Josh picked up his pack and slung it over one shoulder, but he took a step backward when I scooped up the kid closest to me and thrust her into his arms. “Yuck! It’s all wet!”
I almost laughed, but I managed to convert it into a small choking sound. I admit, maybe I was a little happy that he didn’t like it. Heck, I hadn’t asked him to show up unannounced. I hadn’t asked for reminders of the past. He could take what came.
“Welcome to farm life. Here, put one arm under her chest and use the other to support her hindquarters.” I helped him make the adjustment, and the four-legged kid settled in tight against the two-legged kid’s chest. I picked up my bag of supplies and the other twin. Thistle nuzzled my leg, bleating for her babies. “It’s okay, girl,” I told her. “Just follow us back to the barn.”
Josh looked uncertainly at the leggy bundle in his arms. “Hey, something’s wrong with her eyes. She looks like a space alien.”
I leaned over to look. Nothing was wrong. “You mean her pupils?”
“Yeah. They’re rectangles. It’s creepy. Aren’t they supposed to be round?”
“That’s normal if you’re a goat.”
Normal. A normal, peaceful life was what I craved. Was that too much to ask for? My need for normal was why I lived on my own, why I’d given Landon an emphatic no. I was a talented expert when it came to avoiding complications. But Josh’s unexpected appearance had flipped my day from totally normal to utterly bizarre.
We started toward the barn. Thistle stuck close, wobbly and still upset but determined to keep up. The buzzards flew down to investigate, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d cheated them out of their meal. Despite an unexpected nephew and a conniving sister, the day was not a total disaster.
At least not yet.
CHAPTER TWO
Josh
I followed Bryn on a dirt path through scratchy weeds, carrying the wriggling goat, with Bryn’s dog close beside me. My stomach had been hurting the whole long drive, and the goat’s funky stink made it worse. All day I kept telling myself that once I got here, everything would be okay. But now I was in a strange place with a strange aunt, holding a strange animal. Now I was here, and nothing was okay.
The path widened underneath tall trees, and Bryn dropped back to walk beside me. She took one of those deep breaths like when I have to write an essay for English class. “What’s going on? Where’s your mother? And how did you get here?”
I only knew the answer to the last question. “Uber.”
“You Ubered across the entire state? I didn’t know that was even possible.”
“It wasn’t easy.” Yeah, okay, I was a little proud I’d done it. Some of my friends didn’t even have the app. “Nine rides. Four hundred miles. I promised big tips, and I had a note Mom wrote a long time ago. My son has permission to ride with you. If questions, call. Three of the drivers called, got her voice mail, and drove me anyway. The other six just looked at the note, shrugged, and told me to get in.”
“How did you pay for it?”
“I didn’t. It’s linked to Mom’s credit card.” Mom was going to shit when she saw the bill, but hey, she was the one who told me to come.
“So why are you here? Does your mom know? Do you need to call her?”
Too many questions. Her voice was calm and quiet like when she talked to the goat, but the answers made my stomach twist. “I don’t know where she is. And her phone is off. It’s been off the whole time she’s been gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone a whole week.”
“A week?” Not so calm and quiet anymore. She stopped walking, stared at me, and her face went all scrunchy. “She abandoned you for a week?”
She made it sound like Mom had done something awful. “She didn’t abandon me.” I said it hard, and she turned kind of pink like she’d gotten the message. “I was with neighbors. I’ve stayed with them before.”
Jill and Francie. In and out all day and night, their apartment smelling like the locker room at school. I’d heard them talking the night before, saying a week of babysitting was too long, especially now that summer vacation had started. They mentioned child services, a major hit to the gut, and I knew I had to jump. “I left this morning before they were awake.”
“You didn’t tell them you were going?”
I shook my head. She didn’t get it. They probably hadn’t even noticed I was gone yet.
“Okay then. Let’s get the animals settled, and first thing we do is call those neighbors.”
Yeah. Go ahead. Call them. But that wasn’t going to find my mother.
