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PROLOGUE

Hope is a coin I carry: an Aiven to me by a man I came to love There were times in my journey when it felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept

I came west in search of a better life, but htreed These past few years have been a tis lost: Jobs Homes Food

The land we loved turned on us, broke us all, even the stubborn old ratulate each other on the season’s buht out here to , they’d say to each other

A man

It was always about theto cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens But omen of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until ere as dry and baked as the land we loved

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I swear I can still taste the dust …

1921

To dae your children

—WENDELL BERRY, FARMER AND POET

ONE

Elsa Wolcott had spent years in enforced solitude, reading fictional adventures and i other lives In her lonely bedroom, surrounded by the novels that had become her friends, she sometimes dared to dream of an adventure of her own, but not often Her family repeatedly told her that it was the illness she’d survived in childhood that had transforood days, she believed it

On bad days, like today, she knew that she had always been an outsider in her own family They had sensed the lack in her early on, seen that she didn’t fit in

There was a pain that ca unna quiet, by not de that she was loved, but unliked The hurt had become so co to do with the illness to which her rejection was usually ascribed

But now, as she sat in the parlor, in her favorite chair, she closed the book in her lap and thought about it The Age of Innocence had awakened soe of time

Tomorroas her birthday

Twenty-five

Young by in and drove recklessly and listened to ragtied dresses

For women, it was different

Hope began to dim for a woman when she turned twenty By twenty-two, the whispers in town and at church would have begun, the long, sad looks By twenty-five, the die was cast An unmarried wo heads and tsking at her lost opportunities Usually people wondered hat had turned a perfectly ordinary woood family into a spinster But in Elsa’s case, everyone knew They must think she was deaf, the way they talked about her Poor thing Skinny as a rake handle Not nearly as pretty as her sisters

Prettiness Elsa knew that was the crux of it She was not an attractive woht say she was handso—too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself

Elsa had attended both of her sisters’ weddings Neither had asked her to stand with them at the altar, and Elsa understood At nearly six feet, she was taller than the groo to the Wolcotts Her parents prized it above all else

It didn’t take a genius to look down the road of Elsa’s life and see her future She would stay here, in her parents’ house on Rock Road, being cared for by Maria, the ed the household forever Someday, when Maria retired, Elsa would be left to care for her parents, and then, when they were gone, she would be alone