It was high summer now. The sky was almost shrouded by the canopy, except for the trace of the trail I could see where the trees didn’t quite meet. I always liked to look at that line, like a bright river above me to follow, how the path was written in the sky. Everything was lush and alive. I should have been happy. My mother would be gone for two weeks. Thomas and I would be home alone. Ellen would be safe. But instead I felt something I couldn’t name, like grief.

I looked at my feet. The trace of blood was still there, a dark smear in the creamy white of the shoe. One of the last times Ellen had come working with us, it was a job for people we’d never worked for before, just a one-off, in a rural place. In a weird way, it had made Dad more uncomfortable, like these were people that should be turning their grassland for hay, and why were we there cutting a big lumpy meadow for them. The woman who came to the door was young, and she had a pile of children around her. She reminded me of Laura Ingalls’s mother in the Little House on the Prairie series. Even though it was the late 1970s, this woman at the door looked like she belonged to another century.

Dad had gotten a seat for the Gravely. It didn’t have a steering wheel—we had to turn the machine using levers on the handles—but it had a seat that hooked on, and it was the first and only time we ever had anything resembling a sit-on lawn mower or tractor. All day Ellen begged him for a ride on it. The handles were thicker than her wrists, but she kept asking. Dad and Thomas were running it across this huge field, maybe five acres. The grass had yellowed and thinned and gone to seed. Papery spears reached my thighs. We didn’t even try to catch the grass; the woman just wanted it cut. I was going around large oak trees and their bumpy roots with the edging mower. Ellen wanted to try the big one, and eventually Dad let her sit up on the seat for a few rows and walked alongside her as she drove it. She was halfway up the second row when he reached over and hit the ignition off. He told her to get down and step back.

She’d hit something.