Free The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips Page A

tree or sit down on a flat rock with no moss or bugs. I could hear pecans or hickory nuts hit the ground. No one else there. No one watching, no one listening. I liked the woods best when I could be alone.
    Ella and Lois were with me this time, but I knew them so well it was almost like being alone.
    The trees were mostly green, just tinged with fire as we walked, with a little spark of yellow or orange drifting down around our heads every now and then. Ella had a sackful of chinquapins, and Lois collected all the hickory nuts. I had the wild blueberries. We all sampled from our sacks and snitched from the others, and even with our bellies swollen and ready to pop, we’d still have enough to take home for roasted hickory nuts and berry pies and cobblers.
    Back behind Highway 78, up along the mountain, was a dinner table always set.
    “So if he is sweet on you, are you gone let him call on you?” Ella asked. She crunched a chinquapin, tossing away the shell with its mouth still gaping from losing its nut.
    I frowned. Henry Harken was the son of a big mining inspector in town, well-to-do. He made me nervous. His family had plenty of money, and his clothes must have cost more than mine, Tess’s, and Jack’s put together and doubled.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You better get t’ thinkin’!”
    I didn’t like how he never introduced himself as Henry—he always said Henry Harken, Jr. I thought that was right snooty. I watched Ella and Lois in front of me, walking so close their arms touched, like paper dolls still attached at the elbow. I hadn’t known any other twins, so I didn’t know if they all acted like mirror images—their movements, gestures, the way they walked. It was like God had given lessons with just those two in the class. When Mama and Tess and I walked and the sun lay our shadows down in front of us, we looked like that, like triplets. But we were stick-figure women, all legs and arms and skinny middles, and Ella and Lois had enough curves to wear girdles on Sundays. I didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet.
    Ella and Lois loved talking about boys, but I didn’t have any fondness for it. I didn’t like how they looked at me, how a group of them would holler when you walked by. Like suddenly you were on a stage but you didn’t know any lines to say. Aunt Celia lived with Grandma Moore, and I wondered if that wasn’t the better way to go about it. It seemed simpler.
    Grandma Moore had separated from Grandpa Moore before I was born, leaving him in Fayette and moving here to a house Papa bought her. That was the first house she ever lived in that was her very own. And Grandpa Moore’s mother had divorced her husband and changed her name and all the kids’ names back to her maiden name. That’s why we were Moores. He must’ve done something awful to make her want to go out and not just erase him out of her life, but erase his name, too. Whatever he did, if he hadn’t have done it, we’d all be named Adams.
    Nobody ever talked about what those men did, but that was two generations of women who’d picked up and moved along.
    “Know whose baby that was yet?” asked Lois, her hair catching the sun where the trees thinned out.
    “Uh-uh,” I said as I stepped over a log. “We haven’t heard anything. Have you?”
    “Mama says must have been a no-account.”
    I wondered if it was another woman who wanted to pick up and move along and that baby was only a weight holding her back. I didn’t have dreams like Tess—the pictures in my head of the woman and her baby came during the daylight. She liked these same woods. And liked how cool and damp the air was. And felt like it was the only place that was really hers.
    “What’s the matter with Henry?” Lois asked.
    “He’s nice-looking. Sweet on you for sure. Good manners,” added Ella.
    “He makes me nervous,” I said, knowing that’d just make them hound me more.
    “Shoot, everybody makes you nervous. You’d think lookin’ like Mary