CHAPTER 2
LILA
I was used to moving around. All my stuff fit in the same ugly brown suitcase I’d had since I was twelve, when my parents died and I had to leave the farm where I’d grown up, north of Cedar Falls. I’d switched foster homes seven times in six years, and sometimes I didn’t even unpack. But this move was different. I was leaving Iowa, and I wouldn’t be coming back.
My social worker, who’d been telling me from day one that teenagers rarely got adopted, had tried to prepare me for aging out of the system. I was actually looking forward to it until it happened to my foster sister, Crystal. She was a year older and we’d shared a bedroom at the Humphries’ house. My parents wouldn’t have approved of Crystal, who was always ditching school and talking back, but the two of us had something that bonded us together: No one wanted to keep us for very long, not even people like the Humphries, who took in disabled kids and crack babies.
Crystal said we got moved around so much because we were pretty and had big boobs, that foster moms didn’t want us tempting their husbands and sons, but in Crystal’s case it might also have had something to do with her habit of setting things on fire. She was partly right about me. It wasn’t my fault if my foster fathers or brothers had roving eyes, if they looked at me inappropriately. I never purposely flirted with them, though I did sometimes flirt with their friends or neighbors. I might have even slept with one or two. And gotten caught. (Cue suitcase.) The social worker called it a problem with impulse control. I’d done something else, too, after my parents died, something worse. I didn’t know for sure if it was in my file, but if it was, I couldn’t blame them for passing me around like a hot potato.
Crystal had lightened the mood at the Humphries’ house, always mocking our foster mother’s obsession with modesty. Mrs. Humphries bought us sports bras to mash down our breasts, even insisting we wear them to sleep. Crystal would jump up and down on her bed, topless, waving around the Bible Mrs. Humphries had given her and quoting the crazy mom from the Carrie movie: I can see your dirty pillows! It always cracked us up.
When Crystal turned eighteen, she dropped out of school and moved from Cedar Falls to Des Moines to work at a strip club. She wrote me a letter and invited me to join her, and I thought about it. Then I didn’t get any more letters. Six months later, I learned that Crystal had died of an overdose. The social worker gave me a moment to let the news sink in, then launched into her scared-straight routine, pushing up the sleeves of her blue blazer, the one she’d been wearing since I met her in 1986, when giant shoulder pads were in style.
What have you done to prepare yourself, to keep from ending up like her? she asked, her eyes bulging. All these years I’ve been trying to get through to you. You’re too busy moping about your old life to plan for a new one. Your old life is gone, and you’ll never get it back! She was so worked up, she was yelling. Little drops of spit flew out of her mouth. I wanted to punch her in the face. I curled my fingers into a fist.
She tossed a stack of pamphlets at me. You have nothing. NOTHING. Nobody’s going to take care of you but you. YOUR PARENTS WOULD WANT SOMETHING GOOD FOR YOU. Figure it out. You’re running out of time.
I wondered if she said the same thing to everyone—to Crystal, whose parents were still alive and, to my knowledge, didn’t give a rat’s ass what became of her. I didn’t need the social worker to tell me what my mom and stepdad would’ve wanted. I was their only child, and they’d been overinvolved in everything I did. My mom was my Daisy Scout troop leader. My stepdad had hollered encouragement from the sidelines of my Pee Wee soccer games. They had continued to waste money on piano lessons year after year, refusing to acknowledge defeat. My mom was a teacher, and I’d actually done really well in school before everything fell apart. I knew my parents would want me to do something with my life. If they hadn’t died, maybe I would have found some sense of direction. Maybe, if they were still with me, I’d be a completely different person. I had no way of knowing.
That night, I flipped through the pamphlets the social worker had given me. Community college, trade school, cosmetology school. They all cost money, and I’d already missed the cutoff for financial aid, so there was no point in applying until the next semester. I had a part-time job at IHOP, but my pay wouldn’t be enough to cover rent and expenses when I moved out on my own. I set aside the army and navy recruitment brochures as my last resort and opened the one remaining pamphlet. It advertised an employment agency specializing in live-in positions where room and board were included. Nannies, housekeepers, laborers, companions for the elderly. I didn’t want to do any of those things for the long term, but in the short term it would be a good way to save up money until I figured out what I did want to do.
