Jonathan grinned at her, though the grin turned to a grimace as he hefted his basket another few feet forward. “The soul of manners.”
Katie was not diverted; she narrowed her eyes as she hauled her own basket forward. “Why would you ask me over for dinner?”
“To eat.”
“Am I in trouble with your father?”
“I don’t know. Should you be?”
“Oh, piss off,” she panted, setting her basket down. “It’s not like you’re so well behaved. I know you’ve been skipping classes. It’s all over school.”
“Sure, you know that. But you don’t know why.”
“Well . . . why?”
“Come to dinner and find out.”
She frowned, still sensing something off about the invitation. She had never heard of Jonathan inviting anyone over to his house, not even to play when they were younger. Again she remembered that day in the clearing, Jonathan’s eyes staring miles away, seeing all the way to nowhere.
We tried, Katie. We did our best.
“Haul ’em forward!” Bryan Bell shouted, making her jump. She grabbed her basket and scurried to catch up with the line.
“Well?” Jonathan asked.
“What time?”
“Seven.”
“All right.” Katie wiped her forehead, feeling as though she were covered in dirt. If she was going to dinner at William Tear’s, she would need to take a bath first.
“I’ll see you then,” said Jonathan. He dumped his basket on the counter, waited for Bell to check it off, then walked away. Katie was left staring after him, thinking of that day in the clearing, wondering: What did we try?
And then: How did we fail?
Despite the proximity of the Tears’ house to her own, Katie had been there fewer than a dozen times in her life. Except for Mum and Aunt Maddy, and sometimes Evan Alcott, people were rarely invited to Tear’s; when there was something to discuss, Tear usually went to them. Katie had an idea that he was trying to act like a normal man, to avoid the appearance of a king demanding audience from his subjects. If so, he had failed. People dressed more formally for a visit to the Tears’ than they did for a festival.
Katie had taken a bath and combed out her long amber hair. The latter was no small feat; she hadn’t combed her hair since her last bath, and it was utterly tangled and ratnested from two days of sweating in the fields. After some thought, Katie pinned it up, not wanting Tear—or, somehow worse, Jonathan—to think that she was trying to look pretty.
She had been dreading a barrage of questions when she told Mum that she was going next door for dinner, but Mum merely shrugged and went back to kneading her bread dough. Katie wondered why she had been so worried; after all, she was seventeen now, no longer accountable for all of her movements, even to Mum. At eighteen, she would begin building her own house somewhere in town, and at nineteen she would move out. Row, whose twentieth birthday was only a week away, had decided to hang in with his mother well after the usual time—Katie couldn’t quite picture what Mrs. Finn would have done if Row had moved out early—but he had already designed his house and bartered for most of the lumber. He couldn’t wait to get away, but Katie was more ambivalent. A part of her didn’t want to leave Mum, but a second part of her loved the idea of being out on her own, responsible only for herself, answering to no one.
The Tears’ house was almost the duplicate of Katie’s: one floor, fronted by a high, raised porch to accommodate their basement. Katie tromped up the steps, and the front door opened to reveal Lily. She, too, had been in the fields today, but now she looked ill, and Katie wondered if she had caught a touch of the fever running around the town.
“Katie,” Lily said. She sounded genuinely pleased, as though Katie were bringing her a present.
“Mrs. Freeman,” Katie replied politely. She always thought of Lily as Mrs. Tear in her mind, but any misstep here, and Mum would surely hear about it.
“Come on in.”
Katie followed her into the Tears’ living room, a small area filled with comfortable wooden chairs that had supposedly been built and finished by William Tear himself. The eastern wall of the room was dominated by a broad brick fireplace, though no fire burned there now, in early Ocobter. Two portraits hung above the mantel, and, as she always did on her rare visits to the Tear house, Katie paused to have a look at these.
One was of William Tear. It had been painted by John Vinson, who was understood to be the best artist in town, but it was not a particularly good picture. Tear was standing next to a small bookshelf, staring at the artist with shoulders drawn back. The posture and setting were right, but Tear himself looked annoyed at having to stand for a portrait.