Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,56

doesn’t like Cate.”

He thought back. “I guess that’s the wrong way to put it.” He paused. “My grandfather died a few months before the crash. He had a heart attack.” Larkin paused again, thinking back. “I didn’t know him all that well. I told you, he was a doctor. And that’s most of what he was, being a doctor. When my grandmother came up here to see us, he stayed in town. He didn’t like to leave his patients.”

Which was something I understood: how a sick stranger might count more than a grandson, even.

“We went to town sometimes,” he said. “And I saw him then, but he was a serious man. I don’t think I ever saw him in anything but a suit and waistcoat. Always very proper . . . and a little cold . . . and it was always my grandmother who was the big, warm, jolly one.” He looked over at her in her little bed. “Not like she is now.” He sighed. “She’s changed a lot.” The look on his face made my heart hurt. “After he died, she waited too long to come out of her grief and decide how she would live. She waited too long to sell the house. The crash came and no one wanted to buy a big house like that. So she locked it up and left it behind and kept nothing much but her books, really, when she came to live with us.”

“Almost like we did,” I said, thoughtful, though the house we’d left behind was no longer ours.

“A season before you.” He gave me a sad little smile. “And not quite as you did. She was from these mountains. From this one. And she came to us, who had made our home here because we wanted to. Not because we had to.”

I looked at my boots. “You said it before. How hard it was to watch us in the beginning. How sad that was.”

He nodded. “But it was different for her. For us. When she first arrived, everything was fine. Everything was really good.” He looked at nothing in particular. “But then, a few weeks before you came here to live, my daddy took sick.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t know what it was. Something terrible. And he was dead before we could do anything about it.”

I waited.

“My mother thought . . . well, she didn’t see how my grandmother, who had so much learning and had been a nurse and lived with a doctor for all those years, could be so . . . useless.”

I thought about Esther. How much she needed someone to blame for what had happened to our father. I looked around the little cabin. “And Cate ended up here, by herself?”

Larkin nodded. “It was just awful after my daddy died. My mother was like a wild woman.” He shook his head. “Three years it’s been, and she’s still not right.”

I thought about that—how Larkin had lost his father just weeks before he stood in the trees and watched us come to live on the mountain. Watched our pitiful start. Listened to Samuel bleating like a lamb in the cold, gray time before the wilderness greened again.

“You carved that little lamb for Samuel when your father had just died,” I said, wanting to touch his wonderful hair, his battered face.

“I did,” he said. “But for me as much as him.”

“And treasures for her, too,” I said, nodding at the tiny fawn on the windowsill. The little squirrel. The perfect mouse.

When he looked at Cate, his face softened. “I think about how my grandmother lived before she came to us. In a fine, big house in town. And now . . .” He looked around the sad little cabin. “But she won’t leave me.”

I looked at his black eye. The sadness in it. “And your own mother doesn’t want you coming up here?”

He shook his head.

“Just because your grandma is teaching you to read?”

“That.” He sighed. “And other things, too.”

I tried to put myself in his mother’s shoes. They were far too small. But I knew more than I had before. “She’s worried you’ll go off to school and become a doctor and she’ll never see you again.”

He chewed his lip. “I think so.”

We looked at each other.

“And be useless,” I said.

“Hard to know how she can feel that way.” Larkin wiped a clot of muck from the corner of his eye. Cleared his throat. “I keep hoping she’ll get better. But I don’t