Where the Forest Meets the Stars(12)

“The poor kid!”
Before Jo could say the girl had come back, the call-waiting tone sounded in her ear. She looked at the screen. Shaw Daniels, her advisor, was calling. “I have to go. Shaw is calling.”
“Okay, bye,” Tabby said. “And call me sometime when it isn’t raining, damn it.”
“I will.” Jo hung up, then accepted the incoming call. “I was just going to text you.”
“I’m surprised I got you,” Shaw said. “Between study sites?”
“It’s raining. I’m in the Laundromat.”
“Good, you’re taking a break.”
Would any of them ever let her be the person she was before her diagnosis? She suspected Shaw was mostly stopping in to assess her health. He’d tried to make her hire a field assistant while she recovered, and he’d opposed her living in the Kinney house alone.
“Are you still up for a visit tonight?” Shaw asked.
“Of course. What’s your ETA?”
“We’ll get on the road after the last session, at around three o’clock. We should be there by seven thirty—eight at the latest. If you can wait, we’ll take you out for dinner.”
“Do you mind if we eat in? I was going to grill burgers. But I may have to make them inside if the rain keeps up.”
“Are you sure you want to go to all that trouble?”
“It’s no trouble at all,” Jo said.
“If you insist,” he said. “See you soon.”
After stops at the grocery store and farm stand, Jo returned to the cottage in the early afternoon. The girl was gone. Jo hoped she had gone home. But when she imagined the brutality the girl might be facing, she regretted wishing for it. She scanned the house, noting the girl hadn’t stolen anything. The only item out of place was a textbook, Ornithology , taken off the desk and left on the couch.
Jo pushed the girl out of her thoughts. She had a lot to do before her visitors arrived. After she straightened the house, she began preparing pies for dessert, one peach and one strawberry-rhubarb, made with fruit she’d bought at the farm stand. Normally she wouldn’t spend her precious field time so frivolously, but the rain was still coming down and she wanted the dinner to be nice for Shaw—if not for Tanner Bruce. Tanner, also one of Shaw’s PhD students, had been only one year ahead of her when she entered graduate school, but now he was three years ahead and nearly finished. Shortly before Jo left school to care for her dying mother, she’d slept with Tanner. Three times. But the only contact she’d had with him since she left was his signature on a sympathy card from Shaw and his graduate students.
Jo’s hands perfunctorily rolled out a circle of pie dough while her mind traveled to the last day she’d spent with Tanner. The July night was hot, too warm to sleep in the tent, and they’d stripped and made love in a deep pool of a stream near their campsite. The memory would have been one of the best of her life if Tanner Bruce weren’t in it.
“Who are the pies for?”
Jo’s attention snapped back to her hands. The girl had slipped into the house without a sound, her hair and Jo’s oversize clothing damp with rain.
“Where were you?” Jo asked.
“In the woods.”
“Doing what?”
“I thought you’d have that policeman with you again.”
Jo laid a smooth round of floury dough in one of the new pie pans. “I’ve decided you and I should work this out on our own. Do you think we can do that?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Tell me where you live and why you won’t go back. I’ll help you with whatever is going on.”
“I told you all that already. Can I have some pie when they’re ready?”
“They’re for later, for my guests.”
“Who’s coming?”
“The professor who oversees my project and three graduate students.”
“Are they ornithologists?”
“They are. How do you know that word?”
“From your Ornithology book. I read the preface and first two chapters,” she said, pronouncing the word pre-fāce .
“You actually read it?”
“I skipped the parts someone from Hetrayeh wouldn’t understand, but not that much. I liked the chapter about bird diversity and how their beaks match what they eat and their feet match where they live. I never really thought about that before.”
“You’re an advanced reader.”
“I use the dead girl’s brain to do things, and she was smart.”
Jo wiped her floury hands on a dish towel. “Go wash and I’ll let you pinch the edges of the piecrusts.”
The alien ran for the sink. When she finished washing, Jo said, “I need a better name to call you than Earpood. Can you think of a regular name?”
The girl put her chin in her hand and pretended to think. “What about Ursa . . . because I’m from the place you call Ursa Major?”
“I like the name Ursa.”
“You can call me that.”
“No last name?”
“Major.”
“That makes sense. Have you ever made piecrust, Ursa?”
“We don’t make pies on Hetrayeh.”
“Let me show you.”
Ursa mastered piecrusts as quickly as she grasped college-level reading, and while the pies baked, scenting the kitchen with their sweetness, she helped Jo make potato salad. They used Jo’s mother’s recipe—the only potato salad worth eating, in Jo’s opinion. Next they prepared ground beef to make burgers the way Jo’s mother had, with Worcestershire, bread crumbs, and spices. Jo hadn’t cooked so elaborately for herself since she’d lived at the cottage. She liked the idea of making her mother’s recipes on her birthday—a way of honoring her—and the food preparation helped distract her from the mounting tension of seeing Tanner again. Even the girl wasn’t enough of a diversion.