We arrived at a little barn with a rust-streaked sheet-metal roof. Chickens fluttered around in a pen on the left, and there was another goat making a lot of noise in a fenced corral on the right. The goat who had just dumped the babies was reddish-brown, the other one was black, and they both had long floppy ears that were even bigger than the ones on Aunt Bryn’s dog.
Bryn unlatched the goat pen. “Tellico, stay out.” The dog sat down at once, panting with a long pink tongue. Pretty good, listening like that.
We carried the babies in, and the mother goat followed. We set down the little ones, and they ran straight to her to nurse. At least they had a mother.
“This one is Thistle,” Bryn scratched the goat on her forehead, and Thistle lifted her head for more. “The other one’s Kudzu.”
Like I care.
“We’ll have to think of names for the little ones.”
We? Yeah, right.
“I’ll put the chickens up for the night, and then we’ll go to the house.”
“I’m hungry.” Maybe food would help things seem not so strange. “I got one of the drivers to stop at a McDonald’s, but that was a long time ago.”
“Okay. We’ll put dinner on the list.”
She went to the other side of the barn, and I could hear clucking sounds. I stayed with the goats.
The baby I’d carried came over and sniffed at the legs of my jeans. I bent to give it a pat, and it sucked on my fingers like it was still hungry. I wiped my sticky hands on some straw, took out my phone, and snapped a few pictures of the goats.
The gurgling of some sort of creek or river sounded close by, and the air was cooler here than in Memphis and smelled wet and green. Beside the barn was a beat-up truck, the kind with four doors in the cab and a short cargo bed in back. It had a kayak strapped on top, a fancy kayak like I’d seen once on an ESPN special, so I left the goat pen and took another few pics. Marcus would like them; he was into all that water stuff, always going off fishing with his dad and sending me snaps of what he caught.
I’d made it the whole way here, I’d found Mom’s sister, and I was seeing mountains for the first time—my ears popping when the road twisted up and up on the way here. But Mom says you always have to watch out for the bad news, and around here I didn’t have to look all that hard. I had no real idea where I was. I had to watch goats being born and carry one through a field. And it was possible my aunt was certifiably crazy living out here. Out here I hadn’t seen any houses, any stores—any anything. Out here, something creepy bad could happen, and nobody would ever know.
I shouldn’t have come—that was already too obvious—but I wasn’t sure what to do next. Bryn—Aunt Bryn? —had mentioned food. And her dog acted kind of nice, sort of like Marcus’s dog, Henry, who carried his own ball with him everywhere. This one stayed right beside me every minute, like he would leap to my defense if I needed it. That might be because he could smell the Snickers bar I’d had in my pocket earlier in the day, but maybe he really liked me.
It was my growling stomach that made up my mind. I could stick around long enough to eat and see what happened next.
Bryn got done with the chickens and led the way to a cabin made from old gray logs stacked on top of each other, like in pioneer days. Old-timey except for a big satellite dish on the roof. I took a few more pics, the sun low in the sky and the shadows long. The mountains surrounded us like
a giant’s fence, maybe walling something out but maybe just trapping us in, and I was glad to head indoors.
We went into the cabin through the unlocked back door, into a little room with coats on hooks and muddy boots in a scrambled-up pile. The dog came with us.
“Leave your shoes here.” Bryn dumped hers onto the heap, and I added my wet tennis shoes. She washed her arms and hands at a deep metal sink in the corner, waited while I did the same, and handed me a fluffy towel. We went into a long narrow kitchen—bare countertops and pots hanging on the walls—way bigger than our kitchen at home and a lot more sparkly. Bryn pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. “These neighbors. Do you have their number?”
I pulled up a snapshot in my head that showed the list of numbers on the fridge at home and read the right one off. Her eyebrows went up when I didn’t need to look it up, but she punched it in and got Jill.
“Hi, my name is Bryn Collins, and I’m Del Whitman’s sister. Josh showed up at my house, so I wanted to let you know.”
