The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  While Katie’s back was to me, I slipped the hook on the calf’s collar from the tethering chain. Just like I figured, Sadie didn’t even notice. Her throat chugged up and down as she managed to drain every last drop of the bottle, and then butt her head underneath my arm.

  “Sorry,” I said. “We’ve run dry.”

  Katie smiled at me over her shoulder, where Gideon—a little older, a little less greedy—was still summarily slurping his bottle. And that was the moment when Sadie vaulted over me, kicking me hard in the stomach as she sprang for freedom.

  “Ellie!” Katie cried. “What did you do!”

  I could not answer, much less breathe. I rolled around in the dirt in front of the little igloo, clutching my side.

  Katie ran after the calf, which seemed to have developed springs on the bottoms of her hooves. Sadie ran in a half circle and then began to curve back toward me. “Grab her front legs,” Katie yelled, and I dove for Sadie’s knees, crumbling the rest of her body in a neat tackle.

  Panting, Katie dragged the chain to where I was bodily restraining the calf and clipped her collar secure again. Then she sat down beside me to catch her breath. “Sorry,” I gasped. “I didn’t know.” I watched Sadie slink back to the shade of her igloo. “Hell of a good tackle, though. Maybe I ought to try out for the Eagles.”

  “Eagles?”

  “Football.”

  Katie stared blankly at me. “What’s that?”

  “You know, the game. On TV.” I could see I was getting nowhere. “It’s like baseball,” I finally said, remembering the school-age children I’d seen with their gloves and balls. “But different. The Eagles are a professional team, which means that the players get a lot of money to be in the game.”

  “They make money for playing games?”

  Put that way, it sounded positively stupid. “Well, yeah.”

  “Then what do they do for work?”

  “That is their work,” I explained. But it seemed strange even to me, now—compared to the day-to-day existence of someone like Aaron Fisher, whose job directly involved putting food into his family’s mouth, what was the value of tossing a ball through an end zone? For that matter, what was the value of my own career, making a living with words instead of with my hands?

  “I don’t understand,” Katie said honestly.

  And sitting on the Fisher farm, at that moment, neither did I.

  * * *

  I turned to Coop, amused. “You got a divorce because of a bank dispute?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly.” His teeth flashed in the moonlight. “Maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  We were sitting on the back of a contraption I’d seen Elam and Samuel and Aaron dragging behind a team of mules, and trying hard not to cut our feet. Wicked prongs stuck like fangs from three deadly pinwheels attached to the base, and it seemed to me an instrument of torture, although Katie had told me it was a tetter, used to fluff up the cut hay so that it could dry better before baling. “Let me guess. Credit card debt. She had a weakness for Neiman Marcus.”

  Coop shook his head. “It was her ATM password.”

  I laughed. “Why? Was it some embarrassing nickname she had for you?”

  “I don’t know what it was. That was the dispute.” He sighed. “I’d left my wallet at home, and we’d gone out to dinner. We needed to get cash from one of the bank machines, so I took her card from her purse and said I’d go. But when I asked for her password, she clammed up.”

  “In all fairness,” I pointed out, “you’re not supposed to tell your password to anyone.”

  “You probably had a client whose husband cleaned her out and ran off to Mexico, right? Thing is, Ellie, I’m not one of those guys. I never was. And she just wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t trust me with this one thing. It made me wonder how much more she was holding back from me.”

  I worried a button on my cardigan, unsure of what to say. “Once, when Stephen and I had been together, oh, I don’t know—six years?—I got the flu. He brought me breakfast in bed—eggs, toast, coffee. It was sweet of him, but he’d brought the coffee with cream and sugar. And for six years, every day, I’d been sitting down across from him and drinking it black.”

  “What did you do?”

  I smiled faintly. “Thanked him up one side and down another, and dated him for two more years,” I joked. “What other choice did I have?”

  “There are always choices, Ellie. You just don’t like to see them.”

  I pretended not to hear Coop. Staring out over the tobacco field, I watched fireflies decorating the greenery like Christmas lights in July. “That’s duvach,” I said, remembering the Dietsch word Katie had taught me.

  “Changing the topic,” Coop said. “Good old Ellie.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You heard me.” He shrugged. “You’ve been doing it for years.”

  Eyes narrowing, I turned toward him. “You have no idea what I’ve been doing—”

  “That,” he interrupted, “was not my choice.”

  I crossed my arms, annoyed. “I understand this is a professional hazard for you, but some people prefer not to drag up the past.”

  “Still touchy about what happened?”

  “Me?” I laughed, incredulous. “For someone who says he’s forgiven me, you sure as hell harp on our history together.”

  “Forgiving and forgetting are two completely different things.”

  “Well, you’ve had twenty years to put it out of your mind. Maybe you could manage to do that for the length of time you’re involved with my client.”

  “Do you really think I’m driving way the hell out here twice a week to meet pro bono with some Amish girl?” Coop reached out and cupped my cheek with his palm, my anger dissolving in the time it took to draw a startled breath. “I wanted to see you, Ellie. I wanted to know if you’d gotten what you wanted all those years ago.”

  He was so close now that I could see the sparks of gold in his green eyes. I could feel his words on my skin. “You take your coffee black,” he whispered. “You brush your hair a hundred strokes before you go to bed. You break out in hives if you eat raspberries. You like to shower after you make love. You know all the words to ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ and you keep quarters in your pockets at Christmastime, to give to the Salvation Army Santas.” Coop’s hand slid to the back of my neck. “What did I leave out?”

  “A-T-T-Y,” I whispered. “My ATM password.”

  I leaned toward him, tasting him already. Coop’s fingers tightened, massaging, and as I closed my eyes I thought how many stars there were here, how deep the night sky was, how this was a place where you could lose yourself.

  Our lips had just touched when we broke apart again, startled by the sound of footsteps running down the driveway.

  * * *

  We had followed Katie on foot for nearly a mile now, stumbling along in silence so that she wouldn’t see us. She was the one who was carrying the flashlight, however, so we were clearly at a disadvantage. Coop held my hand, squeezing it in warning when he saw a branch in our path, a rock, a small rut in the road.

  Neither of us had spoken a word, but I was certain that Coop was thinking the same thing I was: Katie was off to meet someone she didn’t want to meet with me around. Which left Samuel out of the running, and cast into perfect light the absent, unknown father of her baby.

  I could see a farmhouse rising in a gray mountain just beyond us, and wondered if that was where Katie’s lover lived. But before I could speculate any further, Coop yanked me to the left, into a small fenced yard that Katie had entered. It took a moment to realize that the small, white stones were actually grave markers—we were in the cemetery where Sarah and Aaron had buried the body of the dead infant.

  “Oh, my God,” I breathed, and Coop’s hand came up to cover my mouth.

  “Just watch her.” His words fell softly into my ear. “This could be the wall tumbling down.”

&nbs