Serena Jane managed to last eight years with Bob Bob, which, if you think about it, is a long time to do penance for anything, never mind for an evening that wasn’t your fault. In all of that time, I saw her only twice. The first time was right after her wedding in mid-June. I wasn’t invited—no one was. It was just Bob Bob, and Serena Jane, and his parents, all of them grim-jawed and quaking in Judge Warson’s office. Serena Jane wore an aquamarine dress the same color as her eyes, and even from my vantage point in August’s truck across the street, the effect was unsettling, making her milk white skin jump out like a ghost’s. She carried a half-wilted nosegay of roses and had tied her hair in a severe knot at the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry, Truly, but I don’t want anyone there,” she insisted when I offered to be her maid of honor. “It’s just going to be a quick ceremony, and then we’re moving to Buffalo while Bob Bob’s in medical school.”
“Where are you having the baby?”
Serena Jane drummed lightly on her belly with her fingers. “Why, Buffalo, of course. That’s where everything will happen from now on, I guess.”
I tried to imagine my sister alone in a strange city with no one for company but Bob Bob. Then I tried to imagine myself without Serena Jane in Aberdeen. Maybe we weren’t sisters like those girls in Little Women or any of the other books I’d read, but she was all I had of kin. Of the two of us, I figured, she probably had it worse, and I have to admit, a little part of me was glad. That’s what she gets, I thought, for going off and leaving me again. I turned my eyes to her, hoping she couldn’t see the tears swimming in them. “When will I see you next?”
“I don’t know, Truly.” Serena Jane blew a wisp of hair off her face. “Christmas, maybe? I imagine we’ll be back for the holidays, after the baby’s born.”
But they weren’t, not for Thanksgiving and not for Christmas, either. The Thanksgiving break was going to be too short, Serena Jane explained in a quick note she sent me in early November, Bob Bob had exams, and the baby was due any minute. They would be home in December, though, for certain.
“What’s the matter?” Amelia asked as she watched me fold the letter up and slide it back in its envelope. She had grown tall and thin over the past few years, but her skin was still as pale as ever, and even though her speech had improved to the point where she would sometimes talk to people outside her family, I could always still hear the trouble her tongue had with certain letters. “Bad news?” Her voice, when it arrived, still had the stubborn and rough quality of a tree stump planted in the ground. People were often surprised that her voice was deeper than mine.
We were sitting on the beds in our shared room. I turned to her. When had Amelia’s face become more recognizable to me than my own sister’s? I wondered. I took in her wet brown eyes and half-bow mouth. If I’d closed my own eyes and grabbed a pencil, I probably could have sketched Amelia to the perfect likeness. Was familiarity as good as blood? I wondered. I laid the letter on my bed, missing my sister, my heart confused.
The baby was a boy named Robert, of course. “Look,” I breathed, showing off the three-by-three black-and-white photo to Amelia. He looked like a tiny warrior, with his fists bundled tightly underneath his chin and his eyes alert. “He was born at four-fifteen a.m.,” I read, “and weighed seven pounds three ounces. They’re calling him Bobbie.”
Amelia examined the photograph. “He looks like Serena Jane,” she said, “but with Robert Morgan’s mouth. That’ll be trouble later.”
But I thought Bobbie looked perfect—so perfect, I wished he were mine. I wondered what motherhood was like, if having a tiny sack of skin and air to hold every minute was a blessing or a burden. There were different kinds of mothers in this world, I knew. I’d watched the cats in the barn. Some of them lavished maternal pride over their offspring, ostentatiously purring and running their sandpaper tongues over the litter. And other mother cats just did the bare minimum, birthing their kittens, then turning tail and lighting out for the fields. I didn’t know what made a cat stay with her brood, nor could I identify what it was in the world that lured the bad ones back to the wild so soon or so hard, but I hoped my sister was more like the former.
I placed the photograph of Bobbie in the shoebox I kept hidden under my bed at the Dyersons’, which, in addition to my father’s old winnings from August’s horses and some more recent ones of my own, contained the single wedding photograph of my parents and a newspaper clipping of Serena Jane as May Queen. It was the closest thing to a family album that I possessed. I was about to place the lid on the box when I was seized by a terrible thought. What if Bobbie turned out to be like me? What if he grew fat and heavy as a melon? What would Bob Bob do with a baby like that? Would he turn all his medical charms on his son, trying to fix a soul that wasn’t broken? Or would he just ignore him, like a piece of dough left to rise too long?
