Burn Our Bodies Down(32)

There it is. A lie I’ve caught her in. It never works with Mom, never gets her to back down, but Gram’s different. She has to be different.

“Did I?” she says. “Really?”

“Yeah.” I shift from foot to foot warily. She’s too easy, too curious. I know what to do with defensive, with angry. Not with this. “You didn’t say it was Mom’s, anyway.”

“I’m sure I must have.”

“You didn’t. I know what I heard.”

Gram tilts her head, eyebrows raised. “And I don’t?”

I can’t breathe right. Shallow and quick, a seizing in my lungs. How did I end up in this same fight? I’ve had it with Mom, over and over, and I left her, I left all that. This was supposed to be better.

“Margot?” Gram sets down her work boots and the bucket and comes toward me, her too-familiar face creased with concern. “Are you okay, honey? Come here. It’s all right.”

I just stare at her. Rooted to the spot, a hundred arguments playing all at once in my head. I’ve always told myself it’s just Mom, just Mom who can’t accept that things happened the way I know they did. But if it’s the same with Gram, maybe the problem isn’t either of them. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one who’s wrong over and over; I’m the one dreaming up hurts and picking fights. Maybe that notebook I kept in Calhoun was full of lies.

But it can’t be. I saw what I saw.

“Let it out,” Gram says. “Deep breaths.” She takes hold of my shoulders, squeezes them gently and draws me into a hug. I stand there rigid in the fold of her arms, exhausted, afraid. For a second I want to apologize. If it were Mom, I would.

That, at least, can be different here.

“Good girl,” Gram says, stepping back. “All right. Why don’t you go get changed?”

She’s smiling. The fight over, the conversation dropped. It’s a relief, really, and I go without another word. Back to my room. Back to that fucking dresser. And that dress still matches what I saw on that girl. But it doesn’t matter. It didn’t prove a single thing.

I was stupid to think it would be enough to get answers from Gram. I shouldn’t have played my cards so early. Shouldn’t have let her make me wonder if I ever had any in the first place.

It’s not giving up, I tell myself. I’ll try again. But I’m not going at Gram without a hell of a lot more in my pocket.

My clothes from yesterday are still dirty, so even though it stings, feels like defeat, I pull open the dresser drawers and grab a pair of shorts, along with a T-shirt worn through with small holes.

I don’t know for sure what Mom looked like at my age, but as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror wearing her clothes, in her house, I think it must have been exactly like this. Before her face narrowed. Before that scar marked her cheek. It’s easier today than it was yesterday, to know I’m only ever what she already was. I can’t have her here with me, but least I’ll have this.

Back downstairs Gram is waiting. She doesn’t say anything about the fight we had, if that’s what she’d call it. I know I would. Even the smallest thing can come back bigger. Instead she just nods to my shoes, dangling from my hands by their laces, and waits while I put them on. As soon as I’m ready, she’s leading me out the back of the house. We step onto the porch, and I watch her take the same moment I did. A breath, and a gaze, and the warmth of the sun.

“What’s the work?” I ask, eager to fill the silence. The farm is nearly dead, from what I can tell. I don’t know what there is to be done besides start it all over.

“Back acres need tending,” she says, stepping off the porch and making for the side of the house, where the truck is parked. I take one last look at the Miller house before I follow.

I wait until we’re in the truck, easing down one of the access roads, to ask her. The burned fields are off to the right, far enough that I can only taste the lingering smoke. The way the fire was burning, at least a third of her land must be gone, if it’s even all the way out. But she doesn’t seem worried. She hasn’t since I met her.

“How do you make it work?” I ask. I’m facing her instead of the road, neither of us buckled in as the fields slip by, each one just like the last, like the ones by the house. Corn too golden for this time of year, somehow dead and growing at the same time. “The farm, I mean. It’s just you, isn’t it?”

We both know what I’m not saying. The girl like a grave dug between us, and for a moment Gram hesitates. I didn’t mean to bait her. I didn’t mean to start this again.

Then she shrugs, and the tension breaks. “It is.”

I don’t know exactly, but a farm this size—it would probably take a good seventy or eighty people to keep it running the way it should. Instead it’s only Gram in a pickup, with crops that hardly seem like they’ll yield anything at all.

“So how do you manage it all alone?”

Gram gives me a sidelong look as she turns the truck onto a road running toward the Miller house. “I should think you’d know the answer to that better than anyone,” she says. And it catches in my throat, winds between my fingers like a hand to hold, because I know exactly what she means. Me, managing my own life, raising myself, alone in an apartment with Mom right there next to me.