Their office was in Des Moines, in a half-empty strip mall, and I had to take the bus. A guy with a long, snaking ponytail plucked me from the waiting room ahead of two middle-aged women who had been there longer. He asked a lot of personal questions that didn’t seem relevant, but I answered them anyway. Now we just need a photo, he said when we finished the application. All I had in my purse was a picture of me and Crystal at the pool. I’d been carrying it around in my address book since she left. I asked the guy if he could photocopy it so I could have the original back, and he assured me he could crop it down to a head shot. A month later I received a contract in the mail, signed it, and sent it back. I’d agreed to two years on a southern Missouri farm in a tiny town called Henbane.
The social worker drove me to the Greyhound station and wished me luck. Mrs. Humphries had insisted I take the Bible she’d given me, and I left it on the floor of the social worker’s car. My suitcase was swallowed up in the belly of the bus, and I climbed on board.
The bus ride from Des Moines to Springfield took fifteen hours, including a layover in Kansas City. An old man named Judd picked me up at the bus station, explaining that my sponsor, Mr. Dane, was sorry he couldn’t be there himself but would take me to breakfast in the morning. Judd wrestled my suitcase into the back of his truck and didn’t say much the rest of the way to Henbane, except for some aggravated muttering when he switched between two country stations to find both playing “Achy Breaky Heart.”
We drove for over two hours, turning onto increasingly rough and winding roads, and it occurred to me that I’d never be able to find my way back. Finally, we reached a dirt path that cut through fields of churned earth specked with rows and rows of seedlings. Judd parked the truck in front of a concrete-block garage, and we stepped out into the humid evening air. Low green mountains rose beyond the fields, and I could smell the nearby river: wet rocks and moss and mud. When I accepted the job, I’d imagined—hoped—that this farm might be something like my parents’ farm. It wasn’t. Everything was unnervingly distorted, like my reflection in the bus station bathroom, the warped mirror and flickering fluorescents making me question if this was how I really looked—raccoon-eyed, sallow, scared; if the real me no longer matched the version in my head.
I had to remind myself I was only one state south on the map. How different could it be? But the hills were too steep, the sky too blue. Even the dirt was wrong, rocky and red and alien. It was a place where you’d have to watch your footing, be careful what you touched. It made me miss the flat, welcoming expanses of home: the black dirt and whispering corn, the big white farmhouse I’d grown up in, and the lush square of lawn that surrounded it. Here in Henbane, the few clumps of grass sprouting at the edge of the garage were parched and prickly, a warning to bare feet.
Regardless of my first impression, there was no going back to Iowa, nothing to go back to, so there wasn’t much point in whining about it. A handful of machine sheds surrounded the garage, and behind them, halfway up the hill, sat a small cottage. My new home, I guessed. Judd grabbed my suitcase, but instead of heading up the hill to the house, he opened a door on the side of the garage and shoved my luggage inside. “You’ll be staying in here,” he mumbled. With a nod, he got back in his truck and left. I felt a flicker of disappointment, but I tamped it down. I’d learned from my time in foster care that you never knew whether a place would be cozy or hostile or filled with creepy Precious Moments figurines until you stepped inside.
It was dark in the garage, and musty, like it had been closed up for a while. A narrow bed sat under the one window, piled with faded quilts. In one corner was a kitchen counter with a hot plate and tiny refrigerator. In another corner was a makeshift bathroom with a toilet, sink, and stall shower, blocked off from the rest of the garage by flowered sheets that hung from the ceiling. The only furniture aside from the bed was a dresser with the varnish peeling off. I opened the drawers and found them half-full of someone else’s abandoned clothes.
The garage, with its concrete floor and exposed rafters and gritty film of dust, wasn’t exactly charming, but there was one thing I liked about it: It was mine. A room all to myself, something I hadn’t had since I left my parents’ house. I turned on the little lamp and opened the window to the racket of insects; as I listened, the noise sorted itself into distinct whining rhythms like sirens, intensifying, fading, intensifying, the sound of a thousand alarms. With nothing else to do, I got ready for bed and lay down on top of the quilts, sweating. This was it. My new life would start in the morning. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do anything to screw it up.
