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“People who are hardcore about bike touring only need water and a toilet.” He indicates the port-a-potty. “You’ve got that covered, and having wi-fi is a huge bonus. What do you say?”

I’m about to say no when I remember Sam mentioning, as we walked the boundary, that recreational use was permitted on preserved farmland. “I guess if someone wanted to pitch a tent on the lawn, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Cool.” Oliver sticks his phone in the side pocket of his bike shorts. “Want me to make you something?”

“I’m fine, thanks, and thanks again for doing this today. I have no idea how much money you’ll make, though.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He weaves his fingers together, turns his hands out, and stretches his arms above his head. “It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.”

Seeing Wren coming toward the house, I stick around to introduce him to Oliver.

“Okay, guys, I’ll be in the bookshop. Good luck today.”

Wren and Aisha aren’t the only ones who’ve been hard at work. For the past three weeks, I’ve been busy coaxing the bookshop back to life. I cleaned windows with vinegar and dish soap, changed a dozen burned-out bulbs, filled a score of vacuum bags with five years’ worth of dust and dirt and droppings, and threw out five shriveled snakeskins and twice as many mummified mice. I tacked up signs requiring masks and stacked brochures featuring the wi-fi password on the front table. In the children’s area, where I scrubbed the floors and rolled out a colorful new rug, vintage picture books are now wiped clean and displayed where kids can reach them.

My first customer is Rhonda, who buys a single vintage postcard of Schuywich and declares herself impressed by the state of affairs at Red Barn Books. “I had my doubts about you,” she says, as if her skepticism were a secret, “but you satisfied the conditions of the trust, so I had no reason to turn you down.”

“Be honest, Rhonda.” Eric Anderson, who’s followed her into the bookshop, chimes in. “It was her cash offer that clinched it.”

Even with his mask on, I can see that the headshot on Eric’s website is woefully out of date. Though he still carries himself with the swagger of an athlete, his hair is grayer than in his picture, and added pounds puff his neck and pucker his shirt buttons.

“Have you gone into the antique shop yet?” I ask him. “Wren Ferguson was telling me he knew you in high school.”

“I wouldn’t say we knew each other, exactly.” Eric stuffs his hands nervously in his pockets. “I’ll go say hello for old times’ sake.”

“Poor man,” Rhonda says when he’s out of earshot. “I still remember him on the football field. My little sister played flute in the high school marching band, so our family went to all the games. Watching Eric run in a touchdown, you really believed he was going places.”

“Wren was surprised to hear he never left Schuywich.”

Rhonda shrugs. “Oldest story in the world, isn’t it? I’ve always admired Eric for doing the right thing by his girlfriend, even though it meant turning down a scholarship to Buffalo. It couldn’t have been easy going from prom king to parent in nine months flat. Guess that’s why it didn’t last.”

“He’s divorced?”

“His wife moved away once their youngest started college,” Rhonda says. “He’d taken over his father’s business by then, so I guess he was stuck here.”

I’m finding Rhonda’s gossip distasteful. “How about you, Rhonda, why are you stuck here?”

“Who says I’m stuck?” She bristles. “I traveled the world with the Peace Corps before coming home to Schuywich. In the end, I chose to thrive where I was planted.”

I struggle to imagine Rhonda as a young idealist bringing American know-how to a developing country. I’m about to ask where she served when Nancy trots into the barn carrying a strawberry-rhubarb pie, her husband hurrying to catch up. Where Joe is big and tall, Nancy is short and round, with a helmet of blond hair sprayed into place and a sickly-sweet scent that makes me sneeze even from six feet away. I excuse myself to carry the pie she hands me to the kitchen. By the time I come back, Nancy and Rhonda are so deep in conversation—gossip, I imagine—that I’m able to turn my attention to some new arrivals without being quizzed about the state of my churchless soul.

