back in seventh grade, Fox unfolded the note and read, “Would you please be my boyfriend?”

He wasn’t surprised. Fox let it happen though he knew it wasn’t love. Still, he wouldn’t be to Patricia the way Sharon had been to him. It wouldn’t be all from just one direction. He would treat her nicely even if he couldn’t love her.

He took her out to the A&W for root beer floats or let her make him dinner, eating with her parents. They went to movies and then back to his house, and in the bed Sharon had bought, he taught her the sex he had hoped to have with Sharon, and she learned for them both the version she liked better, where they went slow and gentle at first, building up to a lot of enthusiasm at the end.

“Will you marry me?” she asked him after a month together.

Why not, he thought. There would be no one better, and he liked her. They were friends. Sleeping together was nice. It would be enough, and more than he’d expected.

He and Patricia – Trish now – had a church wedding with everyone in his family showing up. She wore white and he wore a suit, and they went off on a honeymoon to the redwoods by the ocean in Crescent City, staying a week in a little cabin among trees taller than anything he had ever imagined. They walked forest paths and held hands, standing on a footbridge over a rushing blue-white river. All of it surrounded him like a vague dream. He couldn’t touch it, bring it close.

When they returned home, they took up a life together. They kept house, made love several nights a week, ate together at the dining table, and went for a drive on weekends. She got a little heavier and he got a dog, a springer spaniel he named Freckles. He whistled old tunes when he walked the dog, who ran through the underbrush, nose to the ground, searching for something to chase.

He wanted it to be enough.

It was not enough.

Bereft, Grammy Renders had foretold, and he wondered why his life should be so empty, why he should feel nothing for this good woman.

They sat across from each other at the breakfast table two years into their marriage. Fox was reading the baseball scores and the fishing report when he heard a sob. He put down his paper.

Tears were running from Trish’s eyes. She was staring at him with a look of desolation. “Why don’t you love me?”

He was astonished that she knew. He didn’t cheat on her. He always kissed her on the cheek when he left for the bakery in the morning, even though she was asleep and couldn’t feel it. He liked her. He was used to her.

“I keep a good house, don’t I?” Trish looked around at the shining floors, the new paint on the kitchen cupboards. “I try to be interesting to you. I put on make-up every day, and I’m clean, and I keep the bakery accounts – right to the cent.”

That was all true.

“We both like the same radio programs, don’t we? And Fox, I would never, ever step out on you. You know that.” The whole while she talked, tears continued to run down Trish’s face.

He hated seeing her this way, and reaching across the table, caught her fingers in his. The action knocked over the sugar bowl. He gasped at the spill of sugar on the table, the crystals like tiny stars in constellations over the dark stained wood, and pulling his hand away, buried his face in his palms.

He could see it, the oak table in Grammy Renders’ house, the tea tray, the cups.

In a worried whisper, Trish asked, “Fox, what is it?”

It came out in a creaking confession, his voice heavy and slow. “When I was twelve years old, I was sent to meet with my grandmother. You probably heard of Grammy Renders.” He swallowed, turning his eyes from the sunshine at the window. “She was a wise woman, or that was how all the family treated her. All the boys were sent to have their fortunes told.” He pulled in a ragged breath, ready now to say the prophecy he’d never repeated, not once, to anyone. “She told me I would be unlucky in love. She told me I would lose three times: once deserted, twice neglected, the third time bereft.”

Trish was nodding now, but her eyes had gone cold. “And let me guess. I’m the one who’s bereft.”

They didn’t talk about it. There had been a pregnancy once, a year ago, but it had ended in a miscarriage, and after a few joyful weeks of planning, things between them had become sadder and emptier than ever.

Without another word, Trish got up from the table and cleared away the dishes. When Fox arrived home from work that night, he saw that she had gotten out all the Ramsey family photographs. They were spread all over the coffee table, along with two empty coffee cups.

“Who was here?” he asked her, a little afraid of her answer. He settled on the sofa.

“Just Vicky.” Trish had her back to him, putting the coffee things away. But when she started to tidy up the photos, he stopped her and pulled her down to sit beside him. His fingers had found a photo of Warren in his Navy dress whites, eyes retouched a brighter blue, cheeks red as apples. “When Grammy Renders told him he would die young, he was just thirteen years old.” He tossed down the photo. “He was dead six years later.” He found himself laughing in disbelief. “And Loralee has just taken over her role. That’s why she meets with those little boys now. They still come out to see her, even after all this time.”

Dismay twisted Trish’s mouth. “But she doesn’t know what your grandma told you, does she?” She looked at him intently. “Go out and see her. Ask her for your fortune.”

“It won’t do any good,” Fox protested.

“Yes it will.” Trish swept the old loose photos into the basket where they were kept. “Talk to her.”

Fox sighed and gave in – why not? – and the next day he drove down the old back road to the house where Loralee lived.

She met him on the porch and they settled side by the side on the steps. She was just in her thirties but looked older, her short hair gone grayer than it had any right to be, her body shapeless in the overalls. Her hand found his and she met his eyes. “What’s troubling you, little brother?”

He’d planned out a speech, but the careful words wouldn’t come out. “I wish to God our mother had never sent me here,” he blurted. “All my life I’ve been carrying it around: unlucky at love.” He squared his shoulders and said it. “Grammy Renders told me I would lose the women I loved three times. The first one would desert me, the second neglect me, and the third woman I loved would leave me bereft.”

Loralee’s mouth fell open. “Are you saying . . . .” She blinked rapidly, putting her fingers to her lips. A long, quiet, sun-warmed moment passed. Then she put an arm around his shoulder. “Fox, you’ve gotten it all wrong. Yes, you were deserted. By me, your sister. I deserted you when I left our family and came out here. Did it break your heart a little?”

He couldn’t even answer, overcome with the memory of the ache that had filled him when his sister Loralee had left his family and their house and especially him behind. An ache that even now had not entirely left him.

But she was hurrying on. “And yes, you were neglected. By our mother. She was fragile and distracted even before Daddy died. And afterwards, you know she just fell apart. There was no one raising you and Vicky. You had to raise yourselves.”

His shoulders were shaking now, his eyes blurring.

It was true. And it had never been said aloud.

“And bereft? Was that the word?” You loved that girl Gloria. She left you bereft, running off with Cousin Rich and getting herself killed. You walked around like a ghost for months.”

“But,” he managed. “But what about . . . what about Sharon?”

Loralee scrunched up her face in disbelief. “Sharon? You never loved her. Tell me you did, I won’t believe you. She trapped you and used you and we all know you were well shut of her.” She laughed a little. “Sharon doesn’t even count. She would have been number four. Grammy never saw her coming. She only ever counted to three with anything.”

She held up three fingers. Beyond them was blue, empty sky like an unpainted canvas.

When Fox got home that evening, he found Trish waiting for him, sitting in the living room, pretending to read a book. Her craned her neck, watching him with bright eyes, words rushing out as soon as he stepped in the door. “Did you go see your sister?”

He strode fast to sit next to her and took her by the shoulders, gazing into her face, his Trish, sweet and good and hopeful. He felt like a fool. Looking around at the warm room and then back at his wife, he had no words to explain. So he answered by kissing her. For the very first time, he kissed her the way she deserved to be kissed.

When he finished, she was speechless. But her eyes told him everything.

He had already lost three times. All that he had feared was gone from him, shed like an old pair of shoes grown too tight, and he threw himself into love with everything his heart had held back.