8

CORA'S FARM was so cut off from Minerva, Penny began to think of it as an island. Standing at the mailbox, she looked out over the fields. The wind skimmed the wheat, a tawny ocean stretching to meet a horizon unbroken by silos or rooftops. Last summer she'd read Robinson Crusoe. On a remote island, a person could create a whole new world, become someone they could never be if they stayed on the mainland.

An electric current ran up her arm when she opened the mailbox and found the Chicago Tribune, which still came, even though Cora talked about canceling her grandfather's subscription. After years of reading only the Minerva Gazette, it was exciting to peruse a big-city newspaper. Penny glanced over the headlines: SOUTH SIDE SHOOTOUT KILLS SIX. ROSA PONSELLE TO SING AT CHICAGO OPERA. MAYOR DECLARES MEATPACKER STRIKE ILLEGAL. DR. COUP'S AUTOSUGGESTION TAKES NATION BY STORM.

Tucking the Tribune under her arm, she reached inside the mailbox to check if there was anything else. Her fingers landed on an envelope of nearly transparent thinness, emblazoned with foreign stamps. It was from a Mr. Jacob Viney of Aries, France. Who on earth was he? Penny studied the blue envelope. Then she remembered—the brother. At Renfew's they had said something about Cora having a brother. And the name Cora had cried out after her daughter's birth: Jacob, don't let him take the baby away.

"Sweetie," she whispered when she returned to the shady spot at the edge of the driveway where she had left the baby carriage. "You got a letter from your uncle." Phoebe slept on, her little fists curled to her chest. Careful not to wake her, Penny placed the newspaper and letter at the foot of the buggy, then started pushing it back down the long driveway. The trees arched above her, throwing lacy shadows across her path.

 

It was up to Penny to decide what they would have for their midday meal. Cora wasn't picky about food—there just had to be a lot of it. Although Cora had grown lean in the three weeks following her daughter's birth, she ate more than any woman Penny had ever met. After a quick look around the pantry, she decided to make shoestring potatoes and frankfurters, a salad of garden greens, and a dessert of canned peaches and whipped cream. According to the paper, canned food was nutritionally superior and far more hygienic than the vegetables she pulled out of the garden and washed by hand. She moved through the pantry, taking the things off the shelf without glancing at the stockpile of Dr. Nod's Sleeping Powder that Cora had shoved into the far corner, out of harm's way. She had explained to Penny once that her grandfather had suffered terrible insomnia.

Phoebe slept on, giving Penny a chance to spread out the Tribune on the counter and read while she peeled potatoes. Perusing the article on autosuggestion, she nearly cut her finger in her enthusiasm. Dr. Emile Coue was a Frenchman touring America to spread the word about his revolutionary new technique. Changing your life, he declared, was a matter of willpower. All a person had to do was sincerely believe the change was taking place. He said his technique tapped into the amazing power of the unconscious mind, a notion Penny had a hard time grasping. When you sleep and have dreams, she thought, maybe that was when the changes happened. Although it sounded like hocus-pocus, Dr. Coue insisted that autosuggestion was pure science, verified by painstaking research. To harness the power of autosuggestion, all you had to do was recite the following sentence twenty times a day: Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better. He recommended taking a length of cord and tying twenty knots in it to keep track of how many times you repeated the sentence. For something scientific, it sounded an awful lot like counting off rosary beads, but she was willing to give it a try. While the potatoes were frying, she cut a length of household string and tied twenty knots. When she ran out to the garden to pull up a head of lettuce, plucking the slugs off the outer leaves, she chanted her new sentence over and over like an incantation. When Phoebe soiled herself, she went on chanting feverishly, mesmerizing the baby as she scraped away the shit and plunged the diaper into the soaking pail. Day by day. Better and better.

Phoebe didn't stay mesmerized for long. By the time the food was ready, she was screaming. Sweat dripping from her hair, Cora staggered in the door and washed her hands at the kitchen sink. She had been cutting hay all morning. Taking the baby from Penny's arms, she went upstairs to nurse. It transpired without her saying a word, too immersed in her task to make eye contact with Penny, who hovered over the stove, keeping the food warm until Cora came down to eat.

