Sun Prairie Events

No light could work its way into Kelsey's condo after four, so that's when she held the baby and checked email. She never received much. Since she'd been living in Sun Prairie with her boyfriend, Nick, jobless, people had long since quit arranging to meet her in Milwaukee or Chicago, stopped sending updates about new houses they'd purchased, subtle brags about their salaries and offspring.

That April, Kelsey received a surprising email, offering exclusive subscription to Jill Martin's private blog. Jill Martin had been Kelsey's roommate at UW Stevens Point two years before. They'd pursued their passion for television, majoring in Communications alongside one another. Back then, Kelsey had been obsessed with Nick's floppy hair and gummy smile. They'd bantered like good-looking characters on TV, their dialogue so clever that someone could have scripted them and made a million dollars.

"I want to run away with you," Kelsey once said.

"To where?" Nick asked, already grinning.

"Somewhere easy. Like into the center of the Earth."

He grabbed her around the waist. "What about into the center of you?"

Their best conversations shifted to wild, joking fights. They fake-punched each other, lobbed pillows across the room. They used opposite-day insults—Kelsey called Nick fat, or Nick called Kelsey stupid. Next thing you knew, Nick was slamming it in her against the wall, Kelsey's legs wrapped around his scrawny, pimpled hips. She could never pull him in deep enough. Just remembering, Kelsey squirmed under the hot weight of the baby.

Jill's blog was called Portage Events. Kelsey paid for a subscription and began reading at the maiden post, dated more than a year ago. Jill sounded shaky and shy, as though she wasn't sure whom she was writing to. I'm really doing this. A blog! it read, under a photograph of Jill's farmhouse, rickety, a smudgy white. Two years ago, Jill had returned to the dorm one evening after closing on the house, their room already packed up for graduation, and spread pictures on the floor between the beds. She'd explained the problems: insufficient insulation, bats in the roof—maybe rabid bats—the porch wood as soft as bread. Kelsey surged with inspiration looking at the blog—a feeling of possibility that she hadn't felt since college. She'd save the rest of the entries for tomorrow. She'd have something important to do for once.

Too jittery to sit still, Kelsey prepared a casserole, combining the contents of different cans: mushroom soup, green beans, cocktail wieners. She scooped the mix with her finger and pressed it between the baby's lips. He laughed, and she ran her clean hand over his silky head. She called the baby "the baby," though his name was Tad, after Nick's uncle.

"What does Tad even mean?" Kelsey had asked recently, though seven months in was late to complain. "It's like a tadbit or something. Like a tadbit of a person."

"That's tidbit," Nick said. "Jesus."

She wondered if, as the baby grew, she'd revise his name. If he'd become the infant, the toddler, the child, the kid, the teen. The adolescent. The young adult. The thirty-something. That freaked her. Especially if, thirty years from now, she was still stuck here, in this cursed neighborhood: rows of developments set in stretches of prairie grass, one tree per mile. The only clue a unit was occupied might be a half-full basketball sunk in the grass or an Easter flag flopped over a door. Sun Prairie was ripe for an influx that would never come.

When Nick returned from work, he changed into baggy yellow track pants that made him look even skinnier than he already was. Kelsey fit the baby into the high chair and scooted him out of the way so she and Nick could enjoy adult conversation.

"What did you do today?" she asked when he sat down.

Nick's bangs fell over his eyes. "Cleaned a...