“That’s not funny,” I said.
Liz was quiet for a moment. “You’re right,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, I was pulling weeds in the flower beds around the koi pond, still thinking about being Charlie Wyatt’s daughter and how Mom’s getting pregnant with me had created so many problems for everyone. The sound of a woodpecker hammering in the sycamores made me look up, and through the opening in the big dark bushes, I saw Joe Wyatt walking up the driveway, his burlap bag over his shoulder. I stood up. When he saw me, he headed my way, ambling along like he was out for a stroll and just happened to run into me.
“Hey,” he said when he was a few feet away.
“Hey,” I said.
“Ma said I should come over and say hello, seeing as how we’re related and all.”
I looked at him and realized he had the same dark eyes as my dad and me. “I guess we’re cousins.”
“Guess so.”
“Sorry about calling you a thief.”
He looked down, and I could see a grin spreading across his face. “Been called worse,” he said. “Anyway, cuz, you particular to blackberries?”
Cuz. I liked that. “You bet I am.”
“Well, then, let’s go get us some.”
I ran up to the barn to find my own sack.
It was the end of June, and the humidity had kept climbing. The ground was damp from rain the night before, and we crossed the big pasture, squishing in the mud where the land was poorly drained. Grasshoppers, butterflies, and little birds skittered up out of the grass in front of us. We came to a rusting barbed-wire fence line separating the pasture from the woods. Since blackberries loved the sun, Joe said, the best places to find them were along the sides of trails and where the forest met up with the fields. Walking the fence line, we soon came across huge clumps of thorny, brambly bushes thick with fat, dark berries. The first one I ate was so sour, I spit it out. Joe explained that you only picked the ones that came off when you barely touched them. The ones you had to pull weren’t ripe enough to eat.
We made our way up the hill along the fence line, picking blackberries and eating as many as we kept. Joe told me that he spent much of the summer in the woods picking wineberries, mulberries, blackberries, and pawpaws—which some folks called hillbilly bananas—and raiding orchards for cherries, peaches, and apples, as well as now and then sneaking into someone’s garden for a haul of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and beans.
“Only if they’ve got more than enough,” he said. “I never take what would be missed. That would be stealing.”
“It’s more like scavenging,” I said. “Like what birds and raccoons do.”
“There you go, cuz. Though I got to admit, not everyone looks on it kindly.”
From time to time, he said, farmers who spotted him in their orchards or cornfields took potshots at him. On one occasion, he was up in an apple tree in the backyard of this dentist’s fancy house in Byler, and when the family came out to have lunch on the patio, he had to sit in the tree without moving a muscle for an hour until they left, still as a squirrel hoping the hunter wouldn’t notice him. The worst that had ever happened was when someone’s yard dog came after him and he lost part of a finger before making it over the fence. Joe grinned at the memory and held up his hand. “Wasn’t a picking finger.”
When our bags were full, we headed back down the hedgerow to Mayfield. The woods beyond the fence were quiet in the midday heat. At the barn we stopped to get a drink from the faucet above the watering trough, sticking our heads under the spigot, the water splashing on our faces.
“Maybe we can do some more scavenging, cuz,” Joe said, wiping his chin.
“Sure, cuz,” I said, wiping mine.
He walked down the drive, and I turned to the house. As I reached the front porch, Liz came out of the door.
“Mom called,” she said. “She’ll be here in a couple of days.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
That afternoon Liz and I sat out by the koi pond, talking about Mom’s arrival and feasting on blackberries until our fingers were stained. It was about time Mom called. It had been five weeks and two days since she had the Mark Parker meltdown and took off. As much as I liked Byler and as thrilled as I was to know Uncle Tinsley and to have met my dad’s family—even that grump Uncle Clarence—I really missed Mom. We were, as she always said, a tribe of three. All we needed was each other. I had tons of things I wanted to discuss with Mom, mostly about my dad, and Liz and I also wanted to know what the plan was. Would we be going back to Lost Lake? Or somewhere else?