I thought about all the comments I’d had to endure over the years: Hey, Truly, you get any bigger, we’re going to cast you in bronze and stick you on the town green! Hey, Truly, my truck needs a push—to Mississippi! After a while, it seemed as though I had those voices ringing inside me all the time, restless as church bells. It wasn’t a music I would wish on anyone, much less a brand-new infant. But you can’t worry about what life’s going to spit in your direction. Babies would grow up to be what they were, and the world would find a place for them. Spending time with August’s cockeyed horses had taught me that. Even the most hopelessly swaybacked among them could throw a race and pull in some cash. I put the lid back on the box and slid it under the worn springs of the bed.
Two years later, I received my diploma, and I even had a little crowd come watch me. Amelia sat in the very back of the audience with Brenda and August, who was smacking his lips, anticipating the special roast beef supper waiting at home. Amanda Pickerton sat front and center, her lips pinched, a gift-wrapped dictionary in her lap. But it was Marcus I missed most of all. Everything felt wrong without him. He would have clapped the loudest, I knew, and whistled when Miss Sparrow handed me the scrolled diploma, her lips stretched tight across her gums. To this day, she is still the only woman I ever knew who could take the act of smiling and make it painful.
“Two points lower, and you wouldn’t be receiving this,” she stated primly, referring to my final exams. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased about the outcome or not.
“Thank you,” I whispered, and Priscilla Sparrow surprised me by grabbing my wrist with the sudden fury of a bird of prey.
“Speak up for yourself,” she said, her little eyes glittering in the afternoon sun. “Always speak up for yourself, girl. Lord knows no one else is ever going to.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I whispered, somewhat louder, then snatched the rolled-up piece of paper and fled.
Dear Serena Jane, I wrote later that evening, here is the diploma I got today. I wish you’d have been here to see me get it, but I know you’re real busy now with Bobbie. But Brenda and August were there, and Amelia, too. Mrs. Pickerton gave me a dictionary. When are you coming home? I want to see Bobbie. Can you send more pictures?
Every week, I checked the mail religiously, waiting for some response, but there never was any. Who knows how long I would have kept running out to the rusty mailbox and peering into its empty mouth, convinced that it was my lucky day, if August hadn’t won the unluckiest horse of his life and taught me all over again that the world had different rules for the likes of us?
At first, it didn’t look like an unlucky horse. It looked like a winner. It was a Thoroughbred, high-blooded and taut through its withers and neck. August led it into the barn on a worn lead and shut it into one of the stalls. “Name’s Lightning,” he drawled, pleased with the stunned expression on our faces. “I won him in a poker round.”
Amelia’s eyes opened wider, and I knew what she was thinking. I said it for her. “You actually won?”
August’s grin was as sleek as a fox’s tail. “This one’s going to change my luck for sure,” he said, patting Lightning’s flank, then snatching his hand back as Lightning whipped his head around and tried to bite him. Brenda snorted and headed back to the kitchen.
For a few weeks, Lightning was the most honored, if also incredibly bad-tempered, creature in August’s stable. He got first dibs on the oats, the sweetest and longest carrots, and extra brush strokes. “As soon as he gets a little more comfortable, we’ll race him,” August promised, “and then we’ll see who’s laughing all the way to the bank.”
I brushed down the more homely horses and said nothing. Just that morning, I’d risked amputation trying to get a bit into Lightning’s gob, and it seemed to me that his contrariness wasn’t necessarily going to translate into winning speed. And it turned out I was right, for not three days after that, August went out early in the morning to tend to the horses and made the fatal mistake of getting on the wrong side of Lightning.
Startled out of sleep by the sharp smack of the barn door opening and a hubbub of horse hooves, I ran outside to find August slumped in a pile of straw, blue in the face, his chest kicked in. Brenda came running when she heard my cries, and between the two of us, we managed to get August into the house, where he fell back on the ragged blankets covering the sofa and struggled for breath.
“Get in the truck and go for Dr. Morgan,” Brenda barked, but she knew as well as I did that it would be no use. Even as she spoke, August’s breathing was becoming slower and more labored, and the blue around his lips was darkening.
“Daddy?” Amelia squeaked, and then fell quiet, for she had spotted before any of us that August’s chest had stopped sinking and rising and that he was peaceful at last.
