The Memory Trees

“I can probably eat five of Grandma’s pies,” she said. “Just give me a fork and show me where to start.”

Grandma Perseverance never spoke—she had been mute since long before Sorrow was born—so there were no phone calls between them, only letters, actual letters written in pen on paper. Grandma’s tended to be full of news about the garden and the orchard, the weather and the wildlife, but little about herself. Sorrow remembered her grandmother as a prolific writer, filling journal after journal with her slanting script, often sitting up late into the night to write by lamplight, but she had never shared what she wrote with anybody.

“Maybe you can convince her to take it easy while you’re here,” Verity said. “I certainly can’t get her to take a day off, or even sleep past six o’clock.”

“I can try,” Sorrow said. “I’m looking forward to helping her in the garden.”

“She’ll love that,” Verity said.

“But you should probably be warned that last year I ran over Sonia’s hibiscus bush the one and only time I tried to mow the lawn, so I might be kinda useless.”

She forced a light laugh, but Verity didn’t join her. She didn’t say anything, and Sorrow’s face warmed. She didn’t know if it was okay to talk about her stepmother with her mother, to joke about Florida while winding through Vermont, to mention that the garden at home was largely decorative, not functional, and that the only food they grew was basil and cilantro in pots on the porch. The two halves of her life had been separate for so long she didn’t know how to move from one world to the other, how to choose what to bring and what to leave behind. She didn’t know if Verity’s silence meant she had already chosen wrong.

She cleared her throat. “You said you were thinking of hiring somebody to help out?”

“Just for some of the extra work we have in the spring and summer.” A pause, a sidelong glance. “You remember the Abramses?”

Verity’s voice was even, her tone casual, but still Sorrow felt something shift between them, as though the air had grown heavier in an instant. Her first reaction was a hum of fear: Verity had noticed. She had noticed Sorrow’s patchy memory.

But in this, at least, Sorrow had an answer. She did remember. Many of her childhood memories were as frail as morning mist, but she could have been away eighty years instead of eight and she would remember the Abramses.

The Abramses and the Lovegoods were the founding families of the town of Abrams Valley. They had lived side by side since the eighteenth century, two families bound by mutual suspicion and animosity for two hundred and fifty years, ever since the preacher Clement Abrams had accused Rejoice Lovegood of witchcraft. Sorrow knew that history the same way she knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west, a truth so unshakable she wouldn’t have been able to forget it even if she had wanted to.

The Abrams family had occupied such a large part of her childhood it felt like they had been a cloud over the Lovegood orchard, a creeping gloom where there should have been sunshine. Don’t talk to the Abramses. Don’t trespass on their land. Don’t even cross the fence, and if you must, don’t get caught. Come tell me right away if you see an Abrams in the orchard. Those were the rules that governed Sorrow’s childhood. Those she had never forgotten.

Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had worn country club clothes and looked down their noses at the half-feral Lovegood girls. Their daughters had shiny blond hair and prep school uniforms; Sorrow and Patience hadn’t been allowed to play with them. They were the only other children nearby, but their mother’s rule was absolute.

“Yeah, I do,” Sorrow said. “Sure. They have two daughters?”

Verity wasn’t looking at her now. “Julie and Cassie. Cassie is about your age.”

And Julie was the age Patience would have been, had she lived. Sorrow’s thoughts quivered around their names, like rippling water in a pond. Blond hair, bright spots of color. Red coat, pink boots. Cassie, the younger, she recalled mainly as sneering insults behind her back, glares from across the street. She could not summon the details of their faces, but she remembered cold, and she remembered shadows, and she didn’t know why. She shook herself, focused on what Verity was saying.

“You hired one of them?” she asked doubtfully. “Really?”

“Oh, goodness, no,” Verity said. “Their cousin. He’s barely an Abrams at all. Only in name, really.” At Sorrow’s questioning glance, she explained, “Ethan is Paul’s brother’s son. Paul and Hannah, our neighbors?”

“If you say so. They were only ever Mr. and Mrs. Abrams to me. I sort of remember there was another Mr. Abrams.”

“Dean,” Verity said. “Dean Abrams is Ethan’s father, but he and Jody are divorced. They have been for years.”

The other Mr. Abrams. That was what Patience had called him, and Sorrow had thought, for a long time, that was his proper name. He and his family had lived in town. Pretty redheaded wife with a sad smile, and a little blond boy who had once checked out the library’s copy of My Father’s Dragon when Sorrow wanted it. She didn’t remember anything else about them.

“I’m going to need a flowchart to keep everybody straight. I can’t believe you hired an Abrams. What about the whole . . . thing?” Sorrow waved her hand, accidentally knocking her knuckles into the window. She tried for a teasing tone, didn’t think she quite managed it. “Fight? Everything? Pitchforks and torches and all that?”

Verity smiled. “Well, now, I know we’re not as cosmopolitan as Miami, but we only bring out the pitchforks for special occasions these days.”

Sorrow gave her a skeptical look. “So nobody cares? That you’ve got an Abrams working for you?”

“I didn’t say that,” Verity said. “But Ethan’s a good kid. If he would rather make his own way than rely on his family’s money like the rest of them, they’ve only got themselves to blame.”

Sorrow shifted in her seat, tugged at the seat belt digging into her collarbone. Verity’s words ought to have been comforting. She was saying all the right things. She was calm, rational. She was smiling, joking even, about a topic that had been so fraught before.

But she always had been able to smile when she had to. When the police came by, when the social worker visited, Verity had been able to put on a mask and become a woman who was a little odd, a little eccentric, but ultimately harmless. They had all worn masks for the world—for strangers. Patience had been so much better at it than Sorrow. Everything Sorrow had known about keeping their family’s secrets she had learned from her sister, but poorly, a clumsy imitation.

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