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beauty, a condition of existence for the people around her to deal with while Lola sailed off carefree toward a blue horizon. But did that need to include having a loud sobbing childhood fight with Lily, wholly your own fault, yet both of you get smacked equally? Lola, barely more than a teenager herself, saying, I’ll give you something to cry about.
    Lola’s only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever . So, in the future, if somebody came to Luce wanting to know what to carve on Lola’s tombstone, those four words would be it.
    LUCE’S THREE-YEAR anniversary at the Lodge was coming up in the fall, and all that time, she had hardly missed any of the modern world. It pressed so hard against you, like somebody standing in front of you screaming and jumping up and down to misdirect your thoughts. Let it all go and it fades away, similar to when you ignore run-of-the-mill ghosts. All they become is an updraft feeling. Nothing urgent. Just smoke as it begins to draw up a cold flue.
    What good does the world do you? That was the question Luce had asked herself for three years, and the answer she had arrived at was simple. A distressingly large portion of the world doesn’t do you any good whatsoever. In fact, it does you bad. Casts static between your ears, drowns out who you truly are. So she tried to cull daily reality pretty harsh, retaining just landscape and weather and animals and the late-night radio.
    Luce was fairly sure about all that, but she wasn’t a preacher. Pushing her ideas onto the children held no appeal. Early days, she did try to talk with them, though. Just doing her job as caretaker, asking pertinent questions about their favorite things. She got no answers and realized that they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, but unlike the deaf woman in town, who made every possible effort of gesture and facial expression to bridge the gap, the children wouldn’t hardly look your way. When Luce tried getting them to speak by pointing and saying the names of things that fell to hand—water, door, hen, beech tree, moon—they looked at her finger. Or if not that, then they looked impatiently into the distance like she was the crazy one. Sometimes she got the feeling they knew more than they let on, and other times she doubted she would ever be able to reason with them.
    Luce’s first impulse was to be grateful and keep her own mouth shut. Continue running the Lodge like a monastery under a vow of silence. She was used to quiet. But that resolution lasted only a couple of days, and then there was a second dead rooster, and Luce figured that even if she wasn’t a preacher, she’d better try to be a teacher.
    Maybe these city kids had never seen live chickens before. Didn’t realize the direct relationship between the living birds and a fried drumstick or two ecstatic bites of deviled egg, rich with mayonnaise and pickle relish and paprika, which they hoovered up like they’d never had it before, which maybe they hadn’t. Luce had learned by observation that the children liked to eat, and they didn’t seem to discriminate too much. They liked fragrant cabbage, boiled grey as wet newspapers. Thick slabs of fried bologna cut from a long red stalk down at the little country store. Kohlrabi doused with vinegar so pungent it would bring tears to your eyes. Stewed tomatoes and okra, stringing slime behind when you spooned it out of the pot. Or if Luce didn’t feel the least bit like fooling with cookery, sliced tomatoes on light bread with a thick smear of Duke’s. Whatever you set in front of the children, they’d put their heads down and eat with the air of hungry bird dogs.
    So, on a hazy late-July morning, Luce took them out to search the henhouse for eggs, the first lesson of the week, devoted to how we get our food. The wonder of a perfect fresh shit-smeared egg was not lost on Luce, and she aimed to share it. Even before they stepped through the door, she filled the air with words