GLASS BOX, 1956 by Tracy Winn

In her own house, Delia was accomplished, slapdash, unflappable, stylish. She was queen of her kitchen – could cook like no one’s business. These people didn’t know. She reached for the aunties’ paprika and got the feeling she was inside one of those mechanical scenes in a dusty glass box; each woman a gear that did its part, arms stirring, waists bending, opening the oven, closing the oven: “Working in the Kitchen” the typed label would read. The aunts’ kitchen had nothing in it that hadn’t been there for centuries, except for an electric wall clock that hummed, and a radio that wasn’t ever turned on. When Delia married Charlie Burroughs, she’d had no inkling that this sort of day would have any place in her life.
Bess and Gwen Lathrop, Charlie’s utterly threadbare relations, lived in a New England farmhouse with a few old apple trees and an outbuilding, surrounded by sorry suburban developments. Their father had sold out to the developers before he died. Fixing Sunday dinner, they insisted on aprons over their church clothes. Gwen, always the frail and frilly one, had ruffles at her shoulders. The milky edges to her irises made it hard for Delia to look her in the eye. Bess had a curvature or something, so when she walked, her rib cage jerked out on the side opposite whichever leg stepped forward. They were both terribly skinny and quick and smelled of sickly sweet powder.
“Delia, is Franklin doing something he shouldn’t?” Bess asked.
In the pantry, Franklin, who was just a little more than a year old, squatted on his chubby legs, balancing on his white shoes, and peered into the dark of a bag of potatoes as if it were a cave.
“He’s fine.”
Gwen pulled the cabinet drawers out of the built-in to make them like stairsteps.
Delia said, “I can reach. What do you want?”
Gwen marched up the drawers. “No need, dear. It must be lovely to be tall, but we have our ways.”
Whenever Charlie’s chronic sense of duty brought him here, dragging Delia with him, he would set himself some impossible task to make a contribution to the meal. Today he was firing up the old wood-burning cookstove in the outbuilding to make popovers, his latest specialty. Wearing his narrow-lapeled tweeds and a new tie from Brooks Brothers, he’d gone off with his supplies in a basket.
Delia imagined him in the dark old outbuilding folding his jacket and rolling his starched shirtsleeves up. He always wore a jacket and tie, it was a given, as much as the old-fashioned code he lived by. He’d push the tail of his tie into his shirt to keep it out of the way while he checked his fire. The flames would light up the clean lines of his face, his square brow, and close-cropped hair. (He went to the barber every Saturday.) He’d break the eggs for the popovers one-handed, whap, on the edge of the bowl. He wouldn’t raise clouds when he whisked in the flour. She knew his routines. Charlie lived the script his parents handed him at birth. He was the second son and according to family patterns, a doctor. It was no surprise that he’d married her – an attractive society girl. From his first sight of her, which he counted as the most important turn in his life, he’d had eyes only for her. Eyes, and heart and mind, too. Charlie was a brick. Which made him mysterious to her. When she couldn’t control her temper, he kept his head. When steadiness was what she needed, he lent his. He was truly the best part of her. But today, he’d said, “I’d only be in the way if I tried to bake in the kitchen,” and left her with these women.
She heard the sack of potatoes rustling on the pantry floor. Franklin had found the only dirt in the house. She went to wipe his hands on her dress, but then thought better of it. The aunts would want his hands washed. Putting him on her hip, she started for the sink, but he’d learned to use his heavy head to unbalance her. His head was really too big, she was afraid, even for a toddler. He swung from side to side and made his little legs go like pistons so she had to put him down. He waddled right back to the potatoes.
Delia sat down at the kitchen table and watched him getting up his nerve to reach into the bag again. Bess pushed in the drawers. Gwen cleared a place for the platter. The aunts could make her feel so unfit. She’d like to turn their silent box of a radio on, and horrify them by teaching Gwen the Lindy Hop. At home she didn’t wear clothes when she didn’t feel like it, served dinner at midnight if that’s what she wanted, and didn’t give a hoot what anyone thought about her putting chocolates she’d bitten into back in the box. But here: well, when she and Charlie pulled up, the aunts were out Hoovering the stone walk as far as the cord would reach.
