The Crown Under the Steps

A Saucer of Milk

"There's a snake under your back steps," Austėja said, "and it's wearing a crown."

Her grandfather was halfway through a slice of cucumber. He stopped chewing. He set his fork down on the edge of his plate, very carefully, the way people set things down when they are trying not to wake a baby.

"Say that again, Austėjute."

"A snake. Under the steps. Green, kind of gray-green, about as long as my arm, with two yellow spots on the back of its head, right here." She touched the back of her own neck, below her ponytail. "They look exactly like a little crown. I think it's a grass snake. Natrix natrix. Except grass snakes don't live in North America, so it can't be one, so it's probably a garter snake with a skin problem."

"Natrix natrix," said her father, from the other end of the table, as if he were tasting the words. "That sounds like a wrestler."

Nobody laughed, which was unusual, because Senelis always laughed at Dad's jokes, even the bad ones, and especially the bad ones. Instead Senelis got up from the table, pushed in his chair, and walked out through the kitchen to the back door. The screen door squeaked open and banged shut behind him.

Austėja's mother looked at Močiutė. Močiutė looked at the ceiling.

"Oi," said Močiutė. "Here we go."

* * *

It was the last Sunday in August, and the bungalow on Washtenaw Avenue was hot in the particular way that brick houses in Chicago get hot at the end of summer, as if the walls had been saving up sunshine since June and were now giving it all back at once. The fan in the dining room window turned its head from side to side like a slow, bored owl. Out front, on the patch of lawn between the sidewalk and the porch, a white sign on two metal legs said FOR SALE in red letters, with a phone number underneath and a picture of a smiling woman who was not anybody's relative.

Austėja hated the sign. She had hated it since July, when it appeared. Senelis called it "the scarecrow," and every time they pulled up in the car he waved at it and said, "Labas, scarecrow, nobody wants you yet?" and Mom said, "Tėti, don't say that, we want somebody to want it," and Senelis said, "I know, I know," in a voice that meant he didn't know at all.

The plan was that in the spring Senelis and Močiutė would sell the house where Senelis had lived since he was four years old and move to a small new apartment in Lemont, fifteen minutes from Austėja's house instead of forty-five minutes on the expressway. There would be an elevator. There would be no snow to shovel. There would be no back steps, and no basement full of seventy years of everything.

"It is a very good plan," Močiutė said whenever it came up, and she said it in the voice of somebody walking across ice.

Austėja got down from her chair and followed her grandfather.

The backyard was long and narrow, with a chain-link fence on each side and a garage at the end on the alley. Senelis's tomato plants leaned against their stakes like tired soldiers. The grass had gone brown in patches. A gray squirrel sat on the garage roof eating something that looked suspiciously like one of Senelis's tomatoes.

Senelis was down on his knees on the concrete beside the back steps. There were four steps, gray and chipped, and underneath the bottom one was a gap about as tall as a deck of cards, where the concrete had sunk a little over the years. Senelis had his cheek almost flat against the ground. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose.

"Seneli," Austėja said, "your knees."

"My knees are seventy-four years old. They are used to disappointment." He didn't look up. "Where exactly?"

She crouched next to him and pointed. "It went in there. On the left side. It looked at me first. Snakes can't really look at you on purpose, their eyes don't move like ours, but it held its head up like this, and it sort of tasted the air with its tongue, and then it went in."

Senelis let out a long breath through his nose.

"Žaltys," he said.

"What?"

"Žaltys. That's what it is. Not a grass snake, not a garter snake with a skin problem. A žaltys." He pronounced it slowly for her: ZHAHL-tees, with the first sound buzzing like a bee caught in a jar. "Say it."

"Žaltys."

"Good. Again, with more bee in it."

"Žžžaltys."

"Labai gerai." He sat back on his heels and pushed his glasses up. His face had gone pink from being near the ground, and something else was happening in it too, something Austėja couldn't name. He looked the way her friend Theo looked when he found a beetle he had only ever seen in a book.

"In Lithuania," Senelis said, "in the old days, in the farmhouses, a family was lucky if a žaltys came to live with them. It might live under the floor, or behind the stove, or under the step by the door. The family would put out a little dish of milk for it. You never hurt a žaltys. Never, never. If you hurt a žaltys, the luck goes out of the house like heat out of an open window. And the žaltys, it watches the family. It keeps the family."

"Keeps them from what?"

"From forgetting who they are, my mother said." He shrugged, a big Chicago shrug, both shoulders and both hands. "That's a grandmother answer. You can believe it or not."

"Did you ever see one before? Here?"

Senelis didn't answer right away. He was looking at the gap under the step.

"Once," he said. "When I was ten. Summer of 1961. Right here. Same step. Same crown." He laughed, a short surprised sound. "I came running into the kitchen yelling, and my mother put down her rolling pin and went straight to the refrigerator for the milk. She didn't even ask me if I was sure. She poured milk in a saucer, the one with the blue rim, and she put it right there." He pointed to the corner where the bottom step met the house. "Next morning the saucer was empty. My father said it was the cat from across the alley. My mother said nothing. She just smiled."

"Was it the cat?"

"Austėjute," said Senelis, "I have been waiting sixty-four years to find out."

* * *

Inside, the blue-rimmed saucer was not in the kitchen cupboard. Močiutė said it had probably broken before Austėja's mother finished high school. Senelis went through three cupboards anyway, making a great deal of noise, while Mom stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded.

"Tėti. You're not putting milk out for a snake."

"I am putting milk out for a žaltys."

"Snakes don't even drink milk. That's a myth. Austėja, tell him."

Austėja opened her mouth. It was true. Two of her reptile books said so: snakes drink water and eat mice and frogs and worms, and the milk thing is a story people tell.

But Senelis was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a little white dish in one hand and the milk carton in the other, and he had the beetle look on his face, and he was waiting.

"Grass snakes in Europe eat mostly frogs," Austėja said slowly. "And this one isn't a grass snake. So nobody knows what it eats."

Mom closed her eyes. Dad, who had wandered in to see what the noise was about, snorted into his iced tea.

"Rasa," Močiutė said gently to Mom, "let him put out the milk. It's milk. It's a saucer. It's not a tattoo."

So they all went outside, even Mom, who stood at the top of the steps holding the screen door with one hand as if she might need to escape back inside at any second. Austėja's mother was not a fan of anything with more legs than four or fewer than two.

Senelis bent down, with a crack from one knee, and put the saucer of milk beside the bottom step.

"Labas, žalty," he said to the gap. He said it in the voice he used on the phone with his cousin in Kaunas, polite and a little loud. "Here is some milk. Welcome. You are welcome here." Then, in a more ordinary voice: "We are leaving in the spring, so you have bad timing, my friend."

"Do you have to say that part?" Austėja whispered.

"You never lie to a žaltys," Senelis whispered back. "It's bad manners."

Nothing happened. The fan inside the dining room window hummed. A bus groaned along Marquette Road two blocks away. The squirrel on the garage roof dropped its tomato and swore at them in squirrel.

Then, very slowly, from the dark under the step, a small head came out.

It was narrow and smooth, the gray-green of a pond in October, and right behind the head, on either side, were the two spots: bright yellow, edged with black, curving up and around like the two halves of a tiny crown. The eyes were round and dark and shining. The tongue came out, black and forked, and tasted the air once, twice.

Mom made a sound like a teakettle and let go of the door.

The head went back into the dark.

"Rasa!" said Močiutė.

"I didn't mean to!"

"Well," Dad said cheerfully, "it's definitely wearing a crown. I'll give it that. Very regal. Very Natrix natrix."

Senelis did not say anything at all. He was still bent over, his hand on his knee, staring at the place where the head had been. Austėja saw his mouth move a little, and she was almost sure he was saying "sixty-four years" to himself, in English, very quietly.

* * *

Before they drove home to Lemont that evening, Mom sat at the dining room table with her tablet and did what she called "the boring part." She opened the calendar the whole family shared, from Washtenaw Avenue to Vilnius to the second cousins in Cleveland, and typed in the things that were coming up. Austėja read over her shoulder.

Saturday, September 13: Saulutė Saturday School starts (Austėja, 4th year). Folk dance after.

Sunday, September 28: Open house (the scarecrow's big day).

Thursday, February 12: AUSTĖJA TURNS 10!!!

Saturday, February 14: Užgavėnės in Lemont.

April: MOVE.

Mom had typed MOVE in capital letters and then gone back and changed it to small letters, and then changed it back to capitals. Austėja watched her do it three times.

"Mom," she said, "can I add something?"

Mom slid the tablet over. Austėja went to the last Sunday in August, today, and in the little box she typed: Žaltys came back. (Senelis saw it last in 1961.)

She spelled žaltys wrong the first time and had to find the Ž on the keyboard, which meant holding down the Z until a little row of choices popped up, Ź and Ż and Ž, and picking the one with the tiny hat.

"What is it called," she asked, "the little hat?"

"The varnelė," said Močiutė, from across the room, without looking up from her crossword. "Little crow."

"Why is a hat called a crow?"

"Ask your Saturday school," said Močiutė. "That's what we pay them for."

* * *

Above the dining room table, all through dinner and all through the calendar and the crow conversation, the sodas had been hanging from its hook in the ceiling. Austėja had seen it every Sunday of her life, so she didn't usually notice it, the way you don't notice your own elbows.

It was made of straw. Hundreds of pieces of golden straw, each one hollow and shining, threaded together with thin white string into shapes like diamonds stacked on diamonds, pyramids balanced point to point, a big shape in the middle as wide as a bicycle wheel, and smaller and smaller shapes hanging from all its corners, all the way down to tiny ones no bigger than a thimble. At the bottom of each little string hung a tiny straw star. The whole thing was the color of honey that has been kept in a cupboard a long time, and at the top it had gone a little gray with dust and age.

It was older than Mom. It was nearly as old as Senelis's memories. Senelis's mother, Ona, had made it with her own hands in the winter of 1955, the first winter in this house.

Austėja had always thought of it as a kind of decoration, like a chandelier you couldn't turn on.

That night, as she was putting on her shoes by the front door, she looked back through the archway into the dining room. Senelis was standing alone beside the table with his hands in his pockets. The fan in the window had been switched off. There was no wind. Every window in the house was shut because Močiutė had turned on the air conditioner in the bedroom.

And the sodas was turning.

Very slowly, the big middle shape was swinging around on its string, and all the little shapes beneath it were swinging too, each at its own speed, so that the straw caught the light from the kitchen and threw it in thin gold stripes across the wallpaper. Senelis was watching it with his head tipped back.

"Seneli," Austėja said, "what's making it move?"

"The radiator," he said.

It was August. The radiator was off. It had been off since April.

"Oh," said Austėja.

Senelis looked at her over the tops of his glasses, and she looked at him, and neither of them said anything else. Then Dad honked the horn out front, twice, cheerfully, and Mom called "Austėja, seat belt!" and the screen door banged, and she ran out past the scarecrow sign into the hot, cicada-loud evening.

In the car, as they went up onto the expressway with the sky going orange and purple over the rail yards, she took out her mother's old phone and opened her notes, and wrote:

Things to find out: 1. Do grass snakes drink milk? (No. But this one isn't a grass snake.) 2. Why is a hat called a crow? 3. Radiators???

She looked at the list for a long time, and then she added a fourth thing, at the bottom, and underlined it twice.

4. What did Senelis remember?

Little Crows and Handkerchiefs

Saturday school smelled like floor wax, dry-erase markers and somebody's mother's coffee.

It met every Saturday morning from September to May in a big brick building in Lemont, on a hill above the old canal, where the town's limestone streets tipped down toward the river and the trees along the water were just beginning to think about turning yellow. On the drive in, Austėja could see the quarry ponds flashing in the sun beyond the rooftops, still and green as old glass. Inside, the hallways were full of folding tables, bulletin boards with paper maple leaves, and parents talking in two languages at once, so that every sentence seemed to start in Lithuanian and finish in English or the other way around.

"Labas rytas!" said Mokytoja Daiva at the classroom door, to each child, one at a time, and shook their hand as if they were all small ambassadors.

"Labas rytas," said Austėja, and shook.

This was her fourth year. She could read slowly, write badly and say "I don't know" in Lithuanian very fast, which she had found was the most useful sentence of all. Most of the kids in her class were like her: born in Chicago or the suburbs, Lithuanian at the grandparents' table and English everywhere else. They spoke Lithuanian with the careful voices of people walking on a newly mopped floor.

Except Elzė.

Elzė had arrived from Klaipėda, on the Baltic coast, the year before. She had a long blond braid that went nearly to her belt and an expression of permanent mild surprise, as if America kept doing things she had not been warned about. Her Lithuanian was quick and bright and full of words Austėja had never heard. Her English was slow and careful and full of words used in brave new ways. Last spring, when the fire alarm went off by mistake, Elzė had stood up and announced to the class, "Everybody, please, the building is screaming."

Austėja had liked her immediately.

"Elzė," she whispered, sliding into the seat beside her. "I have to tell you something. My grandfather has a žaltys."

Elzė's eyes went wider than their usual wide. "A real one?"

"A real one. With the crown. It lives under his back steps. He gives it milk."

Elzė thought about this. "In Lithuania now," she said, "a žaltys is just a snake. You see it, you say oh, a snake, you walk around. Nobody gives it milk." She paused. "But my great-grandmother, in the village, she had a dish. By the door. For somebody." She shrugged with one shoulder. "We thought it was for the hedgehog."

"Maybe it was for the žaltys."

"Maybe," said Elzė. "Or maybe the hedgehog was lucky."

* * *

Mokytoja Daiva wrote the alphabet across the whiteboard in tall blue letters. It took her a long time, because the Lithuanian alphabet has thirty-two letters, and a lot of them come with extra pieces attached.

"Today," she said, in Lithuanian, then again in English for the slow ones, "we are going to talk about the little things that sit on the letters. The hats, the tails and the dots. In English you have none of these. Poor English. It has to guess everything."

The class laughed. Mokytoja Daiva tapped the whiteboard with her marker.

"This," she said, and drew a small v-shape above an S, "is the varnelė."

Austėja's hand shot up so fast that she knocked her pencil case off the desk.

"Why is it called a little crow?"

Mokytoja Daiva looked pleased, the way teachers do when somebody asks the question they were about to answer anyway. "Some people say because it looks like a bird far away in the sky. You know how you draw birds when you are small? Like this?" She drew a little flying v. "Some people say because it looks like a crow's footprint in the snow. And some people say a varnelė is the little mark you make on a list when something is done. A check mark. Check, done, the crow has landed." She drew a check mark. "I like the crow in the sky. You can pick."

Austėja picked the footprint. She liked the idea of a crow walking across the top of her name and leaving a mark on the way. Then she remembered her name did not have a varnelė. It had a dot, on the ė, which was not nearly as interesting.

"This," said Mokytoja Daiva, and drew a little hook curling down from the bottom of an A, "is the nosinė."

The class waited. Mokytoja Daiva waited too, smiling.

"Nosinė," said Elzė helpfully, in English, "is also handkerchief."

There was a short silence while everybody took this in.

"The letter has a handkerchief?" said a boy named Domas, at the back.

"The letter has a handkerchief," Mokytoja Daiva agreed. "Long ago these letters were said through the nose. Nosis, nose. Nosinė, a thing for the nose. So the mark is the nose-mark, and the handkerchief is the nose-cloth, and they have the same name. Now we don't say them through the nose so much anymore. But the letter keeps its handkerchief. In case."

"In case it gets a cold," said Domas, and the whole class fell apart laughing, and Mokytoja Daiva laughed too and said, "Exactly, in case it gets a cold," and wrote Ą Ę Į Ų across the board, each with its tiny curling handkerchief, and for the rest of the morning Austėja could not look at those letters without seeing them dab their noses.

They practiced writing words with crows and handkerchiefs in them. Šuo, dog. Žąsis, goose, which had both. Mokytoja Daiva said žąsis was a very well-dressed word, a hat at the front and a handkerchief in the middle, ready for a party. Austėja wrote ŽALTYS at the top of her page in big letters, and drew a small green snake curled around the Ž. Then she gave the snake two yellow spots behind its head.

