“I didn’t get all the details, but it wasn’t any kind of disaster. Don’t worry. There they are, anyway.” Griff pointed at the Apostate truck, which was meandering past the rows of cars, in search of a place to park. “I’ll go say hello. Stay here with Lark for a few more minutes?”
Lark gave him a stiff nod, so we ended up working side by side.
She sold bag after bag of apples, and quite a few half-gallons of sweet cider. I restocked them just as quickly as she sold them, my hands growing cold from handling the chilled fruit and the cider jugs. Fall was here, and a stiff wind blew past as we worked.
Lark’s fingers must have grown numb, too. As I watched, the handle of a cider jug began to slip off her thumb. Lunging, I caught it before it hit the ground.
“Thanks. Sorry,” she stammered as I set it to rights on the table.
“You need gloves?” I asked her quietly. “Might be a pair in Griff’s truck.” My subconscious slipped up then, forgetting that we were over. I put a hand on the small of her back, and the contact—even through several layers of clothing—felt right and necessary.
She turned vulnerable eyes in my direction and sighed. “I don’t think I’d be able to make change with gloves on. But thank you.”
“No problem,” I mumbled, forcing myself to let go.
The apples were selling fast, and I stacked more of the five-pound totes on our table, giving myself over to physical labor, which had never steered me wrong.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a female voice. “Do you have any bananas?” I looked up to see a pretty girl standing across the table from us, a hand up to shield her eyes from the afternoon glare.
“Bananas?” I asked. Now there was a ridiculous request. I was trying to decide how to politely explain that bananas don’t grow in Vermont when she dropped the hand that was shielding her face.
And my heart seized at the sight of a familiar face, and that too-long hair all the girls were required to have at The Compound.
Chastity.
Speechless, I took in her pale skin and clear blue eyes. Her face had filled out some, becoming more womanly than it had been at sixteen.
Holy…
“Zachariah.” She laughed. “You should see the look on your face! I’m sorry to take you by surprise. It was all my idea.”
“God.” I stumbled around the end of the table towards her, trying to find words. “What happened? How did you get here?”
“Same way you did, I think.” She held up a thumb, making the universal sign for a hitchhiker.
“No you did not,” I said, unable to take my eyes off her. “That’s dangerous.”
Chastity rolled her eyes. “I took a bus first. But when I ran out of money, I did some hitchhiking. I Googled your name before I left and found Isaac and Leah. Your name must be in the website’s metadata.”
“I…I don’t even know what that means,” I stammered.
Her eyes widened, and she laughed again.
“God,” I said again. A nineteen-year-old girl who’d never left the Compound couldn’t possibly hitchhike across the country. She would never have even met an outsider before she stepped off the property. The idea of her all alone like that made me feel lightheaded. I curled my hand around one of the tent posts as a way of grounding myself. It was as if my brain and body couldn’t keep up with everything I was seeing and hearing. I didn’t know whether to shout or cry. I’d worried about her so many times. And now here she stood.
“Zach, you just took the Lord’s name in vain. Twice.”
“Sorry,” I said quickly.
“I’m joking. I didn’t want to live with their rules anymore. That’s why I left. It’s a long story but…” She gave me another huge smile. “You look great, Zach. Seriously. I can’t stop staring at you.”
“You…look amazing. I’m amazed to see you here.” I tried to smile. My heart was splintering in the strangest way.
She grabbed my free hand. “I’ll tell you all about it later. But right now Isaac is waving you down. Look.”
I turned to see Isaac beckoning from his place down the long row of stalls.
When I glanced at Lark, she was staring at Chastity the way someone looks at a ghost. But then she seemed to snap out of it. “Go,” she said without meeting my gaze. “Here comes Griff, anyway.”
So I let Chastity lead me by the hand over to where Isaac and Leah were setting up their stall as fast as possible. “Zach, come grab these crates with me?” Isaac called.