At noon, I join the Cozy Cozy Lady’s livestream on my phone, sneaking glances between answering customers’ questions and ringing up their purchases. Aisha has positioned the rocking chair in an artistic shaft of sunlight. Lucinda’s hands are in sharp focus while the barn behind her blurs into the background. The feral cat makes an occasional appearance, curling its tail around Lucinda’s ankles as she crochets a sheep-shaped cozy and tells how the Green family came to be farmers in upstate New York.

“Marcus’s ancestor Henry Green was granted land in the Adirondacks back in 1849,” Lucinda says, pushing her pink glasses up her nose as she glances at the camera. “He moved his whole family from Troy to North Elba, near Lake Placid, to live the farming life. His little children dug stones from the cold soil with their bare hands to clear a plot for potatoes. His wife fed her family and mothered her children and birthed a baby, all in a primitive shack before her husband felled enough timber to build her a proper house. Even then, her bedroom was in the kitchen and the children slept in an unheated loft. Imagine that show Little House on the Prairie and you’ll have an idea of what it was like.”

I look up from my phone to sell a young father a stack of illustrated children’s books, the image of Henry Green’s shivering children still in my mind. When I return, Lucinda is discussing the family’s eventual success.

“Many of the Black families who tried farming in the Adirondacks were beaten by the harsh winters and difficult terrain, just as the land defeated plenty of white people, too. The Greens persisted with help from John Brown, the abolitionist, who gifted Henry a breeding pair of Merino sheep. Over the generations, the wool of those sheep allowed the Green family to hold on to their land. In 1955, Marcus, my husband, left a factory job in Schenectady to take over the farm from his father. When we married, I moved up to North Elba to live his dream right alongside him. There were barely enough sheep for a spinner’s flock by then, but Marcus read books and took courses and made plans to cross the Merinos with other heritage breeds to bring the farm back to profitability. He applied for a loan from the Department of Agriculture, but he was denied, as so many Black farmers have been over the years. In the end, debts and back taxes added up to more than the land was worth. My husband worked from sunup to sundown every damn day to secure his inheritance, but right around the time John F. Kennedy was asking Americans what they could do for their country, our government’s policies forced my husband to sign away his birthright.”

Lucinda rocks silently for a moment, face stern and fingers flying as a woolly ewe emerges from her busy hands.

“We packed up over a hundred years’ worth of memories and moved here to Schuywich, where I was from. It was my idea to ask Evelyn Cabot to take in the sheep, but Marcus was the one who came to this very barn every spring to shear the animals whose bloodline ran all the way back to a time when people of conscience and courage, Black and white, worked to abolish the evil institution of slavery, whose legacy is at the root of the protests we see erupting in our streets to this very day.”

I’m reluctantly pulled away from the Cozy Cozy Lady’s talk by a customer looking for a first edition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After locating a somewhat dog-eared copy, I come back to find Lucinda showing off her completed cozy.

“For many years, Marcus felt like a failure for losing the family farm, but if he hadn’t, we’d have raised our children in the Adirondacks instead of here in Schuywich. Our youngest son might have taken over the farm instead of attending Siena College and meeting his wife in Albany. Who knows? This gorgeous granddaughter of mine”—Lucinda looks straight into the camera—“might not have come to exist. Make no mistake: Nothing short of reparations can make up for the wrongs done to Marcus and thousands of other Black farmers, but it’s important to lift up moments of joy while we continue our fight for justice. As James Baldwin taught us, ‘love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.’ Now, that’s a pertinent message in these troubled times if I’ve ever heard one.”

The livestream ends with a reminder to visit the Cozy Cozy Lady’s shop on Etsy, but it’s the James Baldwin quote that rattles around my brain for the rest of the day. I think about all the ways I’ve spent my life hiding behind a mask. For years, I assured my father and my teachers and my friends I was fine even as my mother’s suicide festered like shrapnel in the torn muscle of my heart. I seemed to bare my soul in my memoir, but constructing sentences that make readers weep isn’t the same as letting someone see me cry. David swore he was telling the whole truth when he said he loved me, but I knew he could only be talking about the parts of myself I allowed him to see. The unworthy creature that most needed my husband’s loving touch remained beyond his reach.