AUNT Jinny pulled her into the kitchen and pushed her down on a stool. Anna felt as if she must be in a nightmare. Any moment now, she’d wake up, and everything would be fine again. Jolene wouldn’t be looming over Josh like a hawk mantling over prey. McDaran wouldn’t be stalking her. Ma and Pa—

But she wasn’t asleep. She sat there, feeling as if something had stolen all the breath from her lungs, her stomach a knot, and knowing there was no escape into waking from this.

The letter had consisted of two pieces of paper. The first was the official notice from some official in Soddy. It was a simple, harsh, two-line statement: Pa had died of Winter Fever—which was the official way of saying the mines had killed him with their smoke and dust—and Ma was dead as a suicide.

The other was from one of the neighbors, elaborating a little more. Pa stopped being able to work, then to get out of bed, and then just didn’t wake up, all in the course of two weeks. The neighbors to whom Ma regularly sold potions knew nothing about his death until they noticed Ma hadn’t come out of the house all day, went to see if she needed help, and found him stone cold in his bed and her dead next to him, hanging from the rafters. They went to get the authorities, who had been mighty displeased. A death in one of the Company houses was expected, but how dare Ma taint the place with her suicide!

But there was more. As if that was not enough.

Yur sis left owin a powerful lot to the Company, the letter went on. They sold everthin in the house an it weren’t nuff to cover hardly anythin. They’s likely gonna try an find Anna May an git it from her one way or tother.

Everything—everything gone. Ma, Pa, what little they had—all gone, as if it had all been swept away in the Great Flood. She didn’t even have something to remember them by. She’d had no chance to say goodbye. If she’d been there, could she have saved Pa? Could she at least have saved Ma? And they were buried by now, in an unmarked pauper’s grave, probably without even so much as a ten-minute graveside prayer. She felt as if she ought to be weeping, but all she could feel was emptiness.

Maybe that was because Ma and Pa hadn’t ever really been to her what Josh’s Ma and Pa were so clearly to him. Because Ma had been so wrapped up in Pa that she had nothing to spare for Anna—and Pa had been so wrapped up in himself he had nothing to spare for anyone. Maybe that was why she couldn’t weep. Because the emptiness had been there all along, but it had been hidden by their physical presence, by the fact that she could say “My Ma is Maybelle Jones an’ my Pa is Lew Jones.”