Mokytoja Daiva stopped by her desk and looked at it for a while.

"Who taught you žaltys?"

"My grandfather. There's one under his steps."

"Is there." Mokytoja Daiva said it in the voice grown-ups use when they are not sure whether you are making something up, and are being polite about it either way. "Well. It has a good letter to live on. A crown on its head and a hat on its name."

* * *

At the end of the morning, Mokytoja Daiva handed out the big assignment for the fall.

"Everybody must find one thing in your family that is older than your parents," she said. "A thing. Not a person. A spoon, a photograph, a cup, a book, a piece of cloth. You will find out its story. Who made it, who carried it, how did it come to be in your house. Then before the winter holiday you will tell the class about it in Lithuanian. Five sentences at least. Ten if you are brave."

A groan went around the room. Ten sentences in Lithuanian was about nine more than most of them could do without help.

"You may ask your grandparents for help," said Mokytoja Daiva. "In fact you must. That's the point."

Austėja did not even have to think. She knew immediately. The sodas. The straw sodas over the dining room table, made by Senelis's mother in 1955, which was older than Mom and nearly as old as Senelis's memories, and which turned around and around in a room with no wind.

* * *

After class came folk dance, in the gym, which had a wooden floor painted with lines for three different sports, so that you could dance across a basketball key and a volleyball line and a mysterious red circle nobody had ever explained.

The dance teacher was a tall young woman named Rūta who wore sneakers with her long red skirt and clapped out the beat with her whole arms. This fall the middle group was learning "Kalvelis," the little blacksmith dance. The girls and boys faced each other in two lines, and on certain beats you made fists and hammered them together, one on top of the other, bang bang bang, like a blacksmith at an anvil, and then you spun your partner and stamped.

Austėja's partner was Domas. Domas hammered beautifully. Austėja hammered when she remembered to, which was about every other time, and when she remembered late she hammered alone into the silence after everyone else had stopped, bang, like a door slamming in an empty house.

"Austėja," Rūta called across the gym, kindly, "you are a very enthusiastic blacksmith. But the iron is cold already. Listen to the music. The music tells you when."

"The music tells me too late," Austėja said, which made Domas laugh so hard he missed his own hammer.

They went through it six times. By the sixth time she was hammering on the right beat about half the time, which Rūta said was progress, and Domas said was "like a blacksmith who is also a little bit asleep." Then Rūta put on an old accordion recording, played fast, the village-wedding way, and let them spin until the painted lines of three sports went around like a merry-go-round.

* * *

That night, at home in Lemont, Austėja sat cross-legged on her bed with Mom's old phone and opened the family's word list.

It lived in the same private place as the family calendar and the family photos, the place only their family could see, and it was a long list of Lithuanian words with English beside them. Next to each word was a little round button, and when you pressed it, you heard somebody in the family say the word. Močiutė had recorded most of them, in her crisp Vilnius voice. Mom had done some. One of the Cleveland cousins had recorded a whole page of words about fishing, for reasons nobody had ever explained.

Last Sunday, before they left Washtenaw Avenue, Austėja had made Senelis record žaltys. She pressed the button now.

"Žžžžžaltys," said Senelis's voice, buzzing like the biggest bee in Illinois. Then, because he never knew when to stop a recording: "Austėjute, that is how you say it. With the bee. Labanakt, my sparrow. Is this thing still on? Danute, how do you turn it..."

The recording ended. Austėja laughed into her pillow.

She added two new words to the list herself. She typed varnelė, little crow, a hat on a letter, and nosinė, handkerchief, also a tail on a letter. Then she called Senelis, because it was only eight-thirty and he never went to bed before the ten o'clock news.

"Labas," he answered, on the first ring.

"Labas, Seneli. Will you record two more words for me? I'll come Sunday."

"For you, ten words. For your mother, maybe two."

"Seneli." She lowered her voice, even though nobody in her house could hear. "Did the žaltys drink the milk?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. In the background she could hear the television, and Močiutė saying something about the Cubs that was not polite.

"The saucer was empty Monday morning," Senelis said. "Empty Tuesday. Empty Wednesday. Thursday half. Friday, empty, very clean, like someone licked it."

"Squirrel," said Austėja. "Or the cat. Or a raccoon. We need evidence. Dad has an old trail camera from when he thought there was a coyote. We could put it on the fence and..."

"No."

"But Seneli, it's science."

"Austėjute." Senelis's voice was gentle and very firm, the voice he used about crossing streets. "You don't spy on a žaltys. Would you like somebody to put a camera under your bed and watch you drink your milk?"

"I don't drink milk under my bed."

"That is because you are not a žaltys. Good night, my sparrow. Sunday, you bring your words."

After she hung up, Austėja lay on her back for a long time looking at her ceiling, which had glow-in-the-dark stars on it from when she was six. She thought about a crow walking across the snow on top of a letter. She thought about a letter with a handkerchief in case it got a cold. She thought about a saucer licked clean on Washtenaw Avenue, forty-five minutes away on the expressway, under a sky full of real stars nobody in Chicago could see.

Then she got up, turned on her lamp, and found a pencil. On the back of her Saturday school homework, she wrote her first Lithuanian sentence of the fall, very slowly, checking every hat and handkerchief:

Mano senelis turi žaltį.

My grandfather has a žaltys.

The žaltys had changed its ending to fit into the sentence, the way Lithuanian words do, like someone shifting in a chair to make room. Austėja looked at it for a while and decided she didn't mind. It was still in there. It had just curled up a little differently.

The Straw Orchard

On Sunday Austėja arrived at Washtenaw Avenue with her homework in a plastic folder, two words for Senelis to record, a roll of masking tape, a box of tissues and her father's kitchen timer.

"What's all this?" said Močiutė, opening the door. The house smelled of browned onions and dill, and somewhere in the kitchen a pot lid was rattling.

"It's an experiment," said Austėja.

"On what?"

"On the radiator."

Močiutė looked at the tissues, then at the tape, then at her granddaughter. "Oi," she said, and stood aside to let her in. "Don't experiment on the soup."

* * *

First, the words. Senelis sat at the dining room table with the phone held in front of his mouth like an ice cream cone and recorded varnelė and nosinė, and then, because he was enjoying himself, recorded a short speech about how in his day nobody worried about crows and handkerchiefs, you just wrote the letters and if old Mrs. Vaičiulis at Saturday school didn't like your handwriting, she... here Močiutė said "Algi" from the kitchen in a warning voice and he stopped and said, "she told your mother," and pressed the red button to end it.

Then the homework.

"Something older than your parents," Senelis read off the sheet, holding it at arm's length because his reading glasses were somewhere in the living room. "Well. That's easy. Your grandmother's cookbook. Me. The furnace."

"You're not a thing, Seneli."

"On Mondays I am a thing."

"I want to do the sodas."

Senelis lowered the paper. Above them the straw shapes hung perfectly still in the noon light, gold and gray, with all their little stars pointing at the tablecloth.

"Good choice," he said quietly. "Then you have to know the story. Sit."

* * *

This is the story Senelis told, at the dining room table on Washtenaw Avenue, with the soup bubbling in the kitchen and the sodas hanging still above them.

In 1949, his mother and father came to Chicago on a ship and then a train, with one wooden trunk and two suitcases and a baby blanket with nobody in it yet. They came from a camp in Germany where they had lived for four years after the war, in a long wooden barracks with forty other families, because they could not go home. Lithuania was not allowed to be its own country then. It would not be allowed to be its own country again for a very long time.

"How long?" asked Austėja.

"Until I was almost forty," said Senelis. "Until after your grandmother stood in a line of people holding hands from one country to the next. But that's her story. She'll tell you if you ask nicely and help with the dishes."

In Chicago, Jonas and Ona Rimkus rented two rooms over a shoe repair shop on Archer Avenue, in Brighton Park. Jonas got a job at a factory that made boxes. Ona sewed collars onto shirts in a building downtown, sixty collars an hour. Their first winter, the wind came off the lake and found every crack in the windows, and Ona stuffed newspapers in them, Lithuanian newspapers, so that the wind had to read the news before it could get in. In 1951 Algirdas was born in those two rooms, during a thunderstorm. In 1955 they had saved enough to buy this bungalow, the third one from the corner, with a yard and a basement and a back step.

"That December," said Senelis, "my mother said, we have a house, we have a table, we have a boy. Now we need a garden."

"In December?"

"Exactly. In December. In Chicago. My father said, Ona, the ground is frozen like a hockey rink. And she said, I am not going to plant it in the ground."

Sodas, he explained, meant garden, or orchard, a place with trees. In the villages in Lithuania, in the long dark winters, women made straw gardens to hang over the table, for weddings and for the holidays and sometimes just because the winter was long. A garden of straw that would turn and sway in the warm air from the stove and remind everybody that the summer was coming back. They used rye straw, which was hollow and strong and shone like gold.

"Where did she get rye straw in Chicago?"

Senelis smiled. "From a farmer out past Lemont. A Lithuanian who had come before the war. You drove out Archer Avenue until Archer stopped being a city and turned into fields. My father borrowed a friend's car. I was four. I remember the straw in the back seat, all around me, like I was sitting in a bird's nest. It made me sneeze all the way home."

All that winter, at the kitchen table, after Algirdas was asleep, Ona cut the straw into pieces with a small pair of scissors, and soaked the pieces in warm water so they wouldn't crack, and threaded them with a long needle onto white linen thread, three by three, into triangles, and the triangles into diamonds, and the diamonds into bigger diamonds. It took her until the middle of February. When it was done, Jonas screwed a hook into the dining room ceiling, and they hung it up, and that was the sodas.

"She never took it down?"

"Never. Seventy years. Once a year she blew the dust off it with the hair dryer on cold. After she died, I did it." He looked up at it. "Not very well, as you can see."

* * *

Then it was time for the experiment.

Austėja had planned it all out in the car. If the sodas was being moved by warm air, then the warm air had to be coming from somewhere. So first she closed the dining room's two doors, the one to the kitchen and the one to the hall. Then she taped thin strips of tissue over each heating vent, the window and the archway, so that if any air moved anywhere, a tissue would flutter and give it away.

"Nobody move," she said. "Nobody breathe hard."

"I have to breathe a little," said Dad.

"Breathe through your nose. Slowly."

Mom and Dad and Močiutė and Senelis sat around the table like people waiting for a magician. Austėja set her father's kitchen timer for two minutes and watched the tissues. Nothing fluttered. The sodas hung still.

"Okay," she said. "Now somebody has to remember something true. From before."

"Like what?" said Mom.

"Anything. But it has to be true and it has to be old."

Mom thought. Then she said, "When I was five, Tėtis took me to see the Christmas windows at Marshall Field's downtown, and I got lost for about four minutes by the elevators, and when he found me he was crying more than I was."

"It was six minutes," said Senelis. "I timed it later."

Above them, the sodas began to turn.

It was very slow. You could have missed it if you weren't looking. The big middle diamond swung a quarter of the way around on its string, and paused, and swung back, and the small diamonds below it began to drift on their own threads, each one a little out of time with the others. Austėja stared at the tissue strips. Not one of them moved.

"Dad," she said, her voice high. "Your turn. Say something that isn't true. On purpose."

Dad cleared his throat. "When I was a boy in Dayton, Ohio," he said, in a deep storytelling voice, "I rode a bear to school every day. His name was Gerald. He was a very good bear but he could not stop at red lights."

The sodas slowed down. It stopped. It hung there, as still as a picture of itself.

Nobody said anything.

"Močiute," said Austėja. "You."

Močiutė folded her hands on the tablecloth. She looked up at the straw, and her face went soft in a way that Austėja did not see very often, because Močiutė was usually busy being in charge.

"In Vilnius," she said, "in our apartment on the fifth floor, my mother had a little sodas, much smaller than this one, no bigger than a cabbage. She hung it from the kitchen lamp. Every time anybody opened the oven, the warm air went up and it spun like a dancer. My sister and I used to open the oven just to watch it. My mother would shout, close the oven, you're cooking the kitchen."

The sodas turned. All the way around this time, slow and shining, and the stripes of gold light it threw went sliding over the wallpaper and across Senelis's face and Mom's hands and the soup bowls that had not been filled yet.

The tissue strips did not move at all.

Austėja looked at Senelis. Senelis looked at the ceiling.

"Radiator," he said.

"Algi," said Močiutė, "the radiator has been off since April."

"Then it's a very well-trained radiator."

* * *

They were eating the soup, which was mushroom and barley and so thick that Dad said you could stand a spoon up in it, when the piece fell.

It made a tiny sound, like a fingernail tapping a glass. Something small and gold dropped out of the sodas and landed on the white tablecloth next to the bread basket. Austėja reached for it before anybody else could.

It was one of the smallest diamonds from the very bottom, no bigger than the end of her thumb, with its little straw star still hanging from it. The thread at the top had snapped. When she turned it over in her fingers, very carefully, one of the straw pieces cracked down its length with a dry whisper, like a leaf in November.

The whole table went quiet.

Senelis held out his hand, and she put the tiny diamond in his palm. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked up at the sodas, at the gray places near the top where the straw had gone dull, at the threads that had darkened with seventy years of kitchen air and dining room dust.

"Well," he said. "That's that, then."

"What's what?" said Austėja.

"It can't come with us." He said it simply, like a man reading a weather report. "To Lemont. If one little piece falls just because we eat soup underneath it, what happens when we take it down, put it in a box, put it in a truck, drive it on the Stevenson Expressway with all the potholes? It will be a box of straw dust when we get there."

Mom put down her spoon. "Tėti. We'll find somebody. A museum person. Someone who fixes old things."

"Maybe," said Senelis. "Maybe."

Močiutė put her hand on his arm, and for a moment none of the grown-ups said anything.

Austėja looked at the tiny cracked diamond in her grandfather's palm. Then she looked at her homework sheet, still in its plastic folder on the sideboard. Something older than your parents.

"Then we make a new one," she said.

Senelis raised his eyebrows. "We?"

"You and me. You watched your mother make it. You were there, at the kitchen table."

"I was four, Austėjute. And then I was eight and nine and ten, and every time she made a small one for a wedding or for a friend, I watched, yes. But watching is not the same as doing."

"Watching is not knowing," said Močiutė. "That's what my mother said."

"Then we'll find out," said Austėja. "That's what knowing is for."

She didn't completely understand what she meant by that, but it sounded good, and Senelis seemed to think so too, because he laughed and closed his hand around the tiny diamond and said, "All right. All right. We'll need straw."

* * *

After lunch, Mom took the tablet and stood on a dining room chair, with Dad holding the chair, and photographed the sodas from every side: from below, from the archway, from the kitchen door, close up on the oldest gray diamonds and close up on the stars. Then she opened the family's collection, where every important thing in the family had its own page, Močiutė's amber beads and Senelis's father's toolbox and the wooden trunk from 1949, and she made a new page.

"You tell it," she said to Austėja. "I'll type."

So Austėja told it, the way Senelis had told it, with the newspapers in the windows and the straw in the back seat and the hook in the ceiling. Mom typed it all. At the bottom, after Made by Ona Rimkienė, winter 1955 to February 1956, Mom asked, "Anything else?"

"Put that it turns when people remember things," said Austėja.

Mom's fingers stopped over the keys. She looked at her daughter. Then she typed it in, exactly like that, and didn't change a single word.

Before they left, Austėja went to the back window to say goodbye to the yard. The milk saucer sat by the bottom step. It was empty.

And on the top step, in the last stripe of afternoon sun, lay the žaltys, curled loose and warm on the concrete. Its body made a long bent shape, like an S, and its head was lifted up and tipped back over the curve, so that the two yellow spots of its crown sat right on top.

Like a hat, Austėja thought. Like a letter wearing a little crow.

