On their daily walk home from school, Charlie soon began to fight recklessly with boys twice his size for comments about Diane that he once would’ve let whistle past or perhaps even laughed at himself. When he wasn’t fighting, he tightrope-walked the railing of the footbridge over the creek, stopping Diane’s heart. After dinner—now mostly small mountains of heavily buttered potatoes boiled by their father—he ceased watching their favorite programs and sat in a hardback chair to memorize the Oxford dictionary he’d found at the church thrift shop, a stack of recipe cards kept in his pocket for recording unusual words he fancied and pictured himself using to great effect in a courtroom someday. He badgered their father to buy expensive faux-gilded encyclopedia sets, even though there was no money for such things.

When the twins were ten, their father rotated onto a new shift, and with no money for afterschool care, they were forced to walk to Pool 6, the grain elevator where their father worked, to wait until he got off at seven. They assumed the chore of bringing his supper in a tin bucket each night, his vegetables and meat mixing as they walked. With the bucket often frozen by the time they arrived, they’d set it to warm on a donkey engine still used to draw water from the lake. For dessert, Theodore ate two hardboiled eggs whole, unpeeled.

Because of the twins’ loss, the men on their father’s shift never once bemoaned their presence in the workhouse, even though it meant curbing their swearing and nipping at bottles of grain alcohol on breaks. But soon Charlie hated the elevator even more resoundingly than he hated Thunder Bay and would skulk at a table in the corner like a boy doing penitentiary time, seething over his dictionary while Diane sat sketching, stealing glances to watch the men sip inky coffee as they discussed machines, the vagaries of international shipping, proper bin ventilation, the moisture content of grain, and dreams of summer fishing excursions on secret lakes. She heard them spin complex webs of loyalty and hatred, mostly based on accusations of effrontery, incompetency, or the worst accusation of all: laziness. The elevator workers were mainly sunburned Scotch-Irish or Ukrainian farm boys who’d taken one step up the supply chain or recent immigrants without a word of English that wasn’t a curse or a description of grain. Though their father never smoked, Theodore’s breath rattled, and he coughed up great whopping solids that he expelled from the window of their truck or into the sink. “Down the wrong pipe,” Theodore would say. “Man wasn’t born to breathe bread.” After years of grain dust exposure, most of the workers wheezed, and the older men’s eyes had hardened to something comparable to amber. Back at home, Charlie would bat the grain dust from his clothes before returning to school the next day, scolding Diane if, after her washing, any dust remained on the pair of Brooks Brothers oxford shirts he’d found miraculously in the thrift shop, shirts he wore alternately each day like sacred robes.

Unlike many at the elevator, their father had a steady, even manner and never competed or quarreled with others at Pool 6. He loved the paintings of Breughel, often staying up late to leaf through the expensive art books their mother had once sold her baking every weekend to buy him, the only books in their home other than the telephone directory, Charlie’s dictionary, and Diane’s sketchbooks. He took neither coffee nor alcohol—only hot water from a thermos, which he claimed as Science’s greatest triumph. But from the workhouse the twins witnessed bare-knuckled fights and daredevil contests of every sort. Men jumping across dizzying spaces between grain bins and iron walkways a hundred feet in the air, balancing sharp pitchforks on their chins and timing reckless dodges through the jaws of the death-dealing machinery. For these reasons and others, Theodore forbade the twins to venture outside the workhouse. The harborfront was a dangerous nexus of furnaces, cables, factories, boilers, switching tracks, shipyards, and extreme cold that came in from the lake like a wraith, and he often spoke of Wheat Pool 5, an elevator that had exploded when its venting systems failed.

Eventually, the twins grew old enough to be on their own at home, and their time at the elevator ended, though Diane still brought Theodore his supper nightly. By then she adored the thunder of trains shunting down in the yard and had learned to distinguish this from the roar of the car dumper as it snatched fully loaded grain cars and emptied them like a child’s sand pail. From the high windows of Pool 6 she watched lakeboats crawl off into the blue horizon, toward the canals and locks of the lesser Great Lakes, down to the Saint Lawrence and eventually the ocean. With everything measured on such a grand metric—the thousands of tons of grain and potash and steel and concrete, the enormous boats and stout men, not to mention Thunder Bay’s outsized hopes for the future (“Canada’s Chicago,” it was foretold then with a straight face)—Diane would return to their house on Machar Avenue and think it better suited for her dolls than a family.

Their father neither struck them nor singed them with harsh words, and Diane was frightened by her brother’s growing loathing of Theodore, who she always found pleasantly benign, if only because he was so rarely both at home and awake simultaneously. Charlie began to scoff at Theodore’s monotonous descriptions of his work and would sweep up the grain dust that their father tracked in with brisk, agitated strokes with the corn broom. Charlie confessed during a late-night conversation in their room—a time once reserved for surreptitious play: knock-knock jokes, silly drawings, and improvised tales of talking animals told in hushed tones, but now consisted mostly of silent brooding and angry study—that he’d become convinced their father was an embarrassing simpleton and that their only ladder of escape from Thunder Bay would be academics, scholarships in particular, because they’d never have money for higher education. “You should put down your drawing pencils and pick up your grades,” Charlie said. But since her mother’s death, Diane had felt divided from herself, ensconced, drained, mostly brainless, as though her life had become one protracted sigh.

Though she had no mind for schoolwork, Diane advanced into high school mainly because, she suspected, they wouldn’t dare split the poor twins up. Charlie continued the fervency of his studies, planting his name on the honor roll each year and drilling himself after school with his dictionary and the door-stopping almanacs of trivia and crossword puzzles that he tore through nightly after completing his homework. It was as though he was burning through their collective ambitions himself, and in some way Diane eased the slow-blooming agony and confusion of losing her mother by taking shelter behind him, behind the battering ram of his anger and drive.

Because Thunder Bay was neither large nor moneyed enough to support a private high school, children from all walks of life were thrown together, and Charlie quickly struck up a friendship with Whalen Agnew, the son of one of the major stakeholders in the grain elevators on the Lakes, including Pool 6—a tall boy with a high, regal forehead and grades almost as good as her brother’s. Soon the two were as inseparable as the twins once were. Charlie would have Whalen over to study, visits for which Diane would spend the week beforehand cleaning, horrified by the thought of grain dust clinging to his finely cut pants as he sat before his potato-mound that she’d tried to enliven with a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a salad.

Then one summer day Whalen called while Charlie was at the library and asked her over to mend the pocket of a sport coat for him. Heart pounding, she hurried up the hill, terrified and thrilled by the prospect of nurturing a secret from her brother, who already demanded a complex, devoted loyalty from his best friend and would seethe if he found out they’d met without him.