“I feel like we should hide it or something,” she said.
“Yeah, like we’ll get caught.” I took a long sip. It felt good. It could feel even better. “Hey, do me a favor. Smoke a cigarette so I can have a drag?”
“Have one of your own.”
“Can’t.” I glanced toward the living room, where a police siren wailed. Phoenix said something, and Ocean’s laughter peaked and faded like a whitecap on a wave. “They’re worse than parents.”
Cass nodded. “In my purse.”
The purse was a loaf-shaped thing, something her mother would have carried. I fumbled around, half expecting compacts and hairnets, and found the pack. Old Gold Filters. I lit up and inhaled, and when the nicotine hit, so did the feeling of being twelve or thirteen, getting high on the rush of another small rebellion. I passed the cigarette to Cass, and for a fleeting moment there she was, the girl I grew up with, who knew how a cigarette should be smoked and shared because I’d taught her.
She exhaled and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Yummy. Good to have you back.”
Hearing her words, though, I felt another wave of panic. “It’s good to see you, too, Cass,” I said. “I just wish I could stay for longer.”
I didn’t wish any such thing, and she knew it. She looked at me evenly, as she pulled Poo from his high chair.
“I mean, I’ve got to get back to teach, and the kids have their school and all. . . .” I took another drag of the cigarette, passed it back to her, and changed the subject. “God, that tastes good. I quit fourteen years ago, when I was pregnant with Phoenix.”
“Oh.”
“You ever quit?”
“Oh, sure. A bunch of times. Every time I got pregnant, in fact.” She had Poo on her lap now, and she was careful to direct the smoke away from his curls, into the air above his head. Her jaw jutted upward, tightening the muscles in her throat. She paused and watched the smoke disperse, as though she were remembering something, and when she spoke again, her voice was quiet.
“I’d get pregnant, quit, miscarry. Then do it all over again.” She ground out the cigarette in the saucer, pressing the filter down to extinguish every last spark.
“Oh, Cassie, I’m sorry. Do you know why? I mean, was there a reason, or—”
“Oh, jeez, Yummy.” She looked at her watch over the hump of Poo’s back. He was on the edge of sleep. There was a finality in her voice, as though she wanted to wrap up the conversation, get to her feet, and leave, but instead she shifted and sighed.
“Could be anything,” she said, rocking the baby gently back and forth. “At first we thought nitrates in the groundwater, so we got the well tested and got filters and everything, but it didn’t help. Then we thought it might be one of the other inputs—stuff we use around the farm. For a while Will even thought it might be some kind of chemical exposure from overseas or something.”
“Overseas?”
“He fought in Vietnam,” she said. “And it could be any of these things, or none of them, or maybe even some combination. It’s just impossible to know for sure. And even if we could prove it was something we were using, what could we do?”
“Can’t you stop using it?”
She looked pityingly at me. “You really don’t know shit about potatoes, do you? We got three thousand acres, it’s not that easy.”
“But if it’s poisoning you . . .”
Poo had fallen asleep and started to slump. Now she hauled him higher on her lap. “Banks don’t lend money to farmers who don’t use inputs. Not sound farming practice.”
Poo woke and started to make little mewling noises. Cass bounced him and smiled. “Mind you, we haven’t stopped trying. We’ve still got hope.”
The baby butted her with his big, sleepy head, burying his face in her chest.
I held out my arms. “I’m just weaning him,” I told her. “He’ll go back to sleep. You want me to take him?”
But Cass shook her head. I watched my son’s dark, pudgy fingers knead the front of her pink sweatshirt, looking for my breast, her breast, any breast. Not finding—
“He likes you,” I said, then I realized what was wrong.
Cass was resting her chin on the crown of Poo’s head, watching me. When she saw the look on my face, she nodded. “Both of ’em.” She spoke into Poo’s soft baby curls. “It’s been seven years now and no sign of reoccurrence, so they think they got it all.”
“Oh, Cass.” The sounds of a car chase seeped in from the living room. I tried to say something else, but I’d run out of words.
“I told you my mom died of it,” she said. “I’m the lucky one. As soon as we found the lump, I decided to have them take everything, just in case. The whole shebang.” She smiled and looked down at her chest. “Remember how I used to complain about my cup size? All through high school I was saving up for a boob reduction. Guess you gotta watch out what you ask for.”
She rocked back and forth, quieting the baby, who smacked his lips, sleeping again. Her chair leg creaked against the linoleum. She tapped another cigarette from the pack and lit it. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she mused on the exhale.
“Cass, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”
She shrugged and handed me the butt. “Must be your bad influence. I don’t usually smoke this much. Will won’t let me.”
The cigarette tasted stale now. I took a drag and put it out.
“It’s funny,” Cass continued. “Every time I miscarried, I thought of you. Thought of that horrible trip to Pocatello with that teacher—what was his name?”
I felt my heart start to race. She was opening the door to the past, and I was stepping through it. “Elliot,” I said. It had been years since I’d spoken his name, and the syllables tasted as stale and acrid as smoke.
“That’s right. Mr. Rhodes. He was an okay teacher, but what a creep!”
“Whatever happened to him?” I asked, nudging the door open wider. “Did he keep on teaching or . . . ?”
She looked surprised and shook her head. “I don’t know. He disappeared. I figured you guys had it all planned out and lived happily ever after.”
“I never saw him again. Not after that night.” After that night there was no happily ever after.
Cass nodded. “Maybe they ran him out of town or something. He just kind of disappeared. You know, it wasn’t so bad taking a licking for you from Pa over that business, but I never forgave you for leaving without me. I waited for you, but you never even wrote.”
“But I did! I wrote as soon as I got there.” My mind was racing. I wanted to explain. I was living on the street. I had to steal a pen. I panhandled to buy stamps. “I wrote lots of letters. You’re the one who never wrote back!”
Cass shrugged. “My parents must have burned them. I never got a single one.”
“I thought you’d turned against me, like everyone else.”
“Honestly, Yummy, I did. I started to think it was all your fault. Each time I miscarried and saw the blood, it just brought it all back. I felt like God was punishing me for helping you out. Crazy, huh? But if that’s the case, then how come you’re here now with three great kids? You know what I mean? It doesn’t make sense. If anyone deserved to get punished, it was you, right?”
I felt I’d been punished plenty. I started to answer, then