Fifty Eggs

"Cookies," said the real estate lady. "Fresh-baked cookies. It's the oldest trick there is. People walk in, they smell cookies, they think, this is a home."

Her name was Mrs. Kowalczyk, and she had very shiny shoes and a clipboard and the sort of smile that never got tired. She was standing in the front hall on Washtenaw Avenue on the last Friday in September, explaining to Senelis what would happen at Sunday's open house. Austėja was sitting on the stairs listening, because it was a teachers' conference day and nobody had anywhere to put her.

"Everybody out from one to four," said Mrs. Kowalczyk. "Beds made. Counters clear. And if you can, Mr. Rimkus, a nice tray of cookies in the oven at twelve-thirty."

"Cookies," Senelis repeated, and nodded slowly. He had a look in his eye that Austėja recognized.

"Mrs. Kowalczyk," he said, "I will make the house smell like home. Don't worry about anything."

When the real estate lady had gone, Austėja came down the stairs.

"Seneli. You're not going to make snickerdoodles."

"No," said Senelis. "I'm going to make a šakotis."

* * *

A šakotis, as everybody in the family knew except Dad, who knew it but liked to be told again, is a cake that looks like a tree.

It isn't baked in an oven. It's baked on a spit, over fire, turning and turning, while somebody pours thin batter over it a ladle at a time. Each layer of batter cooks before the next one goes on, and as the spit turns, drips of batter run down and get caught by the heat before they can fall, and harden into little branches sticking out all over. When it is done, you slide it off and stand it on its wide end, tall and hollow and covered in crispy golden branches, like a Christmas tree made by somebody who had only heard one described. The name means "the branchy one." At weddings in Lithuania they are as tall as a child. You break off a branch to eat it, and it tastes like the best part of a birthday.

"Nobody makes these at home," Mom said on the phone that night, when Senelis told her. "Tėti. Nobody. You buy them at the bakery in Lemont. They have a machine."

"So do I," said Senelis.

* * *

The machine was in the garage, behind the snow tires, under a blue tarp that crackled with old leaves when Austėja pulled it off.

Senelis's father, Jonas, had built it in 1963, for the neighborhood picnics in Marquette Park. It was a long metal trough on legs for the charcoal, with a stand at each end holding a wooden pole shaped like a very fat baseball bat, and a crank handle worn pale and smooth by hands.

"Every August," Senelis said, "my father set this up in the park, by the lagoon, and I turned the crank. Two hours. Three hours. My arm would fall off. And everybody would come and stand around and tell him he was doing it wrong."

"Was he?"

"Sometimes. But he always finished."

The machine had one problem: nobody had used it since 1994. The crank stuck. Senelis put oil on it. Dad, who was an engineer at a company that made parts for refrigerators, came on Saturday morning with a toolbox and the motor from an old rotisserie grill he had found in his own garage, and for three hours he and Senelis lay on their backs on the garage floor, attaching the motor to the rod with clamps and wire and something Dad called "a coupling" and Senelis called "the miracle."

"What shall we call her?" said Dad, when the motor finally hummed and the wooden pole began to turn, slowly and steadily, all by itself.

"Lituanica Two," said Senelis immediately.

Austėja didn't know what that meant. When she asked, Senelis said, "Next month. In the park. I'll show you," which was a very irritating answer.

* * *

On Sunday morning, Dad drove to the grocery store on Pulaski and came back with fifty eggs.

"Fifty," he said, setting the cartons down on the kitchen counter one after another, like a man building a wall. "Fifty eggs. The cashier asked if I was opening a restaurant. I said no, I'm making a tree."

Močiutė cracked them. She would not let anyone else do it, because Dad got shell in everything and Senelis talked too much and Austėja, Močiutė said, had a gift for dropping things. So Močiutė stood at the counter in her apron and cracked fifty eggs into the big steel mixing bowl, one-handed, crack, open, drop, crack, open, drop, as fast as a machine, while the yolks piled up like a bowl of small suns.

Then butter, a mountain of it, and sugar, and sour cream, and flour. Austėja ran the big mixer until her arm buzzed. When it was ready the batter was smooth and pale yellow and thick enough to fall off the spoon in a ribbon.

At eleven-thirty they carried everything to the backyard: the machine, three bags of charcoal, the bowl of batter, a soup ladle, a pile of dish towels, a fire extinguisher (Mom's idea, on the phone) and four lawn chairs. Senelis lit the charcoal in the trough. Dad wrapped the wooden pole in baking parchment and tied it on with kitchen string. When the coals had gone from black to orange to a deep red with white ash on top, and you could feel the heat on your face from six feet away, Senelis switched on Lituanica Two.

The pole began to turn.

"Austėjute," he said, holding out the ladle. "You pour. Slowly. Not too much. Pour it over the top while it turns, so it falls like a curtain."

Austėja took the ladle. She dipped it in the batter. She held it over the turning pole. Her hand was shaking a little.

She poured.

The batter slid over the paper in a thin yellow sheet, and the pole turned, and the batter went around with it, and the heat from the coals hit it, and for one wonderful second it looked exactly right.

Then all of it slid off the bottom and landed on the coals with a hiss and a puff of smoke that smelled like burnt pancakes.

"Ah," said Senelis.

"What happened?"

"First layer. The first layer always falls off. That's what my father always said." He frowned. "I think. Again."

The second layer also fell off. The third stayed on for one whole turn and then peeled away like a sock. By now a column of sweet brown smoke was rising into the September sky, probably visible from Midway Airport.

"Lower," said Dad. "We need it closer to the heat. Or the heat closer to it."

He and Senelis moved the coals with a trowel and tongs, arguing gently in two languages. The fourth layer stayed on. So did the fifth. By the sixth layer the pole was coated in a thin golden skin, and the batter was cooking almost the moment it touched, and the drips were starting to do what they were supposed to do: running down, catching, hardening into small crisp points.

"Branches!" shouted Austėja. "Seneli, look, branches!"

"Branches," said Senelis, and his face, red from the heat, broke into a huge grin.

* * *

At ten minutes to one, Mrs. Kowalczyk arrived in her shiny shoes, walked into the house, stopped, sniffed, and walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door.

She stood at the top of the back steps with her clipboard and looked at the family gathered around a smoking contraption in a cloud of sugar, with a small girl in a dish-towel apron solemnly pouring batter over what looked like a golden club.

"Mr. Rimkus," she said, "what is that?"

"Home," said Senelis.

Mrs. Kowalczyk opened her mouth. She closed it. She sniffed again, and something happened to her face. "My grandmother," she said slowly, "used to make a cake on a spit. In Kraków. At Christmas. I haven't smelled this since I was six." She stood there for a moment. Then she remembered she was a real estate lady and checked her watch. "Well, I can't tell people to stay out of the yard, can I? Not with that. Just keep the fire extinguisher where they can see it."

So the open house happened in the backyard.

People came through the front door and walked through the rooms and looked at the closets and the bathroom tiles and the sodas over the dining room table, and then they followed their noses out the back door, and there they found a cake being born. One young couple stayed an hour and took turns pouring. An old man in a Cubs cap stood with his hands behind his back and told Senelis he was pouring too fast, the way people had told Senelis's father, and Senelis said, "Thank you, thank you," and kept pouring at exactly the same speed.

Next door, Mrs. Washington came out onto her back porch with a lawn chair under one arm and a glass of iced tea in her hand. She was eighty, small and straight, and had taught fifth grade at a school on 71st Street for thirty-four years, and when she said something, people listened, even grown men in Cubs caps.

"Algirdas Rimkus," she called over the fence. "I knew that smell. I said to myself, that is Jonas's tree. After the park picnics stopped, that man made one every August right out front on the sidewalk. Whole street smelled like a birthday. My boys used to stand there for three hours with their mouths open." She set up her lawn chair by the fence. "When we moved in, in seventy-two, not everybody on this street was happy to see a Black family move in. Some people wouldn't even say good morning. Your mother was the first one to bring us anything. She came over with a loaf of that black bread, still warm, and stood on my porch and said, I am Ona, you are welcome here. I've never forgotten it."

Senelis didn't say anything. He just nodded and kept the ladle moving, and Austėja saw him blink hard, twice, the way he did when the wind was in his face.

* * *

At two o'clock, a family came out the back door: a mother and father, a grandmother with a cane and a straw sun hat, and a girl of about eight with two dark braids and a T-shirt with a rocket on it.

The girl didn't look at the šakotis. She didn't look at the smoke. She went straight down the back steps, stopped at the bottom, and crouched.

Austėja's stomach did a small cold flip.

The žaltys was lying in the sun beside the empty milk saucer, half on the concrete and half on the warm dirt, its crown shining yellow.

"Abuela," the girl whispered over her shoulder. "Mira. Una culebrita con corona."

The grandmother came down the steps slowly with her cane. She looked at the snake for a long moment with her head on one side. Then she said something in Spanish, very softly, that made the girl nod, and the girl stayed exactly where she was without moving or reaching out, just watching, the way you watch a bird you don't want to scare.

The žaltys lifted its head. It looked at the girl. Its tongue flickered. It did not go back under the step.

Austėja felt something she didn't have a good name for. It was like when a new kid at school sat in your seat and the teacher said it was fine. She put down the ladle and went over.

"That's our žaltys," she said. It came out louder than she meant.

The girl looked up. "What's a žal-tees?"

"It's a... it's Lithuanian. It's a special snake. It lives here. It's lucky." She heard how that sounded. "It's my grandfather's."

"My abuela says," said the girl, "that in her town in Michoacán, when a snake comes to live by your door, you leave it alone, because it is taking care of the house." She looked back at the žaltys, which was still watching them both. "She says it's a good sign."

"Well, it's our good sign," said Austėja.

"Austėja," said Mom quietly, from the steps.

The girl's grandmother looked at Austėja. She had a brown, deeply lined face and very bright black eyes, and she was smiling, but not as if anything were funny.

"Mija," she said to Austėja, in English, slowly. "A house is a house. The snake decides."

* * *

By three-thirty the šakotis was done.

It was not as tall as Senelis remembered his father's. It was about as tall as a two-liter bottle of soda, and it leaned a little, and its branches were thick on one side and thin on the other, where Lituanica Two's motor had hiccupped. Dad said it looked like a tree that had grown up next to a building. Mom, who had driven over at the end because she couldn't stand not knowing, took about forty photos and posted them on the family's private page, and within ten minutes Močiutė's sister Irena had written from Vilnius, Algi, what is this, a cactus? and the cousin in Kaunas had written, Valio!!! and a row of cake pictures.

Senelis slid it off the pole onto a wooden board, and they stood it up on the picnic table, and he broke off the first branch and gave it to Austėja.

It was crisp outside and soft inside and tasted of butter and eggs and smoke and something else, something golden that didn't have a name.

He broke the second branch for Mrs. Washington, over the fence. Then he broke branches for everybody who was still there: the young couple, the man in the Cubs cap, Mrs. Kowalczyk, who closed her eyes when she ate it, and the family with the girl in the rocket shirt. The girl's grandmother took her branch and held it up to the light, turning it, and said "qué bonito," and ate it in tiny bites to make it last.

The last people left at four. Senelis sat down hard in a lawn chair, smelling of charcoal and sugar, with batter on his glasses.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Kowalczyk called. The family with the girl in the rocket shirt had made an offer on the house. The Olveras. They were living in an apartment in Little Village, and the grandmother wanted a yard where she could grow tomatoes and chiles, and the girl, whose name was Fernanda, had asked if the snake came with the house.

"I said I'd ask," said Mrs. Kowalczyk. "Is that some kind of Lithuanian joke?"

"No," said Senelis. "That's a very good question."

Two Doors Squeaking

The first time Austėja heard a sutartinė up close, she thought something had gone wrong with it.

It was the third Saturday in October, and she was sleeping over at Washtenaw Avenue for the first time since the summer. Outside, Marquette Park had turned every color a park can turn. The big trees along the lagoon were orange and red and a yellow so bright it looked switched on, and the wind came in gusts that sent leaves skittering down the sidewalk like small animals in a hurry. The air smelled of leaf smoke and somebody's chimney and, from the bakery on 69th Street, rye bread.

At four o'clock, the doorbell began ringing, and three women came in out of the wind, one after another, unwinding scarves.

"These are my ladies," said Močiutė. "Austėja, say hello properly."

"Labas," said Austėja. "Laba diena," she corrected herself, because they were grown-ups, and the women all said "Oi, kokia graži!" which meant how pretty she was, and which grown-ups always said whether it was true or not.

There was Mrs. Genovaitė, who was eighty-three and tiny and wore a hat with a feather in it. There was Laima, who had come from Lithuania twenty years ago and was a nurse at a hospital on the North Side and laughed like a car horn. And there was Ingrida, the youngest, who had red glasses and a baby asleep in a sling on her chest, and who whispered everything because of the baby.

With Močiutė, they were four. They called themselves Lylio, after a word in the old songs that doesn't mean anything at all, except that it sounds like singing.

They went down to the basement, where Senelis had set up five folding chairs in a circle between the furnace and the shelves of canned tomatoes, and Austėja came too and sat on the bottom step with her chin on her knees.

"You can listen," said Močiutė, "but no comments until the end."

"Okay."

"I know you, Austėjute. No comments."

"Okay!"

The four women stood up in their circle. They didn't use any music or any instruments. Laima hummed a note. Then Močiutė and Mrs. Genovaitė turned to face each other, very close, and began to sing.

* * *

At first it sounded like a song. Močiutė sang a line, low and bouncy: Žydi sodai, lylio. The orchards are blooming, lylio. At the same moment, Mrs. Genovaitė sang something else entirely, a short, quick line that went lylio, lylio, dauno, round and round, like a bird that only knows one phrase.

And the two lines did not fit.

They ran right up next to each other, one note apart, so close that they rubbed. It made the air in the basement buzz. It made Austėja's teeth feel strange. It was like two violins tuning against each other, or, she thought, two cupboard doors squeaking at each other in a windy kitchen.

Then Laima and Ingrida came in with the same two lines, a little behind, so that now there were four voices chasing and bumping, and the buzz got bigger, and it went round and round and round, and Austėja found she was holding her breath.

They stopped all at once, on a word, as if someone had shut a lid.

"Well?" said Močiutė, turning around.

"You said no comments."

"Now you can comment."

Austėja thought hard about how to say it nicely. "It sounds like two doors squeaking at each other," she said. "But on purpose."

There was a silence. Then Laima laughed her car-horn laugh so loudly that Ingrida's baby woke up and stared around in astonishment, and Mrs. Genovaitė pressed her hand to her chest and laughed in little high peeps like a bird, and Močiutė covered her face.

"Yes," said Mrs. Genovaitė, when she could talk. "Yes, little one, exactly. Two doors. But on the same house."

* * *

"Sutartinė," said Močiutė, when the baby had gone back to sleep and everyone had a cup of tea balanced on their knees. "You know where the word comes from?"

Austėja shook her head.

"Sutarti. To agree. Sutartinė, the agreeing song."

"But they don't agree. That's the whole thing. They're two different notes. They crash."

"That's the agreeing," said Močiutė. "Listen. It's easy to agree if you both sing the same thing. Anybody can do that. Two parrots can do that. But to sing your own line, your very own, and let the other person sing hers, right next to you, rubbing against you, close enough to touch, and nobody gives up, and nobody runs away, and nobody tries to make the other one sing like her..." She tapped her teacup. "That's a harder kind of agreeing. That's the old kind. The women in the villages in the northeast of Lithuania sang like that for hundreds of years. While they worked. While they wove, while they harvested flax. Two by two, three by three. Then almost everybody forgot how. Then a few people remembered."

"You?"

"Not me. I learned from the people who remembered. In Vilnius, when I was young, there were ensembles, groups like this one, who went out to the villages with tape recorders and found the very old grandmothers who still knew, and wrote down every word, and learned it. I sang in one of those groups." She smiled into her tea. "We were very serious. We wore linen. We thought we were saving the world."

"Were you?"

"A little bit of it, maybe," said Mrs. Genovaitė.

