LITMIR.BIZ

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up.

      “Hel—”

      “Hello?”

      “Hello?”

      Our voices overlapped. She withdrew. In the interim I somehow managed to ask, “Ava?”

      She was shocked. I heard a sharp intake of breath. I said her name again.

      “Meredith,” she said finally and then sighed with impatience. I wound the telephone cord around my finger at that and squeezed.

      “Can you talk?” I asked

      “Yes.”

      “I thought you might have been at the clinic. I wasn’t sure if you were in.”

      “I just finished a shift.”

      “Are the girls around?”

      “I’m alone, it’s okay.”

      I closed my eyes and swallowed.

      “Good, I—I need to talk to you. It’s—”

      “Is this about Cal Jr.?” she asked abruptly.

      My eyes flew open. I felt winded. My voice, when it came out, was harsh, animal.

      “How?”

      “The family lawyers called me.”

      “When?”

      “A few days ago.”

      “Why?”

      “Same reason I suppose that they contacted you.”

      “They did not call me,” I said, looking down at the letter, which was crumpled in the fist of my hand. “They wrote instead.”

      “I told them straight out I didn’t care. Not about him dying, not about the farm or how he had driven it so far into the ground it was halfway to hell. They talked about my ‘responsibility.’ I told them I had done above and beyond more than my duty by that place.”

      I bit my lip so hard I thought I tasted blood.

      “I suppose I was a bit harsh,” she said reflectively, “but I got the feeling that they would just keep calling if they thought they could get anywhere. I guess that must have been why they tracked you down.” She paused. “Have you heard from Claudia? Do you know if they contacted her, too?”

      I thought about our eldest sister, probably dismissing shop assistants with a bored wave of her hand in some mall in Palm Beach.

      “No, but she has a different name now. She’s married.”

      “Did not stop them from getting to me. Or to you, or don’t you go by our mother’s name anymore?”

      I swallowed hard at the reproach. “No, it’s still Pincetti.”

      She snorted. “And there was once a time when Hathaways were crawling out of our ears, now none to be found. I suppose I was the first person you rang when you got the letter, was I? I am so touched. I wonder why that would be?”

      I closed my eyes, blocking out the orchestra of sounds from the taxis and crowds on the road below and the various cacophony of voices that rose in a fog from the streets. I forced my mind to blank, to hold my breath in my chest, to keep everything still.

      “So you knew then?” I somehow managed. For a moment I thought she had gone, as there was only silence and then, “Yes.”

      I digested this. “I see,” I said and I did, with painful clarity. This was a mistake.

      “I told them I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she volunteered. “They could do what they wanted.” She gave a small laugh. “They even asked me about funeral arrangements. I told them the only way I would help would be if I could make sure he was really dead.”

      I winced. I hate this side to her, especially because I am part of the reason why it is there.

      “It’s all gone you know? The farm …” she began. “In the end it was riddled with debt. They’re going to sell it, did you know that?” She stopped and when she began again, her voice broke. “It was all for nothing and she’ll never know it.”

      There was a pause.

      “What will you tell them?” she asked eventually.

      “Huh?”

      “What will you do?” Her voice was careful, deliberate, and I realized with a small shiver that I was being tested and that she had no expectations that I would pass.

      “I suppose I will have to call them.”

      There was a silence. There was nothing for a moment; just a blank and then when she next spoke her voice had degenerated into a repressed scream of fury.

      “Why?!”

      This time I spoke without thinking, so that what I said not only surprised me because of my daring, but also because it was true.

      “I guess I’m just not ready to walk away yet.”

      Even to my mind they were an interesting choice of words. They hung there in the silence between us. I waited for her to speak and I could tell even in the pause how much she wanted to attack me, to use my words as a noose and hoist me up, legs kicking, desperately searching for ground.

      “I have to go. I need to pick up the girls,” she said.

      All of a sudden I was exhausted. It would never end, I thought. There was still too much damage left to inflict. I had long since ceased to engage in this trading of blows. I had marked her once and that was enough. Nearly two decades later it was still pink and raw, but she was not yet finished.

      “I’ll call you back,” she offered.

      “Okay,” I said and we hung up. Even as we did so I knew she wouldn’t call back. As if we were still children, she spoke again in code, a code she meant for me to decipher:

      You did not do as I expected. You failed me—again.

      Aurelia. I don’t know what it looks like now. It has been years since I last saw it from the back of a car window, but I don’t fool myself for an instant that even if the place was rotted out and the fields of once bright corn are now nothing but broken earth, that I wouldn’t still feel the same pull to it, a need to do the unspeakable for it.

      That is one of the reasons why I have never gone back.

      Why does it have this effect on me? Because of this: regardless of my mother and her lineage, I am a Hathaway. Even though I have taken her maiden name (and no one except my college alumni association asking for money, or Claudia in postcards, refers to me as anything else) it does not matter. I may live in New York, have changed my hair color, name and friends, but tug at the right thread and all this carefully constructed artifice will fall away.

      Blood will out.

      In its heyday, my family’s farm was impressive: it stretched three thousand acres when the average farm was about four to five hundred. But more than its size, our farm was infamous because it was unusual. Unlike any farm in our county, or indeed any farm that I have ever heard of, my grandmother took it in hand and developed it into something more than just a business, but a thing of real beauty. She did the unthinkable, and even more astonishingly, it worked.

      Farms are meant to concentrate solely on that which will maintain them: crops, livestock, tools. They are a place of work and where I come from, the farms that were considered the most impressive were those that embodied this: well-tended fields, a full harvest, up-to-date machinery. This was the attitude of our fellow farmers and their own farms reflected this. If there had been such a thing as Farm Lore, this would be it.

      But my grandmother wanted more. She didn’t see why she shouldn’t and somehow, to the puzzlement and then mockery of their neighbors, she succeeded in convincing my grandfather, the son of a seasoned farmer who had been raised on all the principles I have just described, to

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