"We need to do something," I final y "We need to do something," I final y murmured, turning my head toward Amelia.

"You stay here." Marcus unwound his fingers from mine and headed toward the barn door.

"I'l be right back, and then I'l let you handle the details."

He returned with a bucket, and vinegar, and sponges. Powder, and oils, and a sheet. Dried herbs, a coin, and a length of red yarn. Candles to keep the flies at bay. He replenished the kerosene in the lantern, then left me alone. Working in smal patches, I first bathed the length of Amelia's arms with vinegar, then slowly moved down her torso to her legs and feet. I oiled her brow with the essence of rose, anointed her cheeks and chin, and fixed a coin under her tongue. I loosed her braid and combed powder through her hair, then bound it again with the red yarn, snipping off a lock for a keepsake. I rubbed beeswax into her fingernails, daubed each palm with ashes I found in the corner, and made sure the hol ows in between her toes each held a sprig of dried forget-me-not. When I was finished, I folded her hands on top of her chest and laced the stem of a purple thistle in her fingers for divine protection and luck.

There was peace in washing the dead, I discovered-a preternatural quiet absent from any other activity. As I moved around the examining table, I hummed the half-remembered hymns of childhood, joining phrases and melodies into a ragbag of devotional noise. The only religion the Dyersons had ever fol owed had been the path of hard luck, and its golden rule was simple. You did what you had to do when it needed to be done. I smoothed the last pieces of Amelia's hair down along her brow and stepped back to review my work.

Outside the window, I could see Marcus hacking at a thicket of bushes like a sour angel, already resenting the first licks of autumn. The winters drove him crazy, and it occurred to me that he needed a greenhouse -a condensed universe where the laws of nature were suspended.

Of course, the world doesn't real y work that way, but it helps if you imagine that it does. With every breath, there are choices to make- sometimes to take a life and sometimes merely to ease the pain of it-and sometimes those choices have consequences that you never foresaw.

Nevertheless, I decided right then that I would keep doing what I could, brewing separate infusions for life and death and putting them up on the shelf until someone asked me to take them down. I leaned down and kissed Amelia. I finished winding a bit of thread around the tip of her index finger, binding it tight so she wouldn't ever forget me, and then I stepped out into the day, making sure to leave the door ajar for the souls among us who wished to enter and for the spirits that had chosen to go.

A young, ponytailed official from the coroner's office came to cart Amelia's body away, shaking his head at the string tied around her finger, the red yarn in her hair, and the thistle wound in between her fingers.

"We haven't seen this s.h.i.t since the nineteenth century," he said, zipping Amelia into industrial plastic. "We'l let you know when you can come get her," he told me, slamming the van door and gunning the engine. Marcus and I walked out of and gunning the engine. Marcus and I walked out of the barn together and watched the van drive away, and I was glad he was standing behind me, his knees pressed into the backs of mine, keeping me straight and strong.

"We need to tel Bobbie," I murmured.

"One of us should. He ought to know about the letters."

"He leaves for work at four," Marcus said.

"He's around the cottage until then. I can make myself scarce. Here's my key in case he's not there."

"Thank you." I turned around to face him, shy in front of him. "Marcus..." I lowered my eyes.

"About earlier in the barn-"

He cut me off. "Let's not worry about what's done anymore. When al this is over, let's make a fresh start, the right way." He slid his wounded hand out for mine, and I accepted it, matching the scar on my palm to the patches and lines on his, wondering what kind of seed we would plant together and how tal we could coax it grow.

Bobbie greeted me with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of a puppy, flinging open the cottage door and clapping his hands. He was wearing shorts and a gauzy linen shirt that showed off the new muscles in his chest. "Aunt