Grace. Natashia Deon
a toy.”
“You were the last one to be seen with her.”
“Prove it,” he say, leaning back against the wall. “You believe ’em?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe. No one is asking anymore and that other girl, the Humphrey girl from up the road, moved away years ago.”
“That wasn’t true, neither. Children will say anything.”
“She was five years old, George!”
“More reason for her to lie. Play make-believe. Children will say anything.” He pushes hisself off the wall. “I’m beginning to believe you’d trust strangers before your own brother.”
“I never said I believed them.”
“Is that why you sent me away?”
“That school was good for you,” Annie say. “Besides, it wasn’t me who sent you.”
“You didn’t stop it either . . .”
“Our parents knew what was best for you.”
“They’re dead,” he said. “But I’m still here, Annie.”
“That school was supposed to make you . . .”
“Distant?”
“Happy.”
“You used to hate that place as much as I did, Annie. You used to say it kept us apart. Best friends, remember? Then you let your husband send me there again.”
“University is not the same. That was a privilege. You could have come home anytime.”
“That’s funny.”
“Before then, you were a child. You needed something we couldn’t give you. It helped you to mature . . .”
“You stopped writing—”
“To become a man.”
“Never an explanation why.”
She shakes a pair of trousers from the basket. “I’m happy you’re home now. That’s all that matters.”
“That’s all? You mean, that’s all for you. You didn’t have to go through it. That’s all. Telling me that I need to move on, that’s all.” His face reddens and his cheeks quiver. “Eight years, Annie! Three weeks it took for me to get the news that Mother and Father died.”
“They were my parents, too!”
“And you didn’t send for me . . .”
“You’d only been there a few months. With everything that had just happened to you, your state . . . I didn’t know what it’d do to you. It was the best decision . . .”
He rips the trousers from her hand. “What happened to you?”
She closes her eyes. “I wanted to protect you. You weren’t ready. You needed to mature. Children have to grow up sometime, George. That’s what they do.”
“I suppose I didn’t do that right, either.” He flicks the trousers to the floor.
The doctor knocks on the door, opening it at the same time as he knocks. He walks in and leans over Josey, laying his head on her chest, listening. “Her vapors have gone.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Annie say.
He gathers his tools.
“And, Annie?” Doctor say. “You should reconsider your position on the matter. These negroes have no place in the house like this.”
Conyers, Georgia, 1847
FOR THE BETTER part of this week, me and Johnny been shooting marbles. We mostly play in secret and only after my chores is done. Mostly. Johnny’s good at keeping secrets.
His momma’s been spending more and more time running to that store for Bernadette’s medicine and been rough-sketching something she wants Albert to build under her house. She been gone for most of the day already so Johnny drew a circle in the dirt hours ago. We just dropped our marbles in. All but one of our little ones and a big one. Two each.
The big one is called our shooter. I painted mine blue and it got three stick people on it, holding hands—me and Hazel and Momma. But it mostly look like a spider.
Johnny’s shooter got all sorts of colors—blue and black and white and tan. He used all the pots of color Cynthia gave him to do it. I think his is pretty.
I drop my shooter outside the circle and lay my body down in front of it, my flat chest in the dirt. I put my thumb behind it, close one eye to make sure it’s all lined up. My breaths make the dust putter.
Johnny snatches my shooter, laughing.
“You cheatin’!” I say. “I was about to shoot.”
He holds out his hand, teasing me with my own marble, and closes it before I get it. So I wrestle him for it, both us laughing. I twist his arm and shake it from his limp hand. He lifts his chin toward the barn and smiles.
“What?” I say. “Your momma kill me if I go out that far. And if you keep going out to that barn after she told you not to, she gon’ kill you, too.”
He raises his brows, daring me.
I admit, the risk-taking makes me want to go. It feels like freedom. Reminds me of Hazel and our dusk runs.
I take off with Johnny. Close my eyes and pretend I’m back with Momma and Hazel, pretend that Johnny’s one of Momma’s gave-away babies here to let me be a big sister one time.
I let the grass brush under my feet, the cool air swish over me, half-waiting for Cynthia’s voice to yell me back to my place and keep me from this stole happiness.
The barn meets us.
Its tall front doors are dark-brown masses, three times my height, streaked black and wet. They gap open wide enough for us to slide through sideways without touching.
We hold hands and shuffle our feet through the hay spread on the ground, then around a column, past another, ’til Johnny stops us near the back of the barn where there’s a broken baling machine. Wood planks lay atop two hay bales there like a roof. He lifts the planks.
Four yellow puppies are trembling inside. The runt ain’t moving much, though. That’s the one Johnny picks up and holds to his chest. Johnny smiles and nods for me to pick one up, too, but I shake my head. I ain’t got nothin to give it. “Where’s the momma?” I say. He raises his shoulders, rubs the sickly one again. It moves for him.
“You probably shouldn’t get attached to that one. It don’t look well.”
He turns his back to me, presses the puppy into the crook of his neck, and kneels down to a pail of milk ready for churning. He takes a cloth from his pocket and dips it in the milk, then holds it to the pup’s mouth. Squeezes.
“Johnny, you steal this milk?”
He don’t hear me.
“Johnny?”
Cynthia’s voice rumbles from up the road. She loud-talking, yelling to somebody. “We in trouble now!”
Johnny puts the pup in his shirt and points ahead to a open place in the barn wall and waves for me to follow him. We climb through the space, then run across the field, keeping low to the ground. My legs move as fast as they can go, leaving Johnny behind. I wait ’round the side of the brothel house, can hear the clinks of glass from Sam serving, so I take my chance and run toward the center of the garden, my head held back, my fringe bangs flying straight up in the air. I dive, sliding to a stop, pretend I been here all along, looking at something in the dirt. My knees are scraped and burning but I stay cross-eyed,