"Here, let me take her," Penny said when Cora and Phoebe returned. Holding Phoebe, she watched Cora eat with grave concentration, just like any other farmer, too weary to talk. Phoebe fussed in Penny's arms, no doubt wanting her mother to hold her again, so Penny got up and paced the kitchen with her. Ignoring her own hunger, she tried to distract the baby by dangling a ring of keys. "Your mama has to eat," she whispered.

As she watched Cora stuffing a forkful of shoestring potatoes into her mouth, it was impossible to believe she had ever been a society lady or a surgeon's wife. Her legs were splayed without care, as though she had never worn a skirt in all her life. A streak of dirt marked the side of her neck. Penny decided that Cora was living, breathing proof that it was possible for someone to leave her past behind and become wholly different.

"That was good, Penny." Cora spoke only after she had finished her second bowl of peaches and cream. Then she dragged herself up from the chair, went to kiss her daughter before heading toward the door.

"You got a letter today," Penny said before Cora could go. She had nearly forgotten to tell her. "It's over there on the windowsill. Looks like it's from overseas." She didn't say anything about its being from her brother—it would be too much to confess that she had scrutinized the letter so carefully.

When Cora looked at the envelope, something in her face changed. "I'll read it later," she said.

 

Phoebe was screaming again, her face nearly purple. When Penny picked her up, the baby rooted against her flat and milkless chest, then screwed up her face in rage. Cora had nursed her only an hour ago—how could she be hungry again so soon? Penny reckoned she could bring Phoebe to her mother in the hayfield in less time than it would take to sterilize the bottle and heat up cow's milk, so she took off with the baby in her arms. Phoebe's bawling made Penny's feet fly faster. Skirting the pasture, she reached the field where the cut timothy grass lay flat and glossy on the ground. Halfway down the meadow she spotted Cora working her way across the swath of long waving grass with her grandfather's scythe. In the heat, Cora had taken off her work shirt and wore only an undershirt beneath her overalls. Her bare arms flashed in the sun, her muscles flexing as she swung. She looked strong enough to throw a horse into the air.

When she heard her daughter crying, she threw down the scythe. Wiping her hands on her thighs, she snatched Phoebe from Penny. Before she could unsnap the bib of her overalls, it went dark with gushing milk. Penny could not look away fast enough as Cora freed her pink breast. Penny stumbled off, her face burning when she heard the loud smacking noises Phoebe made while she sucked. Why did the sight of it make the blood rush to her face? What disturbed her most was how the pieces of Cora just didn't fit together. Men's clothing, a man's posture, swinging the heavy scythe, and then the exposed breast. What did it mean if Cora thought she could be a man and a woman at the same time? Who was she trying to fool? She was a woman, and not even Dr. Coup's method could undo that. There was simply no escaping the body that bound her to her daughter and kept unraveling her disguise. Penny knelt down and sifted her hands through the new hay until Cora called her to come and take the baby again.

"Next time you take her out, make sure her skin is covered." Cora had draped her work shirt over Phoebe. "Her head needs to be protected from the sun. There's that little hat I bought her." The front of Cora's overalls was still sodden, but it would dry fast in the heat. The smell of milk mingled with the mown hay. "A baby's skin can burn easily."

Penny nodded as she took Phoebe and watched Cora pick up the scythe and resume her work. She observed how Cora threw her weight behind each swing of the blade, how she stood with her legs apart, bent slightly at the knee. Her work boots were lost under the cut hay as though she had roots sinking into the earth. She looked as if she had sprung up in that field, like the grass she was cutting.

 

That night at supper, Cora didn't talk much more than she had at lunch. She turned in early, carrying the still unopened foreign envelope to her room. When Penny went upstairs an hour later, she saw a strip of light under Cora's door and imagined her reading her brother's letter. Penny settled in bed with the Chicago newspaper, which Cora never looked at. Turning to the society page, she glanced over the pictures of debutantes and socialites. Once Cora's picture had been here among those beautiful smiling ladies. If she combed through the whole paper and looked hard enough, would she find anything that mentioned Dr. Egan? She didn't even know his first name. No wonder Cora never opened the paper.