She sat, looking out the window, feeling just hopelessly out of place. The arborvitae hedge had been recently pruned to the quick. “Aunt Bess, did you ever call Wetherbee? Remember that yard man I told you about?” One way she’d learned to endear herself was to recommend people who could help. “He’s awfully good at the heavy stuff.”
Bess said, “Did we get in touch with Wetherbee. Lord, yes.”
Gwen let go her hilarious laugh. It went up the scale like a bottle filling up. “He’s in the living room.”
Delia pressed her lips between her teeth.
“We couldn’t do without him for a minute,” Gwen said alarmingly, handing Bess the platter. “He’s become like family.”
Bess placed the deviled eggs in rows. Gwen placed the parsley garnishes. Their practiced hands wove in and out. Bess said, “He’s such a find.”
Delia had fired Wetherbee, her second gardener in as many years. And then, feeling guilty, had recommended him to the aunts. She pitched her voice low and sure. “What’s he doing in the living room?”
“He usually reads the paper. He’s come for dinner every Sunday since he started. Comes early.” Gwen smiled and her cheeks folded like sashed drapes. “Gives us someone to cook for.”
Franklin was pulling the potatoes one by one onto the floor. Delia said, “Franklin.” Augustus Wetherbee was going to sit for Sunday dinner with them. “Come here to Mummy.”
Franklin toddled toward her as fast as he could go, swerving – she never could predict what he’d do – down the hall with the crooked pressed-tin ceiling, and into the little living room.
Wetherbee lounged with the newspaper in the wing chair by the fireplace. He was a big man, imposing really, but he looked perfectly at home, dwarfing the furniture and making the aunties’ teacup look like a dolly’s. (He drank coffee all day, Delia remembered, sometimes two mugs going at once, one in the garden shed, one balanced on the sundial in the dahlia bed.) As Franklin careened past him, his shorts sagging with the weight of his diaper, Wetherbee peered over the top of the newspaper: God looking down through the clouds. He had old scars like a fighter, and a nose that had been broken once. His eyes followed the little boy out into the hall. When he saw Delia, he stood. Wetherbee always wore work clothes, but for Sunday dinner with the Misses Lathrop, apparently, he wore clean ones. His shaggy head almost brushed the ceiling. His blue eyes crinkled with . . . what?
“Mrs. Burroughs.” He nodded and smoothed his big hand back through salty hair.
“Wetherbee,” she said, as if naming him would make him go away. She made herself look him in the eye. “Excuse me.” Going after Franklin, feeling toppled as if by a wave, she passed quickly through the other door.
She imagined him sitting back and breathing through his nostrils with satisfaction. He would have known, of course he would have known, that they were coming for dinner.

Charlie obliged the aunts by taking the seat at the head of the table. He helped pass the game hens and scalloped potatoes, the deviled eggs, and turnips. But because he hadn’t timed the popovers quite right – they had to be eaten piping hot or they got soggy – he jumped up from the table, and with his napkin still tucked over his tie, he left again. Delia would just have to fend for herself. Wetherbee had put himself directly opposite her in the narrow dining room. She had the sensation that the whole room tilted toward him, lace-covered table, homely highboy, candles. She felt the pull of him like an undertow, and kept herself steady by looking at the lilac bush through the wavy glass of the old window – how its leaves, chalky with the lateness of the season, wobbled in the breeze.
Wetherbee was telling the aunts in his flat, country accent, “I’ve always worked with the land. I still remember the first time I helped with a calving on my uncle’s farm.” He leaned back in his spindly chair. “The first thing he does, my uncle, is he gives me a glove that stretches clear up to my shoulder.” He made a chopping gesture against his muscle where it strained the cotton of his shirt. The aunts stopped chewing. “If I remember right, Mrs. Burroughs, you have some slim black gloves that reach about yea high, but this glove wasn’t as fetching as those.”
