WE’RE DOWN TO the last hundred rows of the west field, but there’s plenty of work for everyone because lots of people ditched today. That happens at the end of harvest, but this time, it’s got less to do with running out of berries and more to do with Mr. Wardwell telling the locals where to stick it. Good thing he’s not running for dogcatcher.
Now that Shea’s off the board, Bankowski’s made it to first place. Nell sings “My Darling Clementine” while she rakes, and it’s nice, kind of, because it helps keep my mind off Shea. I’d like to think that he’d never show his face here after what he pulled, but yesterday he didn’t seem to care if he got caught, or what anybody thought of him. I remember Mom’s question: Is it over?
I practically jump out of my sneakers when Jesse comes up beside me at lunch. I swallow a dry lump of sandwich, my heart thumping. Mags and Nell get really interested in what they’re eating.
He hunkers beside me. He smells good, like sweat and outdoors. “You get my messages?”
I slap a horsefly.
“So, are you okay or what?”
“I’m good.” My voice is low as I pick at my sandwich. “You?”
His left eye is purple, burst vessels speckling the white, and there’s a scrape down his cheek that looks pretty nasty. “Been worse.”
I watched him for a few seconds earlier: he’s moving slowly today, biting his cheek as he rakes, like something hurts inside. Bruised ribs, maybe. He and Mason rake close together. Mason must’ve been in the middle this whole time, listening to Jesse and Shea both talk about me when the other one wasn’t around. He must’ve known something bad was going to go down sooner or later. I glance at the road again.
“You heard from him?” Jesse knows who I’m worrying about. “If he’s bothering you, tell me.”
“Come on. You went after Shea yesterday for you, not me.” Nell flinches at my tone, pulling her knees in, making herself small. “Shea busted my face. You liked my face better the way it was, so you hit him.” I breathe out slowly, letting the shocked silence settle over us. “I’m sorry you got hurt. But it wasn’t for me.”
He watches me for a long moment. “I was stupid about Shea. I’m sorry, okay. I didn’t see how things really were with you guys. But if you’re still mad about the raking thing . . . I mean, Shea’s done. Bob’s never gonna let him back into the barrens.”
“Yeah. But he never got nailed for it, either.” I squeeze my sandwich into a tinfoil ball and chuck it down. “He got away with it, ’cause nobody did anything.”
Jesse stays where he is, white-lipped and quiet. His hand grips his knee, and I can see the ground-in dirt around his thumbnail, the kind you need pumice soap to get out. “So that’s it, huh?”
I squint off. “Guess so.”
He stands. Then I feel his hand rest on the top of my head for just a second. His fingers slide away. “Take care of yourself, Darcy.”
“I will,” I say faintly, but he’s already gone.
It’s blue twilight when Libby and Nell get home from Bangor. I look out the living room window and watch Nell run across the grass, hugging a long garment bag to herself. Her face is lit up, hair bouncing around her shoulders as she hops over the first step and disappears into the trailer.
I guess Nell found it. The dress she’s going to wear.
“Show us.” Later, Mags flops onto her bed, giving Nell a look. “Come on, you’re really not going to show us?”
“No. It’ll ruin the specialness.” Nell works a sponge around in a little palette of green concealer.
“At least tell us what color it is.”
“It’s the one. That’s all you need to know.” Nell touches my shoulders and lifts my chin with her hand, our reflections moving together in Mags’s vanity mirror as she lightly dabs my forehead and nose, then uses a little brush to spread the concealer around my eyes, practicing to see if she can fix my face for the big night. I look like I did a face-plant in a bowl of pistachio pudding.
“You know about this stuff, right?” I watch Nell in the mirror as she starts smoothing her fingers over my skin. “’Cause, no offense, but this looks . . . kinda . . .”
“Green covers redness and blotchiness really well. Mrs. Hartwell told you it would work, didn’t she?” She’s so gentle that her fingertips feel like wings brushing over my face. “The heat from my skin helps blend it. Your fingers really are your best tools for applying almost any makeup.”
“Look out, Pauline’s School of Beauty,” Mags murmurs, smiling as she flips through one of her yearbooks.
“Next, we build with foundation.” Nell lays it on heavier than I ever do, but you really can’t see the green through it. I sit up a little more, watching.
