ON THE FIRST day of spring, Patience said, “Let’s go for a walk in the orchard.”
Sorrow scraped up a spoonful of oatmeal and considered the view through the kitchen window. The day was gray and overcast, threatening rain or even snow. Sheriff Moskowitz had come by earlier to tell them about a fire in the Abrams barn, but he was gone now, and the house was quiet. They were alone in the kitchen: Grandma was tucked into her chair on the porch with her quilting frame, and Mom had gone upstairs.
“It’s too cold,” she said.
Patience bumped her shoulder. “It’s not that cold. Aren’t you bored being cooped up here?”
“Maybe,” Sorrow said. They were all tired of being stuck inside through the gray days and cold nights. Tired of the howling wind, tired of the mud, tired of sweaters and scarves and boots, tired of barren branches and brown hills. Sorrow was ready for winter to be over.
But she was nervous about going into the orchard. The sheriff had asked them about strangers lurking in the woods, about drifters and troublemakers. He had kind eyes but he’d fixed them on Sorrow when he asked some of the questions, almost like he could see right through her skin to her heart beating rabbit-fast underneath. He had only left after Mom told him they didn’t know anything and Abrams problems weren’t Lovegood problems and they didn’t want to get involved anyway. But the scent of his cologne lingered in the kitchen, and Sorrow was afraid he would come back.
“Just a little walk,” Patience said. “It’s not raining yet. We can look for favors.”
“I don’t want to,” Sorrow said, but Patience only laughed.
“Get your coat,” she said. “You never know. We might find something.”
When Sorrow was bundled up in her boots and coat, they tromped outside together. Sorrow skipped down the porch steps, saying, “Hi, Grandma. Bye, Grandma.”
In her rocking chair, Grandma nodded and smiled. She was wearing fingerless gloves and a bulky sweater; one of her quilts was tucked over her knees, and on her lap was a journal, one of the many little books filled with words she never let anybody read. Another quilt, unfinished, was stretched over the frame, waiting for her careful stitching. The new quilt was a blush of soft spring colors: pink and green and blue, flowers and leaves and sky.
Patience bent to kiss Grandma’s cheek. “We’re going for a walk. We’ll be back soon, okay?”
Sorrow ran ahead. She followed the path around the barren garden, past the coop where chickens pecked in the mud, over the split-rail fence, and down to the old dirt road where the rusty pickup truck sat abandoned in a fallow field. There had been horses and cows and goats on the farm when Mom was a little girl, but the only animals they had now were the chickens.
Sorrow stopped at the edge of the orchard to scrape mud from her boots. Drifts of snow lingered beneath the apple trees, slumped and dirty with a hard crust on top. Everything was brown and gray and still. The trees were naked, without a hint of their first buds, dusted with lacy frost from their massive trunks to their highest branches. She loved the orchard, but at the end of winter, in this cold, uneasy borderland between the stark white silence and the first waking whispers of spring, the quiet put an uneasy pinch in her chest.
“Is Mom okay?” she asked when Patience caught up.
“She’s fine,” Patience said.
“She won’t come downstairs,” Sorrow said.
“She was down earlier.” Patience’s breath misted in the cold. Beneath the brim of her green knitted hat, her hazel eyes were bright, her face pale. “She’s worried, that’s all.”
“Because of the fire?”
“Because sometimes she worries,” Patience said. “It’ll be fine. The fire has nothing to do with us. Race you to the graveyard?”
She was off before Sorrow could reply. Sorrow sprinted after her, jumping over fallen branches and sliding on icy snow. Patience was taller and faster and soon out of sight.
When she reached the cemetery in the western hollow, Sorrow skidded in a patch of snow and tumbled into the fence. She caught her balance and righted herself before climbing to join Patience on the other side.
“You won,” Sorrow said, panting for breath.
“Someday you’ll beat me,” Patience told her, but she didn’t mean it. Patience liked winning.
Patience wandered along the fence, looking up at the naked branches and the gray sky. Sorrow wound through the middle instead; she wove figure eights around the ash trees, starting with the oldest and tallest at the grave of Rejoice Lovegood and cutting diagonally through the grove to the youngest tree at the grave of their great-grandmother. At the base of Devotion’s tree, Sorrow jumped for the lowest branches. Her mittened fingers caught briefly on the bark, her boots scrabbled on the trunk, and she dropped to the ground again.
Patience, moving at a more leisurely pace, took a few minutes to catch up.
“Is that where Grandma will be buried when she dies?” Sorrow asked, pointing to the space beside Devotion’s grave.
Patience’s green hat was a bright spot of color against the shades of brown and gray. “Don’t say that. Grandma isn’t going to die anytime soon.”
“I was just wondering.” Wondering, and imagining the whip-thin ash sapling they would plant above Grandma’s grave. Her headstone would be white and clean, not yet greened by moss, and her name would be carved in neat block letters: Perseverance Lovegood. As the years passed the ash would grow straight and tall like the others, another sturdy sentinel for the grove.
“Someday she will be, I guess,” Patience said. She looked up at the gray sky, into the gray orchard. “We’ll all be here eventually. Let’s not talk about that.”
“I was just wondering,” Sorrow said again. A tickle of guilt curled in her chest. Grandma would live for a long time yet.
“Well, stop wondering,” Patience said. “And don’t let Mom hear you talk that way. It’ll upset her.”