Penny longed to ask her all kinds of questions about her girlhood in Chile, about her life in Chicago and Evanston before she had come to Minerva, but Cora never talked about herself. She did not invite questions, didn't invite much in the way of casual conversation. It was beginning to get on Penny's nerves. She remembered the way Cora had fixed her with that stare after Phoebe's birth and asked Who are you? Now she wanted to ask Cora the same question. They lived in the same house, but Cora was still a stranger, as much a puzzle as the day Penny had first seen her at Renfew's. The biggest gossips in Minerva didn't really know anything about her—they hadn't even gotten the country of her birth right. They had no clue what she was hiding under her disguise.

But Penny could find out if she tried. It was a sneaky thought, but one that filled her with excitement. It was only a matter of patience and time. Hired girls had a way of uncovering secrets no one else could. Often it didn't involve that much snooping—most people left an amazing number of private things in plain view. Hadn't she read Irene Hamilton's diary twice, learning about her crush on Ned Fisk? She had certainly found out more than she wanted to about Mr. H. and her mother. Now she would unravel Cora.

 

Sweeping Cora's room the next morning, Penny found no trace of the letter, but there was an old photo album under the bed that hadn't been there the last time she cleaned. The cover was worn brown leather, the surface fingered shiny. Penny knelt on the floor and held it in her lap. Phoebe was sleeping in her basket downstairs, Cora off baling the hay she had cut the day before. For a moment Penny hesitated, but then, before she could stop herself, the album fell open in her lap, revealing a photograph of a child on a pinto pony. A girl with a braid like hers, a flushed and exhilarated face. It looked as though she had just reined in after a wild ride. That girl was Cora, unmistakably. Penny recognized the stubborn chin, the challenge in those eyes. Even as a kid she had worn pants, her legs hugging the shaggy flanks. There was no saddle, just a bridle on the pony. One hand reached out to stroke the pony's neck. Behind her, jagged mountains reared into the sky. Written underneath the photograph in pencil was My birthday, 1907.

There was another photograph of the same trousered girl fishing in a stream. Her parents stood on either side of her, everyone laughing at the camera. Her father was a handsome man with a turtleneck sweater and a clean-shaven face. Her mother had a nest of wildly curling hair. Like her husband, she wore dungarees and waders. In a different picture, the mother posed with a rifle. Stretched out at her feet was a dead wildcat. Standing over her trophy, she grinned as any sportsman would. In the next picture, she and her husband held hands. Although the date said 1909, they looked like young newlyweds, not a couple that already had half-grown children. There was a photograph of a boy with large eyes and a full, almost puffy mouth. Half a head taller than Cora, he stood beside her on a front porch under a big sign that read HOSPEDAJE PARAíSO. Jacob and I, 1910. Their Sunday clothes appeared rumpled, as though they had been climbing trees in them. Cora's hair was messy, her face tilted to gaze at him while he stared straight at the camera. Her eyes were filled with the unmasked adoration of a girl who worshiped her big brother. Her face seemed to shine. Here was a shot of the whole family riding on horseback. Jacob looked less comfortable in his saddle than his sister did in hers. Then came pages of photographs with no people in them at all—only valleys, lakes, and steep mountains plunging into the ocean.

After the space of one empty page, Penny found a black-edged card glued into the album. The card was marked with a black cross, and printed beside the cross were two names:

Christopher E. Viney 1870–1911
Theodora Van den Maagdenbergh Viney 1876–1911

Following the gap of another blank page was a picture postcard showing the Chicago skyline and then a series of photographs of Jacob. His sober suits couldn't conceal the fact that he was growing into a striking young man. In each photograph his boyish face grew more angled, firmer. But his eyes remained large in his face and there was something thoughtful about his mouth. He looked sensitive and intelligent, the kind of boy who, despite his quiet nature, had many friends. In one photograph, Cora sat beside her brother on a velvet sofa, her long hair flowing over her pale frock. That photograph made Cora look so vulnerable. Penny turned the page to pictures of Cora dressed in the tiered and gusseted gowns of a debutante.

