***

  As a teenager, Lil liked falling asleep outside, under the shade of tall trees. When she hit her teenage years—and her teenage years hit back—when the inside of the house felt too tame and soft for her sharp edges, Lil would spread out a blanket under the trees, where she was finally able to breathe. She’d feel silk nighttime breezes, hear the coo of the far-off train. She’d entertain fleeting dreams of catching one. But she never would. Because curled against the roots of those trees, it was as if she grew roots of her own. She felt right within herself among the trees. It wasn’t nice. The hard limbs bruised her. Bugs bit at the lines of her socks; sometimes nighttime things skittered just beyond the fences. And yet, she was safe. She never overslept there; the trees dropped pecans on her head if she was going to be late for school.

  She falls asleep under the trees again today. She doesn’t mean to, but she must have. Because she wakes up to a change in the sunlight, near the fence. Lil’s neck aches from the angle and she eases up. Her caning pole is nearby, laid neatly against the tree she slept under.

  It’s only when she stands up that she feels a tether at her ankle. Lil trips, catches herself on her knee and twists around. The fence at the border of her property is still broken in one place, a stone’s throw from the front gate. That’s right; she’d come over expecting to fix it and gotten sidetracked, then sleepy. And under the break, a thin line of kudzu has encroached while Lil was dozing. Creeping past the broken post, it has slithered into the grass and threaded around her ankle.

  Lil kicks once, twice—she pulls at its tendons and the vine shreds under her hands. As soon as she’s free, she attacks it, fighting its weak hold on the ground. She rips up young, tender roots, and grassy dirt clods come with it. Even the hammer she’d brought has been partially covered. She untangles the handle. It’s just a lone scout testing a border, easy to stamp out. She tosses the leash of leaves back over the fence and all the little scattered bits with it.

  Lil scans the ground. How had it come so quickly? How had she not seen it until it was over the border?

  Her breathing isn’t quite steady. Her hands feel useless and shaky, and they shouldn’t. She won. It’s fine now.

  She’s only a little tired.

  “I’m so tired,” Mom murmured many times over endless nights, stretched on the couch with one daughter under each arm, her body smelling of sweat and earth. “I don’t think I can even make it up the stairs today…”

  But Lil’s the one who can’t quite get herself up and moving now. This harvest feels like it may never end. She’s still staring when the Clearwater truck trundles up the road. For a stupid second, Lil mistakes the shadowy figure driving it for Mom, recognizing the cut of her jaw, the familiar curl of feathery hair. The next moment, she remembers. Lil waves, and Sasha pulls to a dusty stop, reaches over the dash, and pops the passenger door open. She tucks her camera back behind the seat to make room.

  It’s too late in the day to fix the fence now anyway. She’ll do it first thing in the morning. Lil jogs toward her, swings herself into the cab, and flops down in the passenger seat.

  “You okay?” Sasha laughs, brushing dirt from Lil’s arm. “Did round two with Jason involve mud wrestling, or what?” She and Sasha have been running counter to each other for days, catching each other up in brief sentences exchanged halfway up or down the stairs.

  “I haven’t seen him again.” Lil fiddles the dial on the radio. Still nothing. “Just took a nap.” Sasha has brought the smell of the river with her, and wind in her hair. “How was the ferry?”

  Sasha stares out the windshield, her fingertips running over the skin of her other arm. “Autumn hasn’t been home in forever, has she?”

  It’s been a while since Lil thought about her. “No. Not since before the road closed. Main Street isn’t the same with the bakery shut.” Sasha always had a soft way she talked about Autumn, a lilt when she says her name, like it means hope. “I figured you were in touch with her. Why?”

  “Right.” Sasha frowns, kneading at her forehead. “We may have been in touch a bit.” Had she called? There were no saved messages from Autumn on the answering machine. “Not since the road…right; she didn’t even make it for our birthday. Was that—before the road?”

  “It must have been.” Lil remembers past birthdays so clearly, Autumn in her apron from the bakery near town square, embroidered honeysuckle vines on the faded blue denim. The cake, always a towering masterpiece under the trees.

