Her first draft started with the words “My hypothesis was.” I said, “Honey, start with the baby,” and she tore the card in half and started again.
Ivan got home at one in the morning, and I heard the truck in the yard and the long water noise of the kitchen tap. He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.
“I called my sister from the yard,” he said. “I told her you and I would be at the annex at nine, and that she ought to be there.”
“What did she say?”
“That somebody should check that child’s work. Then she hung up.” He let out a breath. “I’m sorry, Jan. That’s my family.”
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“It’s not yours to be sorry for. You were in Nevada.”
He lay down and slept in his clothes.
The morning came up a hard, clean blue, the way October does in our valley, and the cottonwoods along the canal were the color of canned corn. Emmy wore her gray church cardigan. She carried four jars in a milk crate and a map in a cardboard tube, with her index card in her pocket and her notebook under her arm.
On the highway she said, “Mom, what if I forget it all?”
“Then you tell them what you did,” I said. “In the order you did it. They can’t argue with the order.”
She nodded. After a minute she said, “I wasn’t trying to catch anybody. I just wanted to know.”
“I know you did.”
“Aunt Rhonda’s going to be there.”
“Yes.”
“Is she going to say I cheated?”
I kept my eyes on the road. A grain truck pulled out ahead of us and I dropped back to give it room. “She might,” I said. “And if she does, you will answer it with the same voice you used on the porches. Polite. Plain. You don’t have to win. You only have to be exactly who you are.”
The county annex is a flat-roofed building behind the courthouse with a flagpole out front. The board meets in a room with long windows, a ceiling of acoustic tile, six microphones that mostly do not work, and an aerial photograph of the valley on the wall, taken in about 1974.
By five minutes to nine it was nearly full. There were two dairymen in clean shirts, a woman from the health district with a lanyard, and Glenn Dunning in his canvas jacket against the side wall. Wilbur Greeley had come on his cane and sat in the front row with his hat on his knee.
Evan and Alexis Stroud came in last, with Hazel in the carrier, and Alexis found my eye and gave a very small nod.
And in the back row, with her purse on her lap and her clipboard at her feet, sat Rhonda Brewer with her arms folded.
Mr. Everly had come too. He sat two chairs from her. When I looked back, he looked at his shoes.
Ivan came in five minutes late with his cap in his hands and sat in the very back, one seat from his sister. He did not look at her. He did not say a word. He folded his big hands between his knees and looked at the floor, and it was the loudest thing in the room.