It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was baking the sky. I watched the truck until it was a speck on the grid road and the diesel roar had faded.

“Come on.” Ruth put her arm around me. “We can fill an hour. It’ll go quickly.”

“Will you play a game with me?” I asked her. There were no other farms for miles around, just rolling, empty hills seamed by gullies and creek beds.

“A board game? Sure, whatever you want. But maybe not Monopoly. You know how you get.” Ruth steered me back toward the front door.

“Are they coming back?” Pim asked. He looked up at me with his beautiful eyes and grabbed my hand. He was brown from a wide, blue summer spent outside, the white of his T-shirt stark against his skin. As much as our mother scrubbed his hair in the tub, it grew sideways and dusty through every August, a mocha color that would only darken again in the fall.

“Don’t worry, Pimlet,” I said. “Mom and Dad will be back soon. Ruth said so.”

“What game are we playing? Can we all jump off the roof with umbrellas? I’ll go first.”

“We don’t have enough umbrellas.” Ruth winked at me.

“But inside is boring!” he grumbled. “Let’s play in the fields!”

“Okay,” Ruth said. “But come inside first—we should put on shoes.” She moved us back into the kitchen. “Put shoes on, Pim. The grass is spiky back there. And there might be nails.”

Pim ignored her, of course. That summer, we had devised a game that Pim called “hurry home,” and we played it endlessly from sunrise to sunset. We must have gotten the idea from capture the flag, or kick the can, or one of those other childhood games that involved defending a base and chasing off invaders. There was a patch of farmland out of sight of the house, a grassy corner behind the granary that was surrounded by trees and grew wild every summer, since it lay beyond the turning circle of all the harvest machines. While one of us guarded home—a square marked with an old wooden clothespin driven into the dirt—the other two circled as thieves, picking a moment to fly out from behind a tree or a disused tractor and steal the peg. Then the thief had to race around the grain silo and make it back to home without being tagged. If the thief made it back, they were awarded the more coveted role of guarder. I see you, I see you! Pim would shout as he ran. He was always the guarder and would never venture far from his clothespin.