“Why does it matter?” Ethan asked. “Do you—is that what you think happened?”
“No, nothing like that,” Sorrow said quickly. “I was just wondering why she would say that. Wondering if that’s what people think.” She didn’t like the way Ethan was looking at her, like he was trying to figure out what she wasn’t saying. She took the coward’s way out and promptly changed the subject. “So you working here really does upset your family?”
“Yeah, but I don’t care,” Ethan said. “It’s still better than letting my dad think he can decide for me.”
“You’re doing it to piss off your dad?”
“It’s working. He hasn’t spoken to me in months.”
“That’s a good thing?” Sorrow said.
“You’ve clearly never met my dad if you have to ask that.” Ethan didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in his voice that time, and Sorrow had the uncomfortable realization that in trying to deflect the conversation from herself she had pushed it into territory that was painful for him.
“I don’t think I ever have, actually.” In Sorrow’s mind one Mr. Abrams was indistinguishable from the other: blond hair, polo shirts, nice cars. “Does that mean working here was your idea? Not Verity’s?”
“No, it was mine,” Ethan said. “And I asked Miss P first. I mean, I sort of—she would never admit she needs help with anything, even though she’s like seventy years old, so I kinda let her think she was doing me a favor. She’s always been nice to me, even when I was a little kid. Verity took some convincing.”
That wasn’t how Verity had made it sound; she had talked about hiring an Abrams like it was some kind of coup. And Sorrow hadn’t questioned Verity’s version of events. She hadn’t even wondered if she’d needed to.
“I think I sort of forgot what it was like,” she said. “Our families. I mean, I remember, but it was always just . . . you know, stories. Ancient history.”
“People don’t really forget ancient history around here,” Ethan said. “You know they still call it ‘witch weather’ when there’s an early frost or a bad snowstorm.”
The words whispered an echo in Sorrow’s mind, a long-ago memory of bright colors and spice cake—the yarn and fabric shop where Grandma sold her quilts. Two women talking in low voices: This chill in the air, it’s witch weather. Locals. Sorrow had seen them in the store before. They had shared a glance, a purse of the lips when they realized Sorrow was eavesdropping from behind a shelf, and the subject changed. She had known what they meant, and at the time it had made her feel proud, that those two women in the shop would blame the weather on her family.
There was a crunch of footsteps outside the barn. Verity appeared in the doorway. “There you are. I thought you’d gotten lost.”
“Between here and the house?” Sorrow said.
“Well, you are a city girl now.”
“No need for a search party.” Sorrow glanced at Ethan. “We were talking tractor repairs.”
“I thought I told you not to bother with that piece of junk,” Verity said.
“It’s only about fifty percent junk,” Ethan said. “Maybe seventy-five. The rest still works.”
“It’s almost as old as I am.” Verity stepped into the barn and rapped on the hood of the John Deere with her knuckles. “I remember when we got it. We had to replace the one my grandmother drove into the pond.”
Sorrow was certain she had misheard. “She did what?”
“She drove the old tractor into the pond. The one over in the northwest corner?”
“I know which pond,” Sorrow said. “I’m more interested in why your grandma drove a tractor into it. On purpose?”
“Absolutely. She was trying to make a point.” Verity’s smile was a flicker, gone far too quickly. “The pond is right on the property line, and she didn’t like that Eli Abrams—that would be your grandfather.” She nodded at Ethan. “She didn’t like that he kept pulling up the fence posts to claim the whole pond for himself, so she got on her tractor and rode down there and plowed right over the new fence he’d put up.”
“I think my grandfather told me about that when I was little,” Ethan said. “Only in his version she tried to run him down first. He really didn’t like her.”
“Well, she might have killed his father, so he had his reasons,” Verity said.
Sorrow laughed, a short startled sound, but Verity’s expression didn’t change, and Ethan only looked uncomfortable. The walls of the barn swallowed her laugh into an uneasy silence.
“Are you serious?” Sorrow looked between the two of them. “You’re serious. Is that true? She killed him?”
Verity didn’t answer right away, so Ethan said, “I don’t know if it’s true. I only know what Grandpa Eli used to say, and he was . . . you know. Not all there. Alzheimer’s. He was always saying Devotion Lovegood drove his father to an early grave. He loved to blame a whole bunch of stuff on her and Miss P, like stupid stuff they obviously . . .”
Ethan trailed off. He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck, and he glanced at Verity with a look Sorrow understood all too well. That was the look of somebody who knew he had said the wrong thing but didn’t know yet how Verity would react.
“But he said stuff like that all the time,” he went on quickly. “He was blaming communism on your family too, in the end. All kinds of stuff. Nobody listened to him.”
Verity’s expression hadn’t changed. It hadn’t changed at all, and her stillness made the hair on Sorrow’s neck stand up. Verity was looking at Ethan, her expression carefully blank, and his face was growing redder, and Sorrow almost felt sorry for him, definitely would have if her heart weren’t racing, if there weren’t a weight on her chest, if she could blink, if she could look away, if every muscle in her body weren’t tense with waiting to see what Verity would do.
Verity moved her hand, turned slightly, and for a heartbeat Sorrow was absolutely certain she was going to storm out of the barn. She would return to the house and thump up the stairs to her room. Sorrow could already hear her door slamming, that angry clap echoing through the house, a sound she hadn’t heard in years but had never, ever forgotten.
But Verity didn’t leave. Slowly she unfroze, melting from a tense statue to a flesh-and-blood woman again, and she tapped her fingers idly on the tractor, a nervous, arrhythmic drumbeat. She said, “We can’t claim responsibility for the communism, but he wasn’t entirely wrong about George Abrams. He and my grandmother hated each other, and they had good reason for it.”
“What kind of reason?” Ethan asked—too eagerly, Sorrow thought, too quickly, but she had believed the same once too, that asking Verity to delve into one of her cherished stories was the best way to smooth over an uncertain moment.