* * *

Then they made Austėja try.

"You sing the lylio, lylio, dauno," said Močiutė. "That's the easy part. Just that, over and over. I'll sing the orchard."

Austėja stood up in the circle. Her heart was thumping. Laima hummed the note. Austėja sang lylio, lylio, dauno, which she could do, and it was fine for exactly one time around. Then Močiutė came in with her line, right next to Austėja's, one note away, and the buzz started, and Austėja's voice wobbled and slid, all by itself, like a sock on a wood floor, up to where Močiutė was singing, and suddenly they were both singing the orchard line and the buzz was gone.

"Ach," said Močiutė. "You ran to me."

"I didn't mean to!"

"I know. Everybody does, the first time. It feels wrong to stand next to someone and sing something different. Your voice wants to be friends. But you have to hold your own. Again."

They tried again. Austėja slid again. They tried a third time and she held on for two times around before her voice went sliding off to join Močiutė's like a dog that has seen its owner across a park.

"Here," said Laima. "Try this." She stood Austėja and Močiutė back to back in the middle of the basement floor, shoulder blades touching. "Now you can't see her. You can only feel her. When you start to slide, lean back. Push on her a little. She's there. You don't have to go to her. You're already together."

Austėja leaned back against Močiutė's warm, solid back. Laima hummed the note. They began.

Lylio, lylio, dauno. And right behind her, close enough to feel in her own ribs, Močiutė: Žydi sodai, lylio.

The buzz started. Austėja's voice wobbled. She leaned back, hard, and felt Močiutė lean back too, and she held on, lylio, lylio, dauno, while the orchard line rubbed and pushed and hummed beside her, and the basement filled up with that strange bright sound, and she did not slide. Once around. Twice. Three times. Four.

They stopped on the word, all together, the way the ladies had.

The basement was very quiet. The furnace ticked. Austėja could feel Močiutė breathing against her back.

"Well," said Mrs. Genovaitė softly. "There's a door that knows its own house."

* * *

Later, when the ladies had gone out into the dark wind with their scarves and their baby, and the tea cups were washed and Senelis was watching the news upstairs with the sound too loud, Austėja helped Močiutė dry the last of the dishes.

"Senelis said you have a story about holding hands," she said. "From one country to the next. He said you'd tell it if I asked nicely and helped with the dishes."

"Did he." Močiutė folded the dish towel in half and then in half again. "Well. You've asked nicely. You've helped a little."

She sat down at the kitchen table, and Austėja sat across from her.

"It was the twenty-third of August, 1989," Močiutė said. "I was twenty-nine. Lithuania was not its own country. Neither was Latvia, neither was Estonia. All three were part of the Soviet Union, and had been since before I was born, and nobody was allowed to say out loud that they wanted it to be different. But by that summer, people had started to say it anyway. Quietly at first, then louder. And somebody had an idea. What if we all stood on the road, from Vilnius in Lithuania through Riga in Latvia all the way to Tallinn in Estonia, and held hands? All of us. One line of people. Six hundred and seventy-five kilometers long."

"How long is that in miles?"

"Long. Chicago to almost Pittsburgh."

Austėja tried to imagine a line of people holding hands from Washtenaw Avenue to Pittsburgh. She couldn't.

"Two million people," said Močiutė. "That's what they counted afterward. My ensemble went in a bus to a place on the road north of Vilnius, out in the fields. It was a warm evening. Very gold. There were people everywhere, farmers and grandmothers and students and babies on shoulders, all coming down to the road. At seven o'clock, we all took hands. I had a stranger on my left side, a tractor driver with hands like bread, and my friend from the ensemble on my right. And we stood there for fifteen minutes."

"Just standing?"

"Just standing. And singing. Somebody started a song, and it went down the line, and you could hear it coming from far away, from the next village, like a wind. It got to us and we sang it too, and sent it on." Močiutė looked at her hands on the table. "I don't think I have ever felt so far from home and so at home at the same time. Every person on that road was holding their own hands out. Nobody was doing it for anybody else. But we were all on the same road."

"Like the sutartinė," said Austėja slowly. "Everybody holding their own line."

Močiutė looked up, surprised. Then she laughed and reached across the table and pulled her granddaughter's ponytail, gently.

"Yes. Like that. Clever girl."

"And then what happened?"

"Then, the next spring, Lithuania said it was a country again. And that summer there was a big song festival in Vilnius, and the people who could get there came home for it, and the ones who could not sang along by the radio. From Australia, from Brazil, from Canada. From Chicago." Her eyes crinkled. "And a folk dance group from Chicago came, with a big tall man in it, thirty-nine years old, who could not do the hammering in Kalvelis on the beat to save his life."

Austėja's mouth fell open. "Senelis?"

"He hammered after everybody else stopped. Bang. In the silence. Everybody looked." Močiutė was laughing now, really laughing, wiping her eyes. "I thought, who is this terrible blacksmith? I have to meet him."

"I do that," said Austėja. "That's exactly what I do."

"Then you'll find a good husband," said Močiutė, "eventually. Not soon."

* * *

That night, before bed, Mom called on the video, and Austėja told her about the basement and the back-to-back singing. Mom said, "Do you think the ladies would let me record them? For the family? So we have it, after?"

She didn't say after what. Austėja knew anyway. After the move. After the basement was gone. After a lot of things.

"You have to ask them," said Močiutė, leaning into the phone. "Each one. Not me for them."

So on the first Saturday in November, Mom came with her phone and asked each of the ladies, one at a time. Laima said yes, of course, but only for the family, not on the internet for strangers. Ingrida whispered yes. Mrs. Genovaitė said yes, but only if Mom would cut out the part where she coughed, because she always coughed in the second song and she did not want her great-grandchildren to think she was a cougher. Mom promised. When she put the recording in the family's private place, she wrote under it who had agreed and what each of them had asked, so that nobody would ever forget.

The cough was cut. Austėja checked.

Before she fell asleep on the pullout couch that October night, with the streetlight making orange squares on the ceiling and the furnace ticking below her, she thought she heard something at the basement window well, a small dry rustle against the glass, like a leaf, or like something smooth and long settling down for the night against the last warm bricks.

She didn't get up to look. Some things, Senelis had said, you don't spy on.

But she whispered "labanakt, žalty" into the dark, just in case. It seemed like good manners. And she held her own line, lylio, lylio, dauno, under her breath, very quietly, until she fell asleep in the middle of it.

Still Flying

Theo Lindqvist had never been to a museum about a country before.

"Is it all about Lithuania?" he asked in the back seat of Senelis's car, as they drove north on Pulaski Road the last Saturday in October. "The whole museum? Every room?"

"Every room," said Senelis.

"What if you run out of Lithuania?"

Senelis looked at him in the rearview mirror. "My friend," he said, "in seven hundred years, nobody has run out of Lithuania yet."

Theo was Austėja's best friend at regular school, in Lemont, where they sat together in Mrs. Okafor's fourth grade class in the back row by the window. He was small and serious and had a magnifying glass on a string around his neck that he wore every day, even on picture day. Theo knew everything about insects. He knew that dragonflies were older than dinosaurs. Austėja knew everything about reptiles. Between them, Mrs. Okafor said, they had the whole animal kingdom covered except fish, and fish could take care of themselves.

He had come because Austėja had told him that her grandfather had an insect that was forty million years old, and Theo had said, "That's not possible," and Austėja had said, "Come and see."

* * *

Pulaski Road was wide and busy and gray under a low, heavy sky. They passed taquerías and tire shops, a Polish deli, and a laundromat with a sunset painted across its whole side. The wind blew paper cups along the gutters. At 65th Street Senelis turned into a parking lot beside a long, low building, and there it was: the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, with flags out front snapping in the wind, yellow and green and red.

"Those are the colors," said Austėja to Theo. "Yellow is for the sun and the fields, green is for the forests, red is for... I forget what red is for."

"For the people who loved it," said Senelis, locking the car. "That's what my father said, anyway. Other people say other things. Come on, it's cold."

Inside, it was warm and quiet and smelled a little like old wood and floor polish. A volunteer at the front desk, an old man with a white mustache and a sweater vest, looked up from his book.

"Algirdas!" he said. "Labas! I haven't seen you since the dinosaurs."

"Petrai," said Senelis, and they shook hands across the desk and went on shaking. "This is my granddaughter, Austėja. And her friend Theo, who is a scientist."

"An entomologist," said Theo. "Someday."

"Good," said Mr. Petras. "We need those. Lithuania is full of mosquitoes."

* * *

They saw everything. They saw folk costumes in glass cases, the skirts striped red and green and blue, the aprons woven with tiny patterns like the inside of a snowflake. They saw maps of Lithuania from hundreds of years ago, when it was enormous and reached all the way down to the Black Sea, which Austėja did not believe until Mr. Petras showed her with his finger.

"Biggest country in Europe, once," he said. "Now about the size of West Virginia. But with better soup."

They saw the room full of armor, which was Austėja's favorite. There was chain mail like knitting made of metal, and a whole suit of armor standing in a corner as if a knight had stepped out a minute ago to get a sandwich.

And then they came to the amber.

It was in a long glass case under soft lights, and the moment Austėja saw it she understood why people called amber "Lithuanian gold." There were pieces of every color: pale lemon, honey, deep orange like a sunset, dark red like cherry juice, and a few strange milky ones, cloudy and creamy as butter. Some were rough and lumpy, just as they'd come out of the sea. Some were polished smooth and shining. Some had been carved into beads, brooches, little boxes, a ship with sails, a chess set.

"It's not a stone," said Mr. Petras, who had followed them. "Everyone thinks it's a stone. It's tree sap. Resin, from forests of pine trees that grew where the Baltic Sea is now, forty, fifty million years ago. The sap dripped down, and got buried, and turned hard, very slowly, and the sea washed it up. It still washes up. After a big storm on the coast, people go out with nets and wade into the cold water to catch it."

"Like Elzė," said Austėja. "She's from Klaipėda. She said she used to go amber fishing with her uncle after storms."

"Then Elzė knows more than I do," said Mr. Petras.

Theo had his nose against the glass. He had found, at the end of the case, under its own small light, a piece of golden amber the size of a walnut, and inside it, right in the middle, hung a spider. Its legs were spread out as if it had been walking. You could see every hair.

"Oh," said Theo. That was all. Just "oh." Austėja had never seen him so quiet.

"Now," said Senelis, reaching into his coat pocket. "Theo. Your turn to see something."

* * *

They sat on a wooden bench under a map of the Baltic coast, and Senelis took out a small cloth bag, faded blue and tied with a string, and from inside it he took a piece of amber.

It was smaller than the spider one, about the size of a grape, and not polished, just smooth from being handled, a warm dark honey color with one side that was a little cloudy. He held it up to the window. The gray light from outside came through it and turned gold.

And inside, near the clear side, there was a fly.

It was very small, smaller than a grain of rice. It had long thin legs and two tiny wings, folded back, and a body like a speck of pepper. It hung in the middle of the amber with its legs out, exactly as if it had been flying and had decided to stop for a moment, and then the moment had lasted forty million years.

Theo didn't breathe. He took his magnifying glass from around his neck and held it up, and Senelis held the amber steady for him, and Theo looked for a long time.

"It's a midge," he said at last, in a whisper. "Or a fungus gnat. Look at the antennae. They're like little strings of beads. It's a fungus gnat, I'm pretty sure." He looked up at Senelis with an expression Austėja had only ever seen on him once before, on a class trip to the Brookfield Zoo. "Mr. Rimkus, where did you get this?"

"My father found it," said Senelis. "On the beach at Palanga, on the Lithuanian coast, in the summer of 1938. He was thirteen. There had been a storm the night before, and in the morning the beach was covered with seaweed, and he and his friends went digging through the seaweed with their hands, looking for amber, and he found this."

"And he kept it all this time?"

"He kept it in this bag, in his pocket. When the war came and they had to leave, in 1944, he had to leave almost everything. His bicycle, his books, his mother's dishes. But this was in his pocket. He carried it to the camp in Germany, and he carried it to Chicago. He used to take it out at the kitchen table, when I was little, and hold it up to the light and say, you see, Algi? It was flying. And then everything stopped. But here it is. Still flying." Senelis turned the amber slowly so the light moved through it. "That's what he said. Still flying."

Austėja looked at the tiny fly with its wings folded, hanging in the honey-colored light. She thought it didn't look stopped at all. It looked like it was waiting.

* * *

"There's a story about amber," said Mr. Petras, who had sat down at the other end of the bench. "Do you know it, little one?"

Austėja shook her head.

"Under the Baltic Sea, long ago, there lived a sea goddess named Jūratė. She had a palace made entirely of amber, walls and floors and roof, so that when the sun came down through the water, the whole palace glowed like a lantern. One day she heard a young fisherman named Kastytis singing in his boat above her, and she liked his singing so much that she went up to listen, and they became friends, and then more than friends, and she brought him down to her amber palace."

"But the god of thunder, Perkūnas, was very angry, because a goddess was not supposed to love a fisherman. So he threw lightning down into the sea, and the lightning struck the amber palace and shattered it into a million pieces." He spread out his fingers. "And that's why, to this day, after every storm, pieces of amber wash up on the beaches of Lithuania. They are pieces of Jūratė's palace."

"What happened to Kastytis?" said Austėja.

Mr. Petras and Senelis looked at each other over her head.

"That part of the story," said Senelis, "your mother says is for when you're older."

"That means he died."

"It means," said Mr. Petras gently, "that it's an old story, and old stories are sometimes sad, and that's all right. The important thing is the amber is still coming in. Every storm. A little more of the palace comes home."

* * *

After the museum, Senelis drove them east, past bungalows and corner stores and a school with a playground full of shouting kids, to Marquette Park.

The wind had dropped. The clouds had broken up into long gray stripes, and between them the sky was a cold, clean blue. The park was huge, much bigger than any park in Lemont, with a lagoon curving through it and wide lawns covered in leaves and a golf course where a few men in jackets were still playing, hunched against the cold. Geese stood on the grass like people waiting for a bus.

Senelis parked by the edge of the park, and they walked across the grass to a tall stone monument, pale against the trees, with names carved into it in big letters.

DARIUS. GIRĖNAS.

"Here," said Senelis. "Now I'll tell you about Lituanica."

He told it standing up, with his hands in his coat pockets and his breath making little clouds.

In the early 1930s, two men from Chicago, Lithuanians who had come to America young, bought a used airplane. Their names were Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas. They fixed it up and painted it orange, and named it Lituanica, and they decided to do something nobody had done: to fly it from New York across the whole Atlantic Ocean, without stopping, all the way to Kaunas, which was then the capital of Lithuania. They did it to give a gift to Lithuania, to show that Lithuanians in America had not forgotten where they came from. People in Chicago gave them nickels and dimes to help buy fuel.

"And in July of 1933, they took off," said Senelis. "And they flew. Across the ocean, in the dark, through fog and wind, for more than a day and a half. Thirty-seven hours. Over Ireland, and on across Europe, toward home."

"And then?" said Theo.

"And then, in the night, over a forest in Germany, the plane came down. Nobody knows exactly why. They were about four hundred miles from Kaunas."

Theo's face fell. Austėja felt something tighten in her throat.

"In Kaunas," said Senelis, "that morning, twenty-five thousand people were waiting at the airfield to welcome them. Families with picnics. Bands. Flowers. Children on their fathers' shoulders." He looked up at the monument. "My father was one of those children. He was eight. He waited all morning with his father, looking up at the sky, until somebody came with the news."

Nobody said anything for a moment. A goose honked on the lagoon.

"They didn't finish," said Austėja quietly.

"No," said Senelis. "But, Austėjute, they flew almost the whole way. Nobody forgot them. Not in Lithuania, not here. In this park, people built this monument for them, and every summer people still come and stand here, like we are standing." He put his hand on her shoulder. "And when your father and I put that motor on my father's old cake machine, I thought, this one is going to finish. So I named it Lituanica Two. And it did. You were there. Crooked cake, yes. But finished."

