“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 were in Sawyer, five miles away from the lake.
But. “It’s the only place I was ever happy.” A sad truth speaking from the downhill slope of thirty-five, but a truth nonetheless. Memories of the childhood visits to the orchard and the year in the lake house had saved her sanity on more sleepless nights than she wanted to contemplate.
Royce’s expression was both disbelieving and disdainful. “Come on, Sister Smart One. You were married. You didn’t have to follow Dad all over the world with the army and make new friends every couple of years. There had to be some happiness in there somewhere. You had a life. You had choices.”
“I did my share of Dad-following, too, but I did have a life. You’re right. Let me change what I said. The year on the lake was the happiest I’ve ever been.” She’d had choices, too, and she’d too often made the wrong ones. She hoped this move wasn’t one of those.
“You chose to divorce Tony and let him keep most of everything you guys had.”
“It’s called a prenup.” And she’d given up more than she had to, just because she thought it had somehow all been her fault, but Royce probably wouldn’t understand that. Cass wasn’t sure she understood it, either.
“My mother told Dad he should come and help you, but he wouldn’t. He said you’d made your bed and you could lie in it.”
“She has always been very kind to me.” This couldn’t be said about all of Cass’s stepmothers. The one after her own mother had been determined to marry an army officer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. She’d had a handsy son who had made life difficult for the pubescent Cass. The next one had borne shocking similarities to all the stereotypes ascribed to a Barbie doll, a fact made worse by the fact that her given name was Barbara Ann and Cass’s father’s name was Kenneth.
Royce’s