When they left a year ago to make a go of it in California, the farm in Ohio became mine, mine alone—at least, mine alone to manage. I had talked about classes at community college, but who had the money, who had the time, there were chores. What would I do with a degree, except farm? There was a harvest to get in, there was trimming and weighing. There was work in the way of any plans. Money to be made.

At the high school, I parked in the senior lot out of habit. The football field looked dead, brown and tufted. The air cut my lungs, cold but with an undercurrent of wood smoke, as I joined the trudging crowd.

They were holding this thing outside.

Nobody had dressed up—only warmly. My Carhartts wouldn’t have looked out of place, though I had changed into clean jeans before leaving the farm, washed my hair under the faucet, scrubbing at the plant scent, heady and woodsy, that clung to my skin. The smell wouldn’t come off. I kept a vial of lavender oil on the windowsill to douse myself for days like this. I had dragged a comb through my hair, teeth snagging on stems, put on sneakers in place of my mud-gummed boots. Lisbeth didn’t like it if I looked too country; her folks didn’t like it.

But we all were country, even those of us living in duplexes and houses, like Lisbeth’s, with garages and green lawns. Black rat snakes still found the cracks in cinder-block foundations and slithered into kitchens, box elder bugs still hatched in the sills. In spring, even driveways in town could lose their ends in the rising, brown waters of floods. At least in the springs we used to have.

I felt lighter, less encumbered, without the heavy coveralls, but the chill found its way into my joints. My wet hair crackled around my ears. In the field beyond the high school, the graduates shivered in their thin robes.

Generation to generation, nothing really changed. I knew these kids. They fetched water from springs, were familiar with stalling the electric company. But how many of them had grown up with a handgun duct-taped beneath the dining room table and canisters of money buried in the yard? How many of them slept in the woods some nights? It was safer than being too near the farmhouse with the raving men: customers, friends of Lobo’s, who had brought pills or mushrooms; safer than my house with its thin, bum door. How many of these kids ate deer meat for months straight because that was how the hunters bartered for their weed?

I saw Lisbeth’s folks. “You couldn’t find a dress?” Lisbeth’s mama said. Her lips pressed together until they disappeared.