were in bed. Dave’s whiskers scraped at the side of her face as he sent his palms gliding over her skin, skimming along her thighs, her hips, along the dip of her waist, then up and over her breasts. Over and over, slowly and deliberately, until she felt a heaviness gather between her legs and heard her breath come faster. When he touched her, she was wet, and when he entered her, she sighed, feeling pleasure, dim but palpable, and—she had to be honest—familiarity and comfort. When he buried his face between her neck and her left shoulder, she let the tears spill down her cheeks. Down the hall, she could hear Missy tossing in her fevered sleep. At the moment of his climax, Dave gasped out Jo’s name. You don’t love him, Jo heard her sister say . . . but she did. After a fashion. At least a little. Besides, she was old enough to know that love wasn’t all that mattered. There were other things. Habit and routine. Comingled finances. Children. Letting someone else keep your secrets.
That was the night that their third daughter was conceived. Dave wanted to name her Dora, after Doris, his mother, but Jo insisted, telling him that there was a name she’d always loved, with maybe some small part of her realizing that a girl named Lila would end up with a nickname that sounded like lie.
Bethie
On a sunny June morning, Bethie put on a dress and one of the three pairs of pumps that the women of Blue Hill Farm traded back and forth, and arranged a pair of tortoiseshell combs in her hair. She’d taken the shoes and the combs with her when she’d left Blue Hill Farm and moved into her own place, the apartment above the shop on Peachtree Road. Rose of Sharon was supposed to meet with the bankers, but she’d gotten bronchitis, and so Bethie went to the ten o’clock appointment at the First Bank of the South all by herself, to see if the members of the Blue Hill Farm Collective could secure a line of credit, just in case the month ever came when they couldn’t cover the rent or the payroll.
The fight that had brought her to this point had been terrible. “I refuse to be a cog in the capitalist war machine,” Wren had said at the collective’s monthly meeting. “Why are we even selling anything? Shouldn’t we just barter?”
“Believe me, if I could trade jam for two-ply toilet paper, I’d do it,” Bethie said.
“I don’t see what the big deal is about toilet paper,” said Phil, tugging at his beard, and Bethie said, “Of course you don’t, you’re not the one wiping with it.”
“Hey! I wipe!” Phil said, and Bethie said, “Not like we do.”
Wren stood up and said that she’d come to Blue Hill Farm to escape the hierarchies of capitalism, a world that arbitrarily assigned value to things and to people, and Bethie said, “So should we just give our jam away at the farmers’ market?”
“Maybe,” Wren said, her voice serene. Her straight brown hair fell down to her shoulders; her gauzy Indian-print skirt had bells sewn to its hem and jingled when she moved. “Why do we have to have more money? Don’t we have everything we need right here?”
Bethie had to struggle not to shout. “Look,” she said. “Every Sunday, we sell out at the farmers’ market. Every week, we sell out at the shop. I’ve had three different restaurant owners ask if we can be their condiment supplier. There’s a demand, but we don’t have a supply. We need more people, and probably a commercial kitchen . . .”
Jodi’s voice was low and clear. “This place is meant to be a refuge from that world, of commerce and value and buying and selling. And you want to drag us all right back into it.” She put down the pile of angora yarn in her lap, stood, and pointed her finger at Bethie. “You’re a sellout. A bougie sellout.”
Bethie’s face burned. “I am not a sellout! Look around you. This place is a mess! The wiring’s old, and the bathroom’s practically falling off the side of the house. The furnace needs to be replaced, and the kitchen sink leaks.”
Bethie could have gone on, but Ronnie, her old friend, Ronnie who’d brought her to Blue Hill Farm, Ronnie who’d saved her, raised her hand. The room got quiet. Blue Hill Farm had no official leader, no hierarchies, but