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She means it. This woman who travels for a living, who packs her car and drives to the next town, who hasn't stayed anywhere longer than a month in two years. She means it about wanting to talk to my mother.

We walk back to the house together. Her hand finds mine somewhere between the pasture and the porch. Fingers lacing, her silver rings cool against my knuckles. She swings our hands between us. I let her.

In the kitchen, she opens her laptop. Shows me the morning's shots. Fog on the lower pasture, the cattle backlit, Bucky on the water trough. My hands on the fence wire, close up, detail sharp enough to see every callus.

"These are for the magazine?" I ask.

"These are for me."

My throat tightens.

"The magazine gets the landscapes," she says, scrolling past the hand shots. "The wide shots, the pretty stuff. But these?" She stops on a photo of me leaning on a fence post, looking out at the east field, light hitting the side of my face. "These are mine."

Mine. The word reaches into a place I keep locked. The place where my mother's voice lives, telling me to stop deciding people will leave.

"Stay for dinner," I say. Stupid, because she was going to stay anyway. Both of us know it. But the words need saying.

"I'll cook," she says. "I saw chicken in your freezer."

"You went through my freezer?"

"I go through everything. It's a personality flaw."

She cooks. Jerk chicken, my kitchen, her mother's seasoning. My flannel on her shoulders. Music from her phone, something with steel drums she hums along to while she chops scotch bonnets with bare hands.

The kitchen fills with sound and heat and her.

Five years of quiet. Five years of one mug, one chair, one plate in the rack. Five years of telling myself the silence was a choice.

This is a choice too. A better one.

Mom:

Did you use the good butter?

Me:

I don't have good butter, Mom.

Mom:

Then she's going to have to bring her own. When can I meet her?

Me:

Slow down.

Mom:

Honey, you called me at 5am about a woman for the first time in seven years. I'm not slowing down. I'm booking a flight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

POPPY

POPPY

Friday morning. The last of the photos are editing themselves on my screen, auto-adjustments I'll fine-tune later, but even in raw form they're some of the best work I've done. The farm at dawn. The orchard in late light. The pumpkin rows in morning shadow. Deck's hands on fence wire, close crop, every line and callus sharp.