A Widow's Curse by Phillip Depoy

had barely acquired over the course of agonizing years.
    So I sat, staring at Hek’s back, counting each exhaled breath. The rain drummed on the tin roof and the eaves dripped. Distant thunder whispered over the hills. I could hear the clock on the mantel in the parlor clicking away seconds as intensely as the blood thumped my temples.
    â€œWell,” Hek said suddenly, turning my way, “some things you bury, forget, and you think they’re gone. I haven’t thought about that night in a good long while.”
    â€œI don’t believe it would ever come to my mind at all,” June agreed, “if Fever didn’t dig it up.”
    â€œ That night ?” I heard myself say.
    â€œI made a promise, boy,” Hek growled. “I can’t say a thing about it. Sorry.”
    I fought an impulse to rip the table in half, mostly because I knew he wasn’t finished. Maybe he’d tell me right then, or maybe he wouldn’t, but he had much more to say on the subject.
    â€œA promise is a promise.” He sipped his coffee, leaning back against the countertop.
    â€œYou know we’d tell you if we could,” June added.
    Even after a lifetime of running into stone walls exactly like this one, I still wanted to take a sledgehammer to the kitchen. I loved June and Hek, and I would have helped them rebuild the room once I’d demolished it, but the satisfaction would have been well worth the trouble.
    â€œYou know something about this coin.” I pressed my lips together.
    â€œWe do.” June sniffed.
    â€œYou know who sold it.”
    â€œDid I hear you say something about a Welsh saint?” Hek cleared his throat, still sleepy.
    So he hadn’t been entirely asleep when I’d been talking to June. He’d overheard at least part of my conversation.
    â€œSaint Elian.” Maybe I could lead them down some sort of alternate path that would at least parallel the story they wouldn’t tell me.
    â€œThat’s interesting, don’t you think?” Hek looked me directly in the eye.
    That was a hint. I just didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. I stared back at him.
    June distracted herself by clearing away my plate. The clatter of it seemed loud compared to the drip and splatter at the window nearby. She turned on the water in the sink and began to wash the plate. She spoke with her back still to me, her voice rising over the noise she was making.
    â€œHe means your great-grandpa being Welsh and all.”
    I actually twitched, as if someone had kicked the leg of my chair. “Damn.” I said it before I could think.
    June’s head shot around, face scowling.
    Hek was awake instantly.
    â€œBoy, you better know you can’t talk like that in my kitchen!”
    â€œSorry.” I held up both hands. “Really. I just—sometimes I can’t believe how slow I am.”
    June’s expression softened immediately.
    â€œHoney, you know you’re better at seeing things that aren’t so close to you.” She even managed a smile.
    She was right. I suffered from a malady familiar to most children of odd families: a kind of emotional farsightedness. I could pierce the veil of a stranger’s psychology with three well-chosen sentences, but I couldn’t see the foibles of my own troubled mind even if they were silver and shiny and handed to me on my own front porch.
    â€œThis coin has something to do with Conner.”
    June went back to her washing; Hek sipped coffee and looked at the rain.
    My great-grandfather, Conner Devilin, had been born in Wales but had been apprenticed to a silversmith in Ireland, where he was accused of murder. He narrowly escaped prison and came to America. When he died at the age of eighty-six, most of his things were sold at auction and brought a sizable bit of money, some of which came to me for my university education.
    One of the few things that hadn’t been sold was a silver lily he