“So you’re just going to run away again, like you always do.”
The words were out before Sorrow could stop herself. Verity ran up the stairs—how familiar that sound was, the flight-quick drumbeat of her shoes—and when she slammed her bedroom door Sorrow felt it vibrating through her skin, through her bones, felt it a hundredfold, the relentless echo of every single time she’d heard it before.
There was a soft creak of floorboards; Grandma was standing in the kitchen doorway in her faded flower-print robe.
“What?” Sorrow said. Her face was burning and she felt sick, but she still wanted to shout. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
Grandma didn’t shake her head. She didn’t frown. She didn’t lift an eyebrow or tilt her head in disapproval. She didn’t do anything at all except look at Sorrow, and look, and look, the weight of her gaze so heavy and so silent, as though she was trying to see the stranger beneath her granddaughter’s skin.
20
AFTER A STIFF, nearly silent breakfast, Verity announced that she had errands to run and would be out for most of the day. She didn’t invite Sorrow to go with her.
“Have fun,” Sorrow muttered.
Verity set her mug and bowl in the sink, fetched her purse and keys, and she was gone with the snap of the screen door. The sound of the car engine thrummed briefly, then faded as tires crunched down the driveway.
Their fight had sat between them like a tree toppled over a path, and they on opposite sides, neither wanting to find a way around. Grandma, silent as ever, had looked from one to the other, her eyes unreadable, her pen still and paper empty.
Sorrow sighed and scraped her spoon over her bowl. “I guess it’s better than her locking herself in her room all day.”
Grandma only raised her eyebrows.
“It’s not like I was trying to pick a fight. I just had a question. Am I not even allowed to ask questions now?” Sorrow didn’t know how much Grandma had heard. She cringed to realize that her shouting had probably woken her, but she wasn’t going to apologize. Not to either of them. This time, at least, she was not going to be the one to smooth over the rough patch with careful words and platitudes.
Still Grandma didn’t reach for her pen, but the tilt of her head was eloquently inquiring.
Sorrow squirmed in her seat. “I heard that she and Mrs. Abrams used to be friends. I asked her about it.”
When she glanced up again, her grandmother’s eyes were wide.
“What?” Sorrow said. “You do know that in a normal town with normal families, just asking something like that wouldn’t be a big deal. I don’t even know why it is a big deal. And you can’t expect me to believe it’s because some great-great-great-second-cousin of theirs did something to some great-great-great-aunt of ours. The tourists at the festival might believe that sh—stuff, but come on. I know when it’s more personal than that.”
Grandma shook her head, but Sorrow couldn’t tell if it was disagreement or dismissal.
“Do you mean they weren’t friends? Or that I shouldn’t have asked? I don’t know what you mean.”
Grandma reached for her notebook and pen. She wrote a few words and turned the page for Sorrow to see.
It’s not easy for her to talk about.
“Yeah, I figured that out,” Sorrow said. “Still doesn’t answer my question. Were they friends?”
Grandma held the pen unmoving above the paper for a moment, considered, before she wrote an answer.
They were close, once.
Sorrow hadn’t really believed Julie was lying, but the confirmation made the hair on her arms stand up. “What happened?”
I’ll talk to her about it.
“Okay,” Sorrow said slowly. “Wait, about what? You don’t know? Or you don’t know if you can tell me?”
There are some things you should know, with her permission. Give her time.
Another sting of annoyance—how much time was she supposed to offer, after eight years apart and only a few weeks before she went home?—but it was quickly replaced by a quiver of worry. “What kind of things? What do you mean?”
Grandma shook her head, gave a small sort of half shrug with one shoulder.
“Does it have anything to do with Patience?”
That time Sorrow had no trouble reading Grandma’s expression: she had not expected that question. Grandma shook her head emphatically.
Why would you think that?
“I don’t, really. I was just wondering.”
It’s not about that at all.
“Okay.”
Grandma tapped the page with her pen, leaving tiny dots of ink beside I’ll talk to her about it. Then she wrote, What are you doing today?
Sorrow carried her bowl to the sink. “I was thinking . . . I was thinking about cleaning up the cemetery a little bit,” she said. “Just the trash and stuff. Trimming some things. I don’t like that it’s . . . I want to clean it up a little. If that’s—”
Sorrow stopped. She wasn’t going to ask if it was okay. This might not be her home anymore, but it was still her family buried in the cemetery grove. She didn’t need permission to care for their graves. She only wanted to do what her mother should have been doing anyway.
Grandma looked at her for a moment, then wrote: It’s a good idea. There are leather gloves and trimming shears in the barn.
“Right,” Sorrow said. “Yeah. I’ll need those.”
She loaded the old metal wheelbarrow with supplies: spade and hoe, hedge trimmers and gloves, a black plastic bag for garbage. On a workbench she found a hammer and a Christmas cookie tin full of mismatched nails. It wouldn’t hurt to see if she could mend the fence, even though she didn’t have the slightest idea how to do that. The tools rattled and clanked as she pushed the load down to the orchard. The wheelbarrow’s wooden handles were rough, the tire going flat, and she was sweating before she was halfway through the orchard.
The Lovegood cemetery in its hollow was a patchwork of cool shadows and misty morning sunlight, brown-barked trees and green leaves, white headstones and yellow ribbons and purple traps. Sorrow steered the wheelbarrow through a broken gap in the fence and set it down, rolled her shoulders, flexed her hands. A beetle rattled through the air and she started, turned, stared after it. She had looked up the emerald ash borer online, read a handful of articles about its infestation in New England, studied the pictures and lists of what to look for. Its larvae were responsible for the damage, carving snakelike mazes beneath the bark, cutting off the flow of nutrients, starving the tree from within.
In the pictures the beetle was vibrantly green and shaped like the head of a spear, big-eyed and shimmering and so very tiny. It seemed impossible that such a small thing, and so beautiful, could cause so much damage.