All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki

table a wipe-down. She leaned over to adjust his sheet, then lowered his bed. She patted his arm. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “You keep eating like that and you’ll be out of here in no time.”
    He managed a smile. “Grace?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œHappy Thanksgiving. . . .”

pahoa

    PAHOA
    Cass typed in the letters, then sat back while the search engine churned. With the new high-speed connection, the download was almost instantaneous. When the hits came back, she scanned them quickly.
    Hawaii. Pahoa was a town on the Big Island. She selected a site at random.
    Â 
    PARADISE FOR SALE!
Stunning & productive 20-acre property
with established groves of macadamia nuts & mangoes . . .
Guavas, grapefruits, and avocados!
Spacious home with 6 bedrooms!
Complete solar power throughout!
Twenty acres of Paradise!
    Â 
    Guavas. Macadamia nuts. Mangoes. Made their three thousand acres of Russet Burbanks seem downright dull. She sighed. Cass could not imagine paradise. In Liberty Falls the weather report predicted cloudy skies with a scattering of snow flurries. Patchy fog. Lows in the mid- to lower twenties. The first hard frost had come early this year, and now the wind was picking up. Outside the window the satellite dish rattled in the Quinns’ bare front yard. The cottonwood tree, dry and brittle, creaked the way it did only in winter.
    The office was insulated beneath the drywall, but the room still felt exposed and cold, a large, boxlike addition sticking off from the kitchen. They’d built the office when they started to increase the size of their operation, and Cass tried to keep things neat, but it was a challenge. Along the back wall, the shelves piled up with farm reports, ledgers, and all the paperwork. FAQ sheets on seed potatoes and some recent issues of Spudman magazine lay scattered on the long folding table they used for farm meetings. Another table held a monitor for the DTN, the network subscription service with data on weather and futures prices.
    Cass sat at the main computer, which they used for business, accounting, e-mail, and running the global-positioning-system software. In front of her, printouts of GPS maps were tacked to the wall, showing topographical and yield data from previous years’ harvests, and beside them hung a USDA Potato Disorder Identification Chart with color photos of every affliction that might befall a spud. The cell phone that Will used when he was out in the field was resting in its charger. There were several land-line phones as well, one with a headset that Will wore during office hours. Cass had bought him the headset when he started getting neckaches. She thought he looked cute with it on.
    â€œLike a receptionist.” She sat on his lap and adjusted the mouthpiece, then pulled the rubber band off his ponytail, combing her fingers through his blond hair so it hung loose around his shoulders. “There.”
    â€œI feel like a goddamned stockbroker.” He dumped her off and ambled back into the kitchen for a refill on his coffee. The wire from the headset dangled over his shoulder. “I didn’t become a farmer to sit behind a desk.”
    Cass checked her watch. Will would be annoyed if he knew she was surfing the Net again. He thought it was a waste of time and couldn’t understand why she’d want to spend a minute more in front of the computer than she absolutely had to. At least this was legitimate.
    She typed “Yumi Fuller, Hawaii” into the search engine. A list of course offerings came back from various institutions including the University of Hawaii, a continuing-education program, a high-school-equivalency night school, and a local prison. All taught by Yumi Fuller, M.A.
    Cass checked the descriptions of some of the classes: Introduction to the Novel, Composition Level I, Japanese Poetry in Translation, Creative Non-fiction. There was no information on how to contact the