Austėja leaned against her grandfather's side. Theo stood very straight, looking up at the carved names, and after a while he took off his knit hat and held it in his hands, which Austėja thought was the nicest thing she had ever seen him do.

* * *

That night at home, Austėja opened the family map.

It was a map of the world, but zoomed in, it was a map of the family: little pins in every place the Rimkuses and the Marshes had ever lived, and on each pin, photos with dates. There was Dayton, Ohio, with Dad as a baby in a sailor suit, 1990. There was Vilnius, with Močiutė at nine on a balcony full of geraniums, 1969. There was the camp in Germany, with one blurry photo of a long wooden building and a line of laundry, 1947. There was Brighton Park, with Jonas and Ona standing in front of the shoe repair shop on Archer Avenue, 1950, Ona holding her hat in the wind.

She found Kaunas, and added a note to its pin: July 17, 1933. Jonas (age 8) waited at the airfield for Lituanica.

Then she found Palanga, on the coast, and under it she found the photo she had been hoping would be there: a black-and-white picture of a beach with dark seaweed piled in long rows, and four skinny boys in old-fashioned swimsuits squinting into the sun, and one of them, the smallest, holding something up between his finger and thumb. On the back someone had written in pencil, in Lithuanian, and Mom had copied it into the caption: Jonukas su gintaru. 1938.

Little Jonas with his amber.

Austėja kept looking at it. Then, at the bottom of the map, near Chicago, she found the empty pin Mom had made for Lemont, where Senelis and Močiutė were going in the spring. It had no photos yet. It had no dates.

She left it alone. It was still flying.

A Family Street

"Our whole family," said Senelis, "lives on one street."

It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, very early, and he and Austėja were driving southwest on Archer Avenue with the heater roaring and a thermos of cocoa wedged between the seats. Overnight the first snow had come, not much, just a powdered-sugar dusting on the rooftops and the parked cars and the tops of the fences, and the sky was the pale clean blue that only comes after snow.

"Which street?"

"This one. Archer Avenue." He tapped the steering wheel. "It starts near downtown. It comes down through Bridgeport, through Brighton Park, where my mother and father had their two rooms, out of the city, along the river valley, past the quarries, right to Lemont, where you live, and where we're going to live. My father drove this road to get the straw in 1955. Now we drive it. Same road. Seventy years." He shook his head. "Some families have a family tree. We have a family street."

They had stopped in Brighton Park on the way. The building with the shoe repair shop was still there, red brick, two stories, with a cornice along the top like a frown. The shoe repair was gone. Now there was a phone store on one side and a taquería on the other, with a hand-painted sign of a smiling pig in a chef's hat. Senelis had stood on the sidewalk in the cold looking up at the two windows on the second floor.

"That one," he said, pointing to the left one. "That's where I was born. In a thunderstorm. My mother said the lightning was so close, the doctor dropped his glasses."

Austėja took a picture of the window for the family map, so the Brighton Park pin would have the building now, pig and all, next to the building in 1950.

* * *

Past the city, Archer Avenue became a different kind of road. It ran along a wide valley with the river at the bottom, and on the other side of the river the land rose in long wooded bluffs, bare gray trees with snow caught in their branches. They passed yellow-gray limestone walls and a quarry full of green water, and in a forest preserve three deer stood in the trees and watched the car go by.

Then Lemont, with its old downtown on the hill and its church spires and the canal running gray and still below. Then past Lemont, where the houses got farther apart and the fields began.

The Vaitkus farm was at the end of a gravel road, with a white farmhouse and a red barn and a row of tall bare cottonwoods along a ditch. The fields around it were brown stubble, rows and rows of short cut stalks poking up through the snow, and the snow between them was crisscrossed with tracks.

"Crows," said Austėja, getting out of the car. A whole flock of them was walking in the stubble, big and black and shining, picking at the ground. Wherever they'd walked, they had left little footprints in the thin snow, each one a small sharp V.

She crouched down to look at one.

"Varnelė," she said. "Seneli, look. It really is a little crow. It's a crow's foot in the snow, on top of everything."

Senelis bent to look. "Well," he said. "There you go. A whole field full of Š and Ž."

* * *

Mrs. Aldona Vaitkus came out of the barn in rubber boots and a man's plaid hunting jacket, pulling off a pair of work gloves. She was about sixty, with short gray hair and a face red from the cold and a voice like a school principal's.

"Algirdas Rimkus! You're late. The crows have been waiting."

"Aldona. We stopped in Brighton Park."

"Of course you did." She turned to Austėja and put out a hard, warm hand. "You're the one making the sodas."

"We both are," said Austėja.

"Good. It takes two. One to thread and one to complain."

Her grandfather, she told them, walking them toward the barn, had come from Lithuania in 1912 and bought this land when it was nothing but rocks and thistles. He grew corn and soybeans like everybody else. But at the edge of the farm, every year, he planted one long strip of rye, because the Lithuanian women from the city kept driving out and asking for straw. Her father had done the same. Now she did it.

"Nobody makes money on rye straw," she said. "I do it because if I stopped, some lady from Marquette Park would show up in December with a pair of scissors and nowhere to go, and I couldn't live with myself."

In the barn it was dim and warm and smelled of hay and machine oil and cat. A gray cat sat on a tractor seat and looked at them with disgust. Along one wall, hung from the rafters in bundles tied with twine, was the rye straw.

Austėja stopped in the doorway and stared.

It was gold. Even in the dim barn it shone. Each bundle was as thick as her waist and taller than she was, and every single stalk in it was long and straight and glossy, the color of the sodas in the dining room, or the color the sodas must have been once, in 1955, before the dust.

"I cut it in July," said Mrs. Vaitkus. "By hand, with a sickle, like my grandmother. The machine breaks the straw. Then I hang it in here to dry. You want the long pieces between the joints. See?" She pulled one stalk out of a bundle and showed Austėja the little knobs along it, like knuckles. "Between the knuckles, the straw is a perfect tube. Straight and hollow. That's what you cut and thread. The knuckles, you throw away."

She gave them two big bundles, wrapped in an old bedsheet so the straw wouldn't break, and wouldn't let Senelis pay her a single dollar. "Bring me a picture when it's done," she said. "And bring me some of that cake I heard about. The crooked one."

"How did you hear about that?"

"Algirdas," said Mrs. Vaitkus, "everybody heard about that."

* * *

That afternoon, at the kitchen table on Washtenaw Avenue, they began.

Senelis set everything out the way his mother had, the way he remembered it: a roasting pan full of warm water to soak the straw, so it would bend and not crack. A pair of small sharp scissors. A ruler. Two long thin needles. A spool of white linen thread. A dish towel to dry things on. A pencil and a pad of paper for doing measurements, which Austėja ended up doing, because Senelis kept writing the numbers on his hand instead.

They soaked the straw. They cut it between the knuckles into straight tubes, and then into pieces. Long ones for the big shapes, as long as a pencil. Medium ones. Short ones, for the smallest diamonds, as long as a fingernail.

"Now," said Senelis. "Three straws. Thread goes through all three. Pull them into a triangle. Tie it."

He picked up a needle. He threaded it, after four tries, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He picked up a long piece of straw between his big thick fingers, and tried to push the needle through it.

The straw split down its whole length with a soft crack.

"Ah," said Senelis.

He tried again. The second straw went on the needle all right, but when he pulled the thread through, it snagged and bent the straw in half. The third one went on, and the fourth, but when he tried to pull three of them into a triangle the thread slipped and they all fell off the end and rolled across the table and onto the floor.

Austėja picked them up. Senelis sat back in his chair and looked at his hands. They were big hands, rough and spotted, with knuckles like walnuts, the hands of a man who had fixed cars and shoveled snow and carried things for seventy-four years.

"Her hands were small," he said quietly. "My mother's. Very small and very quick. Like little birds."

Austėja didn't know what to say. So she didn't say anything. She picked up the second needle, and threaded it, which she got on the first try because her eyes were nine years old instead of seventy-four. She picked up a soaked straw. She pushed the needle through, slowly, and it went.

Then another. Then a third. She pulled the thread, gently, and the three straws came together into a triangle, wobbling. She held the ends of the thread out to Senelis.

"You tie it," she said. "I can't do the knot."

Senelis looked at her for a moment. Then he took the thread ends in his big fingers, and tied a knot, small and tight and neat, without even looking down. His hands did it by themselves.

They both looked at the knot.

"Where did you learn that?" said Austėja.

"I don't know," said Senelis slowly. "I don't remember learning it. I must have watched her do it a thousand times."

In the dining room, through the open kitchen door, the old sodas began to turn.

* * *

They worked all afternoon. Austėja threaded and Senelis tied, and after a while they started doing it without talking, the way Mrs. Genovaitė and Močiutė sang, each one holding a different line. By the time the window over the sink had turned dark blue, they had made nine triangles. Senelis showed her how to join the triangles into a shape like two pyramids stuck together at the bottom, a diamond with eight sides. The first one came out lopsided. The second one was better. The third one stood on the table on its point, all by itself, trembling a little, and they both cheered.

At five o'clock the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Kowalczyk, with the Olveras behind her.

They had come to measure the windows for curtains. Mr. Olvera had a tape measure and Mrs. Olvera had a notebook, and Doña Rosa came in last with her cane, wrapped in a brown wool shawl, and behind her, in a puffy purple coat, was Fernanda.

Austėja felt the same cold flip she had felt in September. She bent her head over her straw and kept threading.

The grown-ups went off with the tape measure. Doña Rosa did not. She came into the kitchen and lowered herself into the chair across from Austėja, slowly, and looked at the straw diamonds lined up on the dish towel.

"Ay," she said softly. "Qué fino."

From her big black purse she took out a small pair of scissors with curved blades and a folded square of tissue paper, bright pink. Without saying anything, she began to fold the paper, in half and in half and corner to corner, and then she began to cut. Little snips, quick and sure, at the edges and the folds. Her hands were brown and wrinkled and very fast. Like little birds, Austėja thought.

When she unfolded it, the pink paper had become lace. There were flowers in it, and leaves, and stars, and in the middle, a long curving snake, cut out of nothing, with two small round holes behind its head for a crown.

"Papel picado," said Doña Rosa. She held it up to the kitchen light, and the light came through the holes in the paper the same way it came through amber. "In my town, for fiestas, we hang hundreds of these over the street, on strings, from one house to the other. When the wind blows, they all move. Like your straw. Like a little garden in the sky." She laid it on the table in front of Austėja. "For you. For your snake."

Austėja looked at the paper snake. Then at the straw diamond in her hands.

"Ačiū," she said. "That means thank you."

"De nada," said Doña Rosa. "That means you're welcome."

Fernanda had come and stood at the end of the table in her purple coat, looking at the straw. She didn't touch anything. She didn't say anything. She just looked, the way she had looked at the žaltys in September, as if she didn't want to scare it.

Austėja took a deep breath. It felt like leaning back against Močiutė in the basement, holding her own line.

"Do you want to try?" she said. "You have to soak the straw first. Or it cracks."

Fernanda sat down without taking off her coat. Austėja showed her. Fernanda's fingers were even smaller than Austėja's, and very careful, and the first straw she threaded went on perfectly, and the second, and the third, and when she pulled the thread they came together into a small, neat triangle that did not wobble at all.

"You're good at that," said Austėja, a little unwillingly.

"I do bead bracelets," said Fernanda. "I have about a thousand." She held out the thread ends to Senelis without being told. Senelis tied the knot. Fernanda watched his hands.

"Señor," she said. "Is the snake okay? It's cold now."

Senelis nodded seriously. "The žaltys is getting ready to sleep. All the snakes go to sleep in the winter, somewhere deep and safe, where the frost can't get them. In the spring it will wake up."

"Will it be here?" said Fernanda. "When we move in? In April?"

Senelis looked at Austėja. Austėja looked at the pink paper snake on the table.

"I don't know," said Senelis honestly. "That's up to the žaltys."

* * *

When the Olveras had gone and Senelis was driving her home to Lemont down Archer Avenue in the dark, the whole valley black and the lights of the quarries shining far off like ships, Austėja held her phone in her lap and opened the word list. She added three words, and when they got home she made Senelis record them in the driveway with the engine still running.

Šiaudai. Straw.

Adata. Needle.

Mazgas. Knot.

"With the mazgas," said Senelis into the phone, "you don't think. Your hands think. Okay. Labanakt."

He forgot to stop recording again. The last thing on it, if you listened all the way to the end, was the sound of the car door, and the crunch of feet on new snow, and Senelis saying, to nobody, very quietly, in English, "Little birds."

Twelve Dishes and an Empty Plate

On the last Saturday before winter break, Austėja stood at the front of her Saturday school classroom and said eleven sentences about the sodas in Lithuanian.

She had practiced them all week, until Theo asked if she was casting a spell. She said that the sodas was made of rye straw. She said that her great-grandmother Ona had made it in 1955, in Chicago, in the winter, because she wanted a garden. She said the straw came from a farm on Archer Avenue. She said her grandfather could tie the knots without looking. She said, for her tenth sentence, that the sodas could not come to Lemont because it was too old, so she and her grandfather were making a new one.

Her eleventh sentence was supposed to be about the radiator. Instead, in front of everybody, she said: "Ir jis sukasi, kai kas nors prisimena." And it turns when somebody remembers.

Nobody laughed. Mokytoja Daiva looked at her for a long moment over her glasses.

"Who taught you that sentence?"

"Nobody. I made it."

"That sentence has no mistakes in it," said Mokytoja Daiva. "Not one. I listened twice." And she wrote something on her clipboard that Austėja couldn't see, and smiled.

Elzė leaned over when Austėja sat back down. "I was scared for you on prisimena," she whispered. "It's a long word. You landed it."

* * *

Kūčios, the night before Christmas, was the most important dinner of the year at Washtenaw Avenue, and this year it was the last one.

Nobody said so. Everybody knew. Mom came over at noon on the twenty-fourth to help and stayed in the kitchen with Močiutė all afternoon, and the two of them talked about everything except the last time. Dad was sent to the store twice, once for more onions and once because he had bought the wrong herring. Senelis was sent to the basement to bring up the good chairs and stayed down there almost an hour, and when he came back up with the chairs, his eyes were red, and he said it was the dust.

Austėja's job was the table.

First, under the white tablecloth, you spread a thin layer of hay, from a bag Senelis had bought at a pet store on Pulaski Road and pretended was from a farm. It made the tablecloth lumpy, like a field under snow. This was so that everyone at dinner would remember, Močiutė said, that the food on the table came from the fields, and that the people who ate it had come from farms, a long time ago, even if they lived on Washtenaw Avenue now and bought their hay at a pet store.

Then the plates. One for Senelis, one for Močiutė, one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Austėja.

And one more. A plate, a glass, a fork, a napkin, set at the end of the table near the window, by an empty chair.

"For who?" Austėja asked, though she thought she knew.

"For everyone who isn't here," said Močiutė. "My mother and my father. Senelis's mother and father. Anybody we miss. We set a place so they know they're still invited." She straightened the fork. "Nobody sits there. Nobody puts food on it. It's just there."

Austėja looked at the empty plate for a moment. Then she went to the sideboard and took the tiny straw diamond that had fallen in September, the cracked one, which Senelis had kept in a teacup, and set it very gently in the middle of the plate.

Močiutė saw. She didn't say anything. She just put her hand on top of Austėja's head for a second, warm and heavy, the way you would put your hand on a dog you love.

* * *

At the first star, they sat down.

There had been an argument at four o'clock about whether clouds counted. Dad said the sun had set at 4:24, and Senelis said Lithuanians did not need a phone to find a star, and at 4:50 Austėja ran out onto the front porch in her socks and shouted "There!" at a bright point over the rooftops of 69th Street that might have been a planet, or an airplane, and everybody agreed it would do.