Brenda sank back on her heels and covered her face with her hands. “God damn it,” she said, and then again, slower, as if she wanted to make sure the Lord heard every syllable loud and clear. “God. Damn. It.”
I didn’t say anything. I had experienced the aftermath of death plenty but had never stared it in the face before, and I was struck dumb by the simple mystery of the process. One minute, life had been coursing through August’s body, and the next, he was as still and somber as snow. I stared at his open mouth and his familiar, rotten stumps of teeth, and I found it hard to believe that he wouldn’t rise up in a minute or two, brush off his trousers, and wink at us all.
“What should we do?” I finally asked, my eyes wet, and Brenda took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were dry and hard.
“Well, for starters, we can shoot that foul horse,” she said, and went to fetch August’s rifle herself.
I thought my father’s death had been a bare-bones affair, but at the Dyersons’ I learned just how elemental death could be. There was no funeral, no burial in the cemetery, just a deep hole in the far field and the three of us shivering together in the wind. Brenda refused to say anything, and Amelia, traumatized by grief, couldn’t, so I whispered the Lord’s Prayer, and Brenda nailed together a simple cross, which we stuck on the mound of earth before turning our backs on it and giving the place up to the crows. For the rest of the season, we ate horsemeat, our heads bowed in silence over our plates, the stubborn gristle clumped in between our teeth.
After that, I took over many of August’s old jobs—hoeing Brenda’s vegetable garden into submission, the backbreaking repetition of splitting logs, and, of course, feeding and cleaning the horses. Neither Amelia nor Brenda wanted anything to do with them, but that job was by far my favorite. With horses, I found, there were never any judgments, no sly remarks about my size or appearance. In fact, with horses, my heft was an advantage. A horse could lean its entire weight against my flank and know I would hold.
I sent a short message to my sister explaining that August had died and that I was working on the farm, that I sometimes missed town and school, but that I had the horses to look to now. Love, Truly, I penned in the handwriting I’d learned from Miss Sparrow and which couldn’t begin to express how big and empty the sky looked to me every night or how, when the wind rattled over the shingles of the farmhouse, I sometimes wished I could blow away with it to Buffalo, where Serena Jane and Bobbie were swaddled together in a cozy embrace.
“Why don’t you go see her?” Amelia whispered one night in the dark before sleep. It was shortly after August’s death, and her voice was returning in shaky fits and starts. Sometimes she spoke; sometimes she didn’t. Neither Brenda nor I ever pushed her. And even though Amelia and I were both officially women, we still shared a room like the girls we’d once been. I didn’t reply. Amelia didn’t know it, but I’d tried to go see my sister once. I’d peeled the appropriate layers of bills off the money roll from under my bed and walked all the way to the depot, where I’d stepped up and bought myself a ticket. But when the time came to board the bus, I saw how the other passengers were gaping at me and how the ladies nudged their handbags into the empty seats, hoping I wouldn’t come and collapse next to them.
“On or off?” the driver asked, irritated.
The bus wheezed. I stepped down. “Off.”
The driver put the engine into gear. “Suit yourself.”
“If I was Serena Jane, I bet I’d be real lonely,” Amelia said in the dark. “I don’t know why she doesn’t at least write.”
But I knew why. It was because I was an object stuck in Serena Jane’s past, marooned down a dusty lane, on a rack-and-ruin farm, and Serena Jane was a person who had no use whatsoever for the past. No bus ride was going to fix that.
“Go to sleep,” I told Amelia, and then quickly followed my own advice, my brain muddled with tinfoil tiaras, a cracked looking glass, and the dusty row of my mother’s dresses—all punctuated by the faint lost ring of that silver charm bracelet that used to hang from my sister’s wrist.
Of course, time has a way of biting people in the ankle when they least expect it, and that’s exactly what happened to me when Serena Jane and Marcus came home.
It took eight years, about four years longer than I thought. Bob Bob graduated college, and we all expected he’d return home for the summer before he started his medical training, but he and Serena Jane and Bobbie stayed in Buffalo, and before I knew it, another four years had passed. The war in Asia ended, and boys began making their way home in disappointed trickles, the beards on their chins scruffy, the set of their lips twisting their faces into unrecognizable masks. Marcus was never among them. “Do you think he’s okay?” I whispered to Amelia in our beds at night. “Do you think he remembers us?” But the only answer she ever gave me was a squeeze of the hand.
