the nesting box and felt around until her fingers found two more eggs. She put them in the basket and shut the lid.
“You did the right thing,” Rosie said. “You couldn’t let him do that to that poor girl.”
“Too bad that poor girl won’t stand up for herself.” Liv yanked open the door to the root cellar where Rosie stored eggs, vegetables, and chicken supplies. “How could she not want to report this? Doesn’t she know he’s going to just keep doing it?”
“Most women don’t report it.”
“Which I don’t understand.”
“I suppose until you’ve been in their shoes, you can’t.”
Rosie set down Gladys to join the twenty other hens scratching around in the freshly overturned flower beds. She kicked her foot out to knock back Randy the Rooster, who was on a mission to impregnate as many hens as possible in his lifetime. Liv didn’t know why Rosie didn’t either get rid of him or put him in a soup pot. Probably because his one redeeming quality was that he hated men as much as Rosie and chased off everything with a penis that tried to enter the farm.
That’s probably why Liv stayed there too. She’d answered Rosie’s ad two years ago for someone to live in her garage apartment and help out around her organic farm, which hadn’t actually been Liv’s thing, but she couldn’t afford to live downtown, and she didn’t want to intrude on her sister’s family life.
The day she’d moved in, Liv had found a beaten-up copy of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves sitting on the bedside table like a hotel might set out the Bible. She’d fallen in love with the place and Rosie immediately.
Liv moved the basket of eggs to her other hand and started back toward the farmhouse. Her breath formed white puffs around her face in the chilly morning air. Even in Tennessee, it could get cold on an April morning. Rosie lived on twenty acres a half hour outside the city in what had once been nothing but farmland but now skirted the edges of strip malls and suburban chain stores.
Rosie shook her head and started muttering again as she walked out of the cellar. “Still can’t believe we’re fighting this shit. Marched my ass off in the seventies so your generation wouldn’t have to deal with pricks like that.”
Liv followed Rosie into the main house through the back door. It led to a mudroom with an ancient washer and dryer set, a pile of rubber boots covered in chicken poop and other farm gunk, and a line of hooks where they hung up their coats and hats. Rosie had knit each of them. She was on a knitting streak lately. Said she needed a hobby to keep from losing her mind over the news. Every hen now had a sweater to wear when the weather got really cold. Which wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Rosie subscribed to a backyard chicken magazine, and hen sweaters were a thing among the crazy-chicken-lady set.
Rosie kept muttering to herself as she made her way into the kitchen to start breakfast. Liv helped cook whenever she was home, though Rosie always told her she didn’t have to. I pay you to tend to the animals and the garden, not cook. Liv didn’t know how to tell her—or maybe was just too embarrassed to tell her—that she liked it. Cooking with Rosie reminded her of the years she and Thea had lived with their grandma. Gran Gran’s kitchen was where she’d discovered her love of cooking. Some of her best memories were of Gran Gran, Thea, and her making dinner together as Gran Gran told stories and imparted sage bits of wisdom. Those years were the only time in her life when she’d felt like she and Thea had a real family.
The bang of the back door interrupted her, followed by a loud belch. Moments later, Earl Hopkins wandered in.
Hop, as he went by, was a part-time farmhand who was madly in love with Rosie, and either Rosie had no idea or maybe she just didn’t care, because no two people could be more opposite. He was a Vietnam veteran who liked to drink beer and rant about the liberal media, and she was an avowed hippy who’d once protested the war and now watched Rachel Maddow at top volume every night.
“Start a fire, will ya?” Rosie said, pretending not to watch Hop’s butt as he walked into the living room and squatted in front of