There were twelve dishes, for the twelve months, and none of them had meat. There was herring three ways, which Dad ate bravely with his eyes half shut. There were mushrooms Močiutė had dried in October, beet salad as pink as a flamingo, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, black bread, and cranberry kisielius, like a pudding you could drink, tart and red and wobbly.

And the kūčiukai. Those were Austėja's favorite. They were little hard biscuits, no bigger than a grape, a whole bowl of them, and you poured poppy seed milk over them, sweet and gray-white and speckled with black seeds, and ate them with a spoon while they got soft.

Before they ate, Senelis stood up. He held up a glass of water, because nobody drank anything stronger at Kūčios.

"For everybody at the table," he said, "and everybody who isn't. For this house, which has been very good to us. For the žaltys, wherever it is sleeping. And for the people who come after." He paused, and looked at the window, at the snowy yard. "Whoever they are."

"Valio," said Dad, softly, which was the only toast he knew, and everyone laughed, and drank, and the dinner began.

* * *

At six o'clock they called Vilnius.

It was two in the morning there, but Teta Irena, Močiutė's sister, had said she would stay up, because in Vilnius they had had their own Kūčios hours earlier and nobody was going to sleep anyway. Mom propped the tablet up against the bread basket, and there was Teta Irena, in a red sweater, in her apartment in Vilnius with a small sodas behind her, hanging from the kitchen lamp.

"That's it!" said Austėja. "Močiute, that's the one! From your story! The one that spins when you open the oven!"

"It's the same one," said Teta Irena, laughing. "Our mother's. I took it when we cleaned out the old apartment. It's much older than me, and much better behaved."

The two sisters talked in fast Lithuanian about cousins and weather and who had made the herring too salty. Then Teta Irena asked to see the new sodas, and Senelis carried the tablet into the kitchen.

The new sodas was hanging from the light over the kitchen table. It was not finished. It was not even half finished. It had one big diamond in the middle, three medium diamonds hanging from it, and only seven of the small ones, of the twenty-four it was supposed to have, dangling at uneven lengths like loose teeth. One of the small ones was Fernanda's. You could tell, because it was the neatest.

"Oi," said Teta Irena. "It's a baby."

"It's a work in progress," said Senelis, with dignity.

"It's beautiful," said Teta Irena. "Look at it. It's already moving."

They all looked. It was. In the warm kitchen air, the new diamonds were turning slowly on their threads.

"That's just the oven," said Mom.

Teta Irena shook her head on the screen. "In our family," she said, "it's never just the oven."

* * *

After dinner, they pulled the straws.

This was the game Austėja had been waiting for all year. Everybody took a turn reaching under the tablecloth, without looking, and pulling out one piece of hay. If you got a long one, you would have a long life. If you got a short one, well, you would have a shorter one, but probably a very interesting one.

Močiutė got a long, straight piece and said it was obviously correct. Mom got a long piece with a little bend at the end, and Senelis said that meant she'd have a long life with one wrong turn, probably moving to Lemont. Dad reached under the cloth with great drama, his tongue between his teeth, and pulled out a piece of hay about as long as his thumbnail.

Everybody stared at it.

"Well," said Dad, "I'll just have to pack a lot in."

Austėja got a piece so long that it kept coming and coming out from under the tablecloth, longer than her arm. Senelis said she would live to be a hundred and twelve and probably be very bossy by the end. Then it was Senelis's turn. He reached under the cloth, and felt around for a long time, and pulled out not one piece but two, tangled together, a long one and a long one, crossed in the middle like an X.

"What does that mean?" said Austėja.

"I don't know," said Senelis. "Nobody ever got two before." He turned them over. "Two long lives, maybe. One here. One in Lemont."

"Or a long life," said Močiutė, "with somebody holding on to you."

Mom wrote down everybody's straw on the family calendar, under Kūčios, the way she did every year, so that next December they could scroll back and see who had been right.

* * *

Then they sang.

It was Močiutė's idea. "One sutartinė," she said, "for the house." She and Austėja stood back to back between the table and the window, by the empty chair. Mom and Dad sat at the table, and Mom, who had grown up with these songs and pretended not to know them, sang the lylio line with Austėja, very quietly. Dad hummed. Senelis didn't sing. He sat with his hands folded on the lumpy tablecloth and listened with his eyes closed.

Žydi sodai, lylio. Lylio, lylio, dauno.

Austėja leaned back. Močiutė leaned back. The two lines rubbed and buzzed and held, and did not run to each other, and filled up the dining room right to the ceiling. And above the table, the old sodas began to turn.

It turned the way it had never turned before. Not a slow half-swing, not one slow circle. It turned around and around, steady and smooth, every one of its gray-gold diamonds spinning on its thread, every little star at the bottom twinkling as it went round, so that the whole room filled with thin stripes of moving light, over the white cloth, over the empty plate with the tiny cracked diamond on it, over all their faces, round and round, like a lighthouse, like a merry-go-round, like a garden in a wind.

Nobody stopped singing. Nobody looked up at the radiator. They just sang, and the sodas turned, and the stripes of light went round.

When the song ended, on the word, all together, the sodas slowed. And stopped. And hung there, perfectly still, as if nothing had happened at all.

Senelis opened his eyes.

"Well," he said, in a voice that was not quite steady. "Somebody remembered a lot."

* * *

At midnight, the old people said, animals could talk. On Kūčios night only. The cows in the barn and the horses and the dog by the door, they all spoke to each other in human words, and said what they knew about the family.

"But you must never listen," Senelis said, tucking a blanket around Austėja on the pullout couch. "Bad luck. Very bad manners. It's their one night."

"What about the žaltys? Where is it even sleeping?"

Senelis looked at the floor. Then at the basement door.

"My mother used to keep a basket," he said. "Behind the furnace. With an old wool shawl in it. She said it was for rags." He tucked in the end of the blanket. "Labanakt, my sparrow. Don't listen to anybody talking after midnight."

Austėja tried very hard to stay awake. She lay in the dark with her eyes wide open, watching the clock on the cable box, 11:22, 11:41, 11:53. She heard the furnace click on in the basement. She heard the house creak and settle. She heard snow tick softly against the window.

At 11:58 she heard something else, very faint, coming up through the floor vent from the basement. A little sound, low and humming. It went round, and round. It sounded almost like lylio, lylio, dauno.

It sounded almost like somebody holding her own line.

She meant to get up. She meant to go and look. But the pullout couch was warm, and the blanket was heavy, and she had eaten about four hundred kūčiukai, and her eyes were closing all by themselves.

In the morning, she asked Senelis if anybody had been singing in the basement.

"Me? No. I was asleep by eleven."

"Močiutė?"

"Snoring by ten-thirty. Like a tractor."

Austėja looked at the basement door. Senelis looked at it too.

"Well," he said. "I told you. Their one night. You don't listen." Then he winked, and went to make the coffee.

The Old Man in the Basement

In January the boxes came.

They arrived flat, in a bundle, with a roll of brown tape as wide as a dinner plate, and Mom stood them up in the living room one by one and folded them into shape and wrote on the side of each one in black marker: KITCHEN. BOOKS. SENELIS DESK. MOČIUTĖ DO NOT TOUCH. By the second Sunday there were thirty-one of them, stacked against the walls like a fort, and the house on Washtenaw Avenue had begun to sound different. Hollow. Your footsteps came back to you off the walls.

Austėja hated the boxes almost as much as she had hated the scarecrow sign. Senelis said they reminded him of the camp in Germany, though he had never been there. "My mother said everybody's life was in boxes," he said. "You knew a family by their boxes." Then he went down to the basement to pack his workbench, and didn't come up for a long time.

* * *

The basement was where the masks were.

Užgavėnės was coming, in the middle of February, two days after Austėja's tenth birthday. It was the winter carnival, the last big noisy party before spring, when people put on masks and went around making a racket to scare the winter away. In Lithuania, Elzė said, whole towns did it. People dressed as goats and storks and cranes and witches and old men with big noses, and went door to door shouting and playing tricks, and everybody ate pancakes until they couldn't move. In Lemont, the Lithuanian community did it in the big field behind the building where Saturday school met, with a bonfire and a fight and a whole kitchen full of pancakes.

Every child at Saturday school was making a mask. Austėja had decided in December that she would be a goat.

"An ožys," she told Senelis, at the workbench, on the first Sunday of the boxes. "With horns. And a beard. A big long beard."

"An ožys is a very good choice," said Senelis. "The goat is a troublemaker. It butts everybody. It eats the laundry. It's perfect for you."

"Seneli!"

"It's a compliment."

He showed her how to start. You blew up a balloon, about the size of your head, and covered it in strips of newspaper dipped in flour paste, layer after layer, until it was thick and lumpy. Then you let it dry for two days by the furnace. Then you popped the balloon and cut the shell in half, and there was the start of your face.

"My father carved his masks out of wood," said Senelis, slapping a wet strip onto the balloon. "Linden wood. Soft. He had a set of little knives." He stopped. "Wait."

He got up, went to the shelves at the back of the basement where the boxes of canned tomatoes had been, and began moving things around. Old paint cans. A bag of bowling shoes. A carton that said, in Ona's handwriting in faded pencil, UŽGAVĖNĖS.

He brought it to the workbench and opened the flaps.

Inside, wrapped in newspaper so old it had gone the color of tea, was a wooden face.

It was an old man's face, carved from pale wood and painted, with a long hooked nose, fat red cheeks, bushy eyebrows made of real sheep's wool, gone gray and stiff, and a huge, crooked, gap-toothed grin. Its eyeholes were empty and dark. Somebody had carved little wrinkles around them, laugh lines, deep and careful.

Austėja took a step back. "Whoa."

"Senis," said Senelis softly. "The Old Man. My father carved it in 1962. He wore it every Užgavėnės until he couldn't anymore." He held it up in front of his own face. Behind the dark eyeholes his real eyes blinked. "Boo."

"That's actually a little scary, Seneli."

"It's supposed to be. That's the job. All the masks are a little bit scary, so the winter will be scared too, and run away." He lowered it. "But look at it closely. Look at the eyes."

She looked. Around the empty eyeholes, the carved lines curved upward. Even with the hooked nose and the gap teeth, the face was laughing.

"He's not really scary," said Austėja slowly. "He's only pretending to be scary. He's having fun."

"That's the secret," said Senelis. "That's my father, exactly."

* * *

That evening, Mom took six photographs of the Old Man from every side, under the bright light at the workbench, and added him to the family collection, next to the trunk from 1949 and the sodas and the amber in its little blue bag. Under Made by, she typed Jonas Rimkus, 1962, linden wood. Under Story, Senelis dictated: Worn every Užgavėnės from 1962 to 2003. Scared away forty-two winters. Smiling the whole time.

"Forty-two," said Austėja. "Did you count?"

"I counted," said Senelis. "Every winter he went away. Every winter. That's a good record for one old wooden face."

* * *

The goat mask took three Sundays.

It dried lumpy, which Senelis said was correct for a goat. They cut eyeholes in it and a nose hole and a mouth slot. For the horns, Senelis bent two pieces of wire coat hanger into long curls, and Austėja wrapped them in more newspaper and paste until they were thick and ridged and curled back over the top of the mask like a real goat's. Then she painted the whole thing: gray-white for the face, black for around the eyes, pink inside the ears, brown for the horns with darker stripes. She gave it a pink nose and a mean, happy look.

Fernanda came on the second Sunday.

She had been coming most Sundays since November, with Doña Rosa, who liked to sit in the kitchen and drink coffee with Močiutė. The two grandmothers didn't share a language, exactly. Močiutė's Spanish was three words long and Doña Rosa's Lithuanian was two. But they talked for hours anyway, with their hands and their faces and a lot of English that came out in the wrong order, and laughed until Močiutė had to take off her glasses. Mostly they talked about tomatoes. Doña Rosa had very strong opinions about where in the yard the chiles would go.

Fernanda threaded diamonds for the new sodas at the kitchen table with Senelis, and when she got tired of threading, she came down to the basement.

"I want a mask," she said, looking at the goat. "Can I come to the carnival? My mom said I have to ask."

Austėja thought about it. A month ago she would have said no. A month ago, Fernanda had been the girl who was taking their house.

But a month ago Fernanda hadn't threaded eleven of the small sodas diamonds, all perfect. A month ago Austėja hadn't taught her to say ačiū and labas and žaltys with the bee in it, and Fernanda hadn't taught her culebra and abuela and órale, which you said when something was amazing, and which Austėja now said all the time at regular school until Mrs. Okafor asked what it meant.

"You have to be something with a long nose or horns or feathers," Austėja said. "Or a witch."

"What about a bird?"

"A gandras," said Senelis, from the workbench. "A stork. The stork is a very important bird in Lithuania. When the stork comes back in the spring and builds a nest on your roof, it means good luck for the house."

"Like the snake," said Fernanda.

"Like the žaltys," Senelis agreed. "In Lithuania, the lucky animals take turns. The žaltys under the floor, the stork on the roof. Between the two of them, a house is well looked after."

Fernanda's stork mask had a long red beak made from a paper towel tube, and real white feathers glued on from a craft store bag, and eyes ringed in black. When she put it on and clacked the beak, Senelis laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairs.

* * *

There was one problem with the goat.

The beard.

A goat needed a long beard, Senelis said, and a good goat beard was made of linen tow, the rough, tangled, pale gold fibers left over when you made linen thread from flax. In Lithuania, in the old days, every house had bags of it. In Chicago, it turned out, nobody did. Austėja tried yarn, which looked like yarn. She tried cotton balls, pulled apart, which looked like a cloud had died on the mask.

"It's not a goat without a beard," said Austėja, on the third Sunday, holding up the beardless mask. "It's just a gray guy with horns."

Senelis took his phone out and made a call that lasted twenty-five minutes, mostly in Lithuanian, mostly about the weather in Vilnius.

Eleven days later, a small, battered box arrived at the house in Lemont, covered in stamps with castles and storks on them, addressed in Teta Irena's spiky handwriting. Inside were two things. The first was a bag of linen tow, a big soft tangled cloud of it, pale gold and smelling faintly of hay. The second, wrapped in tissue, was a single small bead of amber on a thin red thread, with a note in careful English: For Austėja, for her tenth year. From the sea at Palanga. Teta Irena.

Austėja held the amber bead up to her bedroom window. The gray January light went into it and came out honey-colored.

"Mom," she said, "can I put this in the collection? Next to Jonas's fly?"

"It's yours," said Mom. "You can put it wherever you want."

So Austėja added it herself, that night, with a photo and a caption: Amber bead from Palanga, from Teta Irena in Vilnius, January 2026. It came in the same box as the goat's beard.

The goat got its beard the next Sunday. It was long and pale gold and wild and went nearly to Austėja's belly button, and when she put on the mask and shook her head, it swung back and forth like a real goat's. Senelis said it was the best goat he had ever seen and also the most frightening, and he would personally not want to be a winter that ran into it in an alley.

* * *

Before she went home that Sunday, Austėja asked if she could look in the basket.

She had not seen the žaltys since October. She knew it was sleeping. She knew snakes slept all winter, in a cold sleep so deep their hearts barely beat. She knew it wasn't a good idea to wake one up. But she had been thinking about it all winter, every time she saw the boxes, every time somebody said April.

Senelis took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt while he thought about it.

"One look," he said finally. "With the little flashlight, not the big one. No touching. No talking."

They went together behind the furnace. It was dim back there and warm, and smelled of dust and hot metal and old wool. In the corner, in the narrow space between the furnace and the wall, sat a low, round basket, the kind people use for laundry, its edges frayed and dark with age. In it lay an old brown wool shawl, folded and folded into a nest.

Senelis switched on the little flashlight and pointed it at the basket, very low, so the light just touched the edge.

In the middle of the shawl, the žaltys lay curled.

It was coiled around and around itself in a tight, neat spiral, like a cinnamon roll, its head tucked into the middle. It didn't move. The light shone on its gray-green back, on the fine scales, dull with sleep, and on the two yellow spots behind its head, which were the only bright things in the whole dark corner.

Austėja held her breath and looked. She did not talk. She did not touch.

