WHERE ONCE THERE had been a narrow muddy track, carved up by two hundred years of cart wheels, there was now a ribbon of level, graded dirt wide enough for two vehicles to pass. Every step Pride took stirred up a cloud of dust around her ankles. The day was warm, summer’s last glimmering, but autumn had begun to turn the mountains gold and red.
The seven miles between town and the Lovegood orchard had seemed a tiny distance when Pride was a child, when her feet had been so swift there was nobody who could beat her in a footrace, not even boys who were three or four years her senior and propelled by stubborn arrogance. It felt a lot longer now. She ought to have hitched a ride from where the Greyhound dropped her off in town, but nobody recognized her anymore, and every face she’d seen had belonged to a stranger.
It was hard to remember their names now, those sulking boys with dust on their faces. It didn’t matter. She was sixty-six years old, and there was cancer in her brain. She had told the doctor, in his grim little office lined with posters of human bodies stripped down to component systems, that she would like to spend her last days in the mountains rather than a sterile hospital room. Her doctor had smiled a sad smile, too ancient for his barely-six-years-out-of-medical-school face, and he had said, “Go home. Go while you still can.”
So here she was, walking along a dirt road on a late summer day, and the air tasted green, smelled green, felt green in the sticky-slick sweat that gathered beneath her clothes. The orchard was waiting for her, right where she’d left it.
Fifty years away and her memory was hazy. She remembered Ma and Dad and their musician friends drinking smuggled Canadian whisky on the back porch. There had been laughing, carrying on, drifting smoke. The twins, nine years old and wild as animals, shouting that they were going for a swim in Peddler’s Creek. The baby had been crying. She remembered that well enough. Baby Devy crying her little head off like she wouldn’t ever stop.
But she must have stopped, at some point, because Pride remembered quiet too. A suffocating silence at dusk. Dad and the men hissing at each other, counting bullets. Fear curdling in her stomach, fear and anger and a desperate swallowed scream. Ma in the doorway with her shotgun, her sharp face illuminated when she struck her lighter, and smoke curling around her head like a veil.
The crack of a shot echoing through the twilight.
Pride had stopped walking. There was a phantom ache in her shoulder: the kick of a shotgun. A pain she hadn’t thought she would ever forget. Her finger had twitched before she told it to. A silhouette had crumpled in the darkness.
She rubbed at her shoulder, arthritic fingers massaging a bruise that had faded fifty years ago, and she scuffed one foot forward, then the other, creaking her old limbs into motion again.
She stood now at the turn to the Lovegood farm. The trees were heavy with apples; their sharp, sweet scent filled the air. Another couple of weeks and it would be time for the harvest.
She walked up the drive through the tunnel of sugar maples, and with every step she half expected the twins to come whooping from the house to greet her. Cherish taller and faster, Charles two steps behind.
But the twins were gone. They had been dead for more than fifty years, and she remembered how pale their bodies had been, laid out side by side in their best clothes. After Simon Abrams and his wretched brother had ambushed them in the woods, Charles had died at once, but Cherish had lingered a few days longer, going mad with fever until she finally slipped away to join her twin. Charles’s funeral shirt didn’t fit right; the bullet had caved in his skinny chest. It had started raining the day he died, rained all through that Bloody July, and it was raining still the day the twins were buried together in the cemetery grove. Pride had stood beside their little graves and felt the roots of the old ash trees reaching up for her from beneath the soil, imagined them wrapping around her ankles, dragging her down, down, never letting go.
The baby was the only one left now. Devotion had a daughter and a granddaughter of her own. They had exchanged letters over the years, but Pride had never returned, and, as far as she knew, Devotion had never traveled more than ten miles from the Lovegood farm.
When she reached the house, Pride bypassed the front door—they had never used it anyway—and walked around to the back. The garden was rich with autumn bounty: cornstalks shoulder-high, gourds and pumpkins tumbling from beneath blankets of leaves. The door to the barn was open, but there was nobody about.
Pride had one foot on the porch step, one hand on the rail, when she saw Ma’s lighter.
It was sitting there on the railing, set upright in the center of the board. Her mother’s old naphtha lighter, the one Dad had given to her after they’d gotten paid for their first successful whisky shipment. It had cost a pretty penny because it was engraved on the side: To My Joy, With Love and Music, Rosie. That was what they had called Dad in the clubs and speakeasies. Rosie for Rosenthal. The newspapers had loved that, when he was arrested: A Lawman’s Rosie Murder!
The lighter was just sitting there on the porch rail, like Ma had set it down to slip inside for a minute, and any second now she would come back out with a hand-rolled cigarette pinched in her fingers, barking orders, making plans.
“The girl found that.”
Pride turned, and for one trembling heartbeat she was looking into a mirror. She was the elder by ten years, but in their decades apart she and Devotion had crept toward a median. They were both old women now, their wood-brown hair gone to gray, skin wrinkled around the eyes. Pride wore her hair short, cropped close to her head ever since her first hospital stay; Devotion had a long braid twisted over her shoulder. Pride was wearing a soft tracksuit in pale yellow, clean except for the clinging road dust. Devotion wore rubber barn boots, trousers patched at the knees, a plaid shirt rolled up at the elbows. Joyful and Rosie’s girls, the one who left and the one who stayed.
“The girl?” Pride asked.
Devotion jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “My grandbaby. She was playing down by the pond.”
Yesterday, Pride would have been hard-pressed to remember the sound of her mother’s voice, so smoky and deep and beloved in the clubs, but she heard echoes of it in Devotion’s words. Ma had stopped singing after the police took Dad away.
“What are you doing here?” Devotion asked.
“I’m sick,” Pride said. Even now she couldn’t bring herself to say dying. People told her she was supposed to be brave in the face of cancer, but she was only tired. She was so tired. “I wanted to come back one last time.”
Devotion crossed her arms and regarded Pride thoughtfully. She had their father’s eyes, blue rather than Lovegood hazel, pale as chips of ice, but without any of the spark or laughter.
Finally she said, “You think you can hold off dying until after the harvest? We need a good one this year, and we’ll still have time to get you in the ground before it freezes.”
Pride had been away for more than fifty years. It wasn’t so much to ask. “I can do that.”
“Put your things inside. I’ve got work to do.”