Free The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt

befitted her new status, she ran, one hand holding the mortarboard steady, the other keeping hold of her robe.
    But they were broken into factions already. Pop, pale and grave, kept to the edge of the crowd, while Ma, holding Chucky by the hand, had appropriated its center. Among the other, decorous mothers, she burned with electrical intensity, leading Audie and Grace in a wave of proud, indiscreet laughter, staking a rebellious claim. Away from their domain, they seemed like night creatures exposed. Garish, alarming, they blinked and clung to each other, fending off the unfamiliar world.
    â€œHere we are, Katie!” Ma called.
    â€œPop’s over there!” Kate said. She stood midway between them, thinking they’d been separated by accident, but nobody moved. The sun cast wide stripes of light through the tent top, kindling a thousand cups of red punch.
    Finally Grace broke from Ma’s side. She was fourteen, taller than Kate now and gangly as telescoped Alice, but she had a new delicacy too: she took Kate’s arm more in solace than in celebration.
    â€œI’ll talk to Pop,” she said, “and when you’ve been with Ma awhile we’ll trade.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Kate had asked, impatient, wondering why they couldn’t let their angers rest just for the day.
    Grace was so accustomed to dividing herself equally between her parents, passing their messages back and forth at the dinner table, that she hardly noticed they never spoke to each other, only to her. She was a mass of scruples, part of her adolescent independence. Everything must test for loyalty and good intention, and Kate’s vexation failed.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Grace asked hotly, and fell under her own censure: this was Kate’s day. Kate watched her cautious face relax until the child appeared again, shy and smiling. “Congratulations!” She threw her arms around Kate’s neck and sent the mortarboard flying.
    Audie, of course, was the one to explain. Married, like her parents, at nineteen, she had become everyone’s confidante and could speak—winding her program around strong, uncertain fingers—of deeds and litigations, Ma’s accusations, Pop’s rebuttals, the process server, and the price of land.
    â€œSo,” she said finally, “we have to be packed in four days. It’s hard to believe it. It’s hard to say it out loud.”
    â€œFour days?” said Kate, but checked herself. “Fine.” She would refuse even to pity them this time. She was in the hands of Fate. Everyone must blaze ahead today.
    Audie took a moment to come around. “I suppose…” she said. Then her trusting, rascal’s smile, her little sister’s will-to-agree. “They are impossible.”
    Grace, baffled by this wicked camaraderie, had set her face. From behind them, a squeal: “Oh, Dad-ee!” as some beaming father dangled a new set of keys.
    *   *   *
    Grace’s room is still neat as a jewel box in the midst of the muddled house, and Kate imagines she is sleeping soundly there. Audie, who is home to help with the packing, is across from Kate in her old bed, an ark of stuffed animals, her hand closed tight on a velvet opossum’s tail. If she would wake up, they could whisper as they used to, watching a jar of fireflies on the sill. Ma used to let them stay up as late as they liked: she was afraid of the night with Pop away. In the morning she’d say school wasn’t important—they should turn over and go back to their dreams.
    Kate dreamed of a larger world than this! She would struggle awake and run up the dirt road out of the valley to catch the school bus: that vessel might teem with threats and humiliations, but it carried her away. In these last years she had come home only for Christmas, and when she thought of the place she saw winter: the house gray as the sky, the brook a sharp black