After a long moment, Senelis turned off the light, and they tiptoed back out into the basement, past the workbench and the boxes and the wooden Old Man laughing on the shelf.

"It's going to wake up in April," Austėja whispered at the bottom of the stairs. "Right when we leave."

"Yes," said Senelis.

"What if it wakes up and we're gone? What if it doesn't know where we went?"

Senelis was quiet. He put his hand on the banister.

"Austėjute," he said, "I don't know. I really don't. My mother would have known. She knew all of those things." He looked back toward the furnace. "But I think, when it wakes up, it will decide. That's what Doña Rosa says, and Doña Rosa is a very smart woman. The snake decides."

Upstairs, through the open basement door, they could hear the two grandmothers in the kitchen laughing at something, one in Spanish and one in Lithuanian, both at the same time, two lines running right up next to each other and neither one giving up.

Kanapinis Wins

Austėja turned ten on a Thursday, which was a school day, which she felt was poor planning on somebody's part.

But when she came downstairs that morning in Lemont, there was a candle stuck in her waffle, and Mom and Dad sang "Happy Birthday" in English and then "Ilgiausių metų" in Lithuanian, which means "Longest Years," and which is what Lithuanians sing instead, three times through, louder each time, until the neighbor's dog started barking along. Dad sang the Lithuanian words about half a beat behind Mom, the way Austėja used to hammer in Kalvelis, which made her laugh so hard she blew out the candle by accident before she'd made her wish.

"You can make it anyway," said Mom. "Wishes don't check."

Austėja closed her eyes and made it anyway. She didn't tell anybody what it was. It had a snake in it.

* * *

Mom had made a page for the day, the way the family did for birthdays and anniversaries, a private page only family and the people they'd invited could see, and all day long, while Austėja was at school doing fractions and spelling, messages came in.

When she got home she sat on the couch with the tablet and read them all, with Dad reading over her shoulder.

Teta Irena had sent a video from her kitchen in Vilnius, with her mother's small sodas spinning behind her head, singing "Ilgiausių metų" in a big round voice that she herself said was more like a cow. The cousin in Kaunas had sent a photo of a cake shaped like a goat. The Cleveland cousins had sent a long message about fishing, which nobody understood but everybody appreciated. Mrs. Washington, who did not believe in computers, had dictated a message to Senelis over the fence: Happy birthday to the second-best cake maker on Washtenaw Avenue. The first was your great-grandfather. Keep practicing. Theo had sent a drawing of a fungus gnat wearing a party hat. Elzė had written, in English, Happy birthday, now you are two numbers. And Fernanda had sent a photo of herself holding up a sign she had made in purple marker that said SU GIMTADIENIU AUSTĖJA!!!! with the letters going downhill and one Ė with the dot drawn as a heart.

"She spelled it right," said Austėja, amazed. "She even got the Ė."

"She called your grandfather to ask," said Mom. "Twice."

The last message was from Senelis. It was a recording, not a video. When she pressed it, she heard his voice, a little too loud, the way he always talked into phones.

"Austėjute. Happy birthday, my sparrow. Ten years. When I was ten, I found the žaltys. You found it at nine, so you were early, like your mother, who was born two weeks early and has been early ever since. I think that's how it works. Every child in this family gets one." There was a pause, and a rustle. "On Saturday, at Užgavėnės, I have something for you. Not on the computer. In real life. You'll see. Okay. That's all." Another pause. "Danute, how do you turn this..."

It ended.

* * *

Saturday was cold, clear and bright, and the snow in Lemont was a foot deep and squeaked under your boots.

Behind the big brick building on the hill, the field had been plowed into a wide white square, with snowbanks around the edges higher than Austėja's head. In the middle stood a tall pile of wood and brush for the bonfire. Beside it, on a sled, sat Morė.

Morė was a straw woman. She was taller than Senelis, stuffed with straw and old rags, with a painted cloth face, a red kerchief on her head, a long ragged skirt, and a broom in one hand. She was winter, Elzė explained, or at least she was standing in for winter today, and at the end of the afternoon they would set her on top of the bonfire and burn her up, and winter would have to leave.

"Poor Morė," said Fernanda, looking up at her from inside the stork mask.

"She doesn't mind," said Elzė. "She comes back every year. That's her job."

There were masks everywhere. Goats and storks and cranes with long necks made of stockings, and witches with green faces and brooms, and bears in fur coats, and old men with hooked noses, and a few things that weren't anything in particular, just big and lumpy and loud. Teenagers ran around in packs banging pots and spoons to frighten the winter, and little kids in snowsuits shrieked and hid behind their mothers' legs and ran out to shriek some more. A man with an accordion was playing a fast, bouncing tune under the eaves of the building, his breath coming out in clouds.

And everywhere, the smell of pancakes.

Inside, the big kitchen was full of women in aprons at long griddles, flipping blynai, thin and golden and lacy at the edges, by the hundreds. You ate them with sour cream or jam or both, rolled up in your hand, standing in the snow. You were supposed to eat a lot of them, Elzė said, nine at least, or twelve if you were serious, so that the whole year to come would be full.

Theo had come as a beetle. He had a black shell made from a painted plastic sled, pipe cleaner antennae, and six extra arms of stuffed black tights that flopped when he walked.

"There aren't any beetles in Užgavėnės," said Austėja.

"There are now," said Theo, straightening his antennae.

Elzė studied him from inside a witch mask with a warty green nose. "In Lithuania," she said finally, "there are much stranger masks than this. You're okay."

* * *

At two o'clock came the fight.

Everybody crowded around in a big circle in the snow, stamping their feet. From one side came Kanapinis. He was thin and tall, dressed all in pale rough clothes with a rope belt, and he was played by Rūta's brother, a long-legged college student with a straw hat. Kanapinis means the Hemp Man. He was spring, and light, and new things growing.

From the other side came Lašininis. The Bacon Man. Winter, and heavy food, and staying in by the stove.

Lašininis was Dad.

He had volunteered in November without really knowing what he was signing up for, and he had thrown himself into it the way Dad threw himself into everything, with complete enthusiasm and very little information. He was wearing two of Senelis's old sweaters, one over the other, stuffed with three bed pillows so that he was as round as a barrel. He had a sausage necklace, made of real sausages, which Močiutė had tied on with kitchen string and told him not to eat. He had a frying pan in one hand. He had drawn on a mustache with eyeliner.

The crowd cheered when he came out. Dad bowed, and almost fell over because of the pillows.

"Austėja," whispered Elzė, "your father knows Lašininis has to lose, right?"

"I told him," said Austėja. "Like four times."

The fight was mostly shouting. Lašininis and Kanapinis circled each other in the snow and argued, in Lithuanian, about who was more important, while the crowd booed and cheered. Kanapinis had a script. Dad had learned his lines from a recording Močiutė made, and he said them in a deep, booming voice with an accent so terrible that the old men in the crowd were wiping their eyes. Then they wrestled. Kanapinis pushed. Dad wobbled. Kanapinis pushed again, harder. Dad spun around, very slowly, his pillow belly swinging, his sausages swinging, his frying pan held out to the side, and then sat down in the snow, hard, on the pillows, with an enormous whumpf, and lay there with his arms and legs in the air like a turtle.

The crowd roared. Kanapinis held his straw hat over his head. Spring had won.

"I'm okay!" Dad shouted from the snow. "I'm okay! The pillows took it!"

Austėja laughed so hard inside the goat mask that her beard fogged up.

* * *

Then the folk dance groups danced, on a square of plywood laid over the snow, with the accordion man playing.

The middle group did Kalvelis. Austėja's group. They danced in their masks, which Rūta had said was fine because it was Užgavėnės and nothing had to make sense. So there were goats and witches and a bear and one stork, because Rūta had let Fernanda join in at the end of the line with Domas's little sister, and the plywood boomed under their boots.

Austėja faced Domas, who was a bear. The music came round to the hammering part. She made her fists.

And she listened. Not to her own heart, which was thumping. Not to the crowd. To the music, the way Rūta had told her in September. To the accordion, and to the beat under it. She could feel it coming, the way you could feel Močiutė's back against yours, the way you could feel a song coming down a long road from far away.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

She hammered on the beat. Exactly on the beat, at the same moment as Domas, and the same moment as the whole line of goats and witches and the one stork. Then again, on the next round. And the next. She did not hammer once in the silence after.

When the dance ended, and the crowd clapped in their mittens, Domas lifted his bear head off and stared at her.

"You did it," he said. "You were a real blacksmith."

Austėja lifted her goat head off. Her face was hot and her hair was full of static and she was grinning so hard her cheeks hurt.

At the edge of the crowd, she saw Senelis.

He was wearing the Old Man.

The wooden face with the long hooked nose and the fat red cheeks and the gap-toothed grin, with his own gray hair sticking out around the edges and his own big hands in their work gloves clapping. Austėja couldn't see his face behind the mask. But she could see the carved laugh lines curving up around the dark eyeholes. And then he lifted the mask, just a little, so she could see under it, and his own real face was laughing exactly the same way.

Forty-three winters, Austėja thought.

* * *

At five o'clock, when the sun was going down red over the trees along the canal and the snow had turned blue, they lit the bonfire.

Two men lifted Morė off her sled and set her on top of the pile, and somebody touched a torch to the brush at the bottom. The fire caught with a crackle and a rush, and climbed up through the wood, and in a minute it was a roaring tower of orange and gold, throwing sparks up into the darkening sky, so hot you had to step back. Morė's red kerchief caught. Her straw arms went up in a whoosh of light.

Everyone cheered and banged their pots and shouted at winter to go away and not come back. Austėja shouted too, in her goat mask with its beard of linen tow from Vilnius. Fernanda clacked her stork beak. Theo flapped his six extra arms. Elzė, beside them, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled something long and fast in Lithuanian that made the grown-ups nearby laugh and look shocked at the same time.

"What did you say?" said Austėja.

"I told winter what my grandmother tells my uncle when he stays too long," said Elzė. "It's not polite."

In the crowd, on the far side of the fire, four women in long coats stood close together in a circle. The ladies of Lylio, with Ingrida's baby bundled up like a burrito in the middle. As the fire roared, they began to sing. You could barely hear it over the crackling and the drums, but Austėja heard. Two lines, rubbing. Holding. Lylio, lylio, dauno.

Senelis came and stood behind her, with the Old Man mask pushed up on top of his head like a hat. He put his hands on her shoulders.

"I said I had something for you," he said. "In real life."

He took off one glove with his teeth, reached into his coat pocket, and took out the little faded blue cloth bag, tied with a string.

Austėja's heart stopped.

"Seneli," she said. "That's Jonas's."

"It was Jonas's," said Senelis. "Then it was mine. Now it's yours." He put it into her mittened hands and closed her fingers over it. "Ten years old. A žaltys and a goat and a blacksmith. You're ready. Just don't take it out here, in the snow. Wait till you're home. Hold it up to the light at the kitchen table. That's where it belongs."

Austėja held the little bag against her coat. Through the cloth she could feel it, small and smooth and round, like a warm grape.

The fire roared. Morė went up in a last great tower of sparks, and the sparks rose up into the deep blue sky over Lemont and went out one by one among the first stars, and winter, everybody agreed, had been well and truly told.

Teardrops on an Egg

The last small diamond went on the new sodas on the first Sunday in March, and Austėja tied the knot herself.

She had been trying all winter. Every Sunday, at the end, Senelis let her try one, and every Sunday her knot came out loose, or lumpy, or slid right off the end of the thread. But this time she didn't think about it. She was talking to Fernanda about whether a stork could beat a goat in a fight, and her fingers just went, over and under and through and pull, and when she looked down there it was: small and tight and neat.

"Seneli," she said. "Look."

Senelis looked. "Well," he said. "Your hands are thinking."

The new sodas was finished. One big diamond in the middle, as wide as a bicycle wheel. Six medium ones hanging from its points. Twenty-four small ones, on threads of different lengths, so that they hung at different heights like apples on a tree. And from the bottom of each small one, a tiny straw star that Močiutė had made, because her fingers were the best at stars. Eleven of the small diamonds were Fernanda's. Nine were Austėja's. Four were Senelis's, the early lopsided ones, which he refused to take apart. "Every garden has a few crooked trees," he said.

They hung it in the kitchen, from the light, next to the boxes. It was so new it was nearly the color of butter, and it shone. When the furnace came on, it turned a little in the warm air, and Senelis said that one was definitely the furnace.

* * *

Then there was the question nobody had wanted to ask, which was what to do about the old one.

The museum lady had come in February. Mom had found her, a woman who fixed old fabrics and baskets and things for museums, and she had stood on a chair in the dining room with a little flashlight and a magnifying glass and looked at the old sodas, diamond by diamond. Then she had climbed down and said, very kindly, that she could try to take it down and pack it, but she couldn't promise. "Straw this old," she said, "it's like a cobweb. It's held together by habit."

"Then it stays," said Senelis.

Mom opened her mouth to argue and closed it again.

"It was made for this house," said Senelis. "My mother made it for this ceiling. That hook. This table. If it falls apart, let it fall apart here, at home, not in a box on the Stevenson Expressway."

"But, Tėti," said Mom, "it's not going to be our house."

"No," said Senelis. "It's going to be the Olveras' house." He looked at the old sodas, gray-gold, hanging still. "Maybe it will like them."

"What if they don't want it?" said Dad. "Some people don't like old stuff on their ceiling."

Austėja thought about Doña Rosa, holding a branch of the crooked šakotis up to the light. About her papel picado, the little garden in the sky. About her saying qué fino at the kitchen table, over the straw.

"Doña Rosa will want it," she said. "I'll ask her. But I know."

* * *

She asked on the next Sunday, in the kitchen, with Fernanda translating the hard parts.

Doña Rosa put down her coffee cup. She got up, slowly, with her cane, and went into the dining room and stood under the old sodas for a long time with her head tipped back.

"For us?" she said.

"It doesn't want to move," said Austėja. "It's too old. It wants to stay with the house. And Senelis says the house is yours now."

Doña Rosa said something in Spanish, quietly, that Fernanda didn't translate. Then she reached up with one brown, wrinkled hand, not quite touching the lowest star, and held it there a moment, as if she were warming her hand at a stove.

"When I was a girl," she said, "in my mother's house, in Michoacán, we had a ceiling of wood, with beams. And for the fiesta of our town, every year, my mother hung papel picado from one beam to the other, all across the room. Pink and green and orange. And when the door opened and the wind came in from the street, all the papers moved together, and made a sound like..." She fluttered her fingers. "Like birds in a tree. Like rain starting."

Above her head, the old sodas began to turn.

Slowly. A quarter turn, a pause, a half turn more, all its gray-gold diamonds drifting on their threads. The little stars caught the light from the window.

Fernanda gasped. Doña Rosa did not move. She just looked up at it, and her black eyes were wet and shining.

"Ay," she said softly. "It knows."

Austėja stood in the archway with her mouth open. It worked in Spanish. She hadn't known if it would. She had thought maybe it only understood Lithuanian, or only Rimkuses, or only people who had been born in this house. But Doña Rosa had remembered a ceiling with wooden beams, in a town Austėja had never seen, and the sodas had heard.

It was the remembering that counted, Austėja thought, in any language.

"Yes," said Doña Rosa, turning to Senelis, who had come to stand in the kitchen door. "Yes. We'll keep it. We'll take care of it. Gracias."

"Ačiū," said Senelis, and then, "Gracias," in an accent so bad that both grandmothers laughed.

* * *

That night, Austėja wrote a letter.

Mom showed her the place in the family's private space where you could keep messages for later: letters you wrote now, sealed, that would only open on a certain date, or when a certain thing happened. Mom had one there for Austėja for when she turned eighteen. Senelis had one for Mom that he wouldn't say anything about. Austėja had always thought it was a strange idea, writing to people in the future. Now she understood it.

