Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · night of day 29 · the fifty-third life: Lowmere County, his ninth year
“Count the names that answer when called.”
“Quick Count.”
Hadley counted the bowls first. He always did. Five on the shelf above the hearth, brown and chipped at the lip, the glaze worn through to the clay where his mother’s thumb went every night to lift them down. Four people at the table. The fifth bowl stood at the end of the row, a little apart from the others, and nobody had touched it since the water came in over the lower field.
The flood had left a line on the kitchen wall. It ran in a brown ring at the height of his chest, and below it the plaster had gone soft and pale and crumbled when you pressed it. His grandmother ran a wet rag along the ring every morning and said nothing about it. His mother scrubbed the boards beneath it on her knees. The water had gone back down the river a month ago, but the ring stayed, and so did the smell of the lower field, sour and green, which got into the bread.
“Four at the table,” said his grandmother from her chair by the stove. “Five bowls. Don’t count them again, Hadley. You’ll wear them out.”
