over the years—I hope the book does you justice. Thanks to Cheryl Reavis for giving the orchard its name and introducing me to the Robert Frost poem from whence it came. And thanks, Charles Griemsman, for everything.
To Nan Reinhardt, friend and writer extraordinaire—this one’s for you.
Contents
“WHY DIDN’T YOU ever come back here?”
They were the first voluntary words Royce had spoken since they’d left the Missouri hotel early that morning. She’d read for a long time with her earbuds in, eaten a drive-through lunch in sullen silence or monosyllabic responses to questions, then stared out at Illinois until she fell back to sleep.
Cass Gentry looked over at the half sister she sometimes felt she barely knew. “The orchard is where my mother and aunt grew up, not me. Mother and Aunt Zoey inherited it from my grandparents and when Mother died, she left her half to me.” How many times did she have to say this? Royce was sixteen, not six.
“Why didn’t you sell it and stay in California?” Royce looked out the passenger window again, at the seemingly endless fields of corn, soybeans and hay that filled this part of central Indiana. Barns and silos and old windmills, some of them in disrepair, sat spare and silent sentinel over farmhouses.
There weren’t as many fences as Cass remembered. Not nearly as many cows, either, which could explain the reduction in fences. A few miles from the highway they traveled, she could see the eerie moving silhouettes of a wind farm. She didn’t remember that being here before.
“There’s nothing here.” At the back of Royce’s disgruntled voice was a thread of fear. Cass recognized it. Remembered it. She wanted to say something sympathetic, but sensed it wouldn’t be welcome.
“I know.” People had been saying that eighteen years ago, too, when Cass had spent that utopian year in the little community that surrounded Lake Miniagua.
“This isn’t a place people move to,” her stepcousin Sandy had said as they’d kayaked around the lake’s six hundred acres. “It’s one they leave.”
That had been true then and probably still was. When the summer people left the lake, its population was sparse, its activities on the slim side. The bed-and-breakfasts and Hoosier Hills Cabins and Campground shut down between October and April. The closest supermarket, movie theater and department store