  “What about her little place above the bakery?” Sasha wonders. “Just empty? Can’t imagine anyone would rent it from her these days.” It’s getting hot in the truck, like the sun is suddenly roasting them through the roof.

  “Why do you ask?” Lil watches thoughts flicker across Sasha’s face. Sasha hasn’t mentioned Autumn in a long time. But it’s easy enough to conjure an image of those two class cutters in their high school days, swinging their legs off the bleachers, Sasha’s head in Autumn’s lap as they cackle their way through some half-remembered in-joke.

  They pull up beside the house and Sasha gives an airy, deflecting shrug. “I thought I saw her on the river today.”

  “I wish she’d stayed around,” Lil replies. “Her baking would bring some stragglers back to town for sure.”

  Sasha cuts the engine and hands Lil the keys. “I wonder if she knows about Russ.” Something in her seems to brighten. “Maybe she’ll come for the service.”

  If anything draws friends, enemies, and lost loves home, it’s a funeral.

  Chapter Five

  The dirt Sasha tosses onto the casket is brittle, just a handful of dust. Last prayers float around the little huddle of mourners. This cemetery is nothing special, no sprawling New Orleans necropolis of poured cement mansions. Here, the little stones poke up from dying grass; this is just a yard like any number of cemeteries along that old sun-parched highway that doesn’t reach here anymore. They’d be last in line at the Last Judgment, that’s for sure. Sasha swears she can feel her second-grade teacher’s postmortem stare on her from a few rows back. She feels sad, but also tired. Maybe mostly tired. They’ve had to do this too many times.

  The soil plunks against the coffin lid. Lil stands beside her, wearing her tear tracks like a badge of honor. They already did their rounds among the grievers together, quiet exchanges with the farmers and shop owners who came to honor Russ. It’s a smaller crowd than expected.

  The speaking is over with, all the eulogies said. Sasha spots Jason; this is the closest she’s been to him in a long time, since her visits home after college, when he was still considering a life in town. Once he was essential here, the last Finch of Honeysuckle House, captain of the volunteer firefighters—but that was a long time ago. Now he just feels like Russ’s nephew from out of town, his shoes a little too shiny for the dust out here. With a soldier’s poise, he stands in huddles of Russ’s friends, his golden head bowed as he leans down to listen to something one of the tiny old women is saying to him.

  She and Lil stand quietly together. Lil doesn’t stride off on her own to hug grandmothers and exchange condolences now. She is rooted to Sasha’s side, to the hole in the ground. “This is wrong,” Lil breathes.

  Sasha had somehow missed Lou at first, but there he is, crouching down beside the grave with two glasses of bourbon, one untouched. She puts a hand on her twin’s back. “I know.”

  They stay that way for a moment, Lil collecting pieces of herself. She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Even Jason. The look on his face. I’ve never seen him like this.” She casts around, eyes flitting between the scattered townspeople. Her back stiffens. “What’s he doing here?”

  Jason is standing under an oak tree with someone else now, someone Sasha hadn’t noticed during the service. Theon, Lil’s personal tormentor these days. Sasha hears all about him when he comes by, proposing Lil sell the Clearwater land. Those visits seem to come more and more frequently. She grinds her teeth. The two men cut starkly different figures: Jason’s broad shoulders and straight back, Theon’s slouch and sneakers.

  “He didn’t know Russ. He doesn’t know Jason. He shouldn’t be here.” Lil’s eyes blaze on Sasha. “He shouldn’t.”

  Sasha folds her arms. Theon’s creeping around is starting to set even her teeth on edge, and Sasha is famously the mellow sister. “Should we go beat him up?”

  Theon leans in to catch Jason’s gaze again, which has slid from him back to the grave. His face is impassive, and he keeps a healthy space between them as those around them melt away. Sasha can’t make out the words, but she catches the tonal ramp of a question. Jason hesitates, but his eyes don’t leave Theon’s this time. They stand there, strung between question and answer. “That ass is after Honeysuckle House,” Sasha realizes. “He gate-crashed the burial to get at the Finch Orchard.”

