Mom was rigid as a tree trunk from head to toe, betrayed only by the faint tremble in her hands. Sorrow looked nervously between them. The soup churned unpleasantly in her stomach.
“I said we would talk about it,” Mom said.
Patience stood to lean against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest. She was as tall as Mom now, and they could have been two sides of a mirror, except that Patience was fully dressed and had combed her hair sleekly over her shoulders, whereas Mom was still wearing her flannel nightshirt, and her hair was a bird’s nest tangle of brown and gray.
“We are talking about it,” Patience said.
“Later,” Mom said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“How much later?” Patience demanded, and Sorrow flinched. “Dad said if I want to enroll by fall I have to catch up—”
Mom dropped a bowl into the sink with a clatter, tossed the towel onto the counter, and walked out of the kitchen without saying a word. There was the muffled thumping of her sock-clad feet on the stairs, the snap of a door closing.
Sorrow glanced at the clock. Mom hadn’t even been out of her room for a full hour.
Patience sighed and turned off the faucet. She picked up the towel Mom had discarded, set it down again. “I can’t believe her.”
“You shouldn’t have mentioned Dad,” Sorrow said.
“Oh, shut up,” Patience said. “You don’t even understand what’s going on.”
Sorrow’s face burned and anger buzzed in her ears. Patience was sixteen. People in town were always telling Sorrow how beautiful her sister was, how she was growing to be such a lovely young woman. Sorrow was eight, exactly half Patience’s age, and she knew she would always be exactly half of what Patience was: half as beautiful, half as beloved.
Maybe she was only half as smart too, but she wasn’t stupid. Mom and Patience were arguing because Patience wanted to go to school—to regular school, the high school in town, after being homeschooled by Mom for her entire life. She claimed Dad agreed it was a good idea, but his last visit had been in January, which meant Patience had waited almost three months to say anything. Three months of mulling it over, forming her arguments, making a plan, and today was the day she chose to bring it up, even though it was one of Mom’s bad days and she knew better.
“You could have helped, you know,” Patience said.
Sorrow looked up. “Helped what?”
“Don’t you want to go to school too? Meet new people? Make friends?”
Sorrow swirled her spoon angrily in her soup. “I don’t know.”
“I think you would like it,” Patience said. “You can help me talk to her later. We can convince her if we do it together.”
It didn’t sound all bad, having a chance to go to school in Abrams Valley and learn things Mom didn’t teach them, to talk to girls her own age and maybe even play with them. But Sorrow couldn’t think about what she might like about school without thinking about all the things she knew she would hate. She didn’t even like to go into town, where everybody knew about their family and made jokes about the weirdo Lovegood girls. Last week two boys about Sorrow’s age had followed her and Mom all the way from the grocery store to the post office and back, muttering about crazies and psychos when their backs were turned, bursting into fits of laughter when Sorrow glared at them. Mom had pretended not to hear anything, but when they got back to the car she had sat for a long time without turning the key, not looking at Sorrow, not doing anything except staring through the windshield and breathing.
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said again.
Patience rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever. I don’t need your help.”
She stomped out of the kitchen. More footsteps on the stairs, another door slamming shut, and Sorrow was alone.
She poked at her soup, but it was cold and filmy and she wasn’t hungry anymore. She had been hoping to convince Patience to play a game or go for a walk. She was tired of being stuck inside through the gray days and cold nights. She was tired of cold, tired of snow, tired of mud, tired of wind and ice. Their farmhouse felt small and isolated in this gray tail end of winter in Vermont. The orchard was only a few miles from town, but nobody came to visit, not unless there was trouble.
She didn’t need Patience. She would be fine on her own. She bundled up against the cold and went outside.
Sorrow followed the path around the barren garden, past the chicken coop, down to the old dirt road. Her boots crunched through the crusty top layer of snow to the hard ice below. The pickup at the edge of a fallow field was a soft white lump.
She knew winter couldn’t last forever, however much it felt like it would. Spring was coming. She could feel it in her bones, in the light flutter beneath her lungs, even if she couldn’t yet smell it in the air.
And when spring came to the orchard, the favors would return.
Last spring she had found the very first favor of the year by the pond in the northwest corner of the property, in the branches of a crooked old beech tree leaning over the water. She wanted to look there again, just in case there was a sign of spring waiting to be found. She followed the dirt road around the hill and stomped down the slope, slipping and sliding in the deep snow, toward the boundary with the Abrams land. When she reached the meadow, cold wind whipped around her, stinging her face and making her eyes water. The stone well at one end of the meadow was a fat hump beneath a snowdrift, the wire fence a sketched black line. At the other end of the meadow was the cider house.
The cider house door was open.
Sorrow’s heart thumped in surprise. The weathered two-by-six that normally barred the door was lying on the ground, and all along the front of the building the snow was trampled. A line of footprints led to the fence and through the field on the Abrams side.
The Abramses weren’t allowed on Lovegood land, no more than the Lovegoods were allowed on Abrams land. The sheriff had made both families promise to keep to their own property after the last time Mr. Abrams had called the police and said Mom was cutting down trees on his side of the fence, and Mom had called the police when Mr. Abrams and his brother were hunting in the orchard.
Sorrow crept forward to approach the door from the side. Her mouth was dry and her heart was racing so fast she could feel it in her throat. She had to say something. She wasn’t a baby. She was eight years old, and she was a Lovegood. She wasn’t going to let an Abrams scare her away.
She leaned into the open doorway. “Hello?”
Her voice echoed dully. It was so dark inside it took her eyes several seconds to adjust.