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took a deep breath and decided to plunge right in. He sat on the couch beside his aunt and patted her leg. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I figured it all out tonight.” He looked from one woman to the other. “I’m quitting school.”
    Ruby had always prided herself on knowing Cyrus’s mind. Not that he’d ever been talkative. When he first came to live with them, he didn’t say a word for almost three months, his jaws clenched so tightly she could hear him grinding his teeth at night. And even now, years later, she had to coax from him the tiniest details of his school day. So it wasn’t his words that had helped her to understand, but his face. He had always seemed to her a still pool, with everything visible. This announcement, however, had caught her completely by surprise.
    “That’s impossible,” she said. “Quit? It’s only three months to graduation. That makes no sense at all.”
    “But it does, don’t you see? I don’t need school.”
    Ruby looked to Isabel for help, and Izzy shook her licorice at him and said, “Look, weirdo, even if you were thinking of working the farm here, Gerry was saying just the other day how with the new machinery and the pricing and the futures market, you’re gonna need a college education just to grow soybeans. It’s the way of the world.”
    Cyrus looked at her as though she had started speaking in tongues. “Farming? What are you talking about? Doesn’t anyone here know anything about me?”
    At that point, Clarence came downstairs in his striped flannel pyjamas and housecoat, his hair tousled. Calm as a sleepwalker, he sat in his favourite armchair and said, “Maybe you need to tell us, boy. Maybe when you spit it out we’ll all know more about you.”
    Cyrus had hoped to avoid a scene like this. He looked to Izzy for help. All his life she’d been his ally. She’d taught him to sing rounds when they did the dishes. She’d taught him to dance and, a few years ago out in the orchard, had told him what girls liked and didn’t like. But this was one time when she was no use to him, her expression a mix of pity and rebuke, as though he’d been caught stealing.
    Taking a deep breath, he looked Clarence in the eye and said, “I was telling Ruby that, you know, I think it’s time I quit school.”
    Clarence nodded. “I thought that’s what I heard you say. Only I couldn’t believe my ears. It sounded too much like craziness, and you never struck me as crazy.”
    “Well, that’s the thing, I’m not crazy. The way I look at it, in terms of my life, you know, it makes perfect sense.”
    “Your life. Goddammit, Cyrus, you’d be throwing away your life. Can’t you see that? Get your head out of the clouds and look around.”
    Ruby gave her husband a warning look. “What your uncle is trying to say, sweetheart, is that it doesn’t make sense to us that you’d throw away all your hard work when it’s just a matter of a few more months. Then with the summer off, maybe things will seem a little clearer.”
    “Everything is perfectly clear right now,” Cyrus said, his voice taking on an edge of irritation. “I know exactly what I want to do, so I might as well get started.”
    Clarence closed his eyes and let his chin rest on his breastbone as though he were fast asleep again. He wondered, not for the first time, why raising kids was so much harder than farming. Thirty years he’d wrestled with the Fates—floods and droughts, good markets and bad. He’d learned that each new season brought a fresh chance. With Cyrus, though, he just couldn’t separate one year from the next, one incident from another. Every victory came tangled in a mess of defeats, every bit of bad news came trailing a long history of grief and disappointment.
    “Get started on what,” he said at last, “a life as a high school dropout? Because let me tell you one thing, young man, there are times when it’s not about what you want, or your life, or any such thing. It’s