She scrambled to her feet, tiger gripped tight in her hand, and she began to search in earnest for more favors. She kicked through the grass where it was high, circled every tree to examine the nooks and crannies of their roots, pulled herself up on her toes to look into low branches. Her excitement quickly gave way to disappointment, however, and the only other favor she found was a single silver button, pressed into the earth by her own footprint near the wheelbarrow.
She dug the button out of the soil and cupped it in her palm with the bead. She shook them together, made a face at the paltry little rattle, and rolled them into the wheelbarrow beside the tiger. Her enthusiasm was gone. She was hot and thirsty, and every time she stepped from shadow to sunlight she could feel the heat on her shoulders, her arms, the back of her neck. She took off her Phillies hat, pulled her hair out of its ponytail and put it up again. She fanned herself with her hat for a moment, looking over the cemetery.
And she stilled. Stopped fanning herself. Lowered the hat. The skin on her neck itched. Her shoulders tensed. Nothing had changed. The birds were still chattering, the insects still humming. No cloud had passed over the sun.
But she felt around her a change like an indrawn breath. She turned slowly.
There was somebody standing at the corner of the orchard.
Her breath caught, the start of a word, but it wasn’t Verity. It was Julie Abrams.
Sorrow exhaled shakily, feeling foolish for her nerves. Julie stepped over the fence, but she took only a few steps into the cemetery before stopping again. She was wearing a red shirt so bright it stood out like a vibrant flower blossom against the orchard’s layers of green. Sorrow walked over to meet her.
“Hey,” she said. She twisted her hat, pulled it over her hair. She had thought, after Cassie’s outburst at the festival, Julie would be avoiding her for sure. She didn’t know how to feel about being proved wrong.
Julie took off her sunglasses and fiddled with them. “Hi. Miss P said you would be out here.”
“You were looking for me?” Sorrow said, then immediately felt stupid. “I mean, yeah. You, uh, you found me.”
A flicker of a smile passed over Julie’s face, gone so quickly Sorrow couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it.
“I wanted to give you this,” Julie said. She reached into the back pocket of her jeans; Sorrow watched the way her thin arm bent, how her collarbone jutted under her skin. “I went looking for it after we talked the other day. It took me a while to find it.”
It was a photograph. Four-by-six on glossy paper, a bright scene overexposed by too much light, the colors washed out by the glare. Two women were sitting on a low brick wall. They were both wearing sunglasses, but Sorrow recognized them immediately. It was Verity and Hannah Abrams.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”
“I told you,” Julie said. When Sorrow looked up she expected a smile, but Julie’s expression was solemn. “Photographic proof.”
Verity and Hannah were sitting so close their shoulders were pressed together, their knees touching, and they were smiling widely. The photographer had caught them laughing. Verity was wearing a dress with a flowing skirt and loose sleeves, and her long hair was braided, altogether looking like she had accidentally wandered into the frame from a Woodstock retrospective, but Hannah was pure early nineties preppy: pleated skirt, square-shouldered blazer, blond hair teased and feathered around her face.
“Holy fashion crimes,” Sorrow said. “How old are they? They look really young.”
“Mom didn’t tell me,” Julie admitted. “But she didn’t move here until after she was already engaged to Dad, so she was at least twenty-one or twenty-two. I think your mom’s a few years younger, isn’t she?”
Sorrow didn’t know the difference in their ages, but it was true that in the photograph Verity looked younger. She looked like a teenager—fresh-faced, long-limbed, slouching. Even captured in a frozen frame there was an easy way about her that Sorrow had never seen before. At first glance Sorrow might have thought Verity looked like Patience, but nowhere in Sorrow’s memories did Patience have that relaxed posture, that careless laugh, bright and summery as though she hadn’t a care in the world, leaning into another girl in a way that was cozy, almost intimate.
“Where are they?” she asked.
Sorrow turned the picture over, but there was nothing written on the back. Turned it again and frowned as she studied the space around the two laughing girls. She didn’t recognize the brick wall on which they were sitting, nor the neat bed of flowers behind them, the trees arched at the edge of the frame. On the right side of the photo there were the vertical lines of a wrought-iron fence and a brick pillar with a sign on it, but Sorrow couldn’t read the words, and she couldn’t see anything beyond it. It didn’t look like any place in Abrams Valley.
“No idea,” Julie said. “Maybe somewhere in Boston. That’s where my mom’s family lives.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“When I found it, I got yelled at for going through things that didn’t belong to me,” Julie said. There was a tired resignation in her voice, as though she was disappointed she even had to explain. “I found it in my uncle Henry’s stuff—he was actually our great-uncle. Grandpa Eli’s brother. He was the photographer in the family. We still have boxes and boxes of his pictures.”
The name Henry nudged something in Sorrow’s mind. “He’s the one who died in a car accident?”
“I guess. It was a long time ago.”
Verity must have known him, to have been so at ease before his camera, but the other night in the barn, when she’d been talking about Devotion’s fight with George Abrams, she had only mentioned Eli, said nothing about Henry.
“This is so weird to see.” Sorrow held the photograph out to Julie.
“You can keep it.”
“Really?”
“Maybe you can get your mom to tell you something about it.”
Sorrow laughed a little and shook her head. “I really doubt that. Not after, what, twenty-some years of pretending it never happened.”
“She might change her mind,” Julie said. “People get so used to avoiding some things they don’t realize it would be better if they just . . . stopped. That what they’re hiding from isn’t as bad as what they’re doing to themselves by hiding.”
“Somehow I doubt she’ll find that convincing,” Sorrow said. “But thanks anyway.”
“I wanted to make sure it didn’t get lost,” Julie said.
Then she was turning, walking toward the fence again, and Sorrow scrambled for something to say, something to keep her from leaving. She hadn’t noticed how the quiet of the orchard was weighing on her until Julie had broken it, but now that she did she didn’t want to be left alone with the trees and the rows of dead ancestors. She didn’t want Julie to walk away and take with her any chance she had of bringing up Patience again, of tugging at that one thread between them. Julie hadn’t even said Patience’s name, but Sorrow could still feel it echoing around them.
“Hey, Julie?” she called. “Do you think we could . . . I’d like to talk about Patience, sometime, again? If we could?”
But instead of answering with a yes, a no, a maybe, Julie looked at Sorrow for a long time, so long Sorrow grew uncomfortable under her gaze.
Julie said, “I heard about what Cassie said yesterday.”