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Magazines buy half a year ahead, Julia, so the calls for winter pictures come in the summer.” Dad remarked on some items in the evening paper. “Professor Jams is certainly staying active in his retirement. I see where he’s giving one of his occult lectures at the University Women’s Club.” Bobby wanted to know if he could get a new grass-catcher for the lawn mower.
    I contributed the story of Trickle’s strange performance.
    “I’ve never heard him growl before,” I said. “I wonder if he’s feeling bad or something.”
    “Maybe he’s been eating grass,” Bobby suggested. “That makes dogs sick.”
    “No, it doesn’t,” I told him. “Dogs eat grass because they’re sick. It makes them better.”
    Julia didn’t often enter the conversation, but she listened. Her eyes went from one of us to another, studying our faces as she took in our words.
    It wasn’t until Peter dropped his fork that she spoke up abruptly.
    “Somebody’s coming.”
    “What?” Peter said, startled.
    “Oh—nothing.” Julia looked embarrassed. “It’s Just something the hill people say. A pussy superstition.”
    “How interesting!” Mother exclaimed. “I imagine you heard about all sorts of fascinating superstitions, living in that area of the Ozarks. Or were you there long enough to be exposed to them?”
    “I heard them from my folks,” Julia said. “They talked about them a lot. My father wanted atmosphere in his book. That’s why they hired Sarah from the village. They used her to learn how the jakey folks talked.”
    “You make it sound like a foreign country,” Peter said, interested despite himself.
    “It was,” Julia said. “Anyway, the parts where we were seemed that way. It’s like nothing there has changed in a thousand years. People get born there and live their whole lives there just like their foreparents. Their idea of a trip to the big city is going into Pine Crest on Saturdays. You try to tell them there’s a whole big world on the other side of the mountains, and they look at you like you’re crazy.”
    “Your father must have liked it there,” Dad inserted gently. “After all, he chose to live there.”
    “But not forever,” Julia said. “Just long enough to write his book. He’d have been done with it by summer. We were coming back then—this very summer, along about August—”
    She let the sentence fall away, too painful to continue. We all shifted uncomfortably in a sudden search for a new direction in which to turn the conversation.
    I grabbed at an old, reliable subject.
    “What did you do on dates? Were there movies or bowling alleys or anything?”
    “Nothing,” Julia said. “Folks just sat and talked. That was courting. And if a girl wasn’t married by eighteen she was an old maid for sure. Sarah was twenty-two, and you should of heard the things people’d say about her—that she was stuck-up and thought she was too good for any local fellows and waiting for a prince to come riding in and carry her off somewhere. After she came to work for us they wouldn’t hardly talk to her. Not that she cared, of course.”
    “Did you have a backwoods boyfriend?” Peter asked her. It was such an unbelievable question to come from. Peter that we all turned to him in amazement. He avoided our eyes, keeping his trained on Julia.
    “No. Not really.”
    “Not really? Or not any?”
    “The boys there weren’t my type,” Julia said. “When I pick somebody he’ll be ambitious. A college man, maybe.”
    She raised her eyes to meet his, and a deep flush began to rise in Peter’s face. He dropped his own gaze to his plate and began fumbling around trying to put butter on a slice of bread he had already buttered.
    “Can I have some more potatoes?” Bobby asked.
    “How did the car run while we were away?” Dad asked Peter. “Were you still getting that chirping sound in the engine?”
    The conversation was channeled off into other directions, and Julia slipped from it as easily as