“Sure.” I dropped Chastity’s hand and followed him. My head was still spinning.
But when we got to the truck, Isaac only leaned against the tailgate and handed me a bottle of water. “Drink that. You look like you’re about to pass out.” I tipped the bottle into my very dry mouth with a shaky hand. “Steady, kid,” Isaac said. “This changes her life, but it doesn’t have to change yours.”
I looked down at him in surprise. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I know you. And right now you’re tearing up your life plan, trying to figure out how to help the girl you think you once harmed.” Isaac hoisted a crate filled with honey jars off the truck and handed it to me.
“She’s nineteen and she hitchhiked here,” I whispered.
“Yep. And she did a fine job of it.” Isaac grabbed another crate for himself. “I need you to take a deep breath. We’re all going to take care of Chastity and figure out what she needs. But don’t freak out, okay?” He hitched the crate up against his chest and trotted towards the booth.
I followed him, still in shock. I’d always wondered who Chastity had been forced to marry and how bad it had been.
It must have been pretty damn bad for her to run away.
* * *
Two hours later, Isaac and I were alone in the booth, except for Maeve, who was playing at our feet. Leah had taken Chastity off to a doctor’s appointment, maybe the first one in her life.
“Why does she need a doctor?” I’d worried.
“She got frostbite in Iowa,” he said calmly. “No coat. And Leah just wants to make sure there isn’t anything special she should do to treat it.”
Already, Isaac had sold all the cheeses he’d brought and a bin of late-season potatoes. He sold some honey and a few candles. And he played with Maeve, who had designated the area under the tables as her fort.
I’d done almost nothing except stare into space. “Sorry,” I said, moving out of Isaac’s way for what was probably the tenth time.
“I didn’t actually need your help today,” he admitted, sitting down on an overturned crate. “You’re really here to talk to me.”
“What is there to talk about?”
“Don’t be thick. I just wanted to tell you that even though Chastity says she came to Vermont looking for you, Leah and I are going to take care of her. You have a lot going on in your life right now. And we’re set up to help. We named our farm to help people like her find us. And now she has.”
“I still want to help.”
“And you shall. But there’s more we need to talk about. What happened with Lark? Griff said you were walking around like a zombie. Gotta agree with him about that.”
I groaned. “There’s nothing to tell. And now it’s time to pack up. The market’s over.”
Isaac let me get away with that dodge, and I helped him load his truck.
“Come on, Maeve,” Isaac called his daughter when we were through. “The market’s over.”
“Aren’t we waiting for Leah and Chastity?” I asked.
Isaac shook his head. “We brought two cars.”
I spotted Griffin waving at me from his truck, beckoning me. But I pointed at Isaac’s, then opened the passenger door and climbed in.
“What are you doing?”
“Riding back with you.”
Isaac shook his head. “You don’t have to come back home with me. Give your hero complex a day to get used to Chastity showing up, okay?” He lifted Maeve into her car seat in back and buckl
ed her in.
“It’s not about that.” I sighed, suddenly exhausted. “Just give me a ride home, would you? You can drop me at the end of the Shipleys’ drive.”
My friend studied me for a moment. “All right.”
I looked out the window to get out from under Isaac’s stare. I was still chafing under that comment about my hero complex.
Isaac pulled the truck slowly out onto College Street. Then he had to brake again as two college guys, in their green Dartmouth sweatshirts, stepped practically in front of the truck. One time the same thing had happened, and it had set Lark off on a mini rant. “This is one of the most selective colleges in the country, and the students aren’t smart enough to look both ways before crossing the street!”
Every time I thought of Lark, my heart gave a painful kick. I looked out the window and tried to think of something else.
“Are you going to tell me why it’s so hard for you to sit in a truck with Griff and Lark?” Isaac asked as we crossed the bridge into Vermont.
Lark called it the Bridge of Big Balls, a moniker that described the concrete ornaments decorating it. I’d never cross this bridge again without cracking a smile because of her.