The aunts seemed to have stopped breathing – perhaps rapt by the thought of Wetherbee reaching into a cow.
“Then my uncle hands me a chain, says he was only kidding about the glove, he’ll take care of that part if I’ll pull when he tells me.”
Gwen laughed her bottle laugh with such relief that she sounded like she might just overflow.
Bess grimaced at Delia. “Isn’t he awful?”
Delia took a black olive into her mouth and held it in her cheek. It gave her something to do with her face.
“So I took ahold of that chain, and he wrapped the other end around the calf’s feet.” His meaty hands wrapped a chain around the air in front of him like a conjurer. “You see, it was a breech birth, he was coming out ornery fashion, which Mrs. Burroughs knows all about. So I pulled with all my might.” He patted his solid middle. “I wasn’t full grown then. But that calf just popped out and slithered into a wriggling heap on the hay.”
Gwen said, “So everything turned out all right,” and smoothed her plaid skirt down. They’d taken their aprons off at the last possible minute.
Bess said, “I didn’t know Franklin was a breech baby.”
“He wasn’t.” Delia handed Franklin a drumstick. “I’m not just sure what Mr. Wetherbee meant.” She lifted her fork to her mouth. “This turnip is delicious.”
Bess said, “Rutabaga, dear.”
Charlie swooshed through the swinging door wearing oven mitts, bearing the cast iron pan of golden popovers. That morning she’d thought he looked handsome. He was built to make tweeds look fine. When he’d shaken hands with Wetherbee, his black eyes snapped, and she’d seen how strong his features were, carved chin, forceful brow. Now he seemed slight, dandyish, excessively proud of his popovers.
Bess oohed. Gwen hopped up for a knife.
Charlie said, “It must be very sharp, Aunt Gwen.”
Such a production.
When Charlie freed the popovers from the pan, Delia cut and buttered Franklin’s. He buried his face in it, getting his tongue into the buttery hollows.
Wetherbee opened a popover, prying with his thumbs, gently separating the steaming skin at the center. He said, “Thank you, Dr. Burroughs.” He buttered the halves, the silver butter knife ridiculous in his big calloused hand.
Charlie, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, said, “You’re welcome.” An awkward silence followed. The aunties had set an atrocious table runner down the middle, an ochre-orange Delia supposed they’d chosen to signify the fall season. The tablecloth was frail with washing, and the glaze on the old dinnerware had cracked into a pattern similar to the wrinkles on the old ladies’ faces. Delia wondered if, at times like these, when fulfilling what Charlie deemed his familial duty, he wished he could be somewhere else, reading one of those detective stories he loved, or playing the piano.
Wetherbee asked, “Is there batter left? Mrs. Burroughs will say she’s watching her wasp waist, but I could eat a couple more.”
Charlie stood and gathered the pan and mitts. “Aunties?”
The aunts said, Oh no, they couldn’t possibly.
Charlie looked at Franklin’s greasy face and said, “If that child will leave us some butter, I’ll bring a fresh round in a minute.”
Delia wiped Franklin’s face with her napkin. She glanced briefly at Wetherbee. Half of his popover sat untouched on his plate. Little spritzes and sizzles of the game he was pulling her into were making her feel she could have done with a nice cold martini. But the aunts were teetotalers. She tucked Franklin’s bib in better, and once Charlie had left, said, “Did Mr. Wetherbee ever tell you about when he worked on the pig farm in Nova Scotia?”
