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I shook out Isaac’s shirt, then laid one of the sleeves on my ironing board, my hands stretching the cotton material, working out some of the wrinkles. I picked up my iron. Two months after I married Isaac, Sue married Paul Anders. He’d been asking her to marry him since she was sixteen. Now they had two boys and two girls. That was enough, Sue wrote, after the last one was born. As for Johnny, it was harder to picture him. Three years ago he’d married Pearl Williams, a slaughterhouse widow with a baby girl not quite two years old at the time. Mama thought Johnny could’ve done better, and it shamed her all the more that Pearl was showing when Johnny finally got around to marrying her. Their son was born a few months later. When I heard all that, I felt bad. Johnny would never get out of Chicago. But he surprised me. Last year him and Pearl took the children to East St. Louis. Johnny made good money there, Sue wrote. He had a job playing the piano six nights a week at a downtown theater.

As for Isaac’s mother, I knew she was doing just fine. People like her always were. Two letters ago Mama wrote that Mrs. DuPree had three boardinghouses now. Likely she was sitting pretty with all those boarders to preach to and all that hired help to boss around. And all her money, I couldn’t stop thinking about all her money and how just a little of it would be a big help to us. Isaac should think of it; he should put his pride aside and ask.

My throat tightened. Home. I wanted to go home.

I looked at the little girls under the kitchen table as I put the iron back on the stove. This was their home, I told myself. Our home. Not Chicago. I was lucky to have so much. I had a house, a wood house. I was the only one in my family able to say that. A person didn’t just walk away from her house, not even when times were bad.

Something inside of me bucked at that. This drought was driving out homesteaders right and left. I used to feel sorry for them, but not anymore. At least the drought was over for them. Their mouths weren’t dried up like they’d been chewing grit. They weren’t watching their cattle die, and they weren’t dropping their children into water wells.

But they had other worries, I told myself. Most everybody did. Things were going to get better here. They had to—it couldn’t stay dry forever. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and put your mind to your work.

Later that day, when the sun was burning its hottest and the wind blowing its strongest, me and the girls sat down to a noon dinner of beans and half-filled cups of lukewarm water. The girls all made faces. I had strained the water but it still clouded up with silt. The beans were nothing without fat or salt, but they were filling and we were hungry. Even Liz ate. When we finished, I gave Rounder a spoonful of beans I’d put aside for him.

“Time for the outhouse,” I said to Alise and Emma, expecting Mary to dry-wipe the dishes clean. Liz gave me a questioning look. “You too,” I told her. I picked up Emma, put her on my hip. She stretched a leg across the top of my belly, resting it there, and that made me smile a little.

Alise whined on the way to the outhouse, Rounder following, but I tried not to listen to her complain about her mouth being all dried up. The Palmer Hotel in Chicago had indoor plumbing. All a person had to do to get water was turn a faucet at the kitchen sink. The hotel even had indoor bathrooms. Mama once wrote that she figured someday all the houses in Chicago would have them too, even the ones in the Black Belt.

When Mary was almost two and Isaac Two a new baby, Isaac made the outhouse bigger. He dug a second hole and cut and sanded a new wood seat that had two round openings. One seat was small for Mary and her brother for when he’d be out of diapers. The other was larger for us. The outhouse was good size, but too small to hold me with my swelled-up belly and three children. “Wait outside,” I told Liz. “Don’t you go off anywhere.”

I held Emma steady while she sat on the smaller hole. “Stinks,” Alise said, pointing at her.

“Hush,”