Mrs. Kirkpatrick said that she would buy the beads herself.

For she felt guilty sending the parents out of the classroom while their children were there, as if she would take advantage of the time alone with them to plant little pagan seeds of indifference and radical thinking deep in the soft primordial soil of their brains, so she would go before class. She would buy the beads herself, an early morning errand, bright sunlight and a deep sense of yawning satisfaction. Jeane could see her actions extending out into the morning, twisting and dividing like oak branches; and it put a happy tear in the corner of her eye.

She pulled her car through the narrow cement lane next to a drive-thru coffee shop. Mr. Elva, the morning manager, would tell her about his trysts into the city the night before when she was a girl working in the shoe store on First street; she would marvel at his bravery. “If I’m not here tomorrow, it’s because I’ve been arrested,” he would say. Jeane could tell by his shoes that he would never be arrested. They were too supportive, orthotically sound, not the shoes of a miscreant — loosely tied, thinly worn affairs. Homeless shoes. Shoes predictive of where a person was going, they were told to tell their customers. A shoe salesman had never been arrested; Jeane was almost sure of it, certainly not Mr. Elva. Then again, neither had a Kindergarten teacher. She tipped a whole dollar and stepped smartly on the accelerator.

The boy in the bead store sat shivering and perched in the corner, loosely draped with faded sweatshirts. He was watching the drums of beads as one person, somewhere, must sit watching barrels of wine ferment. He nodded when she came in through the door, erect, caffeinated, a picture of feminine efficiency, Jeane thought. She saw herself, as she picked through the drums, and the line of her present actions extending gloriously out of the half opened door. There it split and diverged again, seeking a thousand individual paths, each sundered again and again.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick squinted through the harsh sunlight angling in through the windows, past the grotesque wooden statues draped with necklaces. The beads watched her large teeth admiringly with their eyelets. She scooped them up out of their barrels and then let them slide by the small webbings of her fingers and down to her billowy sleeves. She longed to buy the beads by the bucket, by the dump-truck full, and fill an old claw-footed bathtub with them, then burrow into the dark, fragrant dryness, wriggle in them as if they were coffee beans. Oh!

“Three of these then,” Mrs. Kirkpatrick said quietly to herself, nodding inwardly to her self-restraint. She placed the beads in her basket. These beads, she could see them, carefully made by an indigenous, artistic couple deep in some fragrant jungle, there are no roads. The beads have to be carried out in a basket balanced on top of Sada’s head. They are so happy together, she thinks, and they give thanks over their meat to the people who buy these beads. Jeane politely intones, “It’s nothing, really.”

Mrs. Kirkpatrick will have an activity today, and the results are clear to her. The beads from the village, from Sada and Seraphim, would be made into necklaces by her class. She will plant the beads in their soil. Beads and seeds! Two words that sound blissfully alike, delving further into the Immaculate Conception that was the English language. This, too, she felt a part of, a birthmother of first the recognition of letters and then the foreman of the construction of words. She was helping them string letter-beads on the string of, the string of what? Jeane wondered. Meaning?

Jeane could see her actions extending. There would be necklaces, heartbreakingly clumsy and sincere. They would be, Mrs. Kirkpatrick saw, gifts in a bright sunburst of baby teeth. Before, quickly, the sediment of years would form. Then, far in the future the mothers (O mothers! the word, especially in its plural, set her heart fluttering) would be digging, through the crate paper and clay handprint sediment and they would find the lost beads, her beads, strung together crudely by a child long since grown. The lined fingers would caress the beads (these very beads!) They would be tied to such significance, the same beads she bought on this cold and bright morning. Her responsibility for these emotions made Jeane smile. She was tied to those mothers, as if she were the first bead, and they were all subsequent beads — strung together by a definite, individual trajectory. But who would wear my necklace, the many necklaces created by my life, Mrs. Kirkpatrick wondered.

She quickly dived her hands into another bin, sifting and feeling the beads; these were long, thin and smooth. A few of these would do. There were olive-beads in the barrel adjacent, and chive beads across from those. Candy beads, elephant beads (at quite a price — perhaps they would lose their simple charm, she thought). The wooden tokens piled up in her basket. She could see her actions extending haphazardly, crazily.

Would someone ever come digging thought the sediment to find her necklace? She stopped suddenly, wrist deep in wooden droplets. Can my path — my arrangement (a masterful one at that!) — ever be examined with wistful, flat-footed nostalgia? Mrs. Kirkpatrick suddenly felt foolish with her purposeful bag. Some bead crept down her cheek, its path punctuated by stops and starts, immediately buried deep in the seconds of the morning.