Chapter 2

The east wing smelled like woodsmoke and menthol and old paper.

Junie came back the next afternoon because her mother was doing the feed invoices in the office and there was nowhere else to be. The lane was frozen into ruts. The barn was full of men who told her to mind the aisle. The east wing was quiet, and the door was open.

She sat on the floor with her back against the radiator and took out the plastic horse she'd gotten out of a cereal box in September. She walked it across the rug.

"You had horses," she said. "Real ones. Mama showed me the picture in the office."

The man in the chair didn't answer.

She looked around while she waited. The windowsill wore a gray coat of dust. The shelf of leather books wore dust. The little table with the pill cups wore dust. The television screen was dusty enough to write in. Everything in that room had been left alone for a long time except one thing.

The whiteboard behind his head was clean.

She talked for a while about school, and about the substitute teacher who pronounced "thoroughbred" wrong, and about her grandfather, whom she had met four times, each time through glass, at a place called Ridgefield, forty miles away, where the visiting room smelled like floor wax and the phones buzzed when your time was up.

"He's sick," she said. "His heart. Mama cries in the truck."

Still nothing.

She got bored and went through her pockets. Chalk stub, two hair ties, and a black plastic marker cap she'd found on the floor of the office three weeks ago and kept because it made a good click. She snapped it against her palm. Click. Click. Click.

Then she fumbled it. It rolled across the rug, under the bottom edge of the whiteboard, and stopped against the wall.

Junie crawled over. She lay flat and reached under the frame with two fingers, and when she did, she felt something shift - the aluminum bottom edge itself, giving a little against the wall, like it wasn't fixed tight on that corner. She got the cap. She sat back up.

The old man's left hand had come up off the chair.

It was shaking. It rose slowly, the way a crane comes up, and his finger pointed - not at her, not at the cap in her hand. At the bottom corner of the board, where her fingers had just been.

He held it there. Then he tapped the air twice.

Junie looked at the board. She looked back at him.

"Do you want your cap?"

She stood and put it on the tray next to the pill cups, because that seemed polite. He watched her do it. Then he took his hand off the chair, knocked the cap off the tray onto the floor, and pushed it with the side of his boot until it rolled back under the board.

He looked at her.

Junie stood there a long time.

"Okay," she said finally.