I started to tell Mama off. I wanted to storm away. But Mama looked at me with pleading in her eyes and I could do neither one. I blew out a breath. T. Laine would call this effed-up family dynamics, the effed word in place of the regular one because they knew I didn’t care for it much. And she would be right. Worse, it wasn’t Benjamin’s fault that Mama had set this up.
Benjamin was the eldest son of Brother Aden. I liked Brother Aden and I adored his second wife, Sister Erasmus. I could be polite.
But that didn’t mean I had to just sit and take this. “It’s mighty warm in here,” I said as I pulled off my work jacket and draped it across a nearby chair back. I turned back around, my gun and its weapon harness in plain view, along with my badge clipped to my belt. The house went dead silent. I leaned across the table and held out my right hand. “Hi, Benjamin. I’m Nell. Good to meet you.” Only a beat or two too late, Benjamin took my hand and shook it. I released his hand, which was warm and strong and tough-skinned. I lifted my long legs back across the bench, one at a time, the way men did, instead of the way a woman did—sliding in or sitting and lifting knees demurely over, skirts decorously tucked. Into the silence, I took a sip and said, “Thank you, Mama. The tea is wonderful. Just what I need after a long night at a fire investigation.”
Mama’s eyes were big as saucers. Daddy looked as if he’d been hit with a big stick right up across his noggin.
Benjamin, however, looked intrigued. Maybe even fascinated. His big baby blues latched on to me and his full lips lifted into a slow smile, the corners curving up first, then his eyes crinkling. “It’s a sure pleasure to meet you, Nell Nicholson.”
“Ingram,” I said. “Special Agent Nell Ingram, of PsyLED, Unit Eighteen.”
“Ingram,” he said back, as if committing it to memory. His eyes were a peculiar shade of blue that I figured would change with the light and with his emotions. His lashes were long and darker than his hair, and I had a feeling that he smiled often. A contented man.
Benjamin said, “I’d heard that Sam’s widder-woman sister was with law enforcement. Accomplished. Competent. I didn’t know she was such a beauty too.”
And darn it if I didn’t blush like a tomato. And hide behind my tea mug like I was twelve years old.
Benjamin flashed a set of straight teeth at me in a broader smile and swiveled his body to the head of the table. “Sam tells me you’uns got a new tiller, Brother Nicholson. What brand?”
The talk and all the attention fell away from me. I listened with half an ear and sipped my tea. Fifteen minutes after Benjamin and Sam arrived, I stifled a yawn, mumbled my good-byes, and got up, gathering my jacket and coat and hurrying from the Nicholson house. Outside in the bright dawn, I yanked on my winter coat and opened the car door.
Mud was curled up on the seat wrapped in a blanket that she must have brought from inside. Her hair was reddish like mine, still long and unbunned, saying that she was too young to be considered for marriage or concubinage, and for the menfolk to give the child a wide berth. She turned bright eyes to me. “You gonna marry Benjamin and move back home?”
I climbed in, pushing her small frame across the seat and shutting the door. I turned on the truck and eased away from the front of the house so I could make a fast getaway if needed. I turned the heater on high and parked on the side of the street, leaving the engine running. I had to be careful what I said to my sister, because Mud was just like me, whatever I was. Undifferentiated paranormal of some kind. And no way in hell would I allow her to be married in the church. I turned in the bench seat, bringing up my leg and leaning against the door.
“What’s home, Mud?”
She squinched her eyes at me, thoughtful. “You mean like the address? Or ‘Home is where the heart is’? Or, maybe home like the church compound? Or home where I’ll marry and have babies?”
“None a them. My home is a lot of things. It’s Soulwood—a plot of land that I claimed with my sweat and blood. Home is Unit Eighteen, a place I can work and be of use in the world, a place where I have value. Home is family I can come visit, but not be tied to. Home is choice. A chance to grow. To learn. Home, meaning my life and where and how I’ll live it. That’s what home means to me, Mud.”
“You don’t wanna have babies?”
It was odd that Mud had picked up on that small part. “Not particularly. Or at least not now. I want the choice to determine when and where and if I’ll have babies. Myself. Not some husband telling me what and where and when. If I have babies, I want it to be something that a husband and I choose together.”
“Like birth control?” She leaned in closer and whispered, “I done heard that Imogene Watkins and her man is on birth control. And that if they take in another wife they’ll make her use it too. That’s a sin, ain’t it?”
I said, “Mud, are you smart? Book learning smart?”
“Yep. Smartest girl my age.”
“Smarter than the boys your age?”
Mud frowned as if comparing herself to men was a new and unexpected possibility. “I figger I am. What’s that got to do with home?”
I knew this conversation was going to come back and hit me like a nail-studded two-by-four, but I had to say it. In for a penny . . . “Here on church grounds, living in God’s Cloud, you will never be able to explore that intelligence. Chances are you will never go to college. You will never travel. You will never—”
It hit me, hard and fast as that two-by-four. I reached out and took her hands in mine. “You will never put your hands into any soil but that allowed by your husband.” Mud’s mouth fell open in dismay. “You will have baby after baby, sharing a home with one man and several women and lots of children. You will plant only with other women in the greenhouse. You will never be able to claim trees or land and feed it with your soul, sharing back and forth.”
Mud whispered softly, “You’un can do that too? We’uns’re really the same thing? The same kinda people?”
“Yes. And I can, maybe, help you learn how to control your gift. How to explore it. If that is what you want. But not if you stay at God’s Cloud. Not if you live here. Not if you make church land your home instead of the whole world your home. You will have to choose what home is to you. You. Not the mamas or Daddy. You. You have to decide what you want.”
“I ain’t got no money. I can’t buy no land.”
I smiled. “If you want land, we’ll get you land. But you have to decide what kind of life you want.”
“And if I want babies and a husband and land too?”
“That would be your choice.”
Mud pulled her hands free, rose to her knees, put her palms to either side of my face, and guided my head closer. She kissed me on the cheek, released me, opened the passenger door, and slipped into the day, the blanket around her shoulders flying in the cold breeze.