Free A Ticket to Ride by Paula McLain

And then she’d poke it again.
    It was funny, hearing his own words coming back at him, and soon Raymond understood that he didn’t need to chide her at all, because she was doing it herself, vocalizing his counsel like a second conscience, an angel on her shoulder. But he also couldn’t stop following and scolding her, because no matter what she said or seemed to have control over, she didn’t ever stop doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to do. She just rattled away as she yanked the cat’s tail, pitched over a potted plant, peed in the corner after somehow maneuvering her diaper off: Why you do that?
    It wasn’t until Suzette was nearly four that Raymond began tonotice how anxious she could be. If she spilled her milk at dinner, she’d whimper as Berna daubed the mess with a dish towel and refilled her glass. Was it shame? Was she afraid she would get yelled at? Raymond wasn’t sure, but the whimpering and the panicked look on her face made it hard for anyone to stay mad at her for long. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Berna or their father, Earl, or Raymond would sigh, and Suzette would repeat this too, her little face screwed up on the verge of tears. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
    Raymond was eleven and Suzette had just turned six when Earl died in a farming accident. He’d been plowing on an incline in the field when the tractor had rolled and crushed him underneath. Still alive when a neighbor found him; there had been just enough time for Berna to be fetched from the house. She knelt by him in the field while he whispered a confession of nonsense words, and then closed his eyes.
    Earl had not been a good father, exactly, nor had he been a bad one. He put in long days in the field on the combine or baler, or flipping up leaf bases on reconnaissance for beet armyworms, then cared for the animals. When he finally came to the dinner table, he was sunburned and hungry. He ate without chewing and then listened to I Love a Mystery on the radio in the parlor, with a bowl of shelled pistachios in one hand and a bottle of cream soda in the other. He was the kind of man who hoarded his words cautiously, and his affections even more so—though no one could call him unkind. He had a particular fondness for animals, clucking to the hens in their own language as he coaxed their bodies to one side on the straw so he could gather eggs. He babied the sheep as well. When he moved them from their stall to clean it, he didn’t use a halter, just his hands on their black noses as he guided them, cooing a little under his breath.
    When he was a boy, Raymond had sometimes followed his father out to the small animal barn, wanting to be near him, butwas more often dissuaded by the chickens making their usual racket behind a twisted wire gate. Raymond hated chickens. They were too noisy and moved too suddenly, seeming to rush him. He didn’t like their small, too-alert eyes or the way certain hens sported raw, featherless patches from where they’d been pecked and harassed by the roosters or by other hens. Once Raymond saw a hen balding herself. This seemed to take effort, given the shortness of her neck and how far she had to reach to her hindquarters, but she was intent. After several sessions, each lasting forty-five seconds or more, Raymond could make out a rough diamond shape of pink, human-looking skin pricked with red where the blood came.
    “Why do they do that?” Raymond had asked his father, who was nearby, rubbing chicken shit and down and bits of straw from eggs before placing them in a cardboard crate.
    Earl had simply shrugged and looked into his egg rag. “Guess something doesn’t quite feel right to her,” he’d said.
    Raymond, unappeased, had pressed: “Doesn’t it hurt?”
    “Yes,” said his father. “I imagine it does.”
    Very early on, Raymond had given up on Earl as a source of attention. If he wanted praise, or to have someone listen to the best bits of a baseball game, or answer