Sero stared at the page, trying to make sense of the words. Eviction notice? Running low on hot water occasionally hardly qualified as uninhabitable. If Micah was withholding rent payments, where was the money from the household fund to which they all contributed? If there was truly a problem with the pipes, why had he turned away the plumber that day? And how did they still have water flowing in the house and the fields? She would have known immediately if there had been any interruption in the Greenfields farm, since those plants needed a steady supply of water to grow on their aggressive timeline. She recalled Micah swinging the pickaxe maniacally at some invisible ghost under the ground.

Serotina stood in the center of the closet office and looked around at the piles of papers and envelopes. She walked over to the picture window in Micah’s room, the largest in the house and the only one occupied by a single person. Out in the fields, everyone was scattered throughout the rows of crops. She spotted Micah standing with Cerise, his arm around her shoulder. Then his hand drifted down her back and rested on her jeans’ back pocket. Sero returned to the closet and began looking through the piles of folders. She found one titled “Solar” and opened it up to find assorted color brochures from solar companies. There were no contracts, no deposit receipts, nothing. In another folder, untitled, she found several unopened letters from the IRS, addressed to a name she didn’t recognize.

Feeling increasingly frantic, Sero found a folder labeled “Greenfields,” and opened it, desperately hoping to see the license she’d attested to. It wasn’t what she expected, what she saw inside that folder, but it was strangely familiar. Receipts from the purchases she’d made for Greenfields: lights, feed, irrigation. The detailed manifest for the first shipment, with her signature. And a photocopy of the front and back of the credit card her father had given her, which resided in her wallet in the front hall closet.

She stood in place, closed her eyes and tried to think. The printer stopped and the invoices she’d come upstairs to retrieve sat in the output tray. Sero looked at the mess of papers around her. She carefully replaced the folders and papers she’d taken out, took the Greenfields invoices and walked back downstairs, a sinking feeling in her chest.

44 | Jaya

May 16, 2015

Dev and his family were visiting from London, and Jaya found the additional energy in the house unexpectedly refreshing.

“Come on, Jaya Auntie, look up at me and smile.” Sachin, her fifteen-year-old nephew, held his phone up above his head, angled down toward her as she chopped vegetables at the kitchen island. Jaya brushed her nose with the back of her hand and shook her head with a smile.

“Not like that!” His sister, Smita, shrieked as she lunged toward him, reaching for the phone. “Cooking in the kitchen? You trying to attract the hopeless traditional men?” She clucked her tongue, sounding older than her thirteen years. “We need a picture of Auntie out on the patio, in a pretty dress with the sunlight glinting off her hair.”