Page 49 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

“I don’t really know anything about children,” I admitted, though I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Margaret or myself now.

“I know.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile, like she could tell what I’d been thinking when my eyes landed on Annie. I’d spent years faced with my own death, lived and breathed grief since I was a child, but that was nothing compared to this. I didn’t even have a name for the feeling inside of me.

Margaret’s eyes sheepishly dropped from mine, and she went into the kitchen, taking the percolator from the stove and dumping the grounds inside.

“Where is he?” I asked.

She glanced at the window. “Working. He’s out there before sunup most days.”

I went to the back door, watching the wall of tobacco rustling in the wind. “Who helps Eamon with the crop? I haven’t seen anyone in the fields.”

“You did. You did it together.” She turned on the water, pulling the block of soap closer to the sink. “He had a couple hired hands from town, but…” She didn’t finish, her lips pressing into a line as if she’d caught herself before she said something she shouldn’t.

I couldn’t tell where exactly her and Esther’s loyalties lay. Esther had seemed almost protective of Eamon, and she hadn’t hidden the fact that she expected me to keep my distance from Margaret. We were blood, but I’d abandoned them, too, along with a husband, a child, and a farm. The list of things I’d left behind was growing.

If Eamon was running this place alone, I didn’t know how that was possible. I leaned into the door with one shoulder, studying the faint yellowing tobacco leaves along the rows farthest from the house. I’d noticed them yesterday, and it wasn’t good, no matter what decade offarming we were in. During an uncommonly wet season, the water would have drained down those hills, and if blight had taken hold, it could ruin the whole crop before Eamon could harvest. From the look of it, he’d barely been able to keep this place going.

Margaret turned off the water, scrubbing the pot in the sink and I took the dry rag that hung above the stove, drying the bowl she’d already finished.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen.”

Sixteen years old. I’d guessed she was about that age, but hearing her say it made her look even younger to me. She carried herself like someone who wasn’t a child, but that youth in her face was unmistakable. There was a shine to her that was untouched. She had maybe ten years left with Esther before she died, according to what Gran had told me. Then she’d take over running the farm herself.

I watched her from the corner of my eye. If I was here now, did that mean that all this time, Gran remembered me? She grew up knowing Eamon and Annie, yet Gran had never said a word about them. I’d always thought there weren’t things hidden between us, but that wasn’t true. Gran had kept a multitude of things from me.

“You know…” I set the bowl on the shelf, trying to decide how to ask the question. “You know who I am, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That you’re my…”

“Grandmother?” She looked amused by the question. “Yes.”

A laugh escaped me. The situation was so bizarre that I didn’t know how to feel about it. What would it have been like to grow up knowing about all of this? The door. The episodes. The splitting of time. Gran had been given all that knowledge so young, but she hadn’t given any of it to me.

She bit down on her bottom lip, like she was second-guessing whatever she was thinking. “It’s strange. I feel like I have so much to tell you, but then I remember.” She stopped herself.

I knew what she was going to say. That I didn’t know her. The dimming excitement in her eyes when she’d come down the stairs yesterday had told me the same thing.

“Were we close?” I asked. “Before, I mean.”

She nodded, the half smile on her face turning a little sad.

“But you don’t seem angry with me, like the others.” I took a chance in saying it.

Margaret’s full lips pressed into a line again, exactly the way I remembered Gran doing when she was thinking hard about something. “I think you have your reasons.”

Have.I twisted the rag in my hands, staring at her. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. There was something strange about the words. They were so present. Like the future me she knew and loved, the one who’d lived here, wasn’t really gone.

I wanted to ask her what she thought those reasons were. If she knew where I went and why. But Esther’s warning came back to me. This Margaret was still just a kid.

“So, Esther really sent you to watch me?”

Margaret gave me an apologetic look.