Page 75 of The Unmaking of June Farrow

I only half admitted to myself that I hoped it was true. It had been five days since I’d come through the door, and it hadn’t reappeared. Now I was almost afraid that it would. That I’d cross back without ever really knowing what happened here. I didn’t know if I could live with that.

The sunlight glowed around Eamon’s frame as he walked toward the barn, and Callie’s ears perked up behind the fence. I watched until he was out of sight and then looked back to Annie. Her feet swung softly as she watched me with a steady, focused gaze. Was there something new in her expression, or was I imagining it?

I took a step toward her, inspecting every inch of her I could take in. I still hadn’t had memories of her push through, and I suspected that might be because they were buried the deepest. Still, I was getting hungrier for them, the urge to chase them down growing by the day. There was a part of this story I’d never understand until I remembered her. There was a version of me that I’d never know.

Her toes brushed my legs, their shadows painting the floor.

“We’re going to the Faire tonight,” I said, my voice finding a calm that I hadn’t yet been able to muster. “Won’t that be fun?”

She nodded, picking up another cherry with her sticky fingers. “Will there be cake?”

I went rigid, mouth dropping open as I stared at her. She was looking right at me, eyebrows raised as she waited for her answer. But I’d never heard her voice before. She’d never spoken a single word to me.

“Will there?” she asked again, that tiny sound like a bell.

If there was anything strange about the moment to her, I couldn’t tell. She said it like we were continuing a conversation that already existed.

“I—I don’t know,” I said through a stilted breath. “We’ll have to see when we get there.”

“Okay.”

She twirled a stem in her fingers, the sight summoning endless memories of picking cherries over the backyard fence back home. The neighbor’s cherry tree drooped past its boundary in the corner of the yard, where a small pile of bricks was stacked so that I could reach the lowest branches. I’d pick every single one I could find, and after a while, she’d finally come outside with a little ladder and let me fill a basket.

The neighbor. I could see her face, her dark hair pulled back in a clip and painted fingernails. But I couldn’t dredge her name up from my mind. It was just barely out of reach.

I stared into Annie’s bowl of cherries, thinking hard now. I’d known the woman almost my entire life, even before we’d moved into the house next door. I’d visited her at the courthouse many times when I was trying to find documentation on my mother. She’d baked that blueberry pie Mason and I had eaten, for god’s sake.

My mind snagged, an incomplete feeling souring the memory. There was an empty place where something had once existed. Why couldn’t I remember her name?

A hand went to my mouth, fingers pressed to my lips, when Iplaced the sensation. It was the same one I’d had when I couldn’t remember that song Gran used to sing. Like there was a hole torn through my mind and it had simply fallen out. Only now it was different. Before, just the words had been beyond reach, but I couldn’t even think of the melody as I stood there. I couldn’t even picture Gran’s face when she sang it.

And there’d been something else. A shop I couldn’t remember downtown, even though I’d walked Main Street every single day.

Annie jumped down, leaving the bowl of cherries behind, and I struggled to feel my feet beneath me. It was almost as if the memories were fading. Slowly disappearing behind a fog.

I went to the counter beside the back door, ripping a page from the notepad. As fast as my hand would move, I wrote it down—the entire memory of the cherry tree. Those stacked bricks, the glare of the sun, the basket on my arm, the sparrows up in the branches. I recorded every detail except the woman’s name, even noting her hair color and the shape of her glasses and the ring she always wore on her right middle finger with an opal at its center. When I couldn’t think of a single thing more, I set down the pen, folding the paper once, then again.

Margaret pushed through the front door, making me jolt, and I moved my hand behind my back, stuffing the paper into my pocket. I hadn’t even heard the truck pull up.

She stood in the doorway, twisting the long blond braid that hung over her shoulder around her fingers.

The page in my pocket was like a live coal, but I didn’t know what exactly I was hiding. I only knew that I couldn’t fully tell where the alliances of this family lay. I’d gotten the impression that Margaret and June had been in league with each other in a way that Esther hadn’t been. But Esther and Eamon hadn’t been the only ones to keep the truth about my mother and the murder investigation from me. Margaret had, too.

“You okay?” Her wide blue eyes were glassy. She looked like she might cry.

“I’m fine.” I tried to smile, but it faltered when I remembered that had been my dynamic with Gran, too. Her worried and me trying to reassure her.

Margaret fidgeted again with the end of her braid, and for a moment, it felt as if she was going to say something else. But as soon as I was sure she was about to speak, she moved past me, to the kitchen.

I watched as she started on the dishes, cutting a piece of the soap block to lather on the bristled brush. She had that look on her face now that she always did when things were moments from coming apart. Her first instinct was to control what she could, whether it was changing the oil in the farm truck or cleaning out a closet or washing the dishes in the sink. Gran hadn’t just been the glue of our family. She’d been that for this one, too.

I reconsidered pressing her for whatever it was she was about to say, but I wasn’t the same June she’d trusted. And if this Margaret was anything like Gran, she wouldn’t be pried open.

I went into the bedroom, leaving a crack in the door as I made my way to the bed and reached behind the mattress. When I found the fold of burlap I’d left there, I pulled it free.

Quietly, I slipped the folded paper from my back pocket inside, eyes catching on the next page—the list of years I’d written down.

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