“Does it look that bad?”

His face softened, the stony disapproval vanishing. He took her chin into his fingers delicately. “Ain’t no hiding it.”

“I’ll say I wasn’t paying attention when I was cleaning the coop.” She reached up and took his hand from her chin, holding his fingers between hers for a heartbeat, a breath, a blink. Then she let it fall to his side.

“She won’t believe it,” he told her and pulled out the chair at the kitchen table. “You know she can’t do nothing if you don’t report it.”

“I ain’t need any more reasons for something like this to happen.”

Arbuckle sat down and breathed out slowly. His brow creased, his mouth twisting as if trying to keep inside the things they both knew not to talk about. “Up to you,” he said.

She licked her lips and felt the dried crumbs of blood, tasted her coppery insides. Arbuckle didn’t need to say anything for Lady Mae to hear him; the disapproval hung between his eyebrows. His jawbones rose and fell by his ears, the taste of worry fresh in his mouth. She tasted it, too; he was right as he always was.

He put his sack on the kitchen table and took out the book for the day. They were studying algebra, and he pulled out a small abacus as well, its wooden beads worn smooth from years of use. She was good at arithmetic, but what was in her mind was of little consequence; what would matter when she turned of age would be her hands, the steadiness of her long, slender fingers. Most important would be her constitution, and she knew this. If it were of salt like her mother’s she might be able to saw down to the last fragment, but if it weren’t, if it were mired—then what?

“You going to be able to do lessons today?” he asked, untying his kerchief. He blotted his forehead and his upper lip with it before opening the book to where they had left off the day before.

“Looks worse than it is. Come on.”

“Alright. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“And don’t say I didn’t listen.”

He traced his finger down the thin page of the book. “I’ve got one for you.”

“Ain’t no problem no matter which way you figure.”

She’d been schooled at home—and always at home—since she could hold a pencil; she often found problems Arbuckle proclaimed difficult quite easy, and in her he’d met his match.

“At 1.62 ½ per cord, what would be the cost of a pile of wood 24 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 6 foot 3 inches high?” Arbuckle asked.

She took to her abacus then, sliding beads up and down and grabbing a pencil, wrote out an equation that Arbuckle had taught her a few months back. She quickly went back to the abacus to make a correction.

“Seven dollars, sixty-eight cents,” said Lady Mae.

Arbuckle flipped to the back of his primer to check the answer and smiled. “Right you are,” he said. And then, “That’s a lot of wood.”