She wrote her letter twice. Once in the family's place, sealed, to open in fifty years, in 2076, when she would be sixty, and older than Mom was now, and maybe a grandmother. And once on paper, in her neatest handwriting, to fold up and tuck into the ceiling above the old sodas, on top of the hook plate, where nobody would find it until the day somebody finally took the sodas down.

To whoever takes this sodas down,

My great-grandmother Ona Rimkienė made this in the winter of 1955 out of rye straw from a farm on Archer Avenue. She hung it here because it was winter and she wanted a garden. It is called a sodas, which means garden or orchard. It turns when somebody remembers something true. I tested it with tissues. It is not the radiator.

It stayed here when my grandparents moved to Lemont, because it was too old to go, and because it belongs to this ceiling. The Olvera family takes care of it now. Doña Rosa made it turn on the first try.

There was a žaltys under the back step. If you see a snake with a yellow crown, please give it a little milk and do not hurt it. That is very important.

Austėja Marsh, age 10, March 2026

At the bottom, after thinking about it, she added: P.S. My grandfather was a terrible blacksmith and so was I but we got better.

* * *

On March eighteenth, Senelis turned seventy-five, and Mom made him a page and everybody wrote on it, and he read every message out loud at the kitchen table, even the fishing ones from Cleveland. Mrs. Washington dictated: Seventy-five years and you still can't keep your tomatoes away from the squirrels. Happy birthday, neighbor. Austėja added a new pin to the family map, for Lemont, with the first photo: the new apartment building, with a little square of garden behind it where Močiutė had already been told she could have a plot.

The pin had a date on it now. It wasn't empty anymore.

* * *

Easter came on the fifth of April, and it was the last big day in the house on Washtenaw Avenue.

For Easter, in the family, you made margučiai. The decorated eggs. Senelis did them the way his mother had: you boiled the eggs hard, and while they were warm you drew on them with melted beeswax, and then you put them in the dye, and wherever the wax was, the dye couldn't go. You drew with a pin. A plain sewing pin, stuck into the eraser end of a pencil, dipped into a tin of beeswax that sat in a pan of hot water on the stove. You touched the pinhead to the egg and pulled it toward you, and it left a little drop with a tail, like a comma, or a tadpole, or a teardrop. Dot, pull. Dot, pull. You could make flowers that way, and suns, and stars, and little fir trees. Everything on a Lithuanian egg, Senelis said, was made out of teardrops. Happy ones, he said. That was just how the pin worked.

The dye was made from onion skins. Močiutė had been saving them since January in a big paper bag, the dry, papery brown skins from every onion she cooked, and she boiled them in a pot until the water was dark red-brown like strong tea. When you dipped your waxed egg in, it came out the color of a chestnut, or of amber, or of an autumn leaf, depending on how long you waited.

They did it all at the kitchen table, Austėja and Fernanda and Senelis and Doña Rosa, with the new sodas turning slowly above them. Doña Rosa was very good at the pin. Fernanda made an egg covered in tiny snakes, each one with two dots behind its head. Austėja made one with a goat on it, which came out looking like a dog with antlers. Senelis made one with a sodas on it, diamonds inside diamonds, and when he melted the wax off by the stove, the pattern appeared, pale gold on dark amber, like light through a window.

"Your hands," said Austėja.

"My mother's hands," said Senelis. "They're just borrowed."

Then they went out to the backyard for the rolling.

From the garage Senelis brought out a long wooden board with low sides, like a slide for a very small child, which his father had made out of an old door frame. You propped one end up on a cinder block, and laid the eggs on the grass below in a scattered group, and then, one at a time, you set your egg at the top of the board and let it go. It rolled down the slide, wobbling, and out across the grass, and if it hit one of the eggs lying there, you won that egg and took it.

Mrs. Washington came out on her porch with her lawn chair, wearing a yellow hat with a flower on it.

Dad rolled first and hit nothing, and his egg rolled all the way to the fence. Mom rolled and hit two. Doña Rosa rolled and hit three at once and Fernanda screamed. Austėja rolled and her dog-with-antlers egg went down the board, wobbling, and across the grass, slowly, slowly, and bumped very gently into Senelis's sodas egg, and stopped.

"I won it," said Austėja. "Seneli. I won your egg."

Senelis put his hands on his hips. "That," he said, "was a very rude goat."

But he was smiling, and he picked up his own egg out of the grass and gave it to her, and she held it in both hands, amber and gold, with the sodas pattern on it, still a little warm.

* * *

Late that afternoon, while the grown-ups were inside eating, Austėja and Fernanda sat on the back steps in the sun with their eggs in their laps.

It was the first warm day of the year. The sun had real heat in it. Senelis's tomato stakes were bare. The squirrel was back on the garage roof. Along the fence the first green tips of something were poking up through the brown leaves. And the concrete step under them was warm, warm as a hand.

"Is it awake yet?" said Fernanda.

Austėja leaned over and looked into the gap under the bottom step. It was dark. Nothing moved.

"Not yet," she said. "Soon. Senelis says when the ground is warm enough."

"We move in in two weeks," said Fernanda.

"I know."

They sat for a while without talking, with the sun on their faces. Then Fernanda took a small jar out of her jacket pocket and held it up. It was an old baby food jar, washed out, with a lid.

"Milk," she said. "For later. For when it wakes up. Just in case you're not here."

Austėja looked at the jar. Then at Fernanda. Then she leaned back, a little, against the warm step, the way you lean back in a sutartinė when you need to hold your own line, and found that she didn't need to hold it so hard anymore. There was somebody next to her, singing something different, and it was fine.

"It likes the saucer by the corner," she said. "Right there. Where the step meets the house."

Fernanda nodded seriously, and put the jar back in her pocket.

The Snake Decides

The moving truck came at eight o'clock on the eighteenth of April, a Saturday, and it was so big that it blocked the whole of Washtenaw Avenue from one end to the other.

Austėja had been awake since five-thirty. She had slept over one last time, on the pullout couch, which tomorrow would go to a thrift store on Pulaski, in a living room that was nothing but boxes and echoes. She had lain awake listening to the house: the tick of the furnace, the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the third stair, the sound a house makes when it has been a house for a very long time and knows exactly how it sounds. She wanted to remember it.

At six, she had heard Senelis get up and go down to the basement. When she followed him, in her socks, she found him standing behind the furnace with the little flashlight in his hand, pointed at the floor.

The basket was empty.

The old brown shawl lay in it, folded into its nest, with a round dent in the middle where something had been. But the žaltys was gone.

"When?" whispered Austėja.

"I don't know," said Senelis. "Sometime in the night. It woke up." He turned off the flashlight. "It always knew when."

* * *

The movers were three young men in gray T-shirts who carried boxes down the front steps three at a time as if they were empty. Mom checked things off a clipboard. Dad helped, got in the way, and was politely asked to stop helping. Mrs. Washington sat on her front porch in her lawn chair with a cup of coffee and watched everything, like a judge at a parade.

The new sodas went last.

Senelis took it down from the kitchen light himself, standing on a chair, with Dad holding the chair and Austėja holding her breath. He lowered it into a big cardboard box that Mom had lined with an old quilt, and they packed tissue paper around every diamond, gently, one at a time, until the box was a cloud with a garden in it. Senelis wrote on the side in big black letters, SODAS, and underneath, in smaller letters, LĖTAI. Slowly.

"They don't read Lithuanian," said Mom.

"Then they'll ask," said Senelis. "That's good. That's how people learn."

It rode to Lemont in the back seat of Senelis's car, buckled in with a seat belt, like a person.

The old sodas they did not take down. It hung over the empty dining room, where the table had been, from its hook in the ceiling, with Austėja's folded letter tucked out of sight above it. The light through the bare windows came in long and pale across the floor, and the old sodas hung in it, perfectly still, gray-gold, as if it were waiting to see what would happen next.

* * *

At eleven o'clock, when the truck was nearly full, the Olveras arrived in a borrowed van with their own first load: kitchen chairs, a mattress tied on the roof, three big pots of chiles that Doña Rosa had been growing on her apartment windowsill since February, and Fernanda, who jumped out before the van had properly stopped and ran straight up the driveway toward the backyard.

"Is it awake?" she shouted over her shoulder.

"It's awake," Austėja shouted back, running after her. "But it's gone. It's not in the basket."

They came around the corner of the house together into the backyard, and both stopped.

The žaltys was on the back step.

The top step, in the sun, stretched out long and loose on the warm concrete, gray-green and shining. It looked thinner than it had in the fall, and its colors looked brighter, as if it had just been washed. Its two yellow spots glowed behind its head like a small crown that had been polished for the occasion.

Beside it, at the corner where the bottom step met the house, was a saucer. A plain white one, with a pink rim, that Austėja had never seen before. It was full of milk.

Fernanda looked at Austėja. Austėja looked at Fernanda.

"My abuela," said Fernanda. "She came by yesterday. She asked your grandfather if she could. He said yes."

"He didn't tell me."

"He said he wanted it to be a surprise," said Fernanda. "For the snake."

* * *

Everyone came out, one at a time, and stood at a careful distance.

Senelis came first, and stopped at the top of the driveway with his hand on the fence. Then Doña Rosa with her cane. Then Močiutė, wiping her hands on her jeans. Then Mom, who stopped halfway and stayed there, with Dad behind her, holding her arm. Then the three movers, curious, and Mr. and Mrs. Olvera, and Mrs. Washington, who had come around through the side gate with her coffee and said, "Well, I'll be. Jonas's snake."

Senelis went forward alone and lowered himself, with a crack from both knees, until he was sitting on the bottom step, a little to one side, the way you sit next to someone on a bus.

"Labas, žalty," he said, in his polite, loud phone voice.

The žaltys lifted its head and tasted the air.

"We are going," said Senelis. "Today. To Lemont, down Archer Avenue. The whole way. There's a garden there, behind the building. Small, but good. My wife is going to grow tomatoes. You can come with us. My mother used to say, when a family moves, you must ask the žaltys to come along, or the luck stays behind." He held out his hands, palms up. "So I'm asking. You can come. You're welcome. You'll always be welcome."

Austėja had brought the basket up from the basement. She set it down at the bottom of the steps, with the brown shawl folded inside, just in case.

The žaltys looked at the basket for a long moment.

Then it slid down off the top step, smooth and slow, one step, two steps, over the concrete edges like water poured from a pitcher. It went past the basket without touching it. It went past Senelis's hands. It went to the corner where the step met the house, to the saucer with the pink rim, and put its head down to the milk.

Then it lifted its head again and looked, for a long time, at Doña Rosa and Fernanda.

Nobody said anything. A bus went by on Marquette Road. Somewhere a dog barked. Fernanda had both hands over her mouth.

Senelis sat very still on the step. Austėja saw his shoulders go up, and then, slowly, come down again.

"Well," he said. "Well. The snake decides."

* * *

Austėja thought she would cry. She had been sure all winter that she would, if this happened. She had practiced being brave about it in the bathtub.

But standing there in the sun, watching the žaltys at the saucer, and Fernanda crouched down with her hands over her mouth, and Doña Rosa leaning on her cane with her eyes shining, she found that what she felt wasn't sad, exactly. It was more like the feeling at the end of a sutartinė, when the two lines stop together on the word, and the room is quiet, and you can still feel the buzz in your ribs.

The žaltys was holding its own line. It belonged to the house. It had always belonged to the house, the way the old sodas belonged to the ceiling, and the house was going to the Olveras, and so the žaltys was too. It was staying where it lived.

She went and crouched down next to Fernanda.

"You have to say labas to it," she whispered. "Every morning. And keep the milk by the corner, with a little dish of water next to it, because water is what snakes really drink. And never, ever pick it up or hurt it. You just watch."

"I know," Fernanda whispered back. "I know. I'll take care of it. I promise."

"And when it's cold it sleeps behind the furnace. There's a basket."

"Can I keep the basket?"

Austėja looked at Senelis. Senelis nodded.

"You can keep the basket," said Austėja.

Then she took out her phone, Mom's old phone, and opened the family word list, and held it out to Fernanda.

"Say it," she said. "For my list. In your voice."

Fernanda took the phone. She looked at the žaltys. She pressed the red button.

"Žžžžžaltys," she said, with the bee in it, just like Senelis. And then, after a second, because she was eight and couldn't help it: "Hi, Austėja. It's me. Fernanda. The snake is staying with us. I'll send you pictures."

Austėja saved it, right under Senelis's.

* * *

Before they left, everyone went into the empty dining room one last time.

They stood together under the old sodas: Senelis and Močiutė, Mom and Dad, Austėja, and the Olveras, Fernanda holding her abuela's hand, and Mrs. Washington in the doorway with her coffee. The room was bare and bright and smelled of floor cleaner. Their voices sounded strange in it.

Senelis looked up at the sodas for a long time.

"In the winter of 1955," he said, "I was four, and I sat on the floor right there, under the table, and watched my mother's feet go back and forth from the kitchen, and the straw coming down in little pieces onto the linoleum like snow. And my father stood on a chair and put that hook in the ceiling, and he hit his thumb with the hammer, and he said a word in Lithuanian that I was not allowed to say until I was thirty." Everybody laughed. "And then they hung it up, and it turned, and my mother said, There. Now we have a garden. Now we live here."

The old sodas began to turn.

It turned slowly, all the way around, with its gray-gold diamonds drifting and its little stars glinting in the bright bare room, throwing thin stripes of light across the walls where the pictures had been, across the floor where the table had stood, across all their faces, Lithuanian and Mexican and American, and some of them more than one, round and round.

Nobody looked at the radiator.

"There," said Senelis softly. "Now you live here."

* * *

The drive to Lemont took almost an hour, down Archer Avenue the whole way, because Senelis would not take the expressway, not today. Through Brighton Park, where Senelis honked twice at a second-floor window, out along the river valley past the quarries and the trees just starting to fuzz with new leaves, and up the hill into Lemont.

The new apartment was on the second floor, with big windows that looked out over the canal and a little balcony, and an elevator that Senelis rode up and down three times just to be sure it worked. Dad screwed a hook into the kitchen ceiling, standing on a chair, and did not hit his thumb, though Senelis said he should, for tradition. They unpacked the new sodas from its cloud of tissue and hung it up.

It looked very gold and very new in the white kitchen. It hung perfectly still.

Senelis sat down at his table, in his new kitchen, in his new town, at the end of the same street he'd been born on. He looked up at the new sodas. He was quiet for a while.

"I'm going to miss that step," he said at last. "The back step. In the sun. I sat on it every summer night for seventy years."

The new sodas turned. For the first time, all by itself, all the way around.

* * *

In May, Močiutė planted her tomatoes in the little garden behind the building, in her square plot by the fence, and Austėja helped her. It was a warm, soft evening. The canal down the hill was full of light, and swallows were flying low over the water, and from an open window somewhere a radio was playing a baseball game.

Austėja was kneeling in the dirt, pressing it down around a tomato plant, when she saw something move by her hand.

It was very small. No longer than a pencil and thinner than a shoelace, gray-green, perfectly smooth. It lifted its tiny head and tasted the air with a tongue like a black thread. And on the back of its head, on either side, there were two spots. Yellow, edged with black.

A crown so small you could have covered it with a grain of rice.

Austėja did not scream. She did not reach out. She did not take a picture.

"Močiute," she said, very quietly. "Can you bring me a little milk? In a saucer?"

Močiutė looked up from her tomatoes. She looked at her granddaughter's face, and then at the ground beside her granddaughter's hand. Her mouth opened. Then, without asking a single question, she put down her trowel and went inside to the refrigerator, exactly the way, Senelis would say later, his own mother had in 1961.

Austėja stayed where she was, kneeling in the warm dirt, with the little crowned head looking up at her.

"Labas, žaltiuk," she whispered. Hello, little žaltys. "Welcome. You're welcome here."

She didn't know if it had come down Archer Avenue on its own, the whole way, or in the quilt at the bottom of the sodas box, or out of a story, or out of the ground. She decided she didn't need to know. Some things you don't spy on.

Upstairs, behind the kitchen window, in the warm May evening with no wind at all, she could see the golden sodas turning.