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“Come on down,” Frank said.

“No,” I said, throwing some hay on him.

“Hey,” he said. “Hay is for horses.”

I threw some more. It blew back in my face and got stuck in my mouth, so I spit it out. The spit fell on Frank below me.

“No spitting,” he said.

His face was calm, but the glow was gone from his eyes.

I spit out another piece of hay on him and laughed.

“If you do that one more time,” he said, very serious now, “I’ll give you a spanking.”

Frank was my friend, but I felt like a wild animal, trapped. So I spit on him again.

“Okay, that’s it,” Frank said. He climbed up and grabbed me under my armpits, lifted me screaming off the wagon, turned my naked body over, spanked me twice, then put me back down. It was still a common punishment then. Papa had spanked me before, usually behind the woodshed, where he’d make me sit and consider the errors of my ways.

Frank later apologized to Papa for the spanking. He felt badly, but also thought things were a little too loose around the farm, quite different from the parental strictness he’d grown up with in the South. He’d simply reacted to the situation as he’d been raised. While I was mad at Frank for a long time after that, I also felt a reverence of sorts. He’d drawn a line, the boundary I so badly needed in Mama’s absence, and I loved him for it.

After haying, the shorn fields of the cape sprouted a white blanket of Queen Anne’s lace. “Queen Anne was sewing her lace when she pricked her finger and a drop of blood fell on it,” Mama told me once when I was younger. “See.” She showed me the small maroon dot of dried blood at the center of the lace doily flower.

“Drop of blood,” I’d repeated.

That tiny drop of blood was so much more interesting than the lace.

On a warm day in June, six weeks after the day she left in the rental car, Mama walked down the grassy lane with Heidi and Papa, as if they were just coming back from the store. I looked up from selling potted flowers, and there she was. Mama. My first instinct was to run to her. She was more beautiful than ever, her hair flowing back from her face and skin glowing. She was nervous, too, but her beauty covered that. She looked around the farm, breathing it in. Something in me held back for a beat—the torn place was used to being torn, and I wondered if it was easier to keep it that way—but then I gave in.

“Mama,” I shouted and ran across the grass to her. The sun was warm on my face as she bent down and opened her arms. “Lissie,” she said, and drew me into a bear hug, wet where our faces touched. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Heidi was glad to see me, too. She looked so much bigger than I remembered her, the baby fat disappearing into her longer frame. I couldn’t help but love her, though underneath I was angry, too. She got to go with Mama, and something would always feel unequal after that—she was favored. It didn’t matter that she got to go because she was still nursing, and I had to stay because I was in school; it made me want to pinch the soft juicy places under her arms. The sibling rivalry that had smoldered between us ever since she got all the attention as a baby caught the tiniest bit of flame, the way coals ignite in the firebox.

Uncomfortable at her parents’ home, the weight of their disapproval prodding the tuggings for her own home and family, Mama somehow managed to get Papa on the phone. “Please, I want to come home,” she whispered into the line so Grandma couldn’t overhear from the next room. Papa was silent on the other end, standing in the Nearings’ new hand-laid stone garage, his ear resting on the black earpiece of the phone Helen had installed there with a pad and pen next to it to record calls. He’d been taking his cupfuls of vitamins religiously and his doctor was amazed to say the blood tests showed tremendous improvement. Unsure of his feelings for Mama, but missing Heidi dearly, Papa made plans to pick them up at the bus station in Bangor.

It must have been something of a happy reunion, family being an organism that when separated wants to pull