Freedom.

Earline McGrath didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she went into the garden and planted carrots. Nash hated carrots.

On this day that they’d met oh-so-civilly in his brother’s law office to finalize the division of thirty years’ accumulation of things like DVD players and Christmas tree ornaments with “Logan, Fist Graid” written on them in glitter glue, it seemed important to her to do something her husband disliked. Planting carrots made more sense than rearranging furniture and was easier on the back even if it was hard on the knees.

Somewhere in the nightmare that was the three-car garage built to look like a wing on their pseudo-Victorian house, there were some kneepads from when the girls played high school volleyball. Early needed to find them. Only thing was, she’d find other stuff, too. Baby sleepers with spit-up stains and old diaries she should have burned years ago and early marriage melamine dishes that would make her eyes sting and turn her heart into skip-a-beat mush.

They married the day after Nash graduated, when Early was barely sixteen, just finishing up her sophomore year at the tiny high school in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. She’d been eight weeks pregnant, but hardly anyone had known except Early’s friends Mary Brad, Lou Ann, and Emily. Even when she gave birth to Evan seven months later and he weighed in at nearly nine pounds, she’d scarcely looked pregnant.

But, regardless of how she looked, her water broke in the produce department of Waylon’s Supersaver, where Nash was peeling outer leaves off heads of cabbage for minimum wage. Patty Waylon had taken one look at the mess in Aisle Three and hollered, “Nash McGrath, put down those cabbages and get her to the hospital now!”

Nash hurried, but a train blocked their path and Evan Davis McGrath was born at the corner of Evans and Market with only his father and Mike Davis from the Marathon filling station in attendance. Mike said it was a quite a way to become someone’s godfather.

Sitting in the loamy soil of her garden remembering the day Evan was born, Early decided she might as well laugh. In all truth, she’d laughed more in her thirty years with Nash than she’d cried, so it came naturally enough. Besides, it wasn’t as though they were mad at each other or their feelings were hurt. That was part of their problem; their feelings for each other didn’t seem to go deep enough anymore to be hurt.