Finally there was a picture in which she looked like the Cora Penny knew—her chin raised with a touch of bravado. She wore the uniform of a Red Cross nurse. On my way to France, 1917. On the opposite page there was a picture of her brother in an officer's uniform. So she had followed her brother to war. There were more pictures of her in uniform, one of them a group portrait with other nurses and doctors. One corner of the photograph—the back row, where the men stood—had been cut away. Something about that missing piece made Penny uneasy. Who would take scissors to a picture like that? There was another picture of Cora and her brother, sitting at an outdoor table with a jug and three glasses. Mykonos, Greece, 1919. Again, part of the photograph had been cut away. The next one, dated 1920, showed Cora in a delicate blouse with pearls at her throat. It appeared that someone stood beside her, but the photograph had been cut in half, rendering her companion invisible.

Penny felt a jolt when she figured it out. The missing piece must have been Cora's husband. The next page was blank. When she turned the page again, she came to the ragged edges where all the other pages had been ripped from the album.

 

The investigation continued, between frying potatoes and mopping the kitchen floor. In the parlor, Penny found a big leather-bound volume called Patagonia: The Star of the South. When she paged through it, she saw watercolor illustrations of glaciers and fjords, which, along with the photographs, helped her put together a picture of the landscape in which Cora had been born and raised. In the lull between chores, when Phoebe was asleep, she stole time to read about Patagonia.

The first Spanish explorers, she learned, had named the southernmost point of land Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, because of the great bonfires the Yahgan Indians built up and down the shoreline, which could be seen from miles away at sea. Despite the cold, wet climate, the Yahgan people wore no clothing. They had their fires to warm them, even in their bark canoes when they paddled the icy waters. The book said that most of the Yahgans were dead now, killed off over the centuries by diseases the white men brought, such as measles and influenza. As Penny boiled diapers in the copper wash kettle on the stove, she thought about those vanished people and their blazing fires.

 

One afternoon she finished her chores more quickly than expected. Phoebe slept quietly, allowing her to steal out to the orchard to read in the hammock. Only twenty minutes, she told herself, only five pages. But the longer she rocked herself and read, the harder it was to drag herself back to the kitchen. The wind moving through the apple branches swallowed the noise of Cora's approaching footsteps. When Penny heard Cora call her name, she was so startled that she gave a little scream and leapt up from the hammock. The book fell from her hands and landed in the grass. Before Penny could do anything, Cora picked it up and smoothed her hand over the front cover.

"This was my grandfather's. My mother gave it to him." In Cora's tone, Penny understood that this book had been one of her grandfather's most cherished possessions, a memento of both her departed grandfather and her dead mother. Penny began to squirm when she considered that she, the hired girl, had taken it from its place of honor in the parlor without asking permission. Swallowing hard, she braced herself for a good bawling out.

"I'm sorry. The baby was sleeping. I—"

Cora cut her off. "I've noticed you like to read."

Penny closed her eyes and wondered if Cora had also noticed she'd been looking through her photo album.

"You don't have to sneak around behind my back. As long as you don't neglect Phoebe, you can read all you like. Next time," she said, handing the book back to Penny, "bring Phoebe out with you. I think she likes the hammock."

***

The following day Penny read for a whole hour with Phoebe in the hammock beside her. The baby's soft breath mingled with the wind in the apple trees, the whisper of turning pages, the scratch of her pencil as she jotted down unfamiliar words so that she would remember them. If she couldn't go to high school, then she would learn about things in other ways. Educate herself. In the paper, she had read about the Self-Made Man. Guanaco, she wrote. Refugio, rhea, estancia, archipelago, milodon. The guanaco, she found out, was a wild antelope, the milodon a giant ground sloth that had died out long ago. She was so entranced, she nearly forgot it was Cora she was supposed to be investigating. Once she started, she couldn't stop reading on and on about the Patagonian wilderness until those strange creatures became as real to her as the cow in her pasture and the geese on the lawn. When she had finished the chapter, she reached up and grasped one of the low-hanging green apples and tried to gauge the size it would ripen into come September. A fat red apple, too plump and ripe to fit in her hand.

 

The first time Cora offered to drive her into town on Sunday, so that she could visit her mother and go to church, Penny begged off by saying she wasn't feeling well. It was a sweltering, humid day, and she did have a stomachache. Her alibi appeared to give Cora no cause for doubt. But when the next Sunday morning came and Penny again turned down the offer to take her into town, Cora wouldn't let it rest. "Your mother hasn't seen or heard from you in three weeks. I thought you said before that she wanted you to come home."