  “He senses weakness.” Lil watches Theon reach out for a businesslike handshake, and slink off into the crowd. Jason is left standing on his own, wiping the hand absently on his pants leg. He scrubs his face again, at tears or sweat or both.

  Sasha squints across the plot at him, past Lou pouring a last drink out for his friend, past the dwindling mourners. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Lil straightens her back, her face grim, but determined, tears dry. “Whatever I can.”

  ***

  Long ago, after home games when Jason would be surrounded by friends, Lil used to wait in the emerald glow of fireflies under the bleachers, and watch. She could have joined them, slotted into place under his shoulder if she wanted to be that kind of a girl, the kind that wore varsity jackets and got engaged at graduation. (Back then Lil despised that kind of girl. It felt daring to hate other girls when she was younger, rather than callous.) Lil waited, in those days, until that moment when the crowd that washed Jason out to sea ebbed. She spotted his dark eyes, flashing up, and knew he was finally taking a breath, finally not answering a question, not laughing at someone’s joke. And she’d move, snatch his hand, and they’d vanish, quicksilver, into a world of their own. And he’d be hers. Finally.

  Jason is older now. Lil is older, too, and uncomfortable in the dress she’d bought for Mom’s funeral, scratchy and ill fitting as grief itself. But just like she always has, she lingers in the shade, watching the throng around him, waiting for that moment when he surfaces.

  He may just be a familiar stranger, a face that she knows wearing all sorts of new expressions she can’t totally track anymore, but she still remembers this weary look, this particular smile. Jason is trying so hard. He will never pull himself away.

  Mrs. Grady and Cork are embracing in front of Jason, blocking the other well-wishers, and Lil takes her chance. Just as Jason shuts his eyes and inhales, the first private pause he’s had all day, she presses her hand into the crook of his elbow and tugs him out of the place where he’s been rooted, from under the dissolving canopy of the old oak.

  Jason looks a bit dazed, sun dazed or grief dazed, reeling, like someone who’s just been yanked off a carnival ride. “Oh. Hey,” he says. There’s a tension in the way his hands remain in his pockets, as if he’s resisting lifting them to fend off a blow. They hadn’t parted on the best terms last time. “Thanks for—um—being here.”

  “Come on,” Lil murmurs. “They’ll be okay. You’ve done him proud.” Maybe it’s because of the long, drawn-out torture of a day like today but he doesn’t question her, following with the easy trust of a child. Sensing her gentleness, one hand strays from its pocket to take hers.

  All at once his cologne, peppery and sweet, hits her—and it is Russ’s. Russ only ever wore that one scent, the one Jason picked sometime in college. He’d given Russ the first bottle, wrapped in bright-red paper one Christmas Eve, and Russ had chuckled that he’d better wear it since there was a lady present. Then Jason turned to Lil, the lady present, and handed her a bright-red parcel too. She felt like a happy fool bundled up in flannel with a mug of mulled wine, Jason and Russ—

  Lil breathes through the hot flush of tears behind her eyelids. “Come with me,” she says, and leads him away from the funeral. Jason looks parched and pale, like he hasn’t thought about food and water all day, and it’s only half over.

  The atmosphere is heavy with Russ’s absence—she’ll never hear his ragged laugh again—but the air tastes just the same as it did before they laid him down. The world hasn’t noticed one of its best people is gone.

  “I have to get over to the reception,” Jason manages, when he spots her truck waiting for them. “I don’t really have time to—”

  “We’re going to the reception. You don’t look like you should be driving.”

  He weighs this, scowling slightly now, then jumps in on the passenger side. “Thanks,” he says when she joins him and turns the key over. “I’m dead on my feet.”

  “It’s a long day. He’d want you to take care of yourself too.” She leans over him to pop open the glove box. Sure enough, there’s still a couple of granola bars in there, stashed for emergencies. She tosses him one. “You can eat on the way.”

