The morning after Mara and Elias sat on the fence line until the light went, June woke before either of them and went out to the garden with a bucket and a temper she did not yet have a name for. The air was still cool from the night, and the dew lay heavy on the bean leaves and on the grass between the rows. She pulled weeds too hard, snapping stems she meant to leave, and when a hen scolded her from the yard she scolded it back, which made her laugh once, bitterly, and then stop laughing altogether.
She had watched them the evening before. She had not meant to spy. She had come out of the barn with a lantern to check the mare that had been restless, and she had seen them on the half-built fence line, side by side, not touching, their shoulders close enough that the space between them seemed deliberate, like a thing they had chosen to keep small. They had not kissed. June knew that, because she had stood in the shadow of the barn a long time, watching the light leave the valley in bands of gold and then gray, and neither of them had moved toward the other in any way she could have blamed. And yet she had felt, with a clarity that hurt her teeth, that something had changed between them in the quiet, and that the change did not include her.
All through the days of the fence work she had told herself stories to soften that feeling. She had told herself that Elias looked at her first in the morning because she was the one who brought the coffee, that he laughed at her jokes because she was funny, that the way he had listened to her at Willow Creek at dawn meant something particular. She had fallen first, she realized now, standing in the garden with dirt under her nails. She had fallen the way she did everything, quickly and all at once, while Mara fell the way Mara did everything, slowly and then completely, and June had not seen it happening until it was done.
Mara came out with the bread pan and the dish towel over her shoulder, and she stopped at the edge of the garden and looked at her sister. Mara knew June the way a person knows weather. She saw the set of June's jaw and the weeds pulled too hard and the bucket half full and the other half scattered.
You're angry, Mara said.
I am not angry, June said, and then, because Mara did not move and did not argue, she said, "All right. I am angry. And I am not angry at you, which makes it worse, because there is nowhere sensible to put it."
Mara set the pan down on the fence post and came into the garden rows. The soil was damp and dark. "Put it here, then," she said. "Say it plain."
June looked at her sister, at the saw scar across her left palm, at the dark hair tied back at her neck, at the sleeves rolled above her elbows as they always were, and the words came out before she could dress them up. "I fell first," she said. "I laughed first. I talked first. I was the one who sat with him at the creek and told him silence was a kind of leaving, and he told me about Thomas, and I carried that story back to you like a gift, and now — now I feel passed over, Mara. I feel like the extra sister again. The one people smile at and pass by on their way to the serious one."
She had not meant to say "again," but there it was, and it was true, and it sat between them like a stone.
Mara did not flinch. She did not rush to soothe, and June was grateful for that, even as it stung. Mara had never been a woman who lied to make a hard thing easy. "I will not lie to you," Mara said, her voice plain and low. "And I will not apologize for my own heart, June. That would be a different kind of lie, and you would hear it in my voice and hate it more."
June nodded, her throat tight. "I know."
I did not plan this, Mara said. "I did not want anything, for a long time. You know why. After the fever took him — after I buried a wedding that never happened — I made a bargain with myself. I would keep this place. I would keep you. I would want nothing else, and wanting nothing felt safe. And then a man came up the trail with a fence offer and a scar through his eyebrow, and he stayed on his pallet and he kept his word, and I found that I was watching the door at dusk not because I was afraid of who might come through it, but because I was listening for him coming home."
June wiped her hands on her apron, leaving two dark smears. "I know that too. I saw it before you did, I think. That's part of why it hurts. I saw it and I kept hoping I was wrong."
They stood in the garden while the sun climbed and the dew dried off the leaves. A jay called from the pines. The creek sounded thin and steady beyond the garden fence, and the smell of the bread Mara had left in the oven began to drift out through the cabin door.
I am not asking you to give him up, June said at last. "I would never ask that. I am asking you to see me. To not pretend this is easy for me, or that I am simply happy for you, because I am happy for you and I am hurting at the same time, and both of those things are true."