“His brother Henry died in a car accident. It was just an accident, but Grandpa Eli had this thing about how it was all that Lovegood woman’s fault, everything was her fault, the Lovegoods had destroyed his father and now his brother and . . .” Ethan made a face and let out a short breath. “He was confusing your grandma with her mother. The same way he used to confuse the guy at the gas station with Richard Nixon. It was kinda sad, really. There was no reason to bring it up. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
The words rang with hollow familiarity in Sorrow’s mind as they walked back to the house. Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Shouldn’t have said anything. How many times she had thought that to herself, always so cringingly aware of saying the wrong thing. She felt a petty sort of satisfaction to learn that Ethan ran into those same traps, but the feeling was gone almost immediately. It wasn’t a contest. There was no prize for being the person who could run the obstacle course of Verity’s moods without tripping.
12
EIGHT YEARS AGO
ON THE FIRST day of spring, Patience said, “Let’s go for a walk in the orchard.”
Sorrow scraped up a spoonful of oatmeal and considered the view through the kitchen window. The day was gray and overcast, threatening rain or even snow. Sheriff Moskowitz had come by earlier to tell them about a fire in the Abrams barn, but he was gone now, and the house was quiet. They were alone in the kitchen: Grandma was tucked into her chair on the porch with her quilting frame, and Mom had gone upstairs.
“It’s too cold,” she said.
Patience bumped her shoulder. “It’s not that cold. Aren’t you bored being cooped up here?”
“Maybe,” Sorrow said. They were all tired of being stuck inside through the gray days and cold nights. Tired of the howling wind, tired of the mud, tired of sweaters and scarves and boots, tired of barren branches and brown hills. Sorrow was ready for winter to be over.
But she was nervous about going into the orchard. The sheriff had asked them about strangers lurking in the woods, about drifters and troublemakers. He had kind eyes but he’d fixed them on Sorrow when he asked some of the questions, almost like he could see right through her skin to her heart beating rabbit-fast underneath. He had only left after Mom told him they didn’t know anything and Abrams problems weren’t Lovegood problems and they didn’t want to get involved anyway. But the scent of his cologne lingered in the kitchen, and Sorrow was afraid he would come back.
“Just a little walk,” Patience said. “It’s not raining yet. We can look for favors.”
“I don’t want to,” Sorrow said, but Patience only laughed.
“Get your coat,” she said. “You never know. We might find something.”
When Sorrow was bundled up in her boots and coat, they tromped outside together. Sorrow skipped down the porch steps, saying, “Hi, Grandma. Bye, Grandma.”
In her rocking chair, Grandma nodded and smiled. She was wearing fingerless gloves and a bulky sweater; one of her quilts was tucked over her knees, and on her lap was a journal, one of the many little books filled with words she never let anybody read. Another quilt, unfinished, was stretched over the frame, waiting for her careful stitching. The new quilt was a blush of soft spring colors: pink and green and blue, flowers and leaves and sky.
Patience bent to kiss Grandma’s cheek. “We’re going for a walk. We’ll be back soon, okay?”
Sorrow ran ahead. She followed the path around the barren garden, past the coop where chickens pecked in the mud, over the split-rail fence, and down to the old dirt road where the rusty pickup truck sat abandoned in a fallow field. There had been horses and cows and goats on the farm when Mom was a little girl, but the only animals they had now were the chickens.
Sorrow stopped at the edge of the orchard to scrape mud from her boots. Drifts of snow lingered beneath the apple trees, slumped and dirty with a hard crust on top. Everything was brown and gray and still. The trees were naked, without a hint of their first buds, dusted with lacy frost from their massive trunks to their highest branches. She loved the orchard, but at the end of winter, in this cold, uneasy borderland between the stark white silence and the first waking whispers of spring, the quiet put an uneasy pinch in her chest.
“Is Mom okay?” she asked when Patience caught up.
“She’s fine,” Patience said.
“She won’t come downstairs,” Sorrow said.
“She was down earlier.” Patience’s breath misted in the cold. Beneath the brim of her green knitted hat, her hazel eyes were bright, her face pale. “She’s worried, that’s all.”
“Because of the fire?”
“Because sometimes she worries,” Patience said. “It’ll be fine. The fire has nothing to do with us. Race you to the graveyard?”
She was off before Sorrow could reply. Sorrow sprinted after her, jumping over fallen branches and sliding on icy snow. Patience was taller and faster and soon out of sight.
When she reached the cemetery in the western hollow, Sorrow skidded in a patch of snow and tumbled into the fence. She caught her balance and righted herself before climbing to join Patience on the other side.
“You won,” Sorrow said, panting for breath.
“Someday you’ll beat me,” Patience told her, but she didn’t mean it. Patience liked winning.
Patience wandered along the fence, looking up at the naked branches and the gray sky. Sorrow wound through the middle instead; she wove figure eights around the ash trees, starting with the oldest and tallest at the grave of Rejoice Lovegood and cutting diagonally through the grove to the youngest tree at the grave of their great-grandmother. At the base of Devotion’s tree, Sorrow jumped for the lowest branches. Her mittened fingers caught briefly on the bark, her boots scrabbled on the trunk, and she dropped to the ground again.
Patience, moving at a more leisurely pace, took a few minutes to catch up.
“Is that where Grandma will be buried when she dies?” Sorrow asked, pointing to the space beside Devotion’s grave.
Patience’s green hat was a bright spot of color against the shades of brown and gray. “Don’t say that. Grandma isn’t going to die anytime soon.”
“I was just wondering.” Wondering, and imagining the whip-thin ash sapling they would plant above Grandma’s grave. Her headstone would be white and clean, not yet greened by moss, and her name would be carved in neat block letters: Perseverance Lovegood. As the years passed the ash would grow straight and tall like the others, another sturdy sentinel for the grove.
“Someday she will be, I guess,” Patience said. She looked up at the gray sky, into the gray orchard. “We’ll all be here eventually. Let’s not talk about that.”
“I was just wondering,” Sorrow said again. A tickle of guilt curled in her chest. Grandma would live for a long time yet.
“Well, stop wondering,” Patience said. “And don’t let Mom hear you talk that way. It’ll upset her.”
“I know,” Sorrow said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself, “I wasn’t the one who upset her yesterday.”
There was a flash of anger over Patience’s face. “That’s not the same thing. That’s not even close to the same thing.”
“She was really upset,” Sorrow said.
Patience threw her hands up. “That’s why it’s so stupid! It shouldn’t even be a big deal. It’s just school. Everybody goes to school.”
“We don’t.”