filled up the car in Massachusetts and I went inside to use the bathroom, I came out to see him resting his head against his arms on the steering wheel, like a child at a school desk.
I didn’t force the conversation. For all that Cade treated each toll road as another coin for the ferryman into hell, I was happy to spend the summer in New Hampshire. Dave had been so disappointed when I called to tell him I wouldn’t be back this year, and that I’d be graduating late on top of that, but there was no sense in brooding over what couldn’t be helped. I’d thought about my mother a lot in those past few months, trying to coax my confused mind to produce a little of her wisdom, and I was at peace with this decision. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, my mother would have told me. At Southridge I would have just been a burden, too ungainly to perform my usual tasks, and any help I requested would have saddled me with guilt. But among family—and Cade’s family counted—it would be natural to ask and receive, because this baby was their own.
We crossed the border at the southern end of the state and drove through the Lakes Region, where Lake Winnipesaukee glittered between the trees and tall-masted boats clustered at docks that stretched far into the water. Cade looked singularly unimpressed with the scenery and drove along the gray highway in silence. His music selections grew darker as we crept farther north. The mountains loomed closer and closer; the woods grew more dense; the towns became farther apart and abandoned 1950s-era motels cropped up by the side of the road in numbers I had not imagined possible. We saw moose-crossing signs and the sheer faces of cliffs. Cade made a left turn onto a smaller road that passed through a faded town of Victorian structures; we passed a gas station and a sandwich shop, then a boarded-up bed-and-breakfast with a charred roof, then two miles of nothing. Then a house.
It was set far back from the road and flanked by trees, a sprawling and ancient white farmhouse with two lichen-flecked boulders marking the entrance to the long driveway. At first glance it seemed ordinary enough. The wooden siding was badly in need of paint, but the large kitchen garden at its side was neatly kept, and a gray barn was dilapidated but stable. An American flag flapped from a pole attached to the front porch, with a frayed yellow bow waving beneath it. A much smaller house built of cinder block stood a slight distance away at the edge of the forest. If the Olmsteads owned thirty acres here, I guessed at least twenty of them were wooded. The driveway turned from asphalt to gravel, then hard-packed dust, and here Cade stopped and jerked the car into Park.
Inside the house, two beagles began howling. Cade tossed his sunglasses onto the dash and twisted his body sideways to face me. For a long moment he said nothing, but the muscles in his jaw looked tense enough to snap. Finally he said, “Jill, tell me you love me.”
“Of course I do.”
“Just say it. Say, ‘Cade, I love you.’”
“Cade, I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He unclasped his seat belt and got out of the car. From the porch came the sounds of a banging wooden screen and general commotion, and then a woman stepped toward us, heavyset and in her thirties, wiping her hands on a dishrag. Her hair fell to her waist, and she wore a dress of smocklike calico.
“Cadey’s home,” she cried. I looked at her with some confusion. Too young to be his mother, too old to be his sister, I could not identify who this woman was in the scheme of the Olmstead family. She hurried to Cade and threw her arms around his neck, enveloping him in a powerful hug. “Praise God,” she said. “You made it here safe.”
He extracted himself from her arms and cocked his head toward the car. “Jill, Candy,” he said. “Candy, Jill.”
So this was his sister. I extended my hand, but Candy used it to pull me into her embrace. “We need another woman around here,” she said over my shoulder. “We’re outnumbered.”
Cade watched us with long-suffering patience. A trio of small boys, all shirtless, rushed out the front door and into the side yard, circumventing their mother. Cade mounted the porch stairs