They sat at the kitchen table and ate their breakfast. Avoiding Cora's eyes, Penny gulped her coffee, swallowed wrong, and choked, spewing over her plate of fried eggs and bacon. When she tried to breathe, she could only gasp.

"Put your head down and breathe through your nose," Cora told her.

Her eyes watering, Penny obeyed, breathing with her head in her lap until the choking subsided. Cora brought a napkin and a glass of water.

"Your poor mother's probably wondering why she hasn't heard from you in so long," she said as Penny wiped her face.

To put an end to the questions, Penny got up from the table and scraped her ruined breakfast into the slop pail. She silently recited her list of new vocabulary. Puma, cormorant, rookery. Meanwhile Phoebe started to fuss. Cora scooped her out of her basket and started talking sweet to her. Penny was about to steal off with the slop pail to feed the geese when Cora called out to her.

"Do you like to swim?"

When their eyes met, Penny had to struggle not to start crying. It was plain that Cora understood that something had gone wrong between her and her mother. And that Cora wanted to make her happy. That she wanted her life to be more than washing diapers, cooking, and cleaning.

"Pack some sandwiches, and bring your swimming suit and a towel. Bring a book, too. I'll drive you to Lake Griffin."

 

Everyone went to Lind Lake on the outskirts of Minerva. On hot Sundays, the beach was carpeted with children flinging sand into each other's eyes and parents yelling at them. Well-to-do families like the Hamiltons owned cabins on the more remote stretches of Lind Lake, but Lake Griffin was something else altogether, tucked away in a state park.

On the eight-mile drive out there, Penny held Phoebe in her lap and teased her hands with the end of her long braid. The baby gazed up at her, her eyes focusing for the first time, locking into Penny's with such an intensity that she felt her middle go soft. When Cora noticed the look that was passing between them, she pulled over to the side of the road and laughed. "Watch out, or she'll think that you're her mother." She sounded jealous.

Penny gently traced the baby's forehead and the tip of her nose. Which one of them did Phoebe think of as her mama, she wondered. Even though Cora nursed her, Penny spent the most time with her. Cora started driving again, her rough hands on the wheel, her eyes fixed on the road.

"I've never been to Lake Griffin before," Penny told her. "I heard there's a forest in that park. They must have planted a lot of trees."

"The trees were always there. Didn't you know this part of the state used to be covered in woodland?"

Penny shook her head. "No, you're wrong. This land was prairie. Everybody knows that."

"I'm sure that's what most people believe," Cora said, "but it's not true. Once there was a forest that stretched all the way up to Saint Cloud. It was called the Big Woods. Full of deciduous trees." She paused, guiding the pickup over a rut. "Oak, maple, elm. They grew to be over a hundred feet tall."

Penny still didn't believe her. "Then what happened to them?"

"The settlers came and chopped them down to clear the land for their fields. They could have farmed on the real prairie and saved themselves the trouble, but most of them came from countries in Europe that were covered in forest. When they saw the prairie, they didn't believe it could be fertile."

Penny held on to Phoebe, cradling her head as they drove over another bump.

"So they settled in the Big Woods and made most of the old trees disappear. They were farmers, not lumbermen. They didn't even use most of the wood. My grandfather came over as a very young man. He used to own all this land we're driving over now. Lake Griffin was on his property. He decided he'd keep his own little piece of the woods. Sometimes he went there just to walk and think. Later he sold the lake to the state. I'm the only one besides the ranger who has the key to the entrance on this end."

 

When they came to the gate, Cora climbed out and unlocked it. Then she drove through, parked, and locked the gate again. "You go on ahead," she said. "I'll catch up with you later. Just keep following the path. In about half a mile you'll come to the lake."

The trees were as tall as Cora had said they would be. Walking beneath them, Penny felt tiny, as though she could melt into the green like a deer and never be seen again. The path was a narrow ribbon through the underbrush. Penny picked her way carefully around the clumps of poison ivy. A blue jay fluttered overhead, the sun lighting its bright wings. She wondered if this was how Cora had grown up, walking through the wilderness with her parents.