Wetherbee’s job had been to make sure the hogs mounted the sows successfully. He had once told her, “You know the tail? All the important parts of a pig, male or female,” – he’d drawn a curlycue, slowly, slowly, with his finger on the inside of her arm – “are shaped like the tail.” Delia remembered his calloused finger tracing circles, how it had unmoored her. Standing in the garden shed in the backyard, she had tried to seem unaffected by the currents he’d set eddying in her. He’d said, “There’s a reason they need full-time help.” He didn’t say that now.
“I worked up there in thirty-eight,” he said, finishing his popover. “The year of that big storm you had here.” He said, smooth as anything, “What was that one called?”
Gwen had her mouth full. Her eyes bugged with wanting to speak, to tell about the great storm.
Bess said, “Oh yes! That was the worst. Father was still with us then.” Her back straightened, excited. “A big old limb from the elm that used to grow out front came very near to flattening the porch.” She glowed like a schoolteacher. “First there was an ungodly cracking sound as if the sky itself had split, then that great limb fell straight down.” Her hand plummeted silently into her lap. “And missed the porch by mere inches.”
Gwen nodded emphatically. “Mere inches.”
Wetherbee appeared consumed with interest. His scars had fascinated her from the first, especially the way his nose angled down from the bridge, giving him a Mediterranean look. “And how did your neighbors fare?” He knew just what to ask.
Bess said, “No one had any serious trouble right around here, but the Oakleys’ first cousins from Westerly all floated away in their house.” She touched her napkin delicately to the corners of her mouth. “Sat down to Sunday dinner at their place on Napatree Point, just as we did here today, and that was the last anyone saw of them. Every last one washed out to sea.”
Gwen said, “In the newspaper photo of the house drifting away, we thought – when we got out the magnifying glass – that we saw their pale faces peering from the attic window.” She looked from Delia to Wetherbee. “Can you imagine?”
Delia said, as innocently as possible, “Was there some reason you had to be out of the country at that particular time, Mr. Wetherbee?” He’d once told her he’d been in a brawl, and a man had died. Wetherbee had been so drunk, he didn’t know whether he was responsible.
Watching her over the rim of his water glass, he took a long drink. Then he said, “Oh, it could have been any year.” He didn’t take his clear blue eyes off hers. “It was none too soon for me to get away.”
Delia said, “But wasn’t there some particular reason?”
“As these fine ladies know,” he picked up his fork. “I was in need of reform. A hotheaded young man.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” Delia said without inflection.
“He had to go away to learn temperance,” Gwen informed Delia.
“So, you changed your ways?” Delia realized she had never seen Wetherbee drink anything but coffee or water. They’d always met during the day when Charlie was at work – the aunts were right, there’d been no liquor.
“That was a long time ago,” Wetherbee said casually. “Ancient history.” He’d lifted her onto the guest bed, as if she weighed nothing. When he touched her, her body hummed, came singing up. He lifted her to the surface of herself – could make her feel inside out with wanting. Now, he pulled his chair closer to the table, closer to her, and asked, “Weren’t you in ankle socks in thirty-eight?”
She tried to sound breezy. “Now what would you know about the fashions of the times?”
Wetherbee said, “I rely on my ladies,” he gestured toward the aunts, “for that.” The aunts tittered. Bess adjusted her cardigan. Gwen smoothed her skirt. Delia used to feel so weak through the middle that her knees shook when he undid her buttons, and she had to lie down wherever they were – in the shade of the hemlocks at the back of the garden, or in the music room where, as he opened first one side of her blouse and then the other, the full morning sun fell hot on her bare skin.
Charlie came in, bringing more popovers.
Delia straightened up and said, “Why don’t you tell us something about your growing up, Mr. Wetherbee. Were you very active in your church youth group?” She smiled at him and said, “I was just an infant in thirty-eight,” giving special emphasis to the word infant. He turned his big head toward her, and it was as if her own center of gravity shifted. She knew, with her hand’s own memory, the thick saltiness of his hair, the heat of his soft ears. She imagined how she would hold his head to her breasts. She would follow the curves of his shoulders and back with her hands, like water over falls.
