They gathered a bouquet from the beds around the house: Siberian iris, lily of the valley, peony. The last of the spring poppies were bursts of orange and yellow, now fading in the summer heat. She had known all of them once, the names of the flowers and trees, the shrubs and clover and grass. It hadn’t been terribly useful when she moved away and teachers expected her to know things like state capitals and presidents, but growing up in the orchard it had been the only knowledge that mattered.
They walked down the hill and along the edge of the fallow field. The grass was high, and fat bees bounced lazily between flowers. The rusty iron skeleton of an ancient pickup truck was slowly being claimed by the earth; soil in its bed bloomed with wild daisies, and a whip-thin maple sapling was growing hopefully through the gap where the windshield had once been. There was a small bird’s nest tucked between the doorframe and the side mirror.
Sorrow glanced into the nest as they passed: empty.
Verity said, “It turns out it’s more trouble than it’s worth to pay somebody to haul something like that away.”
“It’s been here forever anyway,” Sorrow said. “It gives the meadow character.”
“It was my father’s. He got it from his father when it was already a classic—did I ever tell you about them?”
“I don’t think so,” Sorrow said. Verity’s father had died when she was only a child. He was buried in the family graveyard, but Sorrow didn’t know much more about him than his name, which had always stood out from the eccentric but thoroughly New England Lovegood names. “His name was . . . Anton? Where was he from again?”
“Close,” Verity said, smiling. “Antanas. And he was born in upstate New York, but his family was Lithuanian. His parents came over after World War Two. That truck, it was the first real American thing they bought, their first big purchase, after they’d been working long enough to save up some money. My grandfather was absolutely meticulous about maintaining it. He gave it to my father for his eighteenth birthday, and it ran perfectly for another fifteen years until the day my grandfather died. According to my father, he was driving in from the orchard when the truck stopped and wouldn’t start again, and he knew right away what that meant.”
Sorrow looked back at the truck, a ruddy fossil in a rich green field. “I didn’t know any of that.”
“I wish I knew more about his family,” Verity admitted. “I was only six when he died. Pancreatic cancer. It happened so fast we barely knew he was sick before he was gone. But I remember how much he loved that truck. And I remember . . .” Verity laughed a little, shaking her head. “He used to sing these old songs. I couldn’t understand a word of them, but he had a lovely voice.”
Verity’s father and his family had never featured in any of the stories she’d told when Sorrow was a child. Verity had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Lovegoods, so extensive and detailed it had always made Sorrow’s head spin to learn new pieces of it, but the more distant branches of their family tree had never gotten as much attention. She had always assumed it was because the Lovegoods were more important than everybody else. She hadn’t realized until she moved away how thoroughly her mother’s one-sided interest had skewed what she knew.
Past the truck, around the field, to the edge of the orchard. Steps Sorrow had walked a thousand times, barefoot and in stomping winter boots, in sunshine and rain and snow, sometimes skipping, sometimes dawdling, often with no particular destination in mind. The orchard had never been a place that invited hurry. It moved at the pace of the seasons, the change of the weather, the slow orbit of the earth. Their apple trees were the oldest in all of Abrams Valley. They weren’t as bountiful as they had once been, but they still blossomed pink and white when the weather warmed, and in the fall Verity hired people from town for the harvest. The Abrams Valley variety was an old-fashioned apple: small and sour and hard, too bitter to eat, good only for cider.
It should be called the Lovegood variety. That was what Verity used to say, and Sorrow had always bobbed her head in agreement. The Abrams family had the town and the whole valley, with an Abrams Street and an Abrams House, a plaque on a church about its founding minister, Clement Abrams, and another in the park commemorating the day the town name had been officially changed from Cold Hollow. The Abrams name was stamped all over everything, touching every part of the valley. There was no reason for them to claim the apples too. The Lovegoods had been first to the valley, first to plant an orchard. The apples were rightfully theirs.
The scent of apples lingered even now. Sorrow tasted the air as they walked, their footsteps crunching softly on the dirt road, morning sun warm on their shoulders.
Sorrow was quiet for a minute, then said, “I think I saw one of the Abrams girls outside last night.”
“Here?” Verity looked around, as though she expected an Abrams to leap from the trees. “In the orchard?”
“No, on the road, when I was calling Dad. I couldn’t tell who it was. Are both of them living at home now?”
“They are. Cassie’s back for the summer from that prep school of hers, and Julie finally managed to finish college at UVM.”
“Finally?”
“She transferred out of a couple schools before she stuck with one.”
“That sucks for her.”
Verity raised her eyebrows. “Those girls have been given every opportunity, and more chances than most people get, and all they do is throw them away.”
Sorrow slanted a glance toward her. “Didn’t you just tell Ethan to throw away those same opportunities and make his own way?”
“That’s different,” Verity said. “He’s more like us than he is like them.”
Sorrow started to reply, stopped herself. She didn’t like the judgmental tone in her mother’s voice, the us and them and lines between traced in the air with an electric crackle. Eight years in Miami had shown her there was a much bigger spectrum of rich to poor than existed in Abrams Valley, and probably in the whole of Vermont. There were a lot of people in the world with problems bigger than anything the Abrams and Lovegood families could imagine. Sonia’s parents hadn’t even been able to stay in their own country, much less own and farm the same valuable parcel of land for twelve generations.
But she didn’t know if she was allowed to say that. For all that this road was familiar to her feet, these trees in summer as comforting to her as an old blanket, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being the stranger here, a visitor who hadn’t quite learned all of the rules.
The Lovegood family cemetery was on the west side of the orchard, in a deep hollow at the bottom of a hill, far from the house and road. A little farther on was the property line, and beyond that a nature preserve popular with hikers and fishermen. The preserve had once been Lovegood land, long before Sorrow was born, but her great-grandmother Devotion had donated it to a public trust to keep the Abramses from getting their hands on it.