Her family owned hundreds of acres of cornfields. When Etta turned eighteen and told her father she wanted to marry Louis, he insisted his new son-in-law had to learn how to farm. He had no sons of his own, and he wanted Louis to take over the family business. But Etta thought her father just wanted to prove a point to the young man: farming was hard and respectable work. It wasn’t for the weak. And it certainly wasn’t for an intellectual. Etta had chosen someone who was nothing like her father.

Louis had planned to be a doctor like his own father was, and had a scholarship waiting for medical school. But he wanted Etta’s hand in marriage more than he wanted a medical license. Despite Etta’s pleas to take it easy on him, her father worked Louis to the bone. He was up at four o’clock every morning and out into the dewy fields. Four in the morning until dusk, and as Etta liked to remind people, he never complained once. Louis sold the medical bag and textbooks that his own father had passed down to him, and he put the money in a jar on their kitchen counter. He told Etta it was the start of a college fund for their future children. Etta thought this said a lot about the selfless kind of man he was.

One fall day, before the sun rose, Louis was severed by the beater on a silage wagon. He bled to death, alone in the cornfield. Etta’s father found him and sent her to cover up the body with a tarp from the barn. She carried Louis’s mangled leg back to the farmhouse and threw it at her father’s head while he was filling a bucket of water meant to wash away the blood on the wagon.

She hadn’t told her family yet about the child growing inside her. She was a big woman, seventy pounds overweight, and hid the pregnancy well. The baby girl, Cecilia, was born four months later on the kitchen floor in the middle of a snowstorm. Etta stared at the jar of money on the counter above her while she pushed the baby out.

Etta and Cecilia lived quietly at the farmhouse and rarely ventured into town. When they did, it wasn’t hard to hear everyone’s whispers about the woman who “suffered from the nerves.” In those days, not much more was said—not much more was suspected. Louis’s father gave Etta’s mother a regular supply of sedatives to give to Etta as she saw fit. And so Etta spent most days in the small brass bed in the room she grew up in and her mother took care of Cecilia.

But Etta soon realized she would never meet another man lying doped up like that in bed. She learned to function well enough and eventually started to take care of Cecilia, pushing her around town in the stroller while the poor girl screamed for her grandmother. Etta told people she’d been plagued with a terrible chronic stomach pain, that she couldn’t eat for months on end, and that’s how she’d got so thin. Nobody believed this, but Etta didn’t care about their lazy gossip. She had just met Henry.

Henry was new to town and they went to the same church. He managed a staff of sixty people at a candy manufacturing plant. He was sweet to Etta from the minute they met—he loved babies and Cecilia was particularly cute, so she turned out not to be the problem everyone said she’d be.

Before long, Henry bought them a Tudor-style house with mint-green trim in the middle of town. Etta left the brass bed for good and gained back all the weight she’d lost. She threw herself into making a home for her family. There was a well-built porch with a swing, lace curtains on every window, and chocolate chip cookies always in the oven. One day their new living-room furniture was delivered to the wrong house, and the neighbor let the delivery man set it all up in her basement even though she hadn’t ordered it. When Etta caught wind of this, she ran down the street after the truck, yelling profanity in her housecoat and curlers. This gave everyone a good laugh, including, eventually, Etta.

She tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be.

A good wife. A good mother.

Everything seemed like it would be just fine.

2

Things that come to mind when I think about the beginning of us:

* * *

? ? ?

Your mother and father. This might not have been as important to other people, but with you came a family. My only family. The generous gifts, the airplane tickets to be with you all somewhere sunny on vacation. Their house smelled like warm, laundered linens, always, and I never wanted to leave when we visited. The way your mother touched the ends of my hair made me want to crawl onto her lap. Sometimes it felt like she loved me as much as she loved you.

Their unquestioning acceptance about where my father was, and the lack of judgment when he declined their invitation to visit for the holidays, was a kindness I was grateful for. Cecilia, of course, was never discussed; you’d thoughtfully prefaced this with them before you brought me home. (Blythe is wonderful. She really is. But just so you know . . . ) My mother wouldn’t have been someone you gossiped about among yourselves; none of you had an appetite for anything but the pleasant.

You were all so perfect.

You called your little sister “darling” and she adored you. You phoned home every night and I would listen from the hallway, wishing I could hear what your mother said that made you laugh like you did. You went home every other weekend to help your dad around the house. You hugged. You babysat your small cousins. You knew your mother’s banana bread recipe. You gave your parents a card every year on their anniversary. My parents had never even mentioned their wedding.

My father. He didn’t return my message informing him I wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving that year, but I lied to you and said he was happy I’d met someone, and that he sends his best wishes to your family. The truth was we hadn’t spoken much since you and I met. We’d communicated mostly through our answering machines, and even then it had become a series of stale, generic exchanges that I would have been embarrassed for you to hear. I’m still not sure how we got there, he and I. The lie was necessary, like the scattering of other lies I’d told so that you didn’t suspect just how fucked up my family was. Family was too important to you—neither of us could risk how the whole truth about mine might change the way you saw me.