The pavement in Jenksville didn’t look like those paintings of Paris in the rain no matter how hard she squinted. In fact they were just tar-sprayed gravel and wouldn’t reflect anything but the echo of her mother oak upended by the tornado. Mabel sat outside the one-room post office under a torn umbrella and hid the wine glass in her knitting bag. She was on her lunch break, but it would be unseemly for a government employee, even a part-timer, to be seen tippling. That big tree. Ormond had proposed to her under its shade in ’71. Now they were both gone. All she could do was stare at the space between her youth and her split nail.