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She hung her coat on the hook by the door "What’s a sublasses--another new development Little half-moon lenses, cloudy and scratched, set in a black plastic frah Hollis said they oes underwater Sounds like bullshit to ry? I can fix you so felt like too o to bed"

She checked on Kate, as sound asleep, and washed up at the sink She paused to examine herself in theto show Fans of wrinkles had formed around her eyes; her blond hair, which she noore shorter and pulled back, had thinned sohtness She’d always thought of herself as pretty and, in a certain light, still was But sometime in the midst of life she had passed the apex In the past, when she’d looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she’d once been; the woirlhood self Noas the future she saw The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would di into the past

And yet this thought did not disturb her, or not very e came authority, and with authority ca new people into the world You’ll be in our prayers, Dr Wilson Sara heard words like these nearly every day, but she had never become inured to them Just that name, Dr Wilson It still a to her When Sara had arrived in Kerrville, three years ago, she’d reported to the hospital to see if her nurse’s training could be of any use In a little less rooth--bodily systenostics, treatments for illness and injury His face showed no emotion as he responded to her ansithlasted over two hours; by its conclusion, Sara felt like she was stuer training be to a medical establishment that was so far ahead of the homespun remedies of the Colony? How could she have been so na&iuuess that about covers it," Dr Elacqua said "Congratulations" Sara was knocked flat; was he being ironic? "Does this mean I can be a nurse?" she asked "A nurse? No We have plenty of nurses Report back here to starts at oh-seven-hundred sharp My guess is twelvefor what?" she asked, and Elacqua, whose lengthy inquisition was a s to co clear I don’t knohere you learned it, but you knoice asto be a doctor"

And then, of course, there was Kate Their beautiful, a, miraculous Kate Sara and Hollis would have liked to have had a second child, but the violence of Kate’s birth had inflicted too e A disappointment, and not without irony, as day by day new babies traveled into the world beneath her hands, but Sara was hardly entitled to cohter at all, and that the two of them should have been reunited with Hollis and escaped the Hoether--ious in the churchgoing sense--the sisters all struck her as good people, if a bit extreme in their beliefs--but only an idiot would fail to feel the actions of providence You couldn’t wake up each day in a world like that and not spend a solid hour just thinking of ways to be grateful

She thought rarely of the Homeland, or as rarely as she could She still had dreaely, these dreas that had happened to her there Mostly they were dreary and cold and helpless, or the endlessly turning wheels of the grinder in the biodiesel plant So of perplexity, as if trying to re; from time to time she dreamed about Jackie, the old woman who had befriended her, or else Lila, for whos had distilled over time to a kind of sorrowful syht snow, the two of the terrible--but these had abated So that was oneto be thankful for: eventually, perhaps not soon but someday, the Homeland would become just one more memory in a life of memories, an unpleasant recollection that made the others all the sweeter