On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays in the summer, Mom went into Doverton to ride horses with the Princes. She showered there, and often got home smelling of soap and perfume. Otherwise, she hovered over us like a hummingbird. She had a staff of nannies and sitters assigned to watch us during the moments she turned her back, but they were no more than moments.

Behind the rose cemetery stood a narrow band of untouched forest, then high grasses, then the river. Daddy had built a bridge over the river. He walked across it to the bottling factory six days a week and stayed there fourteen hours a day.

Soon after Chris and I met at the club, he got a job with Garden Haven. He told me later that getting a job with the company who did our landscaping was part of his plan to see me.

He rode his bike to us on Fridays to prune and water. It had a trailer with his tools. Mom had seen him caring for the roses at the club and put him in charge of the bushes in the little cemetery. She didn’t like being inside the fence herself, because it reminded her that she was destined to lie there for eternity.

“He’s taking a while back there,” Harper said.

We were on the screened-in back porch, under ceiling fans. It was still muggy and thick. My thighs slid against each other as I watched Chris’s body bend and straighten as he worked on the roses.

Harper turned her attention back to her Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She was reading well past her grade level. It was the only respite from her painful social awkwardness. “Twenty-two percent longer, at this point.”

“It’s the heat.”

Our meeting in the back of the pro shop was a week old. I’d seen him twice since then. His lips tasted of salt and cola, and the young body felt tight and hard under his shirt.

Watching Chris, I wasn’t completely sure if it was all sweat greasing the insides of my thighs. He’d led me behind a secret fence at the back of the club. He laid a towel over a tree stump so I wouldn’t get grass or dirt stains on my white clothes, and he kneeled in front of me. When he kissed me, I wanted to spend the rest of my life attached to his lips, tasting his tongue. He’d bought me a soda, and we took turns transferring a chip of ice between our mouths.

That night, I’d run my fingers over my lips to see if I could reproduce the feeling, then between my legs for the same reason. Fear stopped me from continuing to the end. What if someone saw? What if my mother’s voice in my head wasn’t just a voice? What if—when it burst in saying “how could you?”—it summoned her attention by some as-yet-undisclosed telepathic transference and she could see me?

When Chris stood and wiped his brow, I imagined how his cola lips would taste with a hint of rose on them. He turned away as if something was moving in the trees and waved. A second later, Johnny came through the forest, holding a banker’s box. His son, ten-year-old Joe, was at his side.

Johnny worked at the factory as a chemical engineer. His wife, Pat, owned the grocery store by Barrington Burgers.

Harper stood. “It’s Mister Dorning! Hey, Mister Dorning!”

She was twelve and didn’t have great impulse control. She had a special rapport with Johnny, based on their mutual love of things I couldn’t get my head around.

Johnny stood by the white fence with his box. Chris looked into it and smiled. I didn’t want him smiling without me. If I was miserable and ashamed, he had to be too. I went out, pulled behind Harper as if on a tether.

Johnny put the box on the ground, and everyone looked into it.

Harper squealed with delight. “Can I have one?”

The box was full of puppies. Four of them. The bloodhounds were honey-brown and cheerful except for the smallest one. He just looked soulful.

“It’s up to your parents,” Johnny said.

“I like this one!” Joe said, patting a tail-wagger with her paws over the edge of the box. She licked the boy’s hand.

“Me too,” Chris said.

I realized he was close to me and snapped around to see him looking over my shoulder, bent at the waist so his hands leaned on the three-foot-high fence and his lips were an inch from my body. He flicked his finger against the top of my thigh and I nearly went blind with arousal.

“I like the little one,” I heard Harper say from a million miles away.

Chris and I were eye-locked. I could smell his breath, his body, the heat coming off him.

“He’s the runt of the litter,” Johnny said.

“What’s that mean?” little Joe asked.

“He’ll have certain genetic disadvantages,” Johnny replied.

“In the wild,” Harper corrected.

Chris blinked. Licked his lower lip. I couldn’t tell if it took more effort to not kiss him or to stay standing.

“If I take him, he’ll have advantages,” Harper added.

