“Rain left me with a chill,” Annie says, the sounds of Jacob and Caroline laughing together on the porch dousing any relief she might have felt because Grandma didn’t know about the letters.
Already Grandma is boiling potatoes for her potato salad, and soon enough she’ll mix up the cream and sugar Daddy will freeze out on the porch. Since it’s a special occasion, Mama will have invited Abraham Pace to join them for supper, and he is almost certain to bring Miss Watson. All of it to celebrate Annie finally becoming a woman.
“Is Mr. Pace coming tonight?” Annie asks, tugging and fanning the sweater and wishing she hadn’t scooted away from the open door.
He’ll tease Annie, Abraham will. He’s always teasing her for being faster and taller and stronger than most any boy in the county, but tonight he’ll tease because Annie doesn’t look like the one who has crossed over to being a woman. It’ll be Caroline who he says has sprouted such that Daddy ought have a shotgun at the ready for all the boys who linger past their welcome.
“And Miss Watson too?” Annie says. “Will she be coming too?”
Annie expects it to happen when she goes into town or at Sunday morning services. Some folks will choose a different pew or cross from one side of the road to the other when they see Annie. They don’t mean to be nasty, just figure better safe than sorry. Now Miss Watson has become one of those people. She was worried for Ryce when he stood out in that field with Annie, and now Annie will have to sit across the table from Miss Watson and wonder why she’s so afraid.
“Oh, sure,” Grandma says. “Both of them, I expect. We’ve certainly enough food.”
After leaving Mama to her nap, Annie had changed into the dark undershirt she wears now and pulled on her gray sweater, and not even in the privacy of her own bedroom could she look down on what Ryce Fulkerson had seen. She tried. She stood in front of the mirror where Caroline stands each morning before school or before church to smooth her skirt and twirl side to side to study every angle. Annie looked at herself in the blouse that was still damp, wanted to see exactly what Ryce Fulkerson had seen, what he couldn’t hardly stop himself from staring at. She saw the same girl she’d have seen a week ago or a month ago. Her hair hung in knotted strands, her face was shiny was sweat and rain, and her clothes were wrinkled. Feeling not one bit smarter or older or more certain than she had before looking into that well, she turned her back on the mirror, yanked the blouse overhead, pulled on a dark undershirt that may well have been Daddy’s but ended up in her drawer by mistake, and slipped into her gray sweater.
Tiptoeing past Mama’s room, her arms crossed to keep the sweater closed good and tight, Annie couldn’t help but think of Emily Anne Tylerson and the day all the boys ran from her. Emily Anne’s half birthday fell on a Friday, so all week, the girls had helped Emily Anne plan what she would wear and asked her to promise she’d make the trip, even if she had to go alone. Everyone knew Emily Anne’s daddy overindulged and her mama was too busy with the young ones who couldn’t yet tend themselves, which left Emily Anne to tend her own self most days.
When Friday came, Emily Anne, wearing the same blue dress she wore to church every Sunday, came to school with a smile on her face. She smiled until the first boy ran away. He startled like she was a rat snake slithering underfoot, and then another ran and another, and the girls laughed, though they tried to hide it by turning their backs on Emily Anne. When one of the girls finally asked who Emily Anne had seen down in the well—it was most likely Lizzy Morris, though Annie couldn’t remember for sure—Emily Anne said she didn’t go because it was all foolishness anyway.
If it weren’t for a dead Mrs. Baine, Annie could have told everyone she didn’t go to the well either, but they all know she went, and by the time another day or two passes, they’ll all think Annie’s the one who did the killing too. The more Annie thinks about it, the more she’s certain it was Lizzy Morris who was so nasty to Emily Anne.
“You ought be the girl out there on that porch,” Grandma says, elbow deep in a sink of hot, soapy water. The backs of her arms jiggle as she works the tip of a nylon brush around a mason jar’s insides.
Standing from her seat at the table, her sweater still buttoned top to bottom, Annie starts to dry the jars as Grandma washes them. Most of the jars are clear, a few tinted blue, a few green.