of his tiny body and, when he yawned, smelled his milky breath. Mary got herself back into her blouse. I stared at Bud, lifting his little fist with my finger, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“You want one,” Addie whispered so close I could feel her breath on my cheek.
She was right. I did want one. Like all girls then, I assumed I would have children one day. I naturally imagined myself married and with kids. It was not something I’d ever questioned. I had never felt the physical urge to have a baby, the way I had felt an urge toward Cole, toward the land I lived on, or toward Addie herself. But I felt it then, holding Bud, touching that perfect soft skin and breathing in the moist sweetness of him.
“You’ll need a man first,” Mary said. “Both of you.”
“We’ll get one then,” Addie whispered back, sitting down beside us.
Mary pulled Bud’s little sprouts of hair up into a peak with her fingers. “Better get two. You two can’t share everything.”
Little Bud wiggled again, pulled himself into a ball, turned red, and audibly shit. I felt the force of it in my hand and half-expected that he had gone through his diaper, the gown, and the blankets. Mary looked at my face and laughed. Bud woke. Calm and wide-eyed, he stared up at us.
For days after, Addie was quiet and subdued, often taking long rides alone. She spent a Sunday afternoon at Cole’s house learning how to drive. Then she somehow talked his momma into letting her borrow the family’s old Ford truck the next weekend. She told me she was going “up into the mountains” as if she was doing more than changing geography. And she was going alone. She packed an old pup tent borrowed from Joe and two days’ worth of food. When I saw her fold the tent and put it in the back of the truck, anxiety snaked through my gut. I waited until she came back outside with blankets, the same ones I had first wrapped her in two years before.
“Don’t go.” I took her arm. “Why are you going? What are you going to do up there?”
She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what I’ll do. But I need to go.”
Her eyes had the focused, faraway look of someone already on her way. She caught me staring at her, worried, and snapped back into the present.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be okay, Evelyn. I’m coming back. Just tell everyone I’ve gone hunting.” Then she laughed that staccato laugh that reminded me of Joe.
I did not want to, but I let her go.
Two days later, she came back as she had left, without explanation, herself again.
I felt the pressure to marry and have a family—that was the expectation of my community, my family, and my body. I was content with Addie. But the ripeness of my body was not something I could resist or suppress.
After I held little Bud, I thought of these things more often. I couldn’t see how I would fit a man into the house Addie and I lived in. We would each have to find someone at the same time or share a single man. The former was unlikely, the latter seemed impossible. But that is just how it happened. We found a man.
Four
Adam
The morning sun shone bright and unseasonably warm, though it was still winter, with no sign of buds on the trees yet. Addie and I had just come from Sunday dinner at Momma’s. Logy from overeating, I chose an easy but prickly task for the afternoon—pruning dead stems off the blackberries. I perched high up on the bank where it began its drop from the road to the railroad track, my clippers in hand, when I heard whistling and then the crunch of shoes on the gravel skirting of the tracks below.
A man’s voice called out, “Hello! There a place around here I could get a drink of water?”
I glanced down, expecting to see one of the local boys, but a stranger peered up at me. The brim of his hat shaded his eyes. Too nicely dressed to be a hobo, he held a small, battered suitcase and a wrinkled, grease-stained brown paper sack in one hand. He needed a shave. His jacket was slung over one shoulder and his sleeves rolled up.
“Ma’am, is there a place nearby where I could get a drink of water?” he repeated. “That’s all I want is a drink