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Show 244 carried with her. Parting from her, leaving her, as if that sense of loss itself had died somehow. Passing off from her. So that she was filled with life. Only life. And as she sat beside this woman, from whom her own flesh and blood had-ultimately-come, the two of them together sharing the living silence, a quiet security settled over her. A serene joy. It was with this serenity that she stole a moment after the dishes were done-she and Lynn and Billy and Carla did them together, giving Peggy a chance to rest, a chance to talk with Robbie-and went out the back door to the yard. It was dusk, a close winter dusk, with the grey thickness of the approaching night holding the back yard, the brown grass and the wooden fence, in its cool velvet grip. She was full, from the turkey and the pumpkin pie, and a bit light-headed from Peggy's bourbon, and it was good to stretch her legs, even around this small space. Dinner had gone well, there had been no incidents, Granny had fallen asleep at the table, just before desert, and they had put her to bed. What was this? She came upon a group of mounds, of dirt and leaves and twigs. The girls. It was a farm, she decided, with that small mound the house, a larger mound the barn, and these circled twigs a corral. And inside the twig corral were some small rocks. These would be horses. She bent down to them-bending down, it seemed, in this closer perspective, to her own childhood-reaching out and touching the small rocks. Reaching out and touching, it seemed, in these smooth pebbles, |