Uncle Hank’s chin had rested on his hands which were wrapped, side-by-side, around a shovel’s handle. His shoulders hung loose and relaxed, and he’d nodded as much as he could at the spillage of Bernice’s words. “Are you done now?”

Milly squatted at the side of the flowerbed, let her knees sink into the coffee-ground-soil. She murdered each infant weed she could find.

“Well.” Bernice made a show of thinking it over, head tilted up to the glowering sun, eyes slanted closed against it. “I sure didn’t know he knew how.”

Hank snorted. “You blamin’ me?” He balanced one foot on the shovel’s blade. “I suppose you’re right.”

Bernice rolled her eyes at that. “I’m not blamin’ anybody. I’m just surprised is all.” She looked out at the road and back again. “And sorry for Mazie.”

“Something happen to Mazie?” Milly paused, anchored her hands to the plants’ slender bodies. “I haven’t seen her since her birthday last month, but she seemed fine.”

Bernice’s arms lifted into the air as if she were appealing to God. “Your cousin’s gone and got her pregnant.” Her hands moved to her hair, patted it in place. And then, “Yes, Ernst.”

Milly went as still as Hank with his foot still propped up on the shovel.

Ernst? How was it possible that he had gifted this to a girl? Milly had heard him practice his violin through the ceiling, his bow hesitant across the strings, his fingers too cautious to pluck a string hard enough to make it quiver.

Hank and Bernice went on talking, but Milly’s head had gone cottony, their voices reduced to a murmur too far away for her to reach.

She scooped up her pile of weeds and slipped around the house’s corner, to the side that was deserted, that was flanked by shadow. Hank and Bernice would be talking about her by now, sympathetic whispers from under bowed heads. Bernice’s comments had started when Milly turned thirty and was still childless. Milly had always known that they had stemmed from concern, that they sprouted from Bernice’s own childlessness, like she’d been hoping Milly could provide what she’d never had herself.

Milly knew their worry was a kindness. They were farmers, after all. Were she livestock, she’d have been slaughtered by now, punished for not pulling her weight. She folded herself in half and vomited at her feet. The smell of bile hit her, like all her darkness emptied onto the thin, wispy grass.

The hen house was the first door she could duck inside, the smell of hay and excrement thick, the dust’s slow dance spotlighted by the chinks of sunlight that fit between the boards. She hated watching the roosters circle the hens. How the hens would cluck and flutter and peck their feeble defense at the insistent birds, only to end up with them on their backs anyway.

Milly couldn’t help but want to intercede, drag away the stubborn roosters with her feet, tuck them under her arms and release them to the fields. But she knew what the hens didn’t, that soon there would be a clutch of eggs to sit on, then those eggs would thin and shatter and offer chicks that required tending and maternal warmth.

So Milly would just watch. And what had been empathy incubated into something else. Something that made her reach under a brooding hen, tuck an egg into her palm and hold it there, its heat and its promise. How she longed to release it to the slatted floor, watch it fall—fast and then faster and faster—until it splat its insides, its shell zig-zagged with cracks, smears of yellow seeping out along the boards.

The sun looked like those viscous yolks she imagined, too bright and slightly out of focus.

It was Mazie’s submerged body in Milly’s hands now. And Milly sensed that she, not Ernst, was somehow the one who had dropped her and so had to be the one to put her back together.

Ernst was helpless anyway. The fact that Hank and Bernice expected nothing of him was proof of that. When he’d arrived just over a month ago and disappeared into the room Milly had cleaned out for him, she’d hated him for it. Hated him in the way a child might, with jealousy that flared during those first days and then died with understanding. Ernst didn’t know how to face a world that needed constant tending. Weeding and hauling and milking. He’d only experienced the world through his studies, in a detached, introspective way.

“Milly?” The voice that interrupted her was so timid the hens ignored it.

It wavered. Questioned.

Not Dan. Dan never questioned. He worked hard to appear infallible. Bernice said it was because he’d gotten everything wrong his whole life. At least until marrying Milly.

But Milly had decided that sometimes people were just mean. Hard. Incapable of tenderness. Milly had botched everything, too, but she wasn’t mean. Still knew how to soften names on her tongue, make them precious just by saying them.

She wiped the heel of her hand across her cheeks before turning. “Yes?”

Ernst. He stood in the doorway, the sunlight turning him to shadow.  He looked bigger this way, just an outline. Had his shoulders always been that wide?

“You’ve heard, I suppose.” He stepped towards her, but she kept her eyes down at his sandals, his pressed shorts and button down. His clothes alone turned him into something different, someone not for this place. From away.