flowers. Then she’d take the letter to Stella—why waste a stamp?—along with the jar of preserves that was now jammed against the seat seam under Fergus’s butt.
The landscape didn’t match the ache in her head; everything was flat and pale. “No way around but through,” she told Fergus. He didn’t hear—his head hung out the truck window. At the side of the road Old Man Brown’s Infamous Elm tree loomed, the only thing in her field of vision that had any weight to it.
Some time later, Fergus’s panting quickened as the truck slowed. Rose pulled off the interstate into an empty parking lot. Swaths of green dotted with white stones stretched out in unnatural perfection, and she felt a gut tug toward the overgrown thickets of home. As she cut the gas, the engine sputtered and sighed. Her breath caught. A flag on a pole hung slack in the windless air. The dandelion chain had slid off the dash onto the seat beside her. How dare she refer to those yellow weeds as flowers—what was wrong with her? Some sort of bird cawed.
Driving home after, Rose felt a niggling, a gnawing, as the buildings of town—Mondragon’s, Dunleavy’s Shoes (&Shoe Repair), liquor, bank, gas, The Bluebird Café, her father’s decrepit shuttered B&B—erased themselves. Her wheels turned over and over, spooling everything behind them into grayness. She patted her empty pocket.
In Mondragon’s she’d tucked the letter to Stella and the preserves onto a shelf next to a bag of rice. Stella had been nowhere in sight, but the husband had been there, all right. On the floor below the passenger seat was a shopping bag full of items that she didn’t want and hadn’t asked for. Ward Mondragon had insisted, and shoved the bag at her so urgently she’d had no choice but to take it. A man full of dough and confidence, he was kind to everyone because he could afford to be. He’d hung a framed photo of their empty-eyed president on the wall behind the register, a place of honor. “Please, Rose,” he’d said, escorting her out of the store, leaning through the truck window and patting Fergus on the head. Do you see the sky? she’d meant to ask him, but Fergus had flattened his ears and looped his tail around his haunches. She’d started the engine. Ward Mondragon’s panicked voice rumbled in her head; he used to know how to handle people in all sorts of weather.
“Stupid,” she said to Fergus. “I shouldn’t have gone.” Fergus ignored her, head out the window, enjoying the loft of his ears.
The house was where she’d left it—scruffy, and fretful in its own way. She had the sense of a three-dimensional shape folding itself into something else. The truck engine still rumbled; the faulty gas line had kept going even after she turned off the key and slid out. Wait. Did she have the key? She looked at her empty hand and then down at her legs. Her knees were grass-stained. Gravestained. Two indentations pressed into freshly laid sod; that flimsy string of dandelions draped over a cold stone. She sank to her knees next to the truck, heaving one quick, hard cough—nothing came up. When had she last eaten? Fergus watched with interest, and she shoved him away. Cold spread out and radiated; her knees ground into dry gravel. Letters and numbers swam in front of her eyes, meaningless.
On the front porch she set down Ward’s bag and opened the door. Somebody had been there. The air was different. Currents of it eddied and flowed in new directions, dust swirling in corners that Rose hadn’t noticed, in the parlor, the old sewing room, even the staircase with its creaky boards. It wasn’t Stella, she was almost certain. Stella wouldn’t cover her tracks so well. The antique hand-shaped sconce on the wall near the cuckoo clock gave her the finger, or looked like it did.
The kitchen shocked her a bit, with its newly clean counters and sink. Her chair was pushed back from the table. A pencil rolled along the baseboard and dropped out of sight. She knew she should go collect the bag from the porch. But the front porch felt like another country. She had a feeling that as she walked through her house new rooms opened in front of her and the old ones closed off behind, locked forever.
“We’re living in a funhouse,” she told Fergus. He was next to the fridge, lapping from his water bowl. Rosehips pattered against the kitchen window. Under the sound of the ringing phone, she heard her own heartbeat. “Or a house of cards.”
They were in the front yard again, pruning. Fergus thumped his tail. A prickling made her turn around. There he stood, as crooked and shadeless as his damn tree: Old Man Brown. Looming on her land, white haired now, leaning on his cane. His eyes still wanted to eat the world.
Don’t say it, she thought. But he did: “How are you?”
She clutched her shears and scanned the bushes for more blooms.
“Rose.” He sank to one knee, sighing, “What’s going on? You’ve gotta prepare yourself. I know what Perry’s angling for. I’m here to tell you—”
Don’t talk to me about what to look out for, Old Man.
“…Hear me out. I know Perry will try again. He’ll keep trying. He’s like me, Rose. Like I was…”
“There’s nothing—” her voice croaked and she stopped. Then started again. “There’s nothing to be done, Sherwin.”
The Old Man stood awkwardly and stepped forward. He held out a coin, glinty in the gray light. “Rosie, damn it all. Can’t you tell there’s weather coming?”
A faint reverberation came from the well. The bucket groaned and swung as Rose turned back to work, and the snip of her pruning shears matched it for rhythm. Out on the road, the leaves of the Infamous Elm fluttered.
Rose put some coffee on to brew, strong and muddy, in need of that zooming feeling. She filled a pot with water, set the flame on high, and dropped in three carrots and an onion. “It may boil down to something interesting,” she said to Fergus. Her eyes stung. Fergus nosed the screen door leading to the backyard, asking to be let out. “Hold on,” she breathed, then opened the door and watched as Fergus went under the blackberries and settled into a tight ball next to a small, mounded patch of dirt, nose resting on his tail.
“I have to lie down,” she whispered. But Fergus was too far away under the brambles; his ears didn’t even flicker. She swung the door open to call to him, and he stood and shook himself. Bramble shadows nipped at his paws as Fergus trotted toward her. The air was too still and the light was all wrong for early afternoon. Rose stepped onto the porch, peering overhead. “Do you know what’s wrong?” she asked. Fergus circled around her and sat, unblinking.
Inside, carroty sludge burbled on the stove. Her head pounded. There was plenty of time before dinner. She took the blue airmail envelope from the mantel, traced her finger across its sketch of a single rose and thorn, and slipped it into her pocket. She went to lie down in the sewing room. A tall stack of canned corn hovered in the corner, and she peered behind it to find plant shoots creeping up the wall. Sneaky little bastards, always trying something new—she knocked over the cans and lopped at the shoots. She’d pry up floorboards, crawl into the back of closets, shake down the pantry. Whatever it takes. Fergus was curled up, asleep again, yelping softly. Such a deep sleep, it would be so good to surrender. She gave in and lay down, shadows fleeting across her eyelids.
Rose, Rose, Rose. She tossed and turned. Scratchy thorns pattered out odd rhythms on the window. She reached deep into her apron pocket and threw her pruning shears into the well, but when she leaned over to watch them fall, she heard another name: Lance.
Rose snapped awake with a coffee hangover, feet hanging off the edge of the twin bed. At some point the letter had fallen out of her pocket. Fergus had a paw on it. He watched Rose guardedly, his ears pointed toward the door, tail twitching. “Okay, okay.” Rose grunted to her feet.
A thrumming came from the front of the house. The well was still going, with its blackness and strange noises and no frogs. The Brown girl yelled from her hayloft window. Rose had her shears in hand; the shoots called and swayed. “There’s never an end to the work to be done,” she told Fergus.
The Brown girl kept calling, wanting her to pay attention to paper airplanes that flew into the brambles, caught on thorns, and cluttered under Rose’s feet. The girl was offering paper to Rose, as if Rose needed any more messages, ever. She picked them up,