And then one day, he simply came back. I was up on the Dyerson windmill, normally a superior place to see things coming. Perched halfway up its tower, I could easily take in the messy sprawl of the farm—the well, the crazy patching of scrap material I’d put on the roof last winter, and the sagging withers of the barn. I could also see buttercups colonizing the side of the garden fence—a pleasant yellow smear in the afternoon. The household laundry was bright in spite of itself, fluttering on the washing line, and, up high above everything, like a beneficial angel, the pristine trail of a jet feathered. But I didn’t see Marcus. He just appeared underneath me, squinting up as if no time had passed.
I dug the hobnails of my boots harder onto the latticing of the windmill, unsure whether to climb down and embrace him or to stay aloft. It was an unfamiliar dilemma. In spite of my size, I wasn’t used to having people at my feet. That was definitely a side effect of living with the Dyersons. The world had gone on growing without us, while we’d gotten smaller and smaller, taking up less of people’s imaginations until we were like the litter that blew all over the green after the May Day celebration—a part of things, but not the part that anyone wanted to look at. Marcus placed a hand on the windmill.
“Hello, Truly,” he called, but it was a stranger’s voice—deeper, huskier, with little currents running through it that weren’t there before. When he moved, I could see him limping. His hair had grown longer, and his eyes were deeper set than before. As I climbed down the windmill, I could see how the shadow of a beard was starting to creep around the corners of his mouth, mapping new terrain. I put one boot down in the dust, then the other, smacking the dirt off my hands. Marcus twitched, as if he were about to embrace me, then restrained the impulse. He kept the hand that had been injured shoved in his pocket.
“When did you get home?” I asked.
“Last night.” There was an awkward beat of silence, and then he elaborated a bit more. “I’ve just been wandering since I got out of the hospital. Places you’ve never even dreamed. Did you know that the catacombs in Paris hold the bones of five million people? And a hundred and eighty-six miles of tunnels, lined with eighteenth-century graffiti. Some of them are flooded, though.”
“Oh.” On the one hand, I was reassured to find that Marcus’s old compulsion for facts had survived his injuries intact, while on the other, I was wondering what he was doing roaming around musty old tombs full of bones. I decided to take a tack toward the future, hoping the outlook would be better. “What are you planning on now?” My vowels twanged in my mouth, and I smoothed a lock of my thick hair behind my ear. Now that I was a little older, my hair was possibly my one nice feature, but it always smelled like hay and the dust from the horses, so I wasn’t vain about it.
“I’m going to stay out at the cemetery,” Marcus answered. “You know that run-down cottage?” I did. No one had lived in it for two generations. “Dick Crane said I can live there for free if I fix it up and do some work around the place.”
“You mean tend the graves?” I wondered if his interest in crypts and bones was perhaps something more problematic.
Marcus shrugged. “Guess so.”
“You don’t want to stay at your mother’s house?”
Marcus stared off into the middle distance. “I think I’ve been gone a little too long to go back into my mama’s house. Besides, she’s leaving town soon. Moving with my brother, Dukey, out to Texas.”
“Oh.” I vaguely recalled hearing something to that effect, although I didn’t know that Dukey would have any better luck holding a job in the wide-open state of Texas than he did in tiny Aberdeen. Probably, I thought, he would discover honky-tonk music, Lone Star whiskey, and big-haired women (in that order), and that would be that. A lot of people were jumping town, it seemed, either retiring to warmer climates or relocating for better jobs. Aberdeen was like a party that had gone on a little too long. The people who were left were bleary and half-asleep on their feet. I suppose that included me. I took a deep breath. “Did you—did you ever get that letter I sent you?” My voice wavered, high and unsure, as jittery as the windmill behind me.
I don’t know what kind of answer I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the one Marcus gave me. He merely smiled and said, “Sure, Truly. I read all your letters. Thanks.”
But there was just the one, I wanted to say. I remembered my promise to him that we would spend a night in the fields together and blushed, feeling foolish. Marcus surprised me, though. “Your words were beautiful,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, his eyes pointed down at his boots. I wanted to answer back, but my breath snared in my chest.
Marcus cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve got to be going. I want to get back to the cottage and get some work done before it gets dark. I just wanted you to know I’m in town again.”
I didn’t dare look up as he sauntered off, whistling a tune I half remembered, his bad leg leaving a funny mark in the dirt. Behind me, the windmill thwacked out the rest of his melody. I closed my eyes and listened to it. If I pretended hard enough, I thought, it could almost have been a love song.
