Page 34 of Keepsake
“Wow,” Lark said. “And you said her name was…”
“Chastity,” I supplied.
“Oh, Zach.”
“I know. The irony,” I said, enjoying her smile as much as the feel of her body against mine. “Griffin and the other guys don’t know this story, by the way.”
“I won’t tell,” she said quickly. “It really doesn’t fit your reputation.”
“I know, right?” I smiled into the dark. “They don’t get that I have as dirty a mind as anyone else. Just haven’t put it to recent use.”
She was quiet for a moment. “So they just…threw you out? In spite of your talent with engines and your work ethic.”
“That’s how it goes. Plenty of other suckers to take my place. One less mouth to feed.”
“And do you know what happened to Chastity?”
That was the big question in my life. “Nothing good. They probably married her off to an older man. That’s what happens to seventeen-year-old girls there.”
“Like how old a man?”
“Forty, fifty. If she was super lucky, she’d get to be somebody’s first wife. But that’s rare.”
“Yikes,” Lark said under her breath. “Do you worry about her?”
It was hard to talk about this to anyone, even Lark. “Every day,” I admitted. “I feel guilty. Because I got out and she didn’t.”
Lark made a sleepy noise and relaxed against my body. “Maybe she did get out.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, just to be nice. But the odds were practically zero. The elders would have married Chastity off right away. And the old man wouldn’t have waited to take her to his bed. She might have two kids by now.
I closed my eyes and pictured her face. The girl in my memory was sixteen and smiling. She sang to herself as she hung out our mothers’ washing on the line. I’d see her on my way to the garage, and she’d follow me with her eyes.
It was only four years ago, but it might as well have been a different lifetime. I felt about it like I felt about the alternate universes in Griff’s sci-fi movies. Nobody could ever go back and forth between those worlds. When you were a member of the compound, you stayed on the compound. And when you left, you could never go back.
Every so often I tried to imagine what it might have been like for me if I’d stayed at Paradise Ranch. At twenty-three, I’d still be toiling for other people, trying to get ahead. It would be another five years or so before they might allow me to marry.
If I was as lucky as that, my wife and I would get a crappy little house of our own—at least until the kids started coming along. I’d try to scratch out a living, always having to jockey for position among the other men.
And the moral code of that place was thorny. To keep in the elders’ good graces, I’d have to look the other way whenever they tossed out the next twenty-something boy. If I’d had sons, I’d have to worry whether they’d be thrown out. If I’d had daughters, I’d have to worry that they’d be given to someone who liked to use the switch on his wives.
What a lousy, soul-grinding existence it would have been.
But here’s the thing about Paradise Ranch—even if I didn’t ever want to go back, it still stung that they’d thrown me away. I felt like the merchandise at the second-hand store where I sometimes bought the T-shirts I wore to work on engines. Everything was a dollar in there because nobody wanted it anymore.
Paradise Ranch was the worst place on earth, and yet I hadn’t been good enough to stay.
I closed my eyes and tried to push that awful place out of my mind. I took a deep breath of Vermont air, and rubbed Lark’s back again.
She did not stir. And after another long minute of listening, I decided that she’d fallen asleep, right on my chest.
I lay awake a while longer just appreciating the weight of her sleeping form on my body. Then I slept, too.
9
Lark
It wasthe first Friday afternoon in September, an hour or so before dinnertime. I’d spent the day picking Zestars in the sunshine before May asked me to come inside and make applesauce with her. We’d just canned twenty quarts, and the house smelled like cinnamon.