I woke early and was showered and dressed when Mr. Dane banged on the door. He was nearly as tall as the doorway and broad-chested, casually dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt. I’d thought the farm’s owner would be older, but he didn’t look over thirty-five. His hair was slicked back, just beginning to recede at the temples, and his wide grin revealed lower teeth splayed and overlapping like a hand of cards.
“Mornin’,” he drawled, reaching out to shake my hand. “Good to finally meet you. I’m Crete.”
“Lila,” I said. “Obviously.”
He was handsome in a rugged way, with strong features and intense blue eyes. The bridge of his nose had a bump at the top and angled to one side, then the other, as though it had been broken more than once.
“Glad to see you made it here safely. How’s breakfast sound?”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I’m starving.” I followed him out to his truck, a heavy-duty model with a double axle and a shotgun rack in the rear window. He opened the door for me and offered his hand to help me climb up into the cab.
The air-conditioning roared at full blast when he started the engine, and he quickly apologized and turned it down a notch. “So are you comfortable enough in the garage?” he asked. “I’m fixing to get a window unit put in there so you don’t roast to death. I’ll have Judd get right on that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be great.”
“Well, you just let me know if there’s anything else you need. I want you to feel at home here.”
I smiled at him and he smiled back. I hadn’t had many expectations of my new boss—I’d learned that expectations weren’t terribly useful—but it was a relief to find he was reasonably normal, as far as first impressions went. It was a quick ride to Dane’s, a rustic, tin-roofed cabin that sat across the road from the river.
“Dane’s?” I said. “This is yours, too?”
“Yeah. Not much to look at,” Crete said, parking the truck, “but we do all right.”
Two gas pumps sat out front, and various hand-painted signs listed the offerings within: Breakfast. Canoe rental. Shower. Bait. We stepped inside, the plank floors creaking, and I smelled bacon and burnt coffee. The restaurant occupied most of the right side of the building, and I saw Judd in the cramped kitchen scrambling eggs. Crete gave me a tour while we waited for our food, rattling off more details than I could keep track of. His family had built the store in the 1920s, and his dad had passed it on to him. They sold camping and fishing equipment, groceries, firewood, and an assortment of jams and vegetables canned fresh from the farm. The outdoor shower cost two dollars for tourists but was free to locals who had just come off the river. Blue laws ordained that certain items couldn’t be sold on Sundays, he explained, but that was ignored unless a preacher or member of law enforcement happened to be in the store. Certain people would come in to buy a bottle of White Lightning, a homemade grain alcohol, but it had to be kept out of sight in unlabeled bottles because, technically, it was illegal to sell alcohol in grocery or convenience stores.
“We won’t need you over at the farm full-time,” he said. “I thought if it was okay with you, we might have you help out over here a bit. We get real busy when tourist season hits, lots of folks wanting to float the river.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Whatever needs doing.” We sat at a picnic table on the outdoor patio to eat, the morning sun glaring in our eyes. I could see a rickety old school bus and a couple of boat trailers out behind the main building, and a large metal shed. Beyond that, nothing but woods.
“I don’t mean to throw too much at you at once,” he said, studying my face. “But once you get used to it, I think you’re gonna like it here.”
I doubted I’d ever like Henbane, but that didn’t really matter. My contract was for two years. I could make do for that long. And when I was done, I’d have enough saved to move someplace and start over on my own. Hopefully enough to start taking classes, figure out what I wanted to do.
“More coffee?” His hand skimmed mine as he reached for my mug.
“Sure, thanks.” I brushed toast crumbs from my lips and glanced up to see him looking at me. I didn’t look away and neither did he.
“Damn,” he murmured, shaking his head. “I don’t mean to stare, it’s just … You’re a beautiful girl, you know it? Pictures don’t do justice.”
He flashed a confident smile and got up to fetch the coffee. It was wholly unprofessional, I knew, for my boss to talk about my looks, but nothing at Dane’s was really what you’d call professional. And part of me, the part that always acted without thinking, couldn’t help liking what he’d said.