YOU CRAZY, Ma? You’ve lived in Grainville your whole life!” Caroline Prater could hear her son clearly, even with the phone held at arm’s length. “You can’t just pack up and move across the country all by yourself! And where is Shelter Valley, anyway? I’ve never even heard of the place. This is nuts! I knew I should never have left home….”
“It’s in Arizona, Jess.” She moved the phone close enough to speak into the mouthpiece, but kept the earpiece as far from her head as she could.
Sitting on the front porch of the little white farmhouse she’d lived in for almost eighteen years, Caroline snuggled more deeply into her old winter coat and pushed gently against the ground with one booted foot, setting the aged rocker in motion—and waited for Jesse to slow down enough to be able to listen to her. At not quite thirty-five, she was far too young to have a son who was a freshman at Harvard.
And way too old to be in her current predicament.
“What about Gram and Papa? And Grandma and Grandpa? You can’t just leave them….” Her parents. And Randy’s. She shored up her defenses against the twinge of guilt as Jesse’s words hit their mark. Randy’s parents had taken his death hard. He’d been their only son. Seeing her seemed to make things worse. And they had four daughters in Grainville—four sons-in-law. They’d be fine.
But her parents… Caroline looked out over the slush-covered two-acre yard in front of the house. She was going to have to get out the plow to smooth the potholes in the two dirt paths that served as a driveway or she’d never get her little and embarrassingly old pickup out of the gate.
She was going to miss her parents terribly, especially her mother, but there were things about her parents—about her father—that Jesse didn’t know. And something about her that no one knew.
“Why didn’t you say anything when I was home at Christmas, Ma?”
“Because I hadn’t made up my mind then.”
“It was only a week ago!”
Their first Christmas without Randy had been hard on all of them. It was harder on Caroline than anyone knew. Not only had she just lost the man she’d loved since childhood, but she’d suddenly become far too aware that, other than Jesse, none of the family with whom she’d been surrounded all her life were actually related to her. That had never been an issue before.
Jesse went on for another five minutes, reminding her about her responsibilities to the small cattle farm she and Randy had worked for the nearly eighteen years they’d been married.
He was right about that.
And he talked about her friends. All women who were resigned, most of them happily, to living out the lives that had been mapped for them in Grainville since the day they were born. The girls she’d gone to school with who’d stayed in town after graduation were married, with high-school-aged children.
Her son reminded her how unsafe it was for a woman to travel alone these days. Since Randy was killed when the tractor he was riding had exploded last summer, Jesse had taken to warning her about everything. Mostly she only half listened—just in case he said something she needed to hear, although that wasn’t usually the case. Who did he think had been taking care of her—and him—all his life?
“I can’t believe you aren’t listening to me!”
Taking off a mitten, she glanced at her nails. They’d need to be fixed before she dared leave this town. “I’m listening, Jess.”
“No, you aren’t.” His tone was filled with disgust. “I’m just gonna have to come home.”
“No, you aren’t.” She didn’t raise her voice as she repeated his words back to him. She didn’t need to; Jesse knew the tone.
At seventeen, Jesse Randall Prater, one of the youngest freshmen at Harvard, was intelligent beyond his years, and also emotionally young. She’d been living with his outbursts of frustration most of his life. And giving them the credibility they deserved—which was none.
He huffed. And then again.
As she stared down at the peeling wood floor of the porch, a strand of auburn hair fell forward over her shoulder. It was clean. And that was about all she could say for it. Panic filtered down from her throat to her stomach. She couldn’t afford some fancy hair salon.
And she was never going to pass for anything other than what she was—an uneducated country bumpkin—if she showed up in Shelter Valley looking like this. Her clothes were all wrong. Old jeans. Homemade shirts. Her makeup, which she’d worn maybe three times in the past year, had come from the grocery store in town. And she didn’t own a single pair of shoes that hadn’t, at some time or other, been in contact with cow manure.
“I don’t get it, Ma. There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”
Caroline tensed. Her smart boy was back. It was the moment she’d been waiting for. And dreading.
I’m prepared, she reminded herself. Just do it like you practiced it last night. And the night before that. And the night before…
“Yes, my new cell number, for one.” She rattled it off. “If you need me for anything in the next week, until I get settled and perhaps have a more permanent number, you can reach me on that.”
He repeated the number. “I’m glad you got a cell,” he added. “You’re there all by yourself, driving back and forth to town with no one at home to know if you made it okay. You need a cell phone. And with the extra field we planted last year, you can afford it.”
“Jess, I’m moving.”
He swore again. And in the space of a second switched from maturing young man to little boy. “You can’t move, Ma! Grainville’s our home!”
Perhaps, but she couldn’t dwell on that. Not if she was going to be able to leave.
“It’s a town with a house. A mostly empty house.”
He was quiet again. Caroline, desperately needing to fill the silence, to tell him the rest of why she’d called, didn’t know what to say. She’d forgotten all her well-rehearsed lines. Her little boy was hurting and she was trapped by life’s circumstances and couldn’t help him.
More trapped than anyone knew.
“So, what is it you aren’t telling me?” His words, when they finally came, were soft, compassionate.
Caroline’s recently rehearsed lines popped into her chaotic brain. “You know I’m adopted.”
“Yeah. So?”
The phone wasn’t the right way to do this. It was, however, her best shot at getting through while standing her ground. An uneducated country woman, Caroline understood her role—to be accommodating and obedient. And fell into it all too easily.
“Jess? Hear me out, okay? Without judgment or commentary?”
A pause. Then he said, “Sorry—yeah, I’ll listen.”
“Remember when I told you last fall about going through all the boxes in the cellar?” That first month after he’d left for