“Isn’t that about when you met Mr. Burroughs for the very first time?” he asked.
“Oh tell,” said Bess.
“Yes, do,” said Wetherbee.
Franklin started to fuss and wriggle down out of his chair. She stood to put his pacifier in his mouth. Her neck and then her cheeks flushed. She said, “We met at a party that the people in our set were throwing all the time, you know how it happens – a tennis, or a dance party.” This was a story she had no business telling.
“Which was it?” said Wetherbee. “We want to picture you.”
“Oh, well, then, picture us in white.” She smoothed Franklin’s hair off his forehead as if she were done speaking.
But Wetherbee crossed his arms across his chest and settled back in his chair ready to listen.
“The children of Lowell were in their summer togs.” She was being flip, but what else was she going to do with all of them waiting? “We’d been playing tennis at one house or another, but then a rainstorm came up, and it turned into a Tom Collins party, like the rest of them. You can imagine.”
“I’m not sure we can. Whose house was it?” asked Wetherbee.
Standing by Franklin’s high chair was too much like being on stage. She didn’t like the sort of attention Wetherbee was turning on her. “Charlie, you tell it. You tell it so much better.” It was really his story.
Charlie frowned and shook his head, once. She knew that if he hadn’t had his mouth full, he would have told them how when he saw her, he knew she was the one. Delia Barnett was going to be his bride. For him, it had been love at first sight.
Wetherbee said, “Where was this party?”
“Oh, I don’t know, The Morgans’, the Coopers’, the Banks’s. What difference would that make?”
Bess said, “Charlie was always so handsome, just like his father.”
Delia had always maintained that meeting him had been as much a turning point in her life as meeting her had been in his. But the truth was that she didn’t remember a thing about it. She flashed one of her best smiles in Charlie’s direction.
Wetherbee leaned closer, and said, “When you saw him, did it just hit you like lightning?” He held his lips as if he had a secret in his cheek. She began to think he knew just how much she didn’t remember.
The story of Charlie seeing her for the first time was one Charlie loved to tell. He was really quite sentimental about the whole thing. His face would light up as he described how she looked, what she wore, how she sat swinging her long legs. Charlie knew at once that something definitive and unalterable had just happened to him. He put so much stock in it. She couldn’t even remember where she’d been sitting to swing her legs like that.
She said, “Here came this skinny boy in his tennis whites, in one of those V-necked sweaters with the red and blue piping.” She supposed, she hoped, that Charlie’d had one of those awful sweaters. “He had such a hopeful bounce to his step, such a sweet boy.” Looking back on that boy, she saw how sweet he’d probably been in his prim sweater.
“But what did you feel?” asked Wetherbee, planting his elbows on the table.
His self-assuredness reminded her of the first time she’d gone to him. He hadn’t been working for them for long. He’d left the usual flowers in the music room that morning. But she had been there, passed out on the couch wearing her muskrat coat inside out – the way she liked it – furside to skin. He’d come in with the flowers, and she imagined he stood in the doorway looking at her sleeping while he deliberated whether he should perhaps come back later. Her bare feet and calves would have been exposed, her hair tossed back on the sofa pillow, the satin lining of her coat moving as she breathed. Even though it had signaled that he had seen her like that, he had left the flowers.
Bess and Gwen looked expectantly at her. She said, “Charlie stood out because his attention to me didn’t waver for a minute.” That part was true. She glanced at Charlie. He scooped his dropped napkin from the floor as if he weren’t listening, but the veins at his temples stood out. She would have to smooth this over when they were alone in the car.
Wetherbee fixed her with his eyes. She saw his fine head, his craggy face, his full lips. He was magnificent, and he was manipulating her just as he had the aunts. She remembered how he’d started finding excuses to come in the house in the late afternoon, just when Charlie was expected home. She had begun to feel uneasy, as if he could be there in the house anytime, anywhere – that it was possible that she’d climb out of the bath and reach for a towel and he would be there, uninvited, to hand it to her.