People were washing in and out of Aberdeen all right, and after Marcus it was Bob’s Bob’s turn to make a grand entrance. After a lifetime of tending to the folks in town, Robert Morgan IV was finally retiring, and Bob Bob was all set to take over. He’d passed his medical exams, received whatever qualifications he needed, and was evidently looking forward to becoming Aberdeen’s newest Dr. Morgan. In town, it was all anyone talked about.
“I wonder if he’s still got that ornery streak,” Amanda Pickerton said to Cally Hind while lunching at the counter in Hinkleman’s.
“Oh, I reckon not,” answered Cally. “He’s all grown now. A father and everything. I’m sure he’s a fine young man.”
“Serena Jane says Bobbie is smart as a whip. He’s seven now. I can’t wait to see him. Apparently, he looks just like her.”
I finished gathering my purchases and took them to the cash register. It bruised me some that Amanda Pickerton knew more about my nephew than I did. She spun around on her stool. “Oh, hello, Truly.” I could hear how hard she was trying to inject a note of surprise in her voice, though I was hard to miss.
“Hello,” I replied.
“So your sister is finally coming home after all these years. You must be thrilled.”
It occurred to me that Serena Jane had left home long before she ever left Aberdeen, but I made myself smile and nod. “Sure,” I said.
“I mean, eight years is an awfully long time, isn’t it?” Amanda continued. “Why, you two won’t hardly even know each other, will you?” Her upper lip sneered a little, and I noticed a smudge of lipstick on one of her teeth. I didn’t bother to point it out.
“I guess we’ll have to see.”
“Well, I imagine so. I mean, Serena Jane is a mother now, and a doctor’s wife, and you’re”—here she paused, as if for effect—“well, you’re still out there with the Dyersons, aren’t you?” She sniffed a tiny bit and glanced me up and down, taking in my mud-spattered overalls, flannel shirt, and boots.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Indeed.”
We appeared to have reached an impasse in conversation, and I realized that no matter how big I ever got, Amanda Pickerton would always see me as the awkward, pigtailed child who’d stared her in the eye and defied her judgment about what was good for me. We said our good-byes politely, baring teeth and squeezing hands, and even though I hated to admit it, I couldn’t shake what she’d said about Serena Jane and me becoming strangers to each other. It was the truth, I knew, but it was like a flea bite—itchy, annoying, so tiny that I would have liked to ignore it but couldn’t. That night, I tossed and thrashed the thought around my mind until it was as addled and whipped up as a batch of butter.
“What’s the matter with you?” Amelia asked when we were feeding the hens the next morning. She scattered a wide handful of grain like snow.
“It’s Serena Jane coming home. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act with her anymore. I’ve missed her, but I feel like the sister I had is gone, and I don’t know who all’s coming home in her place.”
Amelia threw down her last handful of feed. “In that case, why don’t you leave all the introductions up to her?” She put down her bucket and smacked her hands together. It was simple and sound advice, I thought, typical for Amelia. A life spent dodging the bullets of creditors had taught her how to get straight to the root of a problem and solve it quick. So I kept my distance, letting my sister sweep back into town with all the glory of a somewhat faded matinee idol. “She’ll come out here, don’t you wonder,” Amelia reassured me. “She won’t be able to resist.” And after a week, that’s exactly what happened.
When she did, it was just me feeding the chickens, tossing out handfuls of corn without even really looking where they were falling, the noon sun bludgeoning my vision so that I didn’t see her walk up and then couldn’t see her clearly when she did. I stepped into a patch of shade and blinked. “Hello, sister mine,” she said, her words crisper than they used to be so that I wasn’t sure if she was being mocking or not. Her hair had grown darker. It was the color of honey now and cut a little shorter so that it no longer flowed over her shoulders like a mermaid’s. In fact, from what I could see, nothing much fluid was left of my sister anymore. She was buckled and belted, her slim legs safely encased in nylon, her hem dropped neatly to her knees. There were still some hippies rattling around the state in their death-trap vans, but fashions were starting to change. Serena Jane appeared to have weathered the era with the tired resignation of an old woman.
“Well,” she said. Her eyes roved across the sky and caught on the outline of the rusted windmill. “Bob Bob and I are back in town now. We just got in last week.”
