Mohawk

that she had been let go at the store. Like the storm, it had been approaching in its own leisurely fashion all summer. Again, she’d been given the opportunity to transfer, and had turned it down almost without thinking. The store was doing well enough by regional standards, but the district office wasn’t interested in regional standards. Eventually, she knew, the store would close, as so many others had. The ones on the highway died slower deaths than the downtown retailers, but they died just the same. She told no one but Randall, who frowned and asked what she’d do.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “The only reason I mention it is that if you decide to go back to school, I won’t be able to help much.”
    “I doubt I’ll be going back right away,” Randall said.
    “I can understand that,” Anne said. “With a blossoming career as a dishwasher at the Mohawk Grill, what would be the point?”
    Since his return to Mohawk in the spring, Anne discovered that they had even less to say to one another than before. She began to understand her father’s attitude when she had returned years ago. She didn’t doubt Randall had his reasons, but doubted they weresufficient or would ever turn out to be. But then, she was an expert on good reasons that turned out not to be. Maybe her father was as well. He certainly understood how perversely loyal human beings could be to mistakes. Anyway, if there was any detectable pattern of motion in the universe, it was clearly cyclical, and for that reason she refused to be upset. Attempts to make life do what it had resisted doing in the past were mostly futile. She had run into Dallas on the street a week earlier and he had told her about Randall—that he was living with some girl. “What am
I
supposed to do about it?” she said.
    “You could talk to him.”
    “So could his father, assuming he wanted to.”
    “She’s married.”
    “I can’t help that either.”
    But it had sickened her a little, just the same. She couldn’t look at him without seeing the boy instead of the man. Talking might not be a bad idea, but the fact was she didn’t really want to know about the girl, the husband or the sordid details that had a way of rendering everything understandable. She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. Probably her father had felt the same way, and it occurred to Anne that, viewed objectively, there had been an insidious moral slippage through the generations, each succeeding one surrendering a small patch of ethical territory.
    It was after midnight when the branches outside her bedroom window began to scratch their urgent message on the screen. “So,” she thought, “it’s to be tonight.” Below, a yellow patch of light reflected off the house next door, which meant that her mother was awake too, prepared to ride out the storm with a grim determination that came from having ridden out a lifetimeof them, firmly believing in the efficacy of passive resistance. Storms went away, like pain and disappointment, like tough times. Not such a bad philosophy. It would’ve been nice to subscribe to it.
    Closing her eyes, she tracked the storm’s approach. The lightning registered no matter how tightly she clamped them shut. As the rumbling neared, the tree branch tapped more insistently. With any luck the storm would skirt town, but Anne had no faith it would. Once the rain started, everything would be fine. The dry electricity would wash deep into the earth. But first it had to rain, after all the howling wind and thunder. All right, the gods must’ve decided, cleanse them again. The hair along their forearms has been standing on end too long. Cleanse them one more time. Allow them to touch one another without fear.
    Even with her eyes closed, Anne sensed a subtle change in the house, and when she opened them, the patch of yellow light on the house next door was gone. So was the luminous dial on the clock beside her bed. The room was still. Anne got out of bed and went to the living room window, hoping to see nothing, the entire street cloaked in the storm’s blackness, but a light shined in the Millers’ front room across the street and another upstairs in the house two doors down.
    Anne cursed the house and pulled on her robe. Downstairs she found her mother sitting on the end of the sofa, staring out the front window at the deserted street. A flash of lightning froze the old woman in her seat, and she didn’t react when her daughter walked in with the