“Okay,” said Henrietta.
She looked over her shoulder. “Honey, I’m kidding.”
Henrietta walked beside the second cow with both her hands out toward its flank. It moved steadily along as though it were a wholly unremarkable event to walk on the wrong side of its pasture fence with the larger body of the herd gathering now as a congregation to watch. Mrs. Miller kept casting over her shoulder to check on their progress. As the Forge paddocks came into view, she said, “Guess there’s a lot to keep a girl busy on a horse farm, huh?”
“I guess.”
“What does a girl like you like to do?” she said.
Henrietta shrugged, a strange new mood was on her; the rains and her mother’s absence had brought it on. “Study diagrams.”
Ginnie reared back. “Diagrams! Of what?”
“Animals and plants. The history of their evolution. That sort of thing.”
The woman hooted and looked back over her shoulder again with a different expression on her face, as though just discovering a different child in Henrietta’s place, one who deserved a second glance. “Is that right,” she said.
Encouraged, Henrietta said, “Did you know there are fifty thousand species of trees? That number’s going down. They come in five shapes — round, conical, spreading— What’s that?”
Mrs. Miller turned to see that Henrietta was pointing at the cursive M on the cow’s rump.
“That’s a brand.”
“What’s a brand?”
“We burn our family letter into them so if they ever get out like today, everybody will know they’re ours and bring them back to us. Just like puppies.”
“You brand puppies?”
“No, honey,” said Mrs. Miller.
They were now approaching the squat Miller bungalow, where begonia pots hung in bursts of color from the scalloped porch trim and the flower beds stood pert in a wealth of watered soil.
“Run ahead and unlock the gate,” said Mrs. Miller, and Henrietta did as she was told, pulling the pin and springing the gate, so the woman could pass on through with the two cows just as the herd was beginning to gather in a mass around the sojourners. With the cows captured, they stopped and watched the reunion, their forearms resting on the top steel rung like two old cowpokes, the older barely taller than the younger.
From this place, Henrietta had a new and clear vision of their home across the road and the black stallion barn atop the rise. Their stone fence was trim and neatly kept except where it had been rearranged by the swollen stream. The Millers’ fence was crumbled and tumbled out of its original form along its length, limestone lying everywhere in heaps.
“Our fence is prettier than yours,” Henrietta said.
Mrs. Miller snorted once and shook her head. “A good-looking fence is not high on my list of priorities. In my opinion, some people mind a little too much about how a place looks and not enough about how it runs.” She looked very pointedly at the girl, but Henrietta was looking across the road to their fields, the grass mowed just so, the fences white as cotton bolls.
“Good looks are an evolutionary mark of health,” she said. “That matters when it comes to mating. I read that.”
Ginnie cocked her head. “Based on my cows, I’m gonna say that’s probably not the whole story. In fact, that sounds like something a man would say to a woman just to get the upper hand. Both of my daughters are dating right now, and they’re running into all sorts of foolishness like that.” Ginnie leaned down and grasped one of her galoshes by the shank and gave it a tug. It came off with a sucking sound and brown water poured out in a stream like old tea from a kettle stroop. Her socks were gray and sodden. Then she said, “You know, I used to have a big old crush on your daddy when I was about your age.”
“Really?” said the girl. “Did he want to marry you?”
Ginnie laughed again. “If he did, he had a poor way of showing it,” she said. “But things turn out the way they should. Just think, if I’d married your daddy, then I never could have married the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the least words ever spoken in a marriage.”
Henrietta’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Honey, I’m kidding,” she said. “But you know,” she went on suddenly, turning toward the girl with a level gaze. “Mind how you grow up. Strive to be a good egg. You’re gonna have to watch yourself. You’re kind of swimming upstream if you know what I mean, which you probably don’t.”
Henrietta just stared at her blankly. Then Mrs. Miller reached down, took her time removing her other rain boot as she gripped the gate with her free hand, and said, “I’ll tell you another secret.”
“What?”
“Your daddy tried to buy us out. Twice.”
Henrietta’s eyebrows rose up in little arcs of surprise. “He wanted your cows?”
“Well, I don’t expect that was the attraction, no,” Mrs. Miller said. “But he wouldn’t offer anywhere close to what this place is worth. My own daddy wasn’t very fond of your daddy, truth be told. He’d have sooner sold it … Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you that.” She sighed, struggling her feet back into her floppy boots.
“Why?”
She turned a mild, considering eye on the girl. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. I suppose it’s just the truth when it’s all said and done.” Then she said, “How old are you?”
“Almost ten.”
“That’s why. You’re just a little slip. You’re too young for the workings of the world. The world can be a pretty crappy place. Just have a good time being a little girl.” She sighed.
“I like your cows,” said Henrietta.
Ginnie Miller actually blushed a bit when she smiled. “Well, they’re not Cardigan Corgis, but … yes,” she said. “I’m very fond of them myself. I really can’t eat beef anymore. I think I’d consider eating my husband before one of my herd. That was a joke.” Then she cleared her throat and said, “You know, sometimes the apple falls pretty far from the tree. And if it’s really brave, when it grows up, it can get up and walk over to another orchard. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“No, I suppose not.” She smiled, and Henrietta realized suddenly the hour was late, and her father would be wondering where she was, so she moved toward the wet black ribbon of the road and the house beyond. Then Ginnie called out, “Henrietta Forge, did you have fun today?”
Henrietta didn’t even have to hesitate; she turned and, walking backward, she called, “Yes, I did!”
* * *
She lay there on the davenport in the front parlor by the phone, her hands still smelling of the damp outdoors, but resolved not to move until the call came. No one bothered her, her father still out with the horses and the cleaning lady polishing and vacuuming around her. When the phone rang in the early evening, she had only to reach over her own head without rising to grasp the receiver. It was her mother.
“I’ve been missing you,” Judith said in a voice too gentle.
“You have an apartment in Lexington now?” Henrietta blurted. “But you still live here, right?”
“Is that what your father told you?”
“He said he wants you to come back home right now.”
There was silence on the line.
“When are you coming home?”
“Well,” her mother said, and sighed. “I think I’ll come out to the farm tomorrow.”
“Why can’t you come right now?”
“I’ll come tomorrow, darling.”
But her mother didn’t come the next day. She came the day after that, and she arrived wearing a dress Henrietta had never seen before, her hair cut in a glassy blonde bob, and with a pained twinge the girl struggled with a strange, phantom sensation that Judith had been gone not three days but three years. She was altered like a heap of coins melted down and newly minted into a foreign currency. When they hugged, her mother’s arms were painfully thin, but maybe they had always been so? Henrietta heard a kissing sound above her head but did not feel the press of lips anywhere.