both hands, bringing it down in decisive strokes to break it up. The tree was dead. How was it that so many of its roots remained lodged in the earth—as if time or disaster had never taken place?
He stopped to sweep his forearm across his brow. Sweat had built there. It soaked through his clothes. He thought of removing his shirt.
“They should take a break,” he heard Briar say. “The heat. It’s getting worse.”
“They can hear you,” William called to her. Humor lilted from his voice.
“Yeah,” Cole piped up from Gerald’s other side. “They’d like a beer, maybe.”
William and Gerald made affirmative noises. Gavin kept slicing the blade through unbroken ground, tuning in to the song of metal and clay. His blood, too, was singing. He ached with effort. The release was sweet.
His head had screamed all morning, since 3:30 a.m. when dreams had tripped him awake. With a meal in his belly, however, and the lull of early afternoon on the orchard, plus the added work...the feeling of industry...he could almost convince himself he was enjoying all of it.
And there was Mavis. It had all started with her, the shovel in her hands. The EMF meters had found anomalies, suggesting activity of some kind. Gavin had heard her struggling with the blade near the woodshed, then the front porch of the house, and finally closer to the irises. When she’d stopped to drink the glass of lemonade Briar brought her, Gavin had yanked the shovel and picked up where she left off. William and Cole had followed his lead. Soon there was a trench around the dead tree beside the irises.
“We close, Frexy?” he called out to her without looking. He felt her watchful eyes.
“It doesn’t work like sonar. There could be something here. There could be nothing.”
“It’s a hotbed, for sure,” Zelda said.
“If it’s buried here, it shouldn’t be but a few feet down,” Mavis said.
“They wouldn’t have buried it deeper,” Olivia said.
A hand found Gavin’s shoulder. He looked around to find his father as flushed as a red pepper. “Dad,” Gavin said, alarmed. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Cole grunted. He leaned into Gavin.
Gavin cupped an arm around his shoulders. Like the others, Cole had sweated through his T-shirt. His breathing was a touch more labored. “Sure?” Gavin asked.
Head low, Cole nodded. “The heat. Can’t take it like I used to, I guess.”
Gavin had already lifted a hand to his stepmother.
Briar linked an arm around Cole’s waist. With the other, she took a firm grip on Cole’s shovel. “Let’s go back to the house for a breather.” Steering her reluctant husband in that direction, she reached back to pass the shovel off to Gavin. “Don’t any of the rest of you let it get to be too much.”
Gavin watched the line of his father’s back retreat until it wavered and became shaded. Damn.
The weight of the second shovel lifted. Mavis tugged at the handle. “Go with them. I’ll pick it up.”
“I can’t let you dig,” Gavin said. “Not after that.”
She tugged again until his hold loosened. “Move aside.”
He watched as she shed her overshirt, the plaid number. She tied it around her waist, then hoisted the shovel. He moved to the right until her blade split fresh topsoil he already knew to be soft. And he watched her, her hair slicing backward just like the dull edge of the long-handled tool. The pale curve of her cheek. The lines of her. She was small with, he suspected, curves that she drowned subtly with her wardrobe of ceaseless black.
There was muscle there, too, he found. Will and might. He considered changing her nickname again, this time to Mighty Mouse. She dug without slowing or even a grunt of effort. She culled clay from its earth bed. He nodded approval, then began working beside her, letting their actions fall into rhythm.
He’d knowingly overlooked her for most of her life. Who knew Kyle’s sister would wind up an endless source of fascination?
The end of his blade met something solid as he sank it decisively into the loose ground. The impact sang up his arms and filled the air with a satisfying thunk. “Aha,” he heard Zelda utter.
Mavis dropped her shovel and knelt as he raised his blade. She didn’t hesitate to sink her hands into the red-tinged dirt, combing it up the sides of the hole.
Gavin took a knee beside her. He took over, leaving her to tug aside loose black roots moist from internment. The smell of earth was darker, richer. Gavin could practically taste it. It coated them both to the elbows as inches gave way to the flat face of a handmade box.
They worked together to loosen the ground hugging it close on either side. Finally, with one hand over and another under, Mavis hefted the box from its resting place. Gingerly, she placed it on the ground as Olivia and Gerald flanked her.
The flat of Olivia’s palm dusted the lid. Gavin leaned in until he could make out the carving of a rose. Until he could inhale Mavis’s mango scent and realized how close he was to brushing his lips across the point of her shoulder.
Gerald found a screwdriver to loosen the lid. As he pried the old screws from their corners, nobody moved.
“It should be you,” Gerald said as he looked to his wife. “Go on, love. Let’s see what Ward and his Olivia found worth saving.”
“Not me,” Olivia said. She beckoned William closer. “Come ’ere, Shooks.”
William obeyed, hesitant. “Mom. You’ve waited...”
“You never knew them,” she told him, scooting so that William could wedge his way between her and Gerald and take a knee. “I should wait for Finny, but God knows he didn’t give me a single patient bone in my body.” Placing a hand on William’s arm, she lowered her voice and said, “Go ahead.”
William paused only briefly before appeasing his parents’ ill-contained curiosity. He pried the lid free. Mavis, who had shifted over with the others, was practically beneath Gavin. He felt the excitement all but zipping from the top of her head even if it wasn’t her gasp that rent the air. “Letters,” she said.
“What’s the date on the postmark?” Olivia asked as Gerald lifted a ragged envelope to the light. “Is the stamp still legible?”
“It is.” A wondering laugh shook Gerald’s shoulders. “July 18, 1953.”
“Six months before they were married,” Olivia calculated. She handled the envelope with care. “From her to him.”
“It’s not the only one,” William said as he riffled through the collection. “The bundles tied with the ribbons are the ones she wrote, from the looks of it.”
“You can tell by the writing,” Olivia noted. “I’d forgotten how precise her penmanship was...”
“And the ones tied with the leather straps are his,” William finished. “Look, Dad. We found someone wordier than you. But I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?” Olivia asked absently as she thumbed through a stack.
“They both grew up here, or close by,” William said. “Didn’t they?”
“He was from Fairhope,” Olivia said. “She lived more toward Malbis.”
“They had cars in the fifties,” William expounded. “Why so many letters? It’s not like they lived on opposite corners of the globe. Even if they did, there were phone lines, telegraphs...”
“People used to communicate differently,” Zelda explained.
Olivia carefully unfolded a page of a letter. She sounded far off, near dreamy, when she added, “And when you