“Earth to Zach,” Isaac prodded.
“Can we just drop it? There’s not much to tell. I love her. She isn’t on the same page. It’s not a very original story.” Every song on the radio was about the same thing, pretty much.
Isaac was quiet for a moment. “Nobody has a bigger heart than you, Zach. Just don’t give it away, hasty-like.”
“Too late.” I swiveled my head around, wondering why Maeve hadn’t bailed me out of this conversation with one of her rambling interruptions. But the little girl’s head was tipped onto the padding of her car seat. She was already asleep. So I turned back to watch the road go by and sank a little further into my own discomfort.
“How do you know she won’t come to love you?” Isaac asked in a quiet voice. “You’ve only known her a little while. Maybe things don’t have to go fast.”
I snorted. “They went plenty fast. And then there was a sudden squeal of brakes.”
“Ouch.” There was a pause, and then Isaac said, “So… While we’re on the topic, is there anything you’re unclear about, sexually? If you have any questions…”
I let out a frustrated grunt. “Nope. No problems there.” I couldn’t even think about sex with Lark without feeling sad. I hadn’t known that holding her in my arms was a privilege I’d soon have to give up.
“Okay.” Isaac sighed. “I just wonder…”
“You wonder what?”
“She just came back from some terrible trip, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me this—if you’d met the perfect girl just a month or two after you got shot out of Paradise Ranch, do you think you would have been ready for her?”
“I dunno,” I said, hoping to get off the topic.
“Think about it. Maybe she just needs time.”
That sounded like the kind of thing you say to someone who’s all out of hope.
We drove on in silence for a minute, and I thought the conversation was over. But then Issac said, “Sometimes you have to take a step back before you can move forward. A month from now, she might realize her error and come back to you.”
I wanted to believe him. But I just couldn’t summon the optimism. “Not everybody gets what you have. Not everyone finds their Leah.”
“You’re too young to call off the search, man. Trust me.”
I didn’t answer. I stared down the double yellow line of the little two-lane highway and tried to think of nothing at all.
* * *
The next night was Thursday Dinner, this one at Isaac’s place. Hemmed in between Kyle and Dylan at Leah’s dining table, I drank more wine than usual. But it didn’t bring on the sort of pleasant fuzziness I’d been hoping for. Instead, it only made my sad thoughts more muddled.
Lark hadn’t come to dinner at all. In fact, she’d made herself so scarce these past twenty-four hours that I had barely glimpsed her. Griff sent her to the market today with Kieran, keeping me on the farm to press cider.
Tonight on my way out, I’d wanted to knock on her bedroom door. But what would I even say if she opened the door? Griff had told me she was leaving tomorrow, and I’d already told her I loved her. There were no more confusions to clear up; there were no new questions to ask.
Except for “please?” and “why?” Those two questions were burned on my heart. I’d told her I loved her, and that hadn’t been enough.
She hadn’t even needed me to chase off her dreams last night.
So here I sat, drowning in my wine glass. Since I wasn’t known as a talker, my silence wouldn’t be noticed. Chastity sat down at the other end of the table, happily planted in a chair with Maeve on her lap.
Hell. Even Maeve had abandoned me.
“I’ve never been further from home than Casper. So when I saw the lights of Omaha, I thought, wow! The big city! But then came Chicago.” She laughed.
Funny. I’d had that exact same experience four years ago.
Sitting there surrounded by the people I knew best in the world, I got a strange chill. Chastity’s storytelling brought me back to those early days, and not in a good way. I was beaten and alone. Didn’t have any money for a bus ticket like Chastity did. All I had was the name of a town in Vermont, and I was going to walk there if nobody would stop for me. On the worst days I froze alone in the rain. Some nights I lay awake on park benches, too afraid to fall asleep.
One time I watched a group of teenage boys eat McDonald’s hamburgers in the park. They saw me watching. Eventually one of them held up half a burger. “You want this?” he asked.
