The question escaped before Susan had a chance to stop it: "Why? The boys go to them."

Susan's eyes flicked toward her mother, glimpsing the almost imperceptible duck of her head. She'd figured out the head thing by watching her mother over the last eight years and could now read the signals well. If her mother looked up at her father or sideways for just a moment, there was no getting around it. But if she ducked her head then maybe, just maybe, mom wouldn't punish Susan if she caught her doing the thing her father said not to.

"Just do as you're told!" snapped her father.

Why couldn't she go to the elevators like her brothers, Susan wondered. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair. The boys always got to do the good stuff, and the elevators were really really good stuff.

Last month her twin brother Robert had brought home seven mewling newborns, orphaned when their calico mother ate a poisoned rat. Dad said Robert could keep the kittens — that the Tom would only eat them now that their mother wasn't there to protect them.

And earlier when Bruce brought home eleven bald baby mice, he was allowed to keep them too. Bruce nestled their squirming pink bodies into a bed of rags under a heat lamp, and fed them through a blue Rexall ear dropper every day. Anyway, everyday until Robert's calicos got at them. Susan winced, remembering the licking Bruce had laid on his younger brother when he discovered the mauled rodents.

Even five-year-old Martin got to go to the elevators. Only this morning he brought home a single black stiletto heel and three dirt-encrusted beer bottles. One of the bottles had a dead mouse curled inside. Neat. Martin put the heel in the wooden MacIntosh crate where he kept all his treasures — the rusted silver fish hook, the 1953 Lincoln penny, the all but toothless black comb discovered at the edge of the boggy, buggy creek bed, and the clay-encrusted metal button in the shape of a ship.

"Well look at that. A shipshape button," Dad had chuckled when Martin showed it to him. Dad seemed really pleased.

If even little Martin was allowed to go, why couldn't Susan? Why should she be deprived of all the treasures the elevators had to offer, of maybe bringing home something that would please dad?

Thirty years later Susan realized that her father's elevator warning and her mother's unconscious duck of the head constituted the only sex education her parents ever gave her. And she realized something else: it was what had compelled her to go to the grain elevators on that fateful day in the summer of 1960.