I hadn’t glimpsed a single star in Dallas.
Then there was the impromptu swim in the pond with Pa that first night after we got the horses settled. The water felt as warm as the stack of pennies baking in the ashtray of our truck.
I hated Dallas. Hated the big city and the fact that we had to let go of most of our livestock. Hated the filthy air and the bland strip malls.
Hated it all except for Luke.
Just thinking of him now sends shivers over me. I miss him so much.
Even though Dallas wasn’t for me, that’s where he is, and I was torn up—still am—over our sudden departure.
But it couldn’t be helped.
“We gotta get back to the land. To what we know,” Pa told our neighbor, an elderly gentleman named Mr. Baxter, who was always in his front yard tinkering with a vehicle sitting on cinder blocks.
“Sure gonna miss y’all,” Mr. Baxter said, then packed a wedge of Skoal in his gums.
I won’t miss seeing that, I thought, but just grinned back.
What we know is homesteading. Our rowdy pigs. Chickens. Farm-fresh eggs so natural, the yolks are the color of tangerines. Not the store-bought, watery mass-produced stuff.
Mom’s little wooden shed filled with her drying herbs. Her oils.
The land. Our luscious gardens with tomatoes so heavy, the vines threaten to snap.
Pa’s woodworking shop.
The land is in my blood. It’s who I am.
I’ll never get sick of an open night sky, so pitch-black that it looks like I’m gazing into a bottomless well. I’ll never get sick of riding Cookie, my thoroughbred, legs clamped around her strong back as she ferries me through the pasture.
But now that I’m seventeen, Iamgetting tired of some aspects of country living. Of being poor. Wearing handsewn rags, for one, and Mom’s hippie-dippie projects. When I was little, dyeing my own clothes and canning fruit was fun. Now it’s just humiliating.
Pa tells me we won’t always have to live like this. That he’s saving.
But peering down at Mom just now from the loft (she can’t tell I’m looking at her) as she hums to herself, stirring a pot of figs to make jelly with, I think shelikesliving this way. Likes all this wholesome bullshit.
She circles the kitchen table, then folds her arms around Pa, who’s sitting in his chair, whittling a new pipe from a pine log, curls of blond bark spilling onto the packed-dirt floor.
This all is enough for her.
One of the cross-stitches she made when I was a baby hangs above the stove in the kitchen:
A truly good wife is the most precious treasure a man can find! She is good to him every day of her life, and with her own hands she gladly makes clothes. She is like a sailing ship that brings food from across the sea. Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
—Proverbs 31: 10–31
She and Pa trade Bible verses all the time, sing hymnals back and forth. The family Bible stays parked on our kitchen table, Pa’s ancestors’ names jotted in the front pages with jarringly short life spans.
Every Sunday night, Julia, little Molly, and I are all expectedaround the campfire for Vespers, to listen to Pa strum on his guitar and belt out gospel songs for us to sing.
But I narrow my eyes while looking down at Mom’s plain face: hair tied back with a bandanna, sweat beading on her upper lip, skin free of makeup, clothes smelling of apple cider; it all makes me seethe. I don’t want to be anything like her when I’m older. Pacing in a kitchen to please some man. Pretending to love constant manual labor.
Not that Pa is just some man. He’s my everything. But not in that gross way you’re thinking; I don’t have some messed-up Electra complex. It’s just that Mom and I, we’ve never seen eye to eye. She doesn’t like me. It’s Pa who has the easy grin for me, the spare quarter he slips me when she’s not looking.
Julia’s always been her favorite, and now baby Molly is her entire world. I’m the middle child, overlooked, even scorned by her.
I have my own mind, and she knows it, can’t stand it.
