10
At home that night I made tea, turned on a lamp in the parlor, drifted around trying to think up an appetite. The house still needed furniture. I had been filling it slowly, piece by piece, but it had been a year already since I bought it and it still felt bare in places. I wondered where my grandmother’s furniture had gone. My family seemed so small sometimes, a scrap, my mother and me only tenuously connected to the aunts and uncles and cousins who had spread out across the sandy flats of the Gulf Coast, up through the Midwest, and into the mountainous silences of the Dakotas and Montana and Idaho. A family that had landed in this country from its various old-world disasters and had been maintaining its moody quiet ever since. New calamities were consigned to silence as quickly as th