As she drew closer to the lake, the trees dwindled to scattered birches and willows. The path led to an old wooden dock that jutted through the cattails and over the reeds. She spotted a heron, then a leaping bullfrog. Walking to the end of the dock, she came to the open water. There was no beach here, no chance of wading or testing the water. She would have to dive right in.

The midday sun reflecting off the lake nearly blinded her. A blazing sapphire, she thought. That phrase sounded as if it had come from one of Cora's books. About two hundred feet from where she stood, a small wooded island rose from the water. Hesitating only a moment, she tugged the hand-me-down dress over her head and threw it on the dock. Underneath she was wearing Irene's hideous castoff swimsuit with the faded stripes and the ridiculous bloomers. But even that ugly swimsuit wasn't going to spoil this. With a wild yelp she launched herself into the water. Her body hit the lake with a hard splash before she broke into a crawl, kicking up waterweed.

When she was eight years old, Mrs. Hamilton had taught her to swim, taking her to Lind Lake with her own daughters. From Mrs. H. she had learned the crawl, the butterfly, the breaststroke. Irene had been so jealous that Penny was the better swimmer.

A fish brushed her ankle. Rolling over on her back, she kicked up a cascade that showered down on her belly and chest. For a while, she floated and stared at the cloudless sky until the sun hurt her eyes. Flopping over on her belly again, she swam at a brisk clip, her arms and legs slicing the cloudy brown water, which smelled faintly of fish. She pushed herself farther and farther from the shore until the lake bottom dropped away and the water turned cold and clear. She swam until she reached the island and pulled herself up on a flat granite boulder, where she lay in the sun and caught her breath until the mosquitoes drove her back into the water. My island, she thought as she headed back.

There was a stretch of shoreline with big smooth boulders where she saw Cora waving to her. "Well, look at you," she said when Penny hauled her dripping body out of the water. "You're a real selkie."

Penny felt her cheeks grow hot, aware of how dumb she must look in Irene's old swimsuit. Cora busied herself with the picnic hamper. "Here, have a sandwich."

After wrapping herself in a towel, Penny sat down and ate. Cora rolled up her overall legs and waded into the shallows with Phoebe, gently dipping her feet in the lake until the baby shrieked in delight. "They say babies are born knowing how to swim," Cora said. Then she lifted Phoebe in the air above her head. "Now you're flying, aren't you? My flying baby." Penny watched how Phoebe arched in the air, held carefully aloft in her mother's hands. Cora turned to her again, her face flushed, the happiest Penny had ever seen her.

"What's a selkie?" Penny asked.

"A kind of water witch. A seal woman, really."

Penny thought of the barking circus seals she had seen in the movies.

"She can take the form of a seal in the water and a woman on land. A shape-shifter."

Penny looked at the dark mark the water left on Cora's rolled-up overalls. She could tell Cora was aching for a real swim.

"I'll watch Phoebe if you want to go for a dip."

Cora shook her head. "I don't have a swimming suit."

"It's all right," Penny heard herself say. "Go on and swim. I won't look." She held out her hands to take the baby, then turned her back on the lake and stared into the shifting green forest. She heard a splash, then the sound of Cora swimming steadily away from the shore. It was probably her first swim since she'd come to live on the farm the previous November. By the time it got warm enough to swim, she would have been too pregnant. And maybe afraid to come here alone. In the grass beside the picnic hamper, Penny picked out the long slender shape of Cora's Winchester rifle. When the noise of splashing grew faint, she turned to the lake again. Cora was a long way out. All Penny could see of her was her dark head bobbing, her arms and legs cresting. Her men's clothes lay on the shore like shed skin.

Shape-shifter. Selkie. She would add those words to her list.

 

The morning Penny turned the pages of the calendar from July to August, she realized she had been living at Cora's for an entire month. Except for Dr. Lovell and the ice deliveryman, no one from Minerva had seen her in all that time. It was as if she had disappeared, hopped a freight train to British Columbia.

Sometimes when she watched Cora and Phoebe together, she couldn't avoid thinking of her mother. There were moments when she wondered if she hadn't been too harsh. Surely after a month's absence her mother would have calmed down, have a new respect for her. One Sunday, instead of going out to Lake Griffin, she would ask Cora to take her into town so she could see her mother again. But the memory of the slap kept intruding on this fantasy, along with the recollections of that stinking lily-of-the-valley toilet water. Besides, she argued to herself, her mother had sent no word to her in all this time, either. It takes two. Maybe her mother didn't want to see her. Her greatest fear was that her mother would tear her down to size, make Cora out to be someone pathetic. And her mother would turn her reading, her vocabulary lists, her Sunday swims into a joke. She would keep cutting her down until she was nothing but a burden again, the unwanted bastard she had fished out of the rain barrel.

