“You left out a few things,” my mother said. “Like how I made you sleep in the woodshed. And how I had Esther stand guard over your father before he woke up.”

“But how were we supposed to know that all her weird business might help Daddy?” Esther said. “She’s not a doctor. She’s just a girl. And she’s too wild and willful. You know she is. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have been under that tree when it fell and none of this would have happened in the first place.”

I took a step back.

I couldn’t help it. I was amazed by how ugly a pretty girl could look.

Samuel said, “You’re as nasty as a rat, Esther. Ellie didn’t mean to be in the way of that tree.”

Which brought me up short.

“I’m not nasty,” Esther said. “You just wait until you’re fifteen and all you want to do is get off this mountain.”

Nobody said a word.

My mother looked away.

I thought back to town. For me, that life was hazy. Not only because I’d been so much younger then, but because I’d given myself instead to the here and now.

Esther surely had strong, clear memories of that time. That home. And I knew that, for her, life on the mountain was the thing she’d rather forget.

For the first time, I realized that town wasn’t just a place where Esther wanted to be.

Town was Esther’s mountain.

And I felt newly sorry for my sister, who had once held me in her lap with a doll and a book.

But mean was mean. And it wasn’t any more useful to Esther than it was to me.

“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t want to get off this mountain. And if I do, I’ll find a way to go.”

“Now hush, the both of you,” my mother said. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Esther, what’s gotten into you? Ellie didn’t make us poor. And Samuel, Esther’s not mean. She’s just mad. Because she’s fifteen. And don’t ask me to explain that, but you’ll understand when you get there.”

“Then I don’t want to be fifteen,” Samuel said.

“That has nothing to do with it,” Esther said. “It’s this place. It’s snakes that come up in the washroom. And mice in the grain. And spiders in the privy. And everything, Mother. And you know it, too.”

“I know no such thing,” my mother said.

“But you do! You know Daddy’s gone again. Because of a stupid tree that he shouldn’t have had to cut down. For what? To make a bigger garden? When we should be able to go to market and buy whatever we need?”

“He woke up once. He’ll wake up again.”