“That’s what I’m saying. And take the day off. Too hot to work anyways.”

“But…” We don’t talk about money. That had been one of Hoyt’s rules. About how much we got. Or what we need. We don’t say a word about any of it. It’s low. Vulgar.

Those rules wouldn’t get me very far in the outside world. I would starve to death trying not to be vulgar.

“I need the money.”

Kevin leaned his heft back in his office chair, which squealed against the weight.

“I’m paying you a salary,” he said. “Just make it up another day.”

I’d worked on the farm my entire life and not once did it earn me a penny. All my money I had to ask for, from Mom and then from Hoyt.

Until I took that three grand from Hoyt’s safe.

Back wages, I’d told myself.

“Now, go on.” Kevin shooed me out the door. “Take a day off.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Because if there’s anything else that needs—”

“No. Nothing else needs doing. Now go.”

Still, I lingered at the door. It’s not that there weren’t a thousand things I needed to get done, but all of them meant leaving the trailer park. This small island of safety. Of work.

I totally tore my life up by the roots and now I was too scared to actually live it.

“Were there any other packages delivered for me?” I asked.

Every night I looked at that phone and thought about calling Dylan. About texting him. Every night I chickened out. Or resisted, like that was a virtue.

“Nope. You gonna stand around here all day?”

“Nope,” I said, pushing the door open and making the bell overhead jingle. “I’m leaving.”

I would go twenty miles into town to get some groceries, because that’s what normal people did when they ran out of gas station food and dish soap. And then I would see if there was a library with an internet connection so I could check on the news from Oklahoma.

Woman Runs Away, I imagined the headlines. Though considering Hoyt, the headline should undoubtedly be more like Lying Wife Runs Out on Husband, Leaving Him No One to Smack Around on the Fifth Day in a Row Without Rain.

Heading back to my trailer I saw Ben in his garden, curling the delicate stems of peas up twine runners tied to the top tier of his fence.

“Sugar snaps?” I asked as I approached.

“No,” he laughed, not looking up, which frankly was a relief. I wasn’t good with eye contact. “Nothing so fancy. I’m trying runner beans for the first time.”

“I wanted to thank you for the tomatoes and the mayo.”

“You did. I got that note. Both notes. You want to write me a letter, too?”

I smiled at the rusty teasing. Smith used to tease me that way, too. A long time ago.

Oh God, Smith.

In my house we had this front hall closet. Right off the foyer next to the front door no one ever, ever used. That front hall closet was where we put the stuff we didn’t know what to do with. Christmas decorations. My grandfather’s old coats. My grandmother’s formal dress, in a garment bag I liked to open when I was a kid, to see the sequins and the peacock pin at the dress’s neck.

And I had one of those closets in my brain. That’s where I’d put all my memories of Smith. All my guilt over what had happened. What…I’d done to him. And I hadn’t thought about him in years, but for some reason, Ben opened that door and the memory rolled out.

“Well, I wanted to thank you in person, then,” I said, pulling myself away from those awful memories.

“My pleasure. I’ve got fifty more tomatoes I can put on your doorstep.”

I had a sudden brainstorm of homemade pasta sauce, with ground beef and Ben’s tomatoes. I learned how to be a lousy cook from my mom, the lousiest, but one year Mom—before things with Smith got so strange, and the new minister, and Mom getting sick—got it in her head to volunteer to make the meat sauce for the church spaghetti supper. She found this recipe on the back of a can of tomatoes and it was such a huge hit that she ended up making the spaghetti sauce for the church for years.

It was the one thing we could make that didn’t involve opening a box and preheating the oven.

And I could give Ben some spaghetti sauce. The quid pro quo of it appealed to me.

“I’ll take whatever you care to give me.”

His garden had everything. Peppers, cucumbers, beets, even. Along the far edge of the fencing were herbs. I saw basil and oregano, which would be pretty awesome in the pasta sauce.

“You want something you should ask for it, girly.”

“I don’t…that’s not—”

“What do you want?” His eyes were nearly black they were so dark, and when they looked into mine I felt pinned to the ground.

Ugh. Eye contact.

“Nothing.”

“Go away, girly. I got no time for this.”

His dismissal stung. “The basil,” I said.

“Yours. Anything else?”

I shook my head, far too uncomfortable to answer.

When I’d needed help, really needed it—life-or-death stuff—I’d been unable to ask. There was no way I was asking for more from this guy’s garden.

“I’m running into town,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”

“Nope.” His thick, gnarled fingers were busy with the delicate work of making sure his beans grew up the twine.

There were tattoos on his knuckles. A word, each letter on a different finger that I couldn’t quite make out.

“Okay,” I said, “sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

I blinked. Sorry for not being able to ask for what I want. Sorry I can’t get anything for you from town. Sorry for being here…Christ, what was wrong with me? Apologizing was an old habit.

“I don’t know, I guess.”

“I guess I don’t either. So stop.”

Right. So stop. That easy. I might be off the farm, but parts of the farm were still very much in me.

Making a grocery list in my head I walked back to my own trailer, my eyes on the dust of the track between the RVs.

“Hello, neighbor,” a woman said and I looked up to see Joan, sitting on a lawn chair on a small improvised deck on the side of her RV. She wore a short, green silk robe and a bland expression of disdain.

“Hi,” I said, feeling utterly grubby in the face of Joan’s inexplicable trailer-park elegance. She was actually kind of regal, sitting there. It was the rhinestones on her toes, maybe. Or her straight posture in the lawn chair, the casual way she held her cigarette.

Because it wasn’t her dirty-blond hair piled up on her head, or her pale blue eyes. The scars on her cheeks from long-ago acne.

But her legs, beneath that green robe, went on for miles.

“I’m Annie,” I said, into the silence.

“Joan.”

The trailer door opened and a man came out, pulling a shirt on over his head. He was thick and muscled, hairy all over, not just his chest. Even his stomach was hairy. When his head popped out of his shirt, he smiled at Joan, his face covered in a thick black five-o’clock shadow. “See you, babe,” he said leaning over the small railing as if to kiss her. Joan took a drag from her cigarette, blowing the smoke toward him, and he pulled back, rebuffed. Though he didn’t seem to be too upset about it.

“I put a little something extra for you on the counter,” he said to Joan before turning away. He gave me a wink and a smile that was so slimy it made me want to take a shower in my clothes.

If my life depended on it I could not look back over at Joan.

A prostitute? Am I living next door to a prostitute?

“A little hot for a scarf, don’t you think?” Joan said.

I put my hand up to it, wincing slightly as I touched the bruises. Joan smirked, like she knew what was under the water-lily print. Like she had been there that night in my kitchen. Like in the ten seconds we’d stood in front of each other, Joan knew all about me.

And all of it was sad.

Without another word, I left, my cheeks on fire.