The voices came from a long tunnel between my connection with Chris and the rest of the world clamoring for attention and getting none.

“We’re naming them after Arthur’s knights,” Johnny said from the end of the tunnel.

“I read Sir Gawain in spring.” That was Harper’s voice.

Johnny. “I remember.”

Little Joe. “Lancelot should be the big one! And Galahad because he’s the best.”

Their voices melted into the density of the silence between Chris and me like chocolate in a marble cake.

“Two are girls.”

“Galahad can be shortened to Gal.”

“The runt is Percival and he’s mine.”

“I promised the runt to Orrin. He needs a beta.”

“We need an Arthur and there’s no girl name for it.”

“We can call a girl Arthur.”

“There something wrong with Guinevere?”

I shook my head ever so slightly and pressed my lips tight together.

My expression was meant to speak a few volumes.

Not here.

I can’t look at you like this here.

“Harper Barrington! You put that mutt down!”

I snapped to attention. Harper had the little puppy in her hands. Our mother bounded down the back porch steps.

Johnny gently took the dog from my sister before our mother reached us. “I’m sorry, Ella. I didn’t think—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“But, Mom…” Harper whined, and Harper never whined. “He’s just a baby. He needs us.”

“Your father is allergic.”

“We’ll keep him outside.”

“No. Go wash your hands.”

Harper stormed off, fists balled on the ends of stiff arms, feet slamming the ground as if she wanted to bruise it.

“I’m sorry, Johnny,” Mom said gently.

“I get it.”

Their eyes locked, and having just had an eye-lock with Chris, I recognized the similarity. But it didn’t last. Not for even a second.

She spun to me, then Chris, smoldering like hot glass. “Are you finished?”

“Not quite, ma’am.”

“I’m not paying you for the time you spend looking at puppies.”

“Of course.” Chris pointed at Johnny and stepped back. “I’ll take Lancelot.”

“You got it,” Johnny replied. “You sure you don’t want one, El?”

My mother was kneeling over the box, letting one of the dogs lick her hand. “Earl’s too sensitive.” Mom stood and put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get in out of the sun.”

I followed her back to the house, looking back only once. Chris was looking at me with his arm shielding his eyes from the glare.

When we got inside, my mother guided me to the kitchen faucet, where we washed our hands. She kept looking out the back window over the sink.

“Is this clean enough?” I asked, willing my eyes away from Chris, into the endless drain.

“Yes.” She shook the water off her hands. “Come here with me.”

She took me to the sun room that overlooked the side of the house. It had windows on three sides and, for that moment, was remarkable for the fact that we couldn’t see the backyard from it.

“Catherine,” she said, folding her hands in her lap, “are you all right?”

“Yes.” I pressed my knees together, wondering if she could see what was happening under my skirt.

She wiggled in her seat as if the conversation made the cushions prickly. “That boy was looking at you.”

“I didn’t notice.”

She sighed. “Where I grew up, in Philadelphia, we were exposed to more things. More men. I worry about you girls’s prospects.”

I knew where she was going, and I wanted to deflect her. “I’m not worried about me. Harper though? She’s so smart.”

“She’ll meet a man in college.”

“Maybe I will too.”

She nodded with the satisfaction of a period after a long string of clauses. “Boys like the one out there will ruin your life. Trust me on that. I won’t let it happen. Trust me on that too.” She looked me right in the eye, one eyebrow raised as if she expected me to rubber stamp her message.

I nodded slightly, because I was sure she was right. He’d ruin my life. I just had to decide if I wanted it ruined.

“Catherine.” She tilted my chin up at her. “It’s hard being a woman. In Philadelphia, it was hard because you were expected to do everything. Family, work, everything. Here, it’s hard because you can let a man take care of you, but you can’t make a mistake. There’s no coming back from them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I didn’t. Mistakes weren’t always mistakes until after they happened. “Did you make a mistake once?”

“No.” Her answer was sharp, as if she was cutting off a contradiction. “I married your father and he brought me here. And now I have my two girls who I love more than anything.”

I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to make her proud and do things the right way. But as she hugged me, I wondered when I’d come to where the road forked between completing her life and completing my own.