Also, a pile of lumber. Even metal patio furniture.
But the big selling point for Pa was the outbuildings. A tiny toolshed so ancient, the slats of its tin roof are warped, like bacon shrinking in a skillet. Pry open the door, though, and you’ll find it’s filled with a shallow row of gleaming tools, far more than we’ve ever had before.
Kitty-corner from the shed is another structure, the small wooden room Mom has already set up shop in, twisting her herbs into bundles to hang from the rafters to dry, lining her shelves—newly built by Pa—with amber glass bottles that hold her oils and potions. And Julia’s jars of honey.
And the final building is an open-air lean-to, Pa’s woodworking station. He’s there now, his circular saw vibrating through the air, but so far away, the sound is faint, a mosquito buzzing in my ear.
Pa wouldn’t care that I’m with Luke; he actually took to him when he befriended Luke’s dad to work on our truck.
But I still keep it a secret.
I can’t risk the others knowing.
11
Charleigh
Rolling down the highway, Charleigh’s hands clench the steering wheel, feathery pines shimmying past her window as she drifts onto the shoulder.
Her stomach seizes like it always does when she turns down Seven Pines Road. So she rarely does. She likes to keep her past firmly there. Including her mother and father.
Years ago, soon after her wedding, she and Alexander bought her parents’ land for them, freeing them from their harsh landlord, Mr. Greer. The transaction was sort of an unspoken agreement that the Millers wouldn’t be bothering Charleigh and Alexander much after that. That they’d keep to themselves.
Not that they minded. Ever since Charleigh had left home, they took to calling herhighfalutin,too big for her britches,stuck-up.
“You just don’t know how to act no more,” her mother, Ruthlynn, said as she thumped her tin of Skoal, packing down the tobacco.
Charleigh had come home from Dallas one Christmas to visit.
It would be the last time she made that mistake, coming home from school on winter break to see them.
Once she and Alexander moved to Longview and had Nellie, though, they’d bring their daughter out to visit her grandparents on occasion. But Ruthlynn and Hank were no more tender with little Nellie than they had been with Charleigh.
“What is wrong with that child? She’s already a little heathen,” Ruthlynn remarked, loudly, one time, a sour smile creeping across her thin lips. “And her nose is bigger than Dallas.”
As if she were one to talk about manners. That woman has no more class than a drunken hobo.
Charleigh presses on the gas with her Cole Haan moccasins, accelerating so fast that her childhood home blurs past. Which is exactly the goal.
But still, the brutal memories flock back.
Charleigh rising at dawn as young as five years old to go and milk the cows, stomach grumbling with hunger that would be only momentarily satisfied by stale toast and one scrambled egg. They never had enough of anything. Food. Money. Patience. Kindness.
Charleigh feeding the pigs, stepping around their muck.
Cleaning the chicken coop when she got home from school, even when freezing sleet stung her little hands.
And when shit went wrong—and it was always going wrong, like the pasteurizer breaking just as they were getting ready toprocess the milk—her parents’ already-foul moods would spiral. Charleigh learned early on to scatter, lest she get the stinging wrath of Ruthlynn’s switch or Joe’s belt.
Both her parents drank. And not in the fun, casual way that she does when she’s socializing. To revel. To celebrate.
No, they did it to escape. The cheap alcohol—Old Crow whiskey or Schlitz beer—turned her parents into even more bitter caricatures of their miserable sober selves.
Just driving by the old homestead, Charleigh can summon the smell of her father’s cheap, filthy cigarettes, feel the scorch mark on the top of her thigh where he extinguished one, drunk and cursing her for spilling the carton of Tropicana, a luxury at their home. Can hear their endless bickering.
She can’t believe she’s out here now, but she has no choice.
Nellie.