“I know,” Sorrow said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself, “I wasn’t the one who upset her yesterday.”
There was a flash of anger over Patience’s face. “That’s not the same thing. That’s not even close to the same thing.”
“She was really upset,” Sorrow said.
Patience threw her hands up. “That’s why it’s so stupid! It shouldn’t even be a big deal. It’s just school. Everybody goes to school.”
“We don’t.”
“That’s the problem,” Patience said. “Why does Mom get to decide that for us?”
“Because she’s our mom.” Sorrow’s heart was beating quickly. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wanted to jump the fence and run into the orchard. Patience knew better. She knew not to ask about school, or to bring up what Dad said about how they lived, or to ask about anything that would upset Mom. She knew not to push and push until Mom fled the kitchen and closed herself in her room.
But that was exactly what she had done yesterday. Patience had broken all of her own rules.
“She says it’s safer this way,” Sorrow said.
“Safer than what?” Patience asked. “Safer than never doing anything? Never going anywhere? Maybe Mom and Grandma are happy to stay here forever doing the same things over and over again, but I feel like—” She made a frustrated noise and slapped at the trunk of an ash tree. “I feel like every time I want to do anything different this stupid orchard is reaching out to pull me back. Like I’ve got the roots all tangled up here”—she tapped her chest, right over her heart—“and I can’t get away. Don’t you ever feel that? How hard it is to breathe?”
Sorrow stared at her sister, too afraid to answer. She had never heard Patience talk like this before. She didn’t sound like Patience at all, but Mom. If Sorrow closed her eyes, she wouldn’t have known the difference, and that scared her as much as the sheriff in the kitchen, as much as the gaping darkness of the cider house, the dull echo of a door slamming closed, and the aching cold winter nights that made it feel like spring would never come.
Patience let out a frustrated sigh. “Never mind. You’re too little to understand anything.”
“I understand,” Sorrow protested, although she didn’t know what Patience meant.
“Don’t you ever get tired of it? Being stuck here where we can’t even talk to anybody?”
She was looking at Sorrow for an answer, but when Sorrow tried to imagine talking to strangers in town, or kids her own age, taunting words echoed in her ears and a door slammed shut in her mind. She squirmed under the weight of Patience’s earnest gaze. She didn’t know what Patience wanted her to say.
“They would be mean to me,” she said finally, her voice small.
Patience’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
All the things Sorrow was worried about buzzed around her mind like bees. She couldn’t even begin to name them all, so she didn’t try, and only nodded.
“Well, I wouldn’t let them,” Patience said. “You would just tell me who was being mean, and I would stop them.” Her voice softened with concern. “Is somebody being mean to you?”
Sorrow pressed her lips together and shook her head.
Patience’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Sorrow mumbled, kicking at the base of Devotion’s ash tree.
“Okay. But you know that if somebody is bothering you, you can tell me, right? I won’t tell Mom. Are you sure there’s nothing?”
“I’m sure,” Sorrow said, letting the word drag out. “You don’t have to keep bothering—oh!”
“What is it?” Patience asked.
Something glinted in the dormant brown grass at the base of the tree.
Sorrow bent to pick it up. It was a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses. One of the round lenses was missing, and the other was split down the middle by a crack.
“Look,” she said.
She held the glasses out to Patience, who looked at them for a moment, then glanced at the base of the tree where Sorrow had found them. “Did you just find those right there?”
“Yeah,” Sorrow said. “In the grass.”
Patience took the glasses from her gingerly, turned them in her hands, then hooked the arms over her ears and looked down her nose at Sorrow. “I say! I can see clearly now!” she exclaimed, her voice warbling with a fake accent. “Fetch me the mail, butler. I must know if the queen is inviting us for tea today.”
Sorrow giggled. “The queen doesn’t want to have tea with you.”
“Here, you try.” Patience took the glasses off and settled them gently onto Sorrow’s nose. “Be careful. If that glass breaks it’ll stab you in the eye.”
“Ew, gross.”
The glasses were too big for Sorrow; she tilted her head back to keep them from slipping down her face. “I say!” she said, mimicking Patience’s accent. The one lens distorted the cemetery grove around them, making everything big and blurry. She took the glasses off. “I don’t like them. Everything looks funny.”
“That’s because you don’t need them to see, silly,” Patience said. “Aren’t you glad you came out here today? You found the first favor of the spring.”
“No, it’s—” Sorrow stopped herself. “Yeah. The first.”
She unzipped her coat to tuck the glasses safely into the inside pocket, and as she did she pressed briefly, quickly, on the small lump of the favor she had found yesterday. The one she could feel tucked against her ribs like an ember. The one she was keeping secret. The puff of air she let in made her shiver before she got her coat zipped up again.
“Are you cold?” Patience asked.
“No.” Sorrow’s cheeks stung and her nose was running, but she wasn’t ready to go back to the house, where Mom would still be in her room and the day would stretch long and quiet. “Can we go see the witch’s grave?”
“You shouldn’t call her that,” Patience said.
“That’s what everybody calls her.”
“Everybody who? You don’t even know that many people.”
Sorrow shrugged and pretended Patience’s words didn’t sting. “I want to go to her grave.”
Patience relented. “Fine, but only for a little bit. It’s colder than I thought out here.”