“Oh.” I tried to picture my sister as the wife of the town doctor, essentially taking up where Maureen Morgan had left off. I tried to see her wrapped up in one of Maureen’s aprons or bent over Maureen’s flower beds, tending the roses, but I couldn’t do it. “It seems kind of strange that Dr. Morgan is moving away,” I finally said. “None of the other Dr. Morgans ever did that.”
Serena Jane nodded. “They’re going down to Florida.”
I scuffed my boot in the dirt, shooing a chicken. “That’s nice.”
Serena Jane shrugged, as if after eight years in Buffalo, time and space had ceased to matter much. “I got your letter about August. I’m really sorry.” But she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded bored.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
Serena Jane sniffed slightly, her nostrils flaring at the chicken stench like flower petals. “Not that much has changed around here. I suppose you know that Sal Dunfry and her husband are living in Papa’s old house now. They painted it yellow.”
“I know. They planted daffodils out in the front yard. It looks real nice.”
Serena Jane sniffed again. “I detest gardening. Do you remember Marcus Thompson? I’ve hired him to come and do the flowers.” I could feel my face grow hot down to the roots of my hair. “He’s wonderful with the garden,” Serena Jane said.
“Is he?” I tried to keep my voice disinterested.
Serena Jane snickered. “Anyone would think you’re still sweet on his little bones, Truly.”
I scowled. “It’s not like that. He’s just my friend.”
“Whatever.” She swatted at a fly.
“How’s Bobbie? When can I meet him?” I pictured the puckered, newborn face in the one photograph I possessed of him. “Why have you never sent any photographs? Why haven’t you ever brought him home?”
Serena Jane stared down at the dirt under her open-toed shoes. “It’s complicated,” she whispered, “but he’s fine, really. He’s good. Growing.” Motherhood had evidently become routine to her. Perhaps the idea that Bobbie would one day detach himself from her seemed like an unbelievable premise.
I wondered if Maureen Morgan had felt that way when Bob Bob got married and moved off to Buffalo—as though a heavy weight had been cut from her body, freeing it from years of inadvertent torture. Probably she didn’t. Maureen was fundamentally opposite from Serena Jane in most things, curved and doughy while Serena Jane was angular and flat, sentimental while Serena Jane was practical, mousy and faded while Serena Jane was blonder than the sun. Or used to be, at any rate. I wondered if, after a life passed in Maureen’s house, sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same plates, Serena Jane would also start to develop plump calves and a small wattle under her chin. If she would list slightly from side to side when she walked, like a ship plowing a gentle and familiar sea. No, I decided. Those qualities—rotundity, a staid calmness in the face of advancing age—came only to contented people, and you just had to look at Serena Jane to tell she was about as far from that as Aberdeen was from the moon.
Serena Jane brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. “You’re staring at me.” She scowled and put one hand up to block the sunlight.
I blushed. “You look different.”
“So do you.”
I had still been half-girl when she got married, but I knew there was no trace left of that person now. Instead, everything on me was square and solid—my cheeks, my eye sockets, even the suggestion of my breasts underneath my baggy man’s shirt. I was taller than most of the men in town, but there was no telling if I’d topped out, and anyway, it wasn’t so much my height that startled folks. It was more my solidity, the way my larger joints bulged like boulders. Serena Jane must have forgotten all that about me.
She made an O with her mouth—a pretty round shape full of promise, full of all the things she could think to say but didn’t—then she choked out an apology and turned and stumbled back to the dirt road where she had left her car. All the other routes in Aberdeen had gradually been sealed up and paved, but not this stretch. After all, it didn’t lead anywhere. Serena Jane slammed the door of Bob Bob’s new Buick and turned the engine over, her delicate ankle working the gas pedal with an energetic fury. In the rearview mirror, she could see that I’d followed her and was standing next to the farm’s single rusted mailbox, my jaw as slack as the hinges. I waved to her, flapping my beefy hands, but Serena Jane ignored me and shifted the car into drive. She put her foot down harder on the accelerator, relishing the hazy dust the car kicked up.
Serena Jane narrowed her eyes, wheels spinning over the road and wheels spinning in her head. Maybe it was no accident that she’d ended up stuck back in Aberdeen, it occurred to me, but maybe she wasn’t meant to stay, either. If she’d made a quick check of the mirror, she would have seen my outline wavering in the dust, still there, always there. The bulk of me would follow her wherever she went. But she didn’t look. She drove faster, leaving me alone, but not for too much longer. Serena Jane was spinning a plan that would change all that.