Firstborn

The Calder fathers die young, around the time their children come. The family calls it the Calder luck, a run of tragic coincidence going back generations, and nobody says the other thing out loud. Owen Calder is a carpenter near the old family land in rural Vermont, decent and ordinary, married to a woman he adores. When Maddie tells him she is pregnant with their first child, it is the best news of his life. So he cannot understand why it makes his mother go pale and quiet on the phone.

Owen starts pulling at the thread, and what he finds is not coincidence. There is a pattern in the family graves that is too exact to be chance, and an eighty eight year old great aunt who has been waiting most of her life for someone to come and ask. She knows where it began, two hundred years ago in a famine winter, and she knows the exact shape of what is owed.

This is the longest and most ambitious of these mini stories, a mythic, slow building tragedy where the clock is a pregnancy and the happiest event of a man's life is the exact thing that will arrive to claim him. Is the curse real, where did it come from, and can Owen be the one who finally ends it?