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By midday, everyone had gathered at the edge of the field beside the barn where Leo had set up his equipment: large earthenware crocks filled with his chemicals, pipes to emit the fumes, balloons loaded with nitroglycerine and ready with timed detonators, which Adelaide would release into the clouds.

A hush descended as he started to activate the contraptions, and noxious fumes began to spew from the pipes, drifting skyward in a great black cloud.

Next, Adelaide took off in the Jenny with the balloon bombs.

Everyone craned their necks to watch, eyes shielded against the glare of the sun as they were detonated at different altitudes.

The thunderous sound of the explosions was impressive, the pyrotechnic lightshow of sparks even more so.

It reminded Emily of herself and Annie and Nell, necks craned as they’d watched the Amazing Aerialist tumble and turn on the trapeze suspended beneath his balloon high above their heads, the crowd spellbound by the performance.

Now, as then, there was something magical, something undeniably powerful in how he brought a community together, uniting them in purpose and wonder and hope.

The children gasped in awe, their eyes trained skyward, enraptured by the spectacle. They’d never seen anything like it.

Dorothy couldn’t look away. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it.”

Emily smiled. “It is, dear. Very pretty.” But among the dazzling spectacle, she also saw their hard-earned dollar bills being blown to pieces and prayed that it would all prove to be worthwhile.

Impressed and encouraged by what they’d seen, the men agreed on a price with Leo to do another round. After sundown, the show continued. The bright lights, the crackle and fizz from calcium flares, the booming rumble and roar of more explosions filled the air for a second time.

Eventually, Leo ran out of dynamite, and the crowd ran out of enthusiasm, and he declared that he had done all he could.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, we wait. If rain comes within the next five days, the experiment will be deemed a great success! If not, then I am afraid there was something wrong with the atmospheric conditions.”

“Another fraud,” Wilhelmina West said as Emily wished her a good night. “Style over substance, no doubt.”

Emily paused. “Let’s wait and see, shall we.” But she agreed with Wilhelmina, and spoke only for the benefit of Dorothy beside her.

As Wilhelmina hopped onto the seat of her bicycle, she trod on Toto’s tail.

The dog yelped and made a retaliatory lunge at her ankles before Dorothy quickly scooped him up.

“That dog’s a liability,” Wilhelmina snapped. “If you can’t keep him under control, I’ll have him taken away.”

Dorothy stood her ground and held Toto tight in her arms. “You can’t do that. You’re just a mean old woman.”

Emily chastised the child. “Dorothy! That’s quite enough. Apologize to Miss West.”

Dorothy refused.

“The girl is as badly behaved as her dog,” Wilhelmina said. “Maybe I’ll have them both taken away.”

Dorothy looked at Emily, aghast. “She can’t send us away, Auntie Em? Can she?”

Emily was furious. “No, dear. She can’t.” She gave Wilhelmina a piece of her mind before grabbing Dorothy’s hand and hurrying them away. “She can’t send anyone away. Now, let’s find Uncle Henry before he sends out a search party.”

Dorothy was still upset by Wilhelmina’s threats. “What’s a search party?”

“It’s when friends and neighbors go looking for someone when they’re lost.”

“Would you send a search party if me and Toto were lost?”

Emily stopped walking and bent down so that her eyes were level with Dorothy’s. “Oh, Dorothy dear. I would never stop looking until I found you.” The words were out before she realized how much she meant them. “Now, let’s forget all about it. Nobody is being taken away, or getting lost.”

But Dorothy was unusually quiet that evening and didn’t want to eat her supper. She even went to bed before being asked and wouldn’t let Toto out of her sight.

“Honestly, Henry. That Wilhelmina West is insufferable,” Emily said as they sat together that evening. “She’s the most unpleasant woman I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t wonder if Dorothy was right all along.”

“About what?”

“About her being a witch.”

Henry laughed lightly. “Witches in town. Wizards summoning the rain. And there I was, thinking we’d come to Kansas for a quiet life.”

Emily couldn’t stop a small smile reaching her lips. “I don’t deserve you, Henry Gale.”

He squeezed her hand affectionately. “Oh, you do. You deserve the best of everything, Mrs.Gale!”

The hours passed.

The rain didn’t come.

Still, the dust blew.

—

Once again, they waited.

The sound of Dorothy clicking the heels of her silver shoes together became the background accompaniment to the little prairie home.

Click, click, click.

Nobody needed to guess what she was wishing for. They all wished for the same.

“Be patient, bella,” Leo said as he tousled Dorothy’s hair. “Give it another day or two. Why don’t you check the rain catcher down by the creek. You might find a few drops of moisture in there. And then we’ll know the experiment worked, hey, kid?”

Emily had noticed he was restless and keeping a low profile. People in town had already started to turn against him, calling him a rain faker. Some were demanding their money back. Even Henry had become doubtful that the experiment had worked.

