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you hear,” Frank says testily. “And what’s that bunk about a smaller gym? What’s the kid’s last name? Who’s his father?”
    “Laurence,” I say.
    “Sounds Catholic,” Frank says, and I say, “Oh, come on, Frank.”
    He stews all afternoon, doesn’t even get cheered up when we sit on the porch and watch the swings swirl and the roller coasters pitch.
    “Chris can’t see that,” Frank says suddenly, later, lying in bed, long after I think he has fallen asleep.
    “He won’t,” I say. “And besides, he wouldn’t care.”
    “He deserves better,” Frank says, sounding kind of choked up.
    “For chrissakes, Frank, it’s a dumb article, not his tombstone.”
    Then I can hear Frank crying. “Tombstone” was not the right choice of words. I used to wish all the time my husband would be more sensitive. The one time I tried to bring flowers from the fields into the farmhouse, shortly after we’d married, he yelled at me for bringing wild carrot under his roof, as if the limp white blooms were going to turn into vines and choke him in the middle of the night. To be fair, they did wreak havoc on the soybeans.
    “In some places it’s called Queen Anne’s lace,” I’d shouted back once he’d slammed the door, and cried into the strawberry jam I was making.
    Things like that. But about five years ago, Frank started tearing up a couple times a day. Just a thin streak leaking from his eyes, soundless. It took me a while to catch on to what it really was. At first, I worried he had an eye infection, but he got so gruff and defensive when I asked that I put two and two together. He would cry at the most obvious, embarrassing stuff on TV: sappy airline commercials where families get reunited, or after the Hoosiers lost a ball game.
    The crying at night is a new development, since we moved here. I’m worried about him. I’d like to bring it up with Beth, but it’s hard to get a second alone with her and I don’t want to embarrass Frank. So I just pretend I don’t hear him. Our first night at the Village, when I put an arm on his shoulder in the dark and asked him about it, he jerked away. The next morning he wouldn’t look at me, like nights in bed years earlier when he’d been a little rough. I’d always liked those nights, and I’d like his new, crying self, if he’d just let me share it a little with him. Sixty-one years of marriage: What’s there to be private about?
    *  *  *
    The next morning, after breakfast, Frank begins writing a letter to the editor. I’ve never seen him work on something so hard, not even when he had to give a county commissioner campaign speech. Meaning I have to sit alone, outside, on the best day of the fair. It’s the last day, when the kids are awarded 4-H prizes, just like ours were, just like we were. I call to Frank when the kids start spilling out, clutching blue and red ribbons, and he glances up but stays inside, pecking at those keys. So I reminisce by myself, remembering Beth and her turkeys, Chris and his calves, the awful day when Chris’s calf died the day of the fair, how I always suspected Beth of poisoning it with stuff we kept in the barn for rats, but I never said a thing. I picture the little pond we built for the kids to swim in, in the summer, in front of the barn; the neat rows of tomatoes I tended; my favorite spot to sit on the porch, where it was always shady.
    But thinking back on the farm is a mistake, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do when we moved out here. The first meal we ate at the Village, when we were just visiting the place with Beth, all the talk was farm talk. How the crops were doing, corn prices, pesticides. To hear it, you’d think that all the men were taking a lunch break from field work, and that as soon as they emptied their plates they would be back up on their combines, the women in the kitchen, keeping an eye on a mean thundercloud, hedging bets on how long there was before we needed to grab the laundry