 

When she finally did go into town again after her weeks of seclusion, Minerva seemed like an alien place. She stared out the dusty pickup's window at the clapboard houses and the stone angel in front of the funeral parlor as if seeing these things for the first time.

"I've got some business at the bank," Cora told her. "Could you get the groceries?" They were parked in front of Renfew's. "Here's the shopping list and here's some money." She handed Penny a five-dollar bill. "I'll pick you up in front of the store in an hour."

When Cora drove away to the bank, Penny settled Phoebe's weight in her arms and mounted the creaking wooden steps of Renfew's porch. The instant she stepped inside, everyone looked up. She glanced around at their unbelieving faces: Mr. Renfew, Mrs. Deal, Mrs. La Plant, and some man she didn't recognize.

What was the matter with these people, she wondered. She didn't look any different from before. She was still Penny Niebeck, wearing one of Irene's castoff dresses, her long braid hanging down her back. Except now she was the Maagdenbergh woman's hired girl, holding Cora's baby as proudly as any aunt would. As she approached the counter, it struck her that she had a different way of walking. Maybe it was only the baby's weight in her arms, but her feet seemed to touch the ground more resolutely than they ever had.

"Penny," Mr. Renfew said, his face turning pink. He had acted awkwardly enough around Cora, but she was an outsider. City people were expected to be a little odd. He didn't seem to understand why a local girl like her could suddenly do something so unexpected and turn herself into a stranger. "I hear you're living out there at the Maagdenbergh farm. Is that, um, permanent?"

She laughed. "I guess."

"How are you?" he asked, searching her face. Was he trying to see if living with Cora had left some mark on her?

"I'm just fine." Penny held up the baby so he could get a good look at her. She was turning into a pretty thing with her big eyes and tufts of strawberry-blond hair. "Her name's Phoebe."

Mr. Renfew's face eased into a smile. Penny smiled, too. Then she freed her hand to fish Cora's shopping list out of her pocket and give it to him. As Mr. Renfew turned to take the items down from the shelves, she felt an uncomfortable prickle. Slowly she turned around. Mrs. Deal and Mrs. La Plant smiled selfconsciously before dropping their gaze back into their glasses of pop. But the strange man in the back of the store kept staring at her and the baby. He was about forty, she guessed, with a swank haircut and a white seersucker suit. His face was deeply tanned, but she guessed it hadn't come from farm work. His blue eyes seemed to leap right out of his face. She twitched uncomfortably. Why was he looking at her like that? She felt herself go red and wondered if he could see right through the thin fabric of her dress.

"There you go, Penny." Mr. Renfew packed the groceries into an apple crate. "Is she parked outside? Do you want me to carry it to the pickup?"

"She's coming to meet me around eleven. Could you hold on to the groceries until then?" She was about to ask him who that man was when Phoebe started to fret.

"How's everything on the farm?" Mr. Renfew pitched his voice above the baby's squalling.

"Fine." She jostled Phoebe in her arms.

"Let me hold her a second." Mrs. La Plant appeared at her elbow and took Phoebe from Penny's arms before she could stop her. "I know all about lil' babies," she crooned. Although she had been married for six years, Mrs. La Plant didn't have any children of her own.

"How on earth is she going to manage the wheat harvest?" Mr. Renfew asked.

Penny looked helplessly at Mrs. La Plant, who was jiggling the baby and singing "Ain't We Got Fun."

"Penny?" Mr. Renfew's voice drew her back to the question she hadn't answered. Mrs. Deal leaned forward on her stool. The man in the white suit stood poised beside a pyramid of Washington State apples, one shiny fruit balanced on his palm. Penny knew that whatever she said would be all over town before she and Cora sat down to supper that night.

Harvest was the time of year when no farmer could afford to stand alone. No matter how much you might dislike your neighbors, you wouldn't survive without them. How could Cora expect to get her threshing done without people pitching in?

