Annie walked between Lew and Raj. They were on their way to the county fair. Clouds faint as steam dissolved into the blue sky. In the air, a chill edge, the fields raucous with crows, the trees turning. Raj had only been here five months, but it seemed to both her and Lew that he had been with them always.

“Where were you boys yesterday?” she asked.

Lew smiled. “I was teaching Raj how to play basketball.”

“It was raining.”

The boys laughed, glancing at each other.

Annie felt a pang of jealousy. “Why are you laughing?”

“We started diving into puddles,” Raj said, “spreading cow crap all over ourselves.”

“I did the mud,” Lew protested. “I didn’t do no cow crap.”

“Liar. He was first in: couldn’t wait to get his gnashers round a good cow pie.”

“What about you,” Lew retorted, “wiggling around like a sow in heat? Good thing there weren’t no hogs on the loose. Might’ve gotten ugly.”

“Love’s never ugly,” Raj declared. He and Lew laughed hard.

“Stop it.” Hooking her arms around their waists, Annie reined them in just as they walked into the scent of skunk. Dozens of sparrows, like a gust of dry leaves, scattered across the path. Just ahead a crow limped guiltily away from the skunk’s corpse. It had been run over by a tractor, its lower half imprinted with the tire tread.

Pulling free, Lew put his hand against the back of his neck. “I’ll meet you guys there.”

“What’s wrong?” Raj said.

Lew examined her and Raj anxiously for a moment before speaking. “The sparrows.” He made a chopping gesture with his hand in the direction the sparrows had gone. “Death cry. Can only go at the angle of the tire tracks. See it. I have to go that way, just a piece. Then I can cut back.”

Annie peeled his hand from his nape and held it, forcing him to look at her directly. “No. You’re coming with us.”

He raised his other hand toward his neck, but she snatched it out of the air. “No!” She hated that she was treating him like a disobedient dog, but she didn’t know what else to do. “Got run over by a tractor, that’s all. Those sparrows got nothing to do with it.”

She looked to Raj for support, but he just seemed confused.

Lew also appealed to him. “Can’t you see the angle’s the same?”

“I suppose,” Raj murmured. “I mean—”

She slapped Raj on the arm. “No, you don’t,” she shouted. “It’s just a stupid skunk. A stupid skunk got hit by a stupid tractor.”

Lew seemed to have calmed a little. More reasonably, he said, “Listen, I just don’t want to go through town.”

“We don’t have to,” she said.