“Go on,” he said. Had she told him she didn’t remember meeting Charlie?
“After he saw me,” she faltered, and felt them all waiting. Then she skated out across her own false brightness. “After he saw me, no other girl could turn his head, not even Caroline Wheelwright.” Those were his words, lifted right from his story. She felt as if she had been pushed to some high place, a promontory over the sea where the wind blew past her ears, obscuring everything but her own voice, full and airy with lies, telling . . . telling whatever she thought up to tell. “When I first met him, I went around calling him Edgar and asking people if they wanted to meet my friend Edgar Burroughs.” She could have done that. “I was very young.” Could that excuse her? “Charlie will say that he knew the moment he met me that I was his fate.”
Charlie held his fork suspended over his plate. The aunts looked from her to him. He didn’t let on. But the skin around his eyes tightened.
“Was that the moment you knew he was the one?” said Wetherbee, his focus on Delia unwavering.
She jutted her chin into the air. He’d done enough damage. When she’d told him he was no longer welcome, even as a gardener, he was fired, he had fallen silent, had sucked in the fullness of his lower lip, and stared at her defiantly, but as if he’d known all along that this would be the way it would happen. She’d kept her voice flat when she’d said, “I cannot trust you.”
Now, she hummed a few notes, lightly, as if she were in control. “As the song says, the rest of the story,” and here she sang, “ain’t no one’s dirty business.”
Gwen’s milky-edged eyes locked onto Bess’s. One of Bess’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. They were in agreement. Gwen reached for the water pitcher and filled Bess’s glass. Delia had never quite met their standards.
She kept singing, “Ain’t nobody’s business but my own.”
Wetherbee leaned closer, resting his chin in his hand.
After he had left her house that last time, she’d thrown a Waterford pitcher at the glass door of the music room. She had wanted him, wanted to drown in him. Was that love? Water soared out in a brilliant arc as she hurled the crystal pitcher. It hit with all the force of what hurt. Such a bright and awful shattering of glass against glass and splashing water. She’d stood in the silence afterwards and thought she’d broken everything there was to break, except her marriage. She didn’t know if that was love, either.
Charlie had found her curled in a chair in the music room, not moving, the dark coming on, and the cool air from the garden pouring through the jagged glass of the door. He’d turned on the light and looked from her to the mess she’d made. She was puffy-eyed and ugly with crying.
“What’s all this?” he’d said. He’d gone for a wastebasket. As he crouched with a dustpan and broom, the light from the sconce fell warmly on his face. His look seemed one of pleasure in tending to her, a contentment in providing what was needed to compensate for her weaknesses – as if in caring for her, he had won something and that thing he did with the broom was just part of what was expected of a winner.
Now Charlie said, “Aunties, I notice you’ve got a bumper crop of pumpkins coming. I like the one climbing the apple tree.”
Bess said, “That pumpkin wasn’t our idea. That one’s a volunteer.”
Charlie said, “Well, I like the idea of a tree full of pumpkins.” He made himself laugh heartily. “Have you seen it, Delia?”
She looked at his unnaturally animated face and couldn’t answer. Why was he talking about pumpkins? Charlie had thought she’d cried with remorse for having ruined both the fine old pitcher and the door, for having lost her temper again, for having fired another gardener. Or, she had believed that until this minute. She laid her knife and fork side by side across her plate.
He went on, “The vine has gone right up that little tree and instead of apples, they’ve got six-inch yellow pumpkins dangling among the branches.” His look shifted from the salt shaker, to the pepper shaker, out the window, at his plate. “Dangling like ornaments, harvest baubles in an apple tree.”
Delia eased her back into her chair for support. He was rescuing her. Through the wavery window, the tired lilac leaves were still. How long had he known? He strained over his plate like a growing boy, cleaning it quickly to catch up with the rest of them. Maybe he knew even back when he swept up the broken glass. Now, he swabbed up the last of his turnip with a bit of game hen, and chewed energetically.
