“Let’s not pressure her, Hank.” Turning to me, Mrs. Nielsen says, “Take the time you need, and let us know. You have a place in our home, whatever you decide.”

Several days later, in the store stocking shelves in the canned food aisle, I hear a man’s voice I recognize but can’t place. I stack the remaining cans of corn and peas on the shelf in front of me, pick up the empty cardboard box, and stand up slowly, hoping to determine who it is without being seen.

“I got some fine piecework to barter, if you’re amenable,” I hear a man say to Mr. Nielsen, standing behind the counter.

Every day people come into the store with reasons why they can’t pay, asking for credit or offering goods for trade. Every evening, it seems, Mr. Nielsen brings something home from a customer: a dozen eggs, soft Norwegian flatbread called lefse, a long knitted scarf. Mrs. Nielsen rolls her eyes and says, “Mercy,” but she doesn’t complain. I think she’s proud of him—for being kindhearted, and for having the means to be.

“Dorothy?”

I turn around, and with a little shock I realize it’s Mr. Byrne. His auburn hair is lank and unkempt, and his eyes are bloodshot. I wonder if he’s been drinking. What is he doing here, in the general store of a town thirty miles from his own?

“Well, this is a surprise,” he says. “You work here?”

I nod. “The owners—the Nielsens—took me in.”

Despite the February cold, sweat is trickling down Mr. Byrne’s temple. He wipes it away with the back of his hand. “So you happy with them?”

“Yes, sir.” I wonder why he’s acting so odd. “How’s Mrs. Byrne?” I ask, trying to steer the conversation to pleasantries.

He blinks several times. “You haven’t heard.”

“Pardon?”

Shaking his head, he says, “She was not a strong woman, Dorothy. Couldn’t take the humiliation. Couldn’t bear to beg for favors. But what should I have done different? I think about it every day.” His face contorts. “When Fanny left, it was the—”

“Fanny left?” I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am.

“A few weeks after you did. Came in one morning and said her daughter up in Park Rapids wanted her to live with them, and she’d decided to go. We’d lost everyone else, you know, and I think Lois just couldn’t bear the thought . . .” He wipes his hand across his whole face, as if trying to erase his features. “Remember the freak storm that blew through last spring? Late April it was. Well, Lois walked out into it and kept walking. They found her froze to death about four miles from the house.”

I want to feel sympathy for Mr. Byrne. I want to feel something. But I cannot. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I suppose I am sorry—for him, for his tattered life. But I cannot muster any sorrow for Mrs. Byrne. I think of her cold eyes and perpetual scowl, her unwillingness to see me as anything more than a pair of hands, fingers holding a needle and thread. I am not glad she is dead, but I am not sorry she is gone.

At dinner that evening I tell the Nielsens I will take their daughter’s name. And in that moment, my old life ends and a new one begins. Though I find it hard to trust that my good fortune will continue, I am under no illusions about what I’ve left behind. So when, after several years, the Nielsens tell me that they want to adopt me, I readily agree. I will become their daughter, though I never can bring myself to call them Mother and Father—our affiliation feels too formal for that. Even so, from now on it is clear that I belong to them; they are responsible for me and will take care of me.

AS TIME PASSES, MY REAL FAMILY BECOMES HARDER AND HARDER to remember. I have no photographs or letters or even books from that former life, only the Irish cross from my gram. And though I rarely take the claddagh off, as I get older I can’t escape the realization that the only remaining piece of my blood family comes from a woman who pushed her only son and his family out to sea in a boat, knowing full well she’d probably never see them again.

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1935–1939

I am fifteen when Mrs. Nielsen finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse.

It’s clear when I walk into the kitchen that I’ve done something to displease her. She is quieter than usual, with an air of injured aggravation. I wonder if I’m imagining it; I try to remember if I said or did anything to upset her before I left for school. The pack of cigarettes, which my friend Judy Smith’s boyfriend bought for her at the Esso station outside of town, and which she passed along to me, doesn’t even register in my mind.

After Mr. Nielsen comes in and we sit down to supper, Mrs. Nielsen slides the pack of Lucky Strikes toward me across the table. “I was looking for my green gloves and thought you might have borrowed them,” she says. “I found this instead.”

I look at her, then at Mr. Nielsen, who lifts his fork and knife and begins cutting his pork chop into small pieces.

“I only smoked one, to try it,” I say, though they can clearly see that the pack is half empty.

“Where’d you get it?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.

I am tempted to tell them it was Judy’s boyfriend, Douglas, but realize it will only be worse to drag other people in. “It was—an experiment. I didn’t like it. They made me cough.”

She raises her eyebrows at Mr. Nielsen, and I can tell they’ve already decided on a punishment. The only thing they can really take away is my weekly Sunday-afternoon trip to the picture show with Judy, so for the next two weeks I stay home instead. And endure their silent reprobation.

After this, I decide that the cost of upsetting them is too much. I don’t climb out my bedroom window and down the drainpipe like Judy; I go to school and work in the store and help with dinner and do my homework and go to bed. I go out with boys now and then, always on a double date or in groups. One boy in particular, Ronnie King, is sweet on me and gives me a promise ring. But I am so worried I might do something to disappoint the Nielsens that I avoid any situation that might lead to impropriety. Once, after a date, Ronnie tries to kiss me good night. His lips brush mine and I pull back quickly. Soon after that I give back his ring.

I never lose the fear that any day Mr. Sorenson could be on the doorstep, telling me that the Nielsens have decided I’m too expensive, too much trouble, or merely a disappointment, and they’ve decided to let me go. In my nightmares I am alone on a train, heading into the wilderness. Or in a maze of hay bales. Or walking the streets of a big city, gazing at lights in every window, seeing the families inside, none of them mine.

ONE DAY I OVERHEAR A MAN AT THE COUNTER TALKING TO MRS. Nielsen. “My wife sent me in here to get some things for a basket our church is putting together for a boy who came on that orphan train,” he says. “Remember those? Used to come through a while ago with all those homeless waifs? I went to the Grange Hall in Albans once to see ’em. Pitiful lot. Anyhow, this kid had one misfortune after another, got beat up pretty bad by the farmer who took him in, and now the elderly lady he went to after that has died, and he’s on his own again. It’s a scandal, sending those poor kids out here on their own, expecting folks to take care of ’em—as if we don’t have our own burdens.”

“Ummhmm,” Mrs. Nielsen says noncommittally.

I move closer, wondering if he might be talking about Dutchy. But then I realize Dutchy is eighteen now. Old enough to be on his own.

I AM NEARLY SIXTEEN WHEN I LOOK AROUND THE STORE AND REALIZE that it has barely changed in all the time I’ve been here. And there are things we can do to make it nicer. A lot of things. First, after consulting Mr. Nielsen, I move the magazines to the front, near the cash register. The shampoos and lotions and balms that used to be at the back of the store I shift to shelves near the pharmacy, so that people filling prescriptions can also buy plasters and ointments. The women’s section is woefully understocked—understandable, given Mr. Nielsen’s general ignorance and Mrs. Nielsen’s lack of interest (she does wear an occasional coat of lipstick, though it always seems to have been randomly chosen and hurriedly applied). Remembering the long discussions about stockings and garters and makeup rituals at Mrs. Murphy’s, I suggest that we increase and expand this section, purchasing, for example, a hosiery carousel with seamed and unseamed stockings from one of the vendors, and advertise it in the paper. The Nielsens are skeptical, but in the first week we go through our entire stock. The following week Mr. Nielsen doubles the order.