Page 8 of Hand Picked
Gage let out a humming sound. “It says here… Hezekiah Pond drew up papers upon his sister’s marriage to Benjamin Sunday. He divided his land ‘from the mighty oak to the hedgerow.’ But the lawyer’s note says the oak got cut down a hundred years ago…”
Emma snorted. “Hedgerow. I thought that was a made-up word in thosePride and Prejudicefanfics Hawk reads.”
“They’re not all fanfic,” Hawk muttered. “Some are retellings. There’s a difference.”
Knox was over Gage’s other shoulder, reading under his breath. “Part of that land passed back to the Pond family on Esther Whistlebaum Pond Sunday’s death, as a legacy to her nephew, but only so far as ‘the line running due east from the bend in Pond Creek to the fence before the cider house.’ And the creek dried up during the world-famous beaver overrun of 1872.”
Now Hawk was the one snorting. “Beaver Overrun. Sounds like the name of a girl band.”
Emma elbowed him out of the way before plucking one of the papers out of Gage’s stack. “Wait. It says here the hedgerow was decimated in the Great Spongy Moth Plague of 1867. What does that even mean? I’m still not sure I understand what a hedgerow is, much less a spongy moth plague.”
I shook my head and tried not to grind my teeth. “None of this matters. It’s not his fucking land. The stone wall between our properties was erected before the Civil War, for God’s sake!”
Gage muttered under his breath. “And people think Floridians are weird. What kind of language is this written in? Ye olde farmhande? Can anything this old still be legal? Can we get someone to translate this?”
Knox met my eyes over Gage’s head. “Webb, the wall doesn’t mean anything. You can build a wall… anywhere. Are you sure the property transfer is legit?”
My fingernails bit into my palms. “Of course it is! We’ve planted on that land for centuries. If LukefuckingWilliams thinks he’s going to dispute a land transfer that happened in the Revolutionary War era, he’s got another think—ah, Mrs. Graber! So nice to see you. Yes, he’s fine. Just sleeping over at a friend’s house.” I tried to smile at the librarian’s kind inquiry, even though I knew it was just a nosy excuse for coming over here to see what had the Sunday siblings in a dither.
Once she was gone, I turned back to my family and noticed Hawk and Emma snickering. “What is it now?”
Emma was laughing too hard to speak, so Hawk said it. “Jebediah Sunday signed a ‘friendship agreement’ saying he could continue growing his crops on Abraham Pond’s land for ‘one hundred fruitful harvests,’ with a certain percentage of the Sundays’ ‘yield from our friendship’ to be paid to Abraham’s heirs. That lawyer guy has a note here asking how many fruitful harvests there’ve been since 1836 and whether or not the Sundays have been delivering apples to the Ponds.”
“I’m not giving Luke Williams my apples,” I snapped, drawing way too much attention.
I felt fury boiling up inside me, coiling and kicking like a living thing, as if all the restless anger I felt about all the shit I couldn’t control in my life had coalesced into something too enormous to ignore.
As it happened, Hawk had been right. It was possible to feel very, very angry over a tiny parcel of land.
Incensed, really.
Infuriated beyond the telling.
My face heated, and I realized I couldn’t stay here for one of Little Pippin Hollow’s interminable town meetings.
I needed to leave.
“He’d probably like our apples,” Emma said, tapping a fingertip to her chin. “At least… he might like Gage and Knox’s apples, if you catch my meaning.”
“I don’t,” I spat, not wanting to hear about Luke Williams and anyone’s apples.
Knox got a knowing look on his face. “I have the pickup line already ready.”
I shot Knox a look. “Don’t say it. Do. Not. Say. It.”
“How do you like them apples?” Knox said dutifully before all four of them lost their collective shit and I stormed out into the night.
There’d never been a clearer sign that tonight was the night for getting utterly and completely wasted.
And I knew just the place for it.
When I hit the cool night air, I stopped long enough to take a deep breath and try to calm the hell down so I didn’t flash an angry scowl at all of the townspeople still filtering into the building. It was just long enough for Knox to catch up to me.
“I’m sorry. I was just trying to introduce a little levity to the situation. We don’t know how serious this is yet, Webb, so take a breath.”
“It’s fine. I just need a drink. And I need to not sit through a bunch of bullshit about some ridiculous clause in someotherdude’s idiot ancestor’s will, and how a developer wants to pave paradise and put up a… a vacation resort. I could give two shits about Fogg Peak when I’m busy worrying about Sunday Orchard, and I’m really fucking tired of random-ass documents from almost three hundred years ago determining the course of people’s lives today.”
“Fine, then let me go with you,” Knox offered. “I’ll tell Gage—”
