Free Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz

counter. There are glasses of orange juice laid out on the little table, a plate of toast, and the air smells fat with melted butter. His father at the stove, cracking eggs one-handed into a skillet that’s already smoking.
    “Still like your eggs sunny-side up?”
    The smile cautious. Because there aren’t any innocent questions anymore, haven’t been for a very long time.
    It’s the word still that bothers him most. The word held over from the past as if from an archaeological dig. Unearth it if you want, dust it off and put it out for inspection, maybe even casually throw it into use again as in historical times when the word was once used. Butthat doesn’t mean its value or meaning has survived. The value and meaning of the word will always reside with the original people in the original life. A boy and his dad. Folks as good as extinct now, or at best reduced to cheap replicas of themselves in foreign lands.
    “I’m not hungry.” He walks out.

RUTH
    S HE DOESN’T SEE IT COMING , but Saturday opens into one of those days that seem to contain all the beauty and horror of living in the country. She wakes to an iconic New England spring, the ground well thawed, the flower beds smelling fertilely of mulch and compost, the daffodils that she planted along the front porch pushing up strong and bright.
    She begins the morning with back-to-back piano lessons in her living room, the students both fourth graders—Carrie Lockhart, whose sight-reading is precocious but her fingering slow, and Adam Markowitz, whose skills run the other way—and then the time is her own and she loads a chair that needs recaning into the Subaru and drives it over to Great Barrington; then back through Canaan to the oblong, church-fronted green of Wyndham Falls, historic site of the American Revolution, bedecked today with balloons and checkered-cloth tables displaying many varieties of baked goods, wax-sealed jars of preserves and duck-liver paté and pickled vegetables, as well as stalls of arts-and-crafty-type things, kilned pots and beaded Indian belts and knitted sweatercoats with wooden buttons big as your thumb. A town fair, in other words, populated with neighbors, fulltime and weekenders alike, from Goshen north to Ashley Falls.
    She is in possession of a single secret goal, which is one of the turkey pies made by Lucinda Jarvis, wife of Andy and mother of her student Ben, to whom she teaches piano with a certain amount of irritation (her sympathy for his tin ear more than offset by his persistent, shin-kicking rudeness) on Tuesdays and Thursdays at school. The Jarvis family less than huggable but their pies sublime. She willtake one home and, at six o’clock this evening with a glass of white wine (not approved by her doctor), pull it steaming out of the oven and devour exactly half, savoring every mouthful of the crimped buttery crust; and tomorrow night, with a second glass of wine from the same bottle, she’ll eat the other half. And with that her weekend, recent chemo be damned, will be over.
    Thus the beauty portion of the day, neatly encapsulated: an independent woman, personal and medical challenges for the moment denied, buying a turkey pie at a country fair. The horror is the complicated part, as it usually is.
    She has the pie corralled and is waiting at the table for her change, Lucinda slowly counting out the bills while fishing in a roundabout way for Ruth’s confirmation of her son’s musical skills (“I heard Ben practicing the other day and he just sounded, I don’t know, Ruth, so mature for his age”), and Ruth murmuring her noncommittal assent (“He does seem to have a strong sense of himself at the piano”) when she feels a hand touch her shoulder. She turns and finds herself staring at Norris.
    Typically for a weekend, he’s colorfully dressed for golf, right down to the socks with little putters on them that she gave him for his forty-sixth birthday. He has less hair than just six weeks ago, she’d