I could hear Jill saying something, her voice short and snappish, but I couldn’t hear the words.
“Yes … He’s right here … Well, yes, of course I’ll take care of him now, but … Yes, but … No, but … I see … Uh-huh … Wait—don’t hang up. Do you have any idea where Del is? … Okay, yes. Thanks.”
Pretty much what I expected—Jill was probably doing a happy dance at the news I was gone—but Bryn’s face was red and her lips were tight by the time she finished. “Your mother left you with those people on purpose? I could have been anyone. She didn’t even ask where I live.” She gave another one of those long I-don’t-want-any-part-of-this sighs.
She wasn’t going to help. I could tell. That whole long drive for nothing.
My chest got small and tight, making it really hard to breathe, like the time in third grade when I came home from school and couldn’t wake Mom up. Her hand was ice cold. Her face was the wrong color. Her chest jerked when she breathed, like it was getting stuck every time. I was scared she was dying, and I was scared she’d kill me if I ran up a doctor bill, but I called it in anyway.
The ambulance guy told me I saved her by getting help, and I knew from then on it was my job to take care of her. But shit, I couldn’t take care of her if I couldn’t find her, could I? I stared out the window. Dark had come on fast, and I could see only a hint of the black shapes of trees.
“Can I have something to eat?” The words spilled out sounding sad, and I cleared my throat. I hadn’t meant to sound that way.
Bryn came over, hesitated, then put a hand on my shoulder. I barely felt it, like she wasn’t sure if it was okay to touch me.
“I’m not mad at you, Josh. It’s just …” She cleared her throat like that would clear up her words. “Look. Your mom and I haven’t talked for a long time. A really long time. Since before you were born. I don’t spend much time around kids, so you’re going to have to help me out.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze that felt more normal. “Everything is going to be all right. We’ll work on this together.”
“Yeah. Okay.” What else could I say? She didn’t know much. Nothing was going to be all right.
She grabbed an apple from a fancy wooden bowl on the counter. “Start on this while I roll through the shower. Then we’ll fix dinner and figure out what happens next.”
I took a big bite. The apple tasted good. Dinner would have tasted better.
“If you’ve got a different shirt in your bag,” she said, “take that one off, and I’ll dump it in the washer with my stuff.”
“Okay.”
She left with my sticky goat shirt. I could hear the shower running, so I got up and gave Tellico a pat, and he thumped his tail. He came with me, and I had a look around. A living room, also very neat and picked up. A woodstove in the corner—awesome. No TV—prehistoric. An open door in the hall led to an office, and there I faced enough electronics to stock a Best Buy.
She had three different computers on three different workstations, all with sticky notes on whiteboards above them and pads of paper with writing beside them. One Dell, one Mac, and one that didn’t have a name, maybe home built like Chris’s dad put together as a demo for the school science fair. Each one of the computers had two big monitors, and a fancy chair on wheels could cruise from one station to another. She could play some awesome games with this gear.
A bookcase was crammed full of programming manuals: Python, Java, C++, Rust, Swift—a little of everything. I’d done some basic programming at the YMCA computer camp one summer, but even the teacher there didn’t have all this stuff.
The router in the corner had a slip of paper taped to it, with an access code. I entered it into my phone. The cell signal was crap out here, but internet would help.
A piece of paper thumbtacked to the wall said “In Case of Emergency” and had a list of names and phone numbers. I stared at it for a few seconds to file it away. Grandma’s number was on it. Mom’s wasn’t.
By the time Bryn was done with her shower, I’d loaded my pics up to Instagram and texted Marcus that I couldn’t play Fortnite with him. I looked up goats—yes, Bryn was right; they had rectangular pupils. One point for my aunt, zero for me.
Bryn looked better without a coating of mud, and a little like Mom with her wavy black hair and dark brown eyes. Instead of her Great Smokies T-shirt, now she wore one with Calvin and Hobbes that said “Some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.” Ha. Someone wearing that shirt was supposed to help me? It didn’t inspire confidence.
