“I need flour and salt. Maybe I can sell a few jars of preserves at the market.”
“Then go before you talk yourself out of it. Sitting in this house by yourself is turning your mind into a dark room.”
Claire didn’t argue because Ruth Ann was right. The house had become a museum of unfinished sentences. Ben’s boots still sat beside the door. His coffee mug still hung from the hook by the stove. His work gloves still rested on the windowsill in the mudroom, stiff with old leather and memory.
After Ruth Ann left, Claire hitched Daisy to the wagon. Every movement cost her something now. Her back ached. Her ankles swelled. Heat pressed against her skin like wet wool. But staying home would have meant staring at the bank notice until it swallowed her whole.
The road to town cut through scrub woods and long stretches of red dirt, empty except for a few mailboxes leaning at tired angles. About two miles from the main highway, near a dead sycamore split by lightning, Claire saw what she first took for trash caught in the weeds.
Then one of the shapes moved.
She pulled Daisy to a stop.