Mags turns pages, then snorts. “I’m sorry, but what a moron.”
She’s stopped on a page of candid photos. Her thumb rests on a shot of Kenyon. He’s half-turned at a table in some classroom, wearing a ski cap and hoodie, eyes heavy-lidded, looking even more like Kat than usual. “He’s not a moron,” I say. “He’s just . . .” I don’t even know if we’re still friends, and here I am, sticking up for him. “He got scared and screwed up.”
“Holding on to that car for a year? That’s more than a screwup. How could he seriously not know that was the worst thing he could’ve done? He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up doing jail time.”
Nell steps back. “Done.”
I’m almost back to normal. If you really stare, you can see something isn’t quite right with my face, but I’ll be far enough away from the crowd on Saturday that nobody will be able to tell. “Wow. Thanks a lot, Nellie. That looks much better.”
She smiles and shrugs like it doesn’t count, gathering her tools. “I’m smart with makeup.”
“You’re smart with lots of things. Don’t run yourself down,” Mags says, setting the yearbook on the pile of novels on her nightstand.
I’m still thinking about Kenyon, picturing his fist slowly meeting the heavy bag, the tightness of his jaw, the focus of his gaze when I asked if Rhiannon knew he was crushing on her. Wasn’t gonna happen, he’d said, not like somebody feeling sorry for himself, but like he knew for sure, like it was a fact. “You think he was lying to me the other night?”
Nell glances at me, then down at her packet of brushes. “He lied to everybody for a year.”
“All he had to do was tell his parents,” Mags says. “You know they would’ve smoothed everything out for him, like they did when he got caught with weed at school. Everybody knows they’ve got more money than God.”
“Gimme the laptop,” I say. Mags raises her eyebrows at me and doesn’t move. “Please. Please gimme the laptop, Your Highness.”
I private message Kenyon, and keep it simple: Y r u lying?
The next morning, I oversleep and wake up to Mags’s big foot kicking my door. No time to see if Kenyon’s messaged me back. But at least I poked him. He knows I suspect something.
The last day of the harvest is probably the most beautiful day of the whole summer. Hot but dry, the blue sky full of those big, rolling clouds that really do make animal shapes. We’ll be outta here by noon and everybody knows it, so the attitude’s pretty relaxed, people calling back and forth between rows, laughing. We girls work close by, not talking much, just feeling the sun and making our last few hours count.
Mr. Wardwell blasts his truck horn three times when the field is cleared, and everybody walks up to headquarters and stands around in a loose knot. Mrs. Wardwell gets to her feet. “You all know we give something away at the end of harvest to whoever raked the most. This year’s a first. We never had a lady up here before. Therese Bankowski, come up and get your check.”
I watch a hard-faced, freckled woman break away from the group. It’s the woman from the fire, the one whose family lost their stuff. She’s rangy and strong, shaking hands with Mrs. Wardwell—the tendons stand out in her forearms like baling wire—and taking the check for seven hundred dollars with no more change in her expression than if she was being handed a grocery store receipt. My gaze meets Jesse’s through the crowd. It’s a long look, neither of us wanting to be the first to break it.
“Awright, people. We brought in some good berries this year.” Mrs. Wardwell drops back into her chair, massaging one foot through her moccasin. “Last checks are in the mail.”
“And don’t let the door hit ya ass,” Mags whispers. I smile on reflex, watching Jesse step back, move away with Mason. Mason, I’ll see at school on Monday. Jesse, I don’t know when I’ll see again.
Locals move toward the line of parked cars, heading home to houses and trailers. Migrants move toward the cabins; starting tomorrow, they’ll be heading north to potato country, or the next under-the-table construction or food service job. Wonder if they’ll come this way again next blueberry season. If I were them, I wouldn’t.
As we walk downhill toward Mags’s car, I hear a whoop. Bankowski’s spinning her little boy around by his hands as he giggles crazily at the sky.
The barrens really deserve their name without us rakers. Nothing left out there but the flatbed loaded with the last day’s haul, some pickups, and the toilets to prove we were here at all. I stop, squinting against the sunlight as I watch Jesse’s pickup pull onto 15 with the rest of the locals streaming back toward town.
Mags stops with her hand on her door. “Forget something?”
I take off my hat, toss it into the car, and climb in after it. “Not a thing.”