“Still hungry?”
“Always.”
She smiled an almost-laughing smile, and in that moment she looked exactly like Mom despite the offbeat T-shirt. My heart gave a jolt that hurt.
“What sort of food do you like?”
“Hamburgers?”
She shook her head.
“Pizza?”
“Takes too long for the dough to rise. Need to plan ahead on that one.”
I’d never thought about pizza as something you made yourself. Didn’t she know you could just call? “Okay, what do you have?”
“How about spaghetti?”
“Yeah, okay.”
Bryn did a lot of banging around with pots and pans. I played Alto’s Odyssey on my phone and tried not to think about the way it was when I ate dinner with Mom. She wasn’t home most nights—working evening shift or out on a date—but sometimes she’d stick a Stouffers in the microwave, and it was nice to have her there on the couch with me. Even if that meant she got to choose what we watched on TV.
The food smelled promising. Bryn brought my plate to the table, and I poked through the lumpy sauce with my fork. “Where are the meatballs?”
Bryn looked at me like she’d never heard of meatballs. “It’s a sauce put up from last year’s garden. Roasted red peppers. Zucchini. Tomatoes. I’m vegetarian. No meat.”
Oh good. Now I was going to starve to death. I stared at it, doubtful, but there wasn’t anything else, so I ate it. Okay, it was better than I expected, sort of spicy and sweet both, but really? No meat?
It was a quiet meal, nobody talking, like when you get stuck having lunch with the new kid at school, and you spend the whole time watching the other person and pretending you’re not. Except Bryn didn’t even pretend—she kept giving me odd looks, like she was trying to figure something out just by studying my face.
I ate two helpings and Bryn ate one. Did vegetarians eat dessert? I decided it was better not to ask.
Bryn drummed her fingers on the tabletop, just like Mom did when she couldn’t make up her mind. “Does Del go away like this often?”
“For a weekend. Yeah. But usually not by herself.” Usually she was with whatever guy she was hanging out with at the time, and the guy was always the one paying. “She comes back late sometimes, but never more than a day or two. And she always calls.”
“Does she still work at the bank?”
“The bank?” I’d never heard anything about
a bank. That must have been when I was little. “She’s a cashier at the Kroger.”
“Would anyone there know where she went?”
“I don’t think so. When she didn’t show up, I called the store and told her boss she was really sick.” I was the one who always called in for Mom if she was going to miss her shift. She never remembered until a day too late.
“Why do you think she told you to come here to me? I mean, why me and why now? She left for other weekends and didn’t tell you about me.”
I shrugged. If I knew any of this, I wouldn’t have had to come, would I?
I couldn’t start tearing up in front of a stranger, so I knocked my fork to the floor and bent down to give myself a minute. Tellico beat me to it, and that distracted Bryn, taking the fork from the dog and getting me another one even though I was done eating. The food hadn’t helped my stomachache at all, and her questions about Mom made the hurt spread up to fill my chest.
The day Mom left, she looked straight at me to make sure I was listening. “If anything happens that scares or worries you, I want you to go to your Aunt Bryn.” She used her toughest voice, and she grabbed a piece of junk mail from the pile on the floor, scribbled out the address, and stuffed it into my backpack. “Promise me. Promise.” She stared hard at me, the Mom stare of death that meant she was serious.
So, I promised.
And I’d spent the past week waiting and worrying.
“So, why did your mom tell you to come here?”
She wasn’t going to drop it. “I don’t know why. But she did.” It came out snarly, and I waited for Bryn to get pissed, but no.
Bryn glanced at the clock on the microwave. “It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow we’ll make some more phone calls, see what we can learn. If we can’t figure anything out, we’ll go to the police and get them to help. Sound like a plan?”
I didn’t like the idea of going to the cops, but at least she wasn’t talking about social services yet, so I nodded.
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