  For once in his life, Jason apparently doesn’t have it in him to argue. He promptly shoves half the bar in his mouth. “Losing him is like being on those endless shifts down at the firehouse.” Groaning, he rubs the back of his neck. “Can’t go home, can’t sleep—but there’s no actual fire, because he’s gone…so there’s nothing I can fix. Just go through junk in the house and wait around.”

  Lil digs under her seat for her aluminum water bottle and hands it to him. Shade dapples the windshield. “It was like that when Mom died. Boxes and boxes, bills, and old papers…” Mom is still everywhere in the house—the pressed flowers in frames on the wall over the stairs, a hall closet stocked with her best coats. One photograph of her and Luis, their father, the man she’d loved…almost as much as the orchard.

  “Exactly.” Jason drains her bottle in a gulp and a half like a quarterback at halftime. “Honeysuckle House has been in the family so long, all the junk is probably what keeps it standing up,” he says gloomily. “Easier to just burn the old place down than empty it out.” He leans his head back against the seat, eyes shut for a moment. “What a mess.”

  “Speaking of messes, what did Theon want?” Lil can drive these roads blind, but she keeps her eyes forward.

  Jason rubs at his eyes, distracted. “Who?”

  “I saw him talking to you. Guy in the really wrinkled suit.” The roads feel especially empty usually, but there’s a small crowd of cars behind them, headed for the reception as well. “Probably the only one that you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, right.” Jason fumbles her water bottle into one of the truck’s cup holders, sighing. “Asked me to call him. Sounds like you know more about it than I do.”

  “He’s always after me to sell my land.” Lil grips the steering wheel a little tighter. “He’s a snake. Buying up all the old properties for low prices.”

  He’s watching her now; she can feel his eyes on the side of her face. There’s a pause, like he’s tasting a few different words before he spits any of them out. “Did you think about it?”

  It’s hard to read his tone. Maybe he wishes she would flee this old trap like he did. And maybe it fills him with fury, to think she would, when she wouldn’t do it for him when he asked her to leave with him years ago.

  “No,” Lil replies. “I wouldn’t think about selling to him.”

  “Then who?” He sighs. “What small-time operation would buy this eaten-up land?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know what he does with it. As far as I can tell, the properties he’s bought are just rotting.” Lil swallows down the anger that always feels close these days. “Someone needs to do something. This town, Jason…it’s changed since you left. It’s like no one cares anymore. Everyone’s just ready to give up on it.”

  Jason gazes out the window, watching the worn-out parade of Main Street buildings pass them by. “What are you asking me, Lilith?”

  “Nothing.” It isn’t true. There’s a question beating away in her throat, desperate for freedom. But they’re pulling up to the country club now, a stately old dowager with cracks in her facade. “Not today at least. But—” She shuts her eyes. “Come to me. If you need anything.”

  In a gentle move, she feels his hand around hers again. They’re close in the car, the musky glow of Russ’s old cologne all around them. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Switching the car off, she faces him again. “Are you ready?”

  He is ready. He squeezes her hand, then releases it, and they go inside together.

  Chapter Six

  Sasha wakes to the smell of pretzels. It’s so near, the buttery tough skin baking, that she could be inside the oven herself, tacky dough knotting around her, expanding in hot bands against her skin amidst the roar of the convection fan. She sits up fast, writhes in her sheets.

  It’s just her room, the same as ever, a fly beating itself brainless against her window. She sniffs again, and the fly throws itself at the pane. Does it smell that too? Cheesy jalapeño pretzels, plain ones covered in thick crystals of sea salt, sweet ones with cinnamon sugar wreathed through the dough. Pretzels. Pretzels. Pretzels. It couldn’t be Lil baking downstairs; she doesn’t have the patience. And pretzels only remind Sasha of one person. There’s only one person she used to split them with behind the bleachers at high school football games, fighting over the nacho cheese.

  Sasha checks the time—late, obviously—and hops up. Her nose aches like she’s inhaled cayenne pepper. She’s trying to get out to the bathroom when she sneezes hard and knocks her head against the door frame. “Argh!” she screams at the house. “I am having a confusing morning!”

  Lil arches an eyebrow at her when she comes downstairs, coffee in hand as she pores over some papers. “You look rough.”