She lets Caroline get a good look at the candle and matches before shoving them back into her pockets.
“Besides,” Annie says, “I ain’t going to the Fulkersons’ place. Going to the Baines’.”
Annie hadn’t been certain until that moment. She had thought she might try to push aside those rocks and the board Daddy stacked on top of Grandpa’s well. Annie had assumed a girl couldn’t see her intended in a dried-up well, but she does have the know-how after all, and so maybe she could see her intended where others likely could not. She would normally ask Grandma such a question, but not this time. Annie had also stowed her bike out near the road so she could ride down to Ryce Fulkerson’s well if need be. But now Caroline wants to come along, and Caroline is a sister who has a way of always getting the better of things.
“You are not going to the Baines’,” Caroline says, lowering herself onto her bed but not before smoothing under her nightgown as if taking a seat on a church pew. “Mama and Daddy’ll have our hides for going up there.”
“Then don’t come,” Annie says. “No one’ll have your hide for staying right here asleep in your own bed.”
A whole brood of Baines once lived up there. Seven Baine brothers, each one larger than the next, and each one, except Joseph Carl, chased away by his own mama. Keeping an ever-watchful eye out for the Baines has been a way of life for the Hollerans, a habit long in the making, one that started before Annie was born. If it rattles, Daddy taught both of them by the time they could walk, choose a different path. If it looks like a Baine, do the same. The last Baine brother left Hayden County when Annie was eight or nine, but still Daddy tells them . . . if it looks like a Baine, do the same, which has always left Annie feeling like someday, one of those Baines will come back.
Clutching the flashlight to her chest, Caroline turns the cone of light on herself. It catches her under her chin, and the shadows make her eyes sink into her head and her cheekbones rise high and grow more slender.
“What if Mama comes to check?” Caroline says. And just like at church, she crosses her ankles but not her legs. “You’ll get a whipping. Me too, for letting you go. What am I supposed to tell her?”
“You’ll tell her nothing,” Annie says, “because you’ll be asleep. I’ll be there and back before you know it.”
Caroline stands and lifts one bare foot, threatening to stomp it. “I’ll wake the house if you don’t take me.”
Caroline is trying her best to be cantankerous. Her fine manners and tender nature never struck Annie as a curse, but perhaps they are. Annie finally lets herself blink, the light glittering in her lashes, and wonders if all people as beautiful and polished as Caroline struggle to plant their flags. Caroline wants to stomp that foot of hers, but she won’t. Grandma is always saying that a person has to know how to plant her flag, and planting flags takes gumption. Grandma also says gumption is no kin to beauty. She says this so Annie will know a person can have gumption without having a pleasing face. She says this because Annie is not the beautiful one.
Caroline has always been the better of the two sisters. “Don’t let bygones get the best of you,” folks will sometimes say to Annie when spotting her and Caroline in town. And then they turn their attentions to Caroline, tug on the end of one of her braids or wrap an arm around her shoulders. “No reason you can’t be just like this one.” Folks have been saying it, or some variation, for as long as Annie can remember.
“Your time hasn’t come,” Annie says, staring straight into the light Caroline has pointed back in her direction and willing herself not to squint or blink. “You’re not old enough.”
Caroline drops her hands so the light pools at her feet. She is wearing a nightgown handed down from Annie. When Annie was still wearing it, Mama would say it had seen its last day. The cotton had yellowed. The lace had drooped and frayed. Now that Caroline is wearing it, Mama doesn’t say those things anymore. What had looked threadbare and worn on Annie looks elegant on Caroline.
“Please, Annie.”
A year from now, it’ll be Caroline’s time to look into the well, but she knows and Annie knows Mama won’t want Caroline to go, same as she didn’t want Annie to go. The difference between the two is that Caroline always does as Mama says. Caroline going with Annie, even if it is a year too early, might be Caroline’s only chance.
“I’m going to look in that well, Caroline Holleran,” Annie says. And because Caroline is the sister who always gets the better of things and because Annie can’t bear to have a witness to who she might or might not see in that well, she says, “And unless you want to come with me to the Baines’ place, you ain’t coming along.”