“Where will you go next, Leo?” he asked. “You and Adelaide headed off to bring rain across the Midwest, I presume?”

“Yes. We should already leave, but the dust is causing the problems with the engine.”

Emily feigned surprise. “Do you not intend to stay, to see the result of your experiments? Share the town’s joy?”

“A watched pot never cooks, Mrs.Gale. I must move on. Find another town to help.”

Emily watched him as carefully as she watched the skies.

Another day passed. Still, the rain didn’t come.

Adelaide insisted on doing her share of chores around the house and farm and did odd jobs to fix bits of farm machinery for folk around town.

The money she earned, she added to Emily’s account at the general store to put toward her keep.

Emily gratefully accepted it. They needed every cent they could get.

Henry occupied himself by working on the rusted plow that hadn’t sown a decent crop in months.

Leonardo tried everything to fix his truck, but the dust was winning so far, much to Emily’s despair.

She wanted him gone from their lives before he caused any lasting damage.

And she didn’t like the way he turned every conversation with Henry back to their financial situation, or the interest he took in John’s businesses back in Chicago.

“You shouldn’t tell him so much, Henry,” she cautioned.

Henry thought she was being overdramatic. “There’s not much to tell him, Em. We’re broke. John was financially ruined. I’m not exactly spilling state secrets.”

Emily had heard Leo that morning filling Dorothy’s head with more nonsense about concussive precipitation and reminding her to check the rain catcher.

“It is very important, Dorothy. Moisture might be there, even if we don’t see it fall from the sky.

” He’d given her a packet of lemon drops from the general store, as if a bag of candy could make up for her disappointment.

With so much of their farming life on hold, Emily clung to small manageable tasks she could control: sewing flour sack dresses, keeping the fiddle clear of dust, hauling pails of water from the well to the orchard in a desperate attempt to keep the fruit trees alive.

She collected the eggs, wrote in her journal, sketched the wildflowers she’d picked from the last blooming summer meadows and placed in her flower press. A reminder of better times.

Dorothy inspected the flowers carefully as Emily lifted them from the press, as if she were admiring a rare treasure in a museum.

“I can hardly believe anything so pretty and colorful ever grew here,” Dorothy said.

It broke Emily’s heart that the child had never seen the prairie in full bloom.

The only pretty thing that had grown through those months of drought and dust was Dorothy.

The girl seemed to stretch in her sleep, the notches they’d marked each month on the timber post a marker of the time passing.

The year had brought such turbulent change, but they had somehow settled into this strange new life together.

Like a blown tumbleweed that eventually finds shelter against a doorway or some other nook, they’d settled into the folds of one another.

“What’s this one, Auntie Em?” Dorothy asked as they continued to organize the pressed flowers.

“That’s a prairie violet,” Emily said. “Pretty, isn’t it.”

Dorothy wrote the name of the flower beside each one Emily had pressed onto the pages through the years since she and Henry had arrived: dandelion, verbena, groundsel, poppy. Almost a decade of flowers.

“Why did you keep them all?” Dorothy asked.

“To remember the spring and summer. To have flowers all the year round—it is nice to look at them through the winter. Look, these are the ones I picked and pressed the year before you came to live here.”

She removed a few more layers from the press, lifted up the delicate paper-thin flowers and placed them in Dorothy’s palm.

“It’s a nice way to look at the flowers, to notice all the little details. The shape of the petals, how many petals there are, the patterns and lines on the leaves.”

“They’re like paper,” Dorothy said, turning them over carefully and then lifting one up to the light at the window. “I can see right through it! Like glass!”

Emily was pleased to see how fascinated Dorothy was by them, just as she had been as a little girl when she’d pressed flowers between the pages of her mother’s Bible.

The translucent petals reminded her of a slice of apple, held up to the light.

“…you’ll always remember this little cottage in Connemara on the edge of Ireland, and that the three of ye ate slices of apple while the autumn sun turned Annie’s hair to flames, and Nell got a fit of the giggles when your da took to snoring, and Emily was after playing the fiddle like a banshee.

” She heard the echo of her mother’s words, remembered standing on the banks of Lough Inagh, turf smoke in the air, the sound of uilleann pipes in the distance, her sisters’ hands in hers.

She drew strength from the memory of these women who had raised her, comforted her, guided her.

They had all faced difficult decisions and endured hard times, just as she must now.

As Dorothy looked at the flowers, Emily consulted a floriography book she’d found in the town library about the language of flowers, reading out the symbolic meaning of each: Violets for love. Verbena for healing. Dandelion for hope. Poppy for remembrance.

Dorothy added the last pressed flower to the page. “What’s this one, Auntie Em?”

Emily smiled. “That’s my favorite. Yellow cinquefoil.”

“What does it mean?”

Emily checked the floriography book and faltered for a moment.

“Auntie Em? What does it mean?”

She looked at Dorothy and placed a hand against the child’s cheek. “It means ‘beloved daughter.’?”