They came up that first sharp knee of the home-place hill and the land opened out not so much in a bowl as a series of wide ledges that held the farmstead: the haymeadows and sheep pastures and the high field where potatoes were grown, the orchard just above the house and barns, to where the sugar house stood flanked by the bush of great maples rising in crown over it all, the final pitch of the hillside steep again at the top amongst granite outcroppings and ranks of spruce. Norman’s gait gained with the sudden leveling of the track and the place there before him, his feet for the first time in years striking ground as if each separate egg of gravel and patch of dusty hardpan were known through the soles of his boots, Leah still apace beside him, her head high and her gaze steady before her, her eyes sweeping at first to draw it all in but settling on the house under the elms. Without looking at him she said, “Reckon they seen us yet?”

As she spoke a figure broke out from the apple trees heavy with ripe fruit. Norman saw the baskets under the trees and the narrow picking ladder and thought Cider—could not smell it yet but could taste it—and then the girl hurtling down the road toward them, short-legged and strong, twice the little girl he’d left behind, still small but grown, her schoolgirl breasts rising against her shirtwaist like young apples as she ran toward him, her voice calling out his name.

Beside him Leah softly echoed her. “Nawmin.”

The girl spied Leah and gathered herself down to a walk and Norman saw the moment when she misstepped, saw her head cock like a puppy’s at something strange, and yet she came on, her eyes on Leah even as Norman stepped the last three feet and pulled her against him. Before he could speak she said, “Seems to me, a man or stout boy would’ve been more useful around, you had to bring one of them home.” And she stepped back from Norman then, her eyes already wiser as she looked Leah up and down.

“Maybe you’ll find out, Miss Quickmouth,” Leah said, “that I’m a good bit stouter than you like.”

Connie shrugged this away. “There’s work enough to share,” she said. “I guess you already learned how to work.”

“Worked all my life. I learned how to let my mind work for me too. Sometimes before I opened my mouth. I know my manners.”

“Well, la.”

“Ain’t no la about it. There was, you’d be behaving different.”

“That’s enough,” Norman said.

Connie said, “You’re a feisty one.”

“I wasn’t, you think I’d be here? Since your brother forgot himself, my name’s Leah.” She held out a hand. Connie looked at Norman and then back at the hand.

Norman said, “My little sister. Constance. Connie, we call her.”

Connie let Leah take her hand and then both women let go. Norman said, “Where’s Mother?”