Maybe what she’d thought was satisfaction on his face as he cleaned up the glass was really victory because she’d banished Wetherbee. And if that were so, couldn’t she see it as proof of his feelings for her, proof of what a good, patient man he was? She imagined feeling swamped by gratitude to Charlie. He pulled the napkin from his shirt and folded it closed on the table. How easy, to be grateful for his generosity and discretion. For his loyalty. A feeling of such ecstatic relief spread through her, reaching like the heat of a strong drink right to the tips of her fingers. They would get through this day and put it behind them.
Gwen said, “Bess thought we should rip that pumpkin vine out, but Mr. Wetherbee convinced her.”
Wetherbee was looking at her. She didn’t care. She set her jaw and looked back. She couldn’t read what was written there, but couldn’t help admiring the shape of his head, the solidity of his chest and neck. One hand lay open on the table. She followed the beautiful curve of vein which wound from his wrist up his forearm and under the rolled cuff of his work shirt. He was, perhaps, the mistake whose memory she would savor most. She turned away to Charlie, who was speaking. He sat squarely, upright, at ease at the head of the table. Even when she could not love herself, he could.
He said, “We must be going along.” He patted his napkin on the table. “I want to hear no objections from you two ladies, to our skipping dessert. You know I like to get home before dark. Wetherbee,” he said, rising, “be a good man, will you, and help these ladies clear.”

She and Charlie rode quietly with half a peach cake on the seat between them. When they’d left, Delia gave each of the aunts a quick peck on the cheek – which seemed more than they were ready for – and then busied herself by carrying Franklin, limp in his blanket, to the car. She had managed to avoid Wetherbee.
She untucked a corner of wax paper from the cake and pinched off a bite with her fingers. The quiet seemed to surround them then, putting a cushion between them and where they’d been. She’d been waiting for the right moment to smooth things over. She said, “I – ”
But Charlie cut her off. “You’re not going to speak to me now. You’ve said enough today. The last thing we needed was your laundry aired at that table.” He held the wheel with two hands. “You are not going to say a word to me until you know precisely what needs to be said.” He turned to look in the sideview mirror. There was no one else on the road.
She sat stunned. She watched his chiseled profile for some softening. It didn’t come. He faced forward as if he were driving alone.
Beyond him, the telephone wires swooped down and up, from pole to pole as they passed. The trees rushed by, shadowy clumps, passing too fast. And beyond them abandoned barns, and then ranch houses with their square lawns and square driveways, one after another.
The aunts didn’t have a clue about her and Wetherbee, but they had exchanged a look. She’d seen it. Silently, they’d agreed that she wasn’t good enough. She had sung at the table; she had said “ain’t.” She had pretended to remember things she didn’t. She wasn’t good enough for their darling Charlie.
Each time she’d made a mess of things, Charlie had come and cleaned up after her. Each time he’d saved her, he had gone a little beyond her. The satisfaction she’d seen in Charlie’s face as he swept up the pitcher, and again today, had nothing to do with winning out over Wetherbee. Each time he rescued her, he affirmed that he was just that bit superior to her.
How could she not have seen? The aunts, even the aunts, knew it. It wasn’t Wetherbee, but she, he’d beaten. He was more capable, more generous and honest. They all knew it. The bastard was a better person, and he had only to wait awhile and she would prove it again.
They pulled into their driveway, where the hard shadow of the beech trees appeared as a gaping hole between them and the house. He turned off the car, opened the door, and swiveled his feet to the pavement. His shoulders in the tweed jacket looked trim, complete, and sure. The door clicked quietly as he closed it behind him. She’d thought he would do anything for her. She saw how smoothly he moved away through the shadows of the trees, how not a motion was wasted as he left her in the car with Franklin.

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Tracy Winn has published stories in Calyx, Western Humanities Review, New Orleans Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.