Burn Our Bodies Down(34)

“Not all.” Gram touches my elbow, and the warmth of her, a real and living warmth, brings me back, urges me along with her deeper into the field. “Most. But not all.”

“What happened? To make them that way, I mean.”

She scoffs, and for a moment her steps take her out of sight. It lights a flare of fear in my chest. I rush after her.

“Look around,” she says. The plants brushing my skin, reaching down the back of my shirt. Writhing up out of the ground. “Phalene got hit with a drought some forty years back. But Fairhaven got a blight worse than that.”

“But the Millers—”

“Yes,” she says, almost upset. “Well, you can spare yourself all manner of things with a bit of luck and a bit of money.”

I don’t really think Gram is one to talk about money. Maybe she doesn’t own half the town anymore, but she’s not exactly hurting for it.

We find a few normal ears of corn. Those are the ones Gram drops into the bucket. It takes a long time to fill it. A long, long time, and we’re nearly at the edge of the farm before we manage it.

I can see the apricot grove ahead, the beckoning of the shade so strong it’s in my bones. I just want to sit, and rest, and feel something besides this pressing heat. But Gram starts back to the truck, and I follow her. Of course I do.

Years ago, a day’s work would’ve filled the whole bed of the truck. And before that, even more. But all these acres, they’ve dwindled down to Gram and me, and what we can carry. She drops the bucket into the bed of the truck with a pitiful thud and we both try hard not to look at the empty space around it.

“Will you sell it?” I ask.

Gram shakes her head. “Anyone buying is looking for larger quantities than we can harvest anymore. This is just for me. For us.”

“But you used to sell?” I try to fill in the pieces, try to sketch out what it was like when Mom was young. My hands braced on the side of the flatbed, corn silk stuck to a hangnail on my thumb. “When my mom was here?”

“Not even then.” She sighs. “The last time we were pulling a profit would’ve been when my parents ran this place.”

“What was that like?” I ask.

Gram waits a moment as the sun builds between us, staring over at the Miller house. Their corn grows too high for me to see the porch, to see the bright flowers I’m sure are gathered by every window. But we’re close enough that I can imagine that picture of Mom I took from the Bible laid over everything, snow and blue sky as she smiled at the camera. At her own mother.

“Like that,” Gram says, at last. “Just like that.”

At the top of the house, as I’m watching, a window opens. “Hey,” I hear, drifting over the field, before I realize there’s a person, there’s Tess, waving her arm so I’ll see, leaning so far out the window it makes my heart skitter into my throat.

Gram’s expression goes tight. They were polite to each other in the station. Even friendly, I think, by Gram’s standards. But being civil can’t go far toward easing the sting of living side by side.

“Margot!” Tess yells. I take a half step toward the house before I even realize it, my fists clenched with the urge to haul her away from the window before she falls out. “Come over!”

Gram is already opening the door of the truck, ready to get back to Fairhaven. But when I met Tess I didn’t get the impression that she ever let people tell her no, and that doesn’t seem to be any different even when she’s barely more than a shadow against the sun.

“Get in the truck,” Gram tells me quietly. “Before Theresa remembers her manners.”

It’s too late. “You too, Vera! My mom’s got brunch.” A pause, and then: “You can introduce Margot.”

That seems to do it. Gram shuts her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them again it’s to give me a sort of conspiratorial look of exhaustion. Two Nielsens, dealing with the Millers together. “All right,” she calls back. “Just a minute.”

Tess disappears from the window. I wait for Gram to get into the truck first. I don’t want to seem too eager. But I’m anxious to see Tess. To talk to her about yesterday. To find out what happened after I left the station, and just what I have to be afraid of.





thirteen





if the outside of the Miller house looks something like Fairhaven, the inside is entirely different. Fairhaven feels like a honeycomb, rooms blocked off and cloistered, but the Miller house is open practically from one side to the other. The living room, the kitchen, the french doors and the sweeping view beyond. All of it done up in varying shades of white, and I catch myself wondering if anybody’s spilled anything anywhere in the last thirty years, if I might find tomato sauce and orange juice stains on the underside of every couch cushion.

Tess met us at the door and is just ahead of us now, wrapped in a blue summer dress and leading us across the plush white rug toward the kitchen. A woman is standing at the marble-topped island, wearing a stiff floral dress and staring down at a plate of fruit with a look of deep concentration. She must be Tess’s mom, but they don’t look much alike. Not compared to me and mine, at least.

“Hello, Sarah,” Gram says as we get close, and Tess’s mom looks up, startled, her fingers poised over the fruit plate with a strawberry pinched delicately between them. “Thank you for having us. This is my granddaughter, Margot.”