Free The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt Page A

schism through the white land. Summer at home, picking chokecherries for jam—stained fingers, hawkweed soft on her legs as she waded toward the bushes at the edge of a field—still seemed too seductive, a memory they would use to hold her here with them while the weeds grew in the gutter and the willow roots wound up through the pipes. She had planned, after Commencement, to stay for two weeks only, drinking coffee on the lawn with Ma. Then she would lift her arms and let Fate carry her away.
    Now she has four days. Driving home after the ceremony, she tried to make new plans: she had three hundred dollars and could double it by selling her car; she could drive to New York, land on a friend’s doorstep, go from there. At every fork she considered, but she always turned for home. Highways became streets, the town dwindled, and finally she turned down the narrow road so little traveled that lilacs and elderberries arched over the stone fences alongside, almost touching overhead.
    Audie and Grace, ahead of her by only an hour, were packing already, the blond and the dark heads leaning from the upstairs window, long arms throwing blankets out to Pop, who caught each bundle and tossed it into the Jeep. Something had stung them into action, and Kate realized, just from the daze Ma always left behind her, that she must already be gone. The girls seemed unwilling to break their rhythm of labor even to welcome Kate, and she stood before the massive stone porch pillars, uncertain as an immigrant: she was no longer one of them. When they left the window for more, Pop came to embrace her.
    â€œWe’re so proud,” he said, looking through her. He was never one to fix on the present, and Kate was used to checking over her shoulder only to realize he was picturing the curve of a rising market, or a sail on a distant sea. Now he was seeing the past, some hallowed recollection—this farm, the first of his dreams. Kate touched his shoulder, to make herself real.
    â€œWhere are we moving?”
    Before he could shake himself into the present, Grace was at the window again. “We don’t know!” she said. “Catch!” Like parachutes, like wide white wings, the sheets unfurled overhead.
    *   *   *
    Drifting, half dreaming, Kate pieces the day back together. Sheets and scholar’s robes; then a maple leaf floats down on a fishhook; a little cracked pitcher Ma always loved appears, full of terror suddenly, Made in Hell. “Sleep, dopey,” she tells herself, in her mother’s voice. “Tomorrow you have to pack all day.”
    Once, Ma had waked them at midnight and taken them out to watch a comet from a blanket on the garden lawn. She and Pop had been fighting all day while Kate and Audie dodged around them, tiptoeing down the back staircase, devising secrets under the porch while Ma, above them, yanked the clothes from the line. Dinner passed in livid silence until one of the sheep nosed open the screen door and tottered toward them, its feet clicking and sliding on the linoleum tiles. Confounded, unable to turn, it gaped at them in dumb sheep-horror and wet the floor.
    This had been Ma’s last straw: she sprang up in fury, but she was full of love for the sheep.
    â€œHere, baby,” she said, sinking her hands deep into its wool, laughing as she coaxed it outside.
    â€œEat your dinner,” she said to Pop. “I’ll be mopping up sheep piss.” She threw the faucets wide open to fill the bucket, then, overcome, hurled it to the floor, splashing them all with a sudsy wave. She smacked the swinging door open with one flat hand and escaped, sobbing, Pop behind her, while the children sat still as statues, watching the door flap back and forth in their wake.
    Waiting for the comet, leaning back against Pop’s knee, Ma had laughed easily again, low and confidential, blowing smoke as mosquito repellent into Kate’s hair. Another storm was past,