SORROW WOKE BEFORE dawn’s first light crept over the farm. The morning was clear, the air cool on her bare arms. She blinked up at the dormer ceiling. The rooster crowed again—her unwelcome alarm clock—and downstairs the screen door squeaked opened and clattered shut.
At home on a Sunday morning nobody would be up before nine, but this was a farm. Verity and Grandma had always been early risers. Sorrow sat up and blearily rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
Her childhood bedroom hadn’t changed much in eight years. Same bed, same dresser, same ladder-back chair in the corner with old wood showing through peeling blue paint. When she was little she had hung her dresses on a string stretched across the wall—there was no closet or wardrobe. The nails were still there, but the string was gone. The sheets on the bed were new, a little stiff, but the quilt was the same soft pink-and-green one that had been in Patience’s room for years before she had noticed Sorrow coveting it. The pattern of green pinwheels and pink starbursts had made Sorrow feel like she was lying in a field of flowers.
She smoothed her hand over the faded cotton, the worn seams, the delicate stitches in intricate, curling designs. Grandma’s handi-work. In a corner on the back side she would have stitched her artist’s signature in white thread, the letters so small they were barely a bump: Per.Love. That was how she had always signed her work, because Perseverance Lovegood was too many letters. Tourists used to stop into the quilting shop looking for new Per Love designs. They probably still did.
Only after Sorrow had dressed did she notice her favors were gone.
Every year when she was a child, as the weather warmed and the last snow melted, she would begin to find little treasures throughout the orchard, nestled in the roots or tucked into the crooks of branches. She had found small animals carved from wood, fine pearl buttons that shone in the sun, scuffed glass beads on leather strings, and shiny pennies from long ago. A frail metal lady’s fan with the finest filigree. Wire-framed eyeglasses with one lens broken out. One summer she had found a pocket watch with a cracked face and the words To George, Love Forever, From Catherine engraved on the inside. She had dug it from summer-dry dirt on a hot sunny day, but it had flung drops of dank water all over when she’d swung it on its chain. Months later it would still speckle the chest of drawers with gritty droplets. She had made a nightly ritual of wiping it clean.
She had told her father about the favors once when he was walking with her in the orchard. His visits had been brief and rare; he would drive a rental car up the driveway for a few days of stilted conversation and sleeping on the sofa, and he would leave again with a promise to return. That summer day in the orchard, listening to Sorrow chatter about buttons and bottles and Indian Head pennies, he had smiled an uncertain smile and told her she had a good eye. That night Sorrow had overhead her parents having a quiet conversation in the kitchen, Dad’s unintelligible murmurs followed by Verity’s sharp answer: “There is nothing wrong with our daughters, Michael.”
After Dad went home that time, Verity told Sorrow not to tell anybody else about the favors.
“It’s none of their business,” she had said. Her voice was tired, not angry, but her disappointment was sharper for its weariness. “It’s easier not to give them an excuse to ask questions. Let’s keep our own secrets, okay?”
Sorrow had always known there was a line between their family and everybody else, a wire fence separating us and them, but she had never been entirely sure what side of the fence her father belonged on. Verity’s answer was clear: Dad was them, an outsider. Sorrow had promised she would never tell anybody again, and the memory made her squirm now: how easily she had promised, how little she had questioned the boundaries her mother placed around their world.
The favors had been such little things, cherished but inconsequential, not worthy of secrets or fights. Sorrow was the only one who found them, because she was the only one who ever looked, making a game of it on the days when she was feeling most lonely and Patience refused to play with her. The top of the dresser was empty now, dusted and polished to a shine. They were all gone. She hadn’t taken any of them with her when she left.
She checked the drawers of the dresser, then the nightstand. Looked under the bed. She found nothing.
It wasn’t a big deal. They were only things. It would have been pointless for Verity and Grandma to leave so much clutter gathering dust for eight years. She looked in the top drawer again, fingers skittering expectantly into the corners. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t worth getting upset over.
But—she hated to admit this to herself, hated how childish it was—she was upset. The collection had been hers. As a child she had believed, fanciful as it was, that the orchard revealed the favors to her on purpose. When a gray spring day needed to be brightened by a flash of color, when a tiresome summer afternoon needed to be livened with a doll or figurine or handful of buttons, she could trudge into the acres of apple trees and search until she found something curious and new. She was never alone when she had the favors. She could always imagine girls from long ago sharing their treasures as they played together.
If she had been given a choice, she wouldn’t have left them behind. But nobody had asked her. She didn’t remember who had packed her things. Grandma, probably. Maybe Dad. Verity had been hospitalized by then.
Sorrow pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes to chase away the sudden sting of tears. They were only things. Trinkets and toys. She hadn’t even remembered them until just now.
The light through the window had changed: the sun was rising in a burst of yellow over the mountains. Sorrow looked around the room one more time, at the empty dresser and narrow bed, the suitcase spilling clothes across the floor. She grabbed her shoes and her Phillies cap and headed downstairs.
The kitchen smelled of baking bread, and Grandma was standing at the sink, rinsing out a bowl. She gave Sorrow a smile and gestured to a teapot in the shape of a pumpkin. Sorrow had to check two cabinets before she found the mugs; everything had been rearranged, spices now residing where dishes had been, cups filling the space once occupied by canned goods.
“Hey, do you know . . .” Sorrow paused, sipped her tea. “Do you know what happened to my little favors?”
Grandma tilted her head slightly. Sorrow couldn’t tell if it was a question or not.