Sorrow stopped in the middle of setting out forks and stared at Ethan. “Your grandfather? Eli Abrams?”
“Oh, god, no, not him,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “This was my grandfather on my mom’s side. Grandpa Eli wouldn’t—I can’t even imagine him going to a ball game. Or voluntarily talking to a kid.”
“I remember him a little,” Sorrow said. “We used to see him around town.”
What she remembered of Eli Abrams was the click of his silver-tipped cane on the pavement, the stale scent of cigar smoke wafting after him, and the way he would scowl and spit when Grandma passed. She remembered, too, watching Patience twist up clusters of dried grass to mimic the hair he had growing from his ears, and laughing so hard her stomach hurt.
Eli Abrams had died when Sorrow was about seven. That night Verity had opened a bottle of cider to raise a toast of good-bye and good riddance.
“So what happened? To your Phillies guy?” Ethan asked.
“It’s kinda sad, actually,” Sorrow said. “He died during spring training. Got in a fight.”
Sonia’s parents had a little shrine in their living room: photographs of a handsome young man with a wide boyish smile, a bat and a jersey and a hat, all kept meticulously dusted in a quiet corner. Sorrow knew all the stories about how his father had died in one of Castro’s prisons, and that was when he decided to leave Cuba forever, how the family would still be there if he hadn’t taken that boat and that chance, all the uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters left behind, and how after he died in a knife fight—drugs, women, baseball, politics; the story of that fight changed with whoever was telling it—the entire family left Philadelphia for Miami and never looked back.
Seeing that shrine, hearing those stories, that was the first time Sorrow had realized somebody else’s family could have a history as strong as the one she had left behind—and she had no part in it. It was bad enough that there were so many people to keep track of, that their food didn’t taste like her food, that the cousins had games and jokes she couldn’t follow, that she couldn’t understand half of what anybody was saying because every conversation slid effortlessly between English and Spanish. That shrine for a lost young man, those photographs and memories, they carried stories she would never fit into, a history she would never share.
There were footsteps on the porch and a few thumps as Verity stomped dirt from her shoes. Grandma waved them all to the table to eat when she came in, and over breakfast baseball talk gave way to small talk. Sorrow learned that Ethan had been doing work for Verity and Grandma for a few months; he also had a job at a restaurant in town, so he made it out to the farm only two or three times a week. He was trying to save up for college, he said, because his father would only help if Ethan went to the right kind of school.
“Define ‘the right kind of school,’” Sorrow said.
“Harvard, obviously,” Ethan said, “because as my dad loves to remind me, Abrams men have gone to Harvard for five generations, and I’m not going to be the one to screw that up. But if I can’t quite swing that, he’d settle for any of the Ivies.”
“You’re better off making your own way,” Verity said. “You don’t need their help.”
Sorrow glanced at her, eyebrows raised. That was easy to say if you weren’t the one trading a legacy spot at Harvard for a lifetime of student loan debt, but she didn’t know Ethan, didn’t know his relationship with his father and the Abrams side of his family. It sounded like a conversation they’d had many times before.
Ethan shrugged, didn’t agree or disagree, and changed the subject. Conversation turned to the work that needed to be done around the farm, the projects they had planned for the summer, Verity and Ethan deciding what to trim, what to paint, when and how, and Grandma filling a page of her notebook with her own suggestions in elegant, spidery handwriting.
Verity had never asked Sorrow about her own college plans.
Sorrow could not recall a single time when they had ever talked about what she would do after high school. She talked about school during their phone calls, mostly because she never knew what else to talk about it, but always carefully, choosing her words so that she wasn’t complaining too much, but she wasn’t too excited either. Verity had never gone to college—Sorrow wasn’t even sure she had ever graduated from high school, and not knowing made her uneasy. Over the phone, from the safety of her bedroom in Florida with the air conditioner humming and palm trees swaying outside, Sorrow had always been wary of saying anything that would make her life in Florida sound so much better than the one Verity could have given her. It was easier to edit and elide than to risk saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Sorrow grew quieter and quieter as the meal went on. She barely even followed what they were talking about, much less had any idea how to help. She didn’t know how to be a farm girl anymore. She hadn’t even been able to feed the chickens without dropping half of their food on her shoes. She had forgotten so much in her years away, transformed into a girl who didn’t fit the puzzle gap she had left behind, and she didn’t know how to find her way back.
9
AFTER BREAKFAST VERITY asked, “What do you want to do this morning?”
They were alone in the kitchen. Grandma was in the garden, Ethan digging tools out of the barn.
Sorrow twisted a dish towel in her hands and took a breath. “I was thinking about bringing flowers to the cemetery.”
Verity looked at her in surprise.
“I thought we could both go?” Sorrow said.
There was a long silence, and Sorrow’s hope crumpled. Verity was going to refuse. She was going to say no. But it was fine. It wasn’t the same as when Sorrow had been a child pleading for her mother to get dressed, to leave her bedroom, to eat lunch and walk through the orchard and lift her face to the sun. It wasn’t the same thing at all, this small overture, however much Sorrow felt she was flickering between then and now, the dark old kitchen and the light new one, memories clouding around the sunny morning with sickly uncertainty.
“We can do that,” Verity said after a long silence.
Sorrow’s smile was shaky and relieved. She turned away quickly.