Crows Over a Wheatfield [antikvár]

1 A FEW MONTHS after my mother died, my father brought Ottilia home for the first time. She was twenty-four years old. My father was forty-one. Ottilia was not my father's only surprise: he also brought Matthew, my half-brother. Matthew, like me, was seven. I felt relieved by Ottilie and Matthew's arrival. Shortly before, my father had stood me on a stepladder in front of the stove, telling me that now that my mother had left us, I was "his little woman, Melanie," who would cook and clean for him: I remember feeling baffled as I watched the steam rise from an aluminum pot, spaghetti unfurling in its roiling waters like a mare's tail. Perhaps my mother's death by a long undetected cancer had left my father temporarily addled. The story of Matt's origins unravelled slowly, in pieces, and never completely. In 1957, the year Ottilie arrived, my father relocated us from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, to the larger town of McCarthy, one hundred miles north, where no one knew any of us. Still, from phrases dropped sparingly by Ottilie, town gossip spooled with skeins of speculation, and the benefit of my own adult hindsight, I am fairly sure that shortly after my parents married, when my mother was pregnant with me, my father initiated an affair with slight, quiet Ottilie, whose pale, luminous beauty must have fascinated