"We're getting help," Penny said.

"That same bunch of Mexicans her grandfather had over?" Mr. Renfew asked.

She shrugged. Cora hadn't really discussed it with her.

"Listen, Penny." Mr. Renfew lowered his voice. "There's been trouble going around."

"Trouble?" She shook her head.

He sighed. "Gang of roughnecks set fire to the Pearsons' barn. They only just managed to get the fire truck out in time."

"Was it the Nelson gang?" Penny thought of the story of how Cora had shot through the Nelsons' windshield.

"The police couldn't say for sure. The Nelson brothers came up with an alibi. Nowadays any bunch of hooligans who get their hands on an automobile can ride around and make trouble." He lowered his eyes and cleared his throat. "There was a second incident. With the Stadler girl. Lived alone on the farm with her old dad. Whoever it was went by their place and messed her up pretty bad."

Penny winced. Why was he telling her this? She turned to look at Mrs. La Plant, who was still bouncing Phoebe up and down.

"Penny, if you were my daughter," Mr. Renfew said, "I wouldn't want you living out on that farm. It was good of you to help her, but it would be a lot safer if you came back and lived with your mother again."

Mrs. La Plant was heading toward the strange man, who now ignored Penny and directed his attention to the baby. A rising sense of panic blotted out everything Mr. Renfew was telling her. Dashing over, she snatched Phoebe back.

"I better take her outside."

"Why, I never!" Mrs. La Plant sputtered. "Look what you've done! She's really crying now. Let me take her again. I know all about babies..."

"I'll be back for the groceries at eleven!" Penny yelled over her shoulder as she ran out the door with the screaming baby.

 

How could she have let Mrs. La Plant—or anyone—take the baby away from her like that? And who was that man? She kept looking back, but there were just the Minervans she had known for as long as she could remember. It was hard to ignore their staring faces. Even the old Norwegians in front of the feed store could not take their eyes off her. She held her head high, trying to copy Cora's proud indifference. At least now she was somebody. They couldn't ignore her anymore.

The rhythm of her moving body eased Phoebe off to sleep. The baby's mouth went slack, and a puddle of drool blossomed on the front of Penny's dress. Turning on Maple Street, she found herself retracing her old way home from the store. Wouldn't her mother be surprised to see her? She would melt when she saw how adorable Phoebe was. Suddenly it seemed so simple and clear. Why hold a grudge forever? All she had to do was say hello. She didn't even have to step inside the Hamiltons' house.

She walked slowly, but steadily, by way of Minerva High School. The red brick school with its new gymnasium was the town's pride, but she gazed instead at the statue of the goddess Minerva on the school lawn. She would never tell anyone how much she loved that pink-veined marble goddess with her helmet, spear, and olive bough cradled beneath her breast. The figure was sweet-faced and pretty, a girl her age with rivulets of hair cascading down her slender back. Balancing Phoebe's weight, she freed one hand to trace the letters of the word WISDOM engraved on the marble tablet at the goddess's sandaled feet. The statue was so delicately chiseled, she could run her fingertip over the edge of each marble toenail. After giving the smooth marble one last stroke, she continued on her way.

Her heart rattled in her chest as she walked down Elm Street. She wasn't a child anymore; she lived at Cora's, earned her own keep. Her mother would have to respect her now. Maybe they could be friends. Yes, they could be friends. If only she didn't think too much about what her mother was doing with Mr. H.

She nearly stumbled on the uneven sidewalk when she saw him on his English bicycle, his face all flushed. Home from the pop factory in the middle of the day. Well, she knew exactly what he had just been up to. As he cycled along, his trouser legs were rolled up, revealing the red and green argyle socks his wife had knit and that her mother kept darning for him. When his eyes met hers, Penny gave him such a look that his face went purple. He swerved, nearly hitting a lamppost. Penny felt her face turn stony. I'm a witch, she exulted. A witch who had the power to make him fall off his bicycle and bleed. She glared at his back as he pedaled away. Then she let out a long breath and retraced her steps to Renfew's. She could have visited her mother. There was still time to have a quick chat before going to meet Cora. She could have at least knocked and said something through the screen door. But she didn't. Not after seeing him.