My stomach was so empty and I nodded.
Then the boy threw the burger to his dog, and all his friends laughed.
It had been a really long time since I’d thought about those days. The wine made a left turn in my stomach just remembering this.
After dinner, I washed the dishes as an excuse not to socialize. But when everyone began to depart, I told Griffin that I didn’t want a lift back to the bunkhouse yet.
“You want us to leave you here?” Griff asked, keys in hand. “It’s a long walk in the dark.”
“Leah will drop me. Or I’ll just crash on the couch,” I suggested. “I want to catch up with Chastity.”
“Okay, man. See you in the morning.”
Maeve wrapped herself around my knees and I picked her up and carried her into the Abrahams’ TV room. “Chassity!” the little girl said when we found my old…friend? Hookup?
“Hi, baby girl,” Chastity said. She patted the sofa beside her. “God, Zach. I can’t believe you’re right here.”
I cleared my throat. “I’d say the same about you.”
“I’m so happy I found you guys. Took me long enough.”
“So…” There was no more containing the question that had long been on my mind. “I just have one question. How much trouble did I get you in four years ago?”
“Lots!” she said with a smile that made no sense. “I got a beating like you read about. Still have the scars.”
There wasn’t enough air suddenly. “Sorry.”
“Hey! Wait until you hear the rest of the story, okay? It gets better. Everyone assumed that I’d been compromised.” She winked, and I wanted to die. “Nobody believed me. My mother didn’t speak to me for months. And nobody wanted to marry me when I turned seventeen.”
I set Maeve down on the floor and put my head in my hands.
“Zach.” Chastity prodded me with her toe. “I told you—this story isn’t over yet. Listen to me.”
I lifted my head and tried to cooperate.
“Nobody wanted to marry me, so I was a pariah for a while. My sisters were awful, and my mother wanted me out of the house. But my father was still in charge of provisions. Remember that?”
I nodded. Her father made many of the trips into Casper for fuel and ca
ttle feed.
“So I asked him if there was a job I could get. And he set me up as a cashier at Walgreens.”
“The pharmacy?” I asked. I’d never heard of a girl on the compound having a job.
“That’s the place. He wanted the cash, you know? My whole paycheck went to him. I wasn’t allowed to keep the money.”
“Oh. Of course not.”
She smiled, and the look of it was so familiar it broke my heart a little. “I loved that job anyway. It was fun to watch the customers. And the manager was an interesting lady. She saw the position I was in, and she didn’t like it. So when I got a raise for seniority, she started to pay me the extra in Visa gift cards. And I hid those.”
“Really? And you didn’t get caught?” Hiding money from the elders would take balls. Chastity was braver than I’d ever known. A trespass like that would have earned her another beating for sure.
“I never got caught. That became my savings plan. I knew I wanted to leave. Working behind that counter taught me a lot about the larger world. And I wanted in.”
“Wow.” I pictured Chastity standing behind the cash register in her long yellow dress and braids, watching girls her age come and go as they pleased. “You would have met a lot of people.”
“Sure! And I read newspapers and magazines. The other people who worked there let me borrow their phones sometimes. Of course I never admitted any of that to my family. But I started to plan my escape. I looked up the cost of bus tickets and worked as many hours as I could to save up. But then my dad started making noises about trying to find me a husband. He thought that the scandal had probably blown over, and that he could get one of the Levite brothers to have me. And I didn’t want that. So I knew it was time to go.”
Just thinking of Chastity married off to an old man made the cold feeling return.
“So I started planning, and that’s when I searched your name on someone’s phone and found Isaac’s farm. I knew you must have landed here, and it made me so happy. Because—Zach, I felt like I killed you.” Her eyes were glassy now.
“Naw, don’t go there.” I reached over and patted her hand. I found it easier to touch people now than I had just a month or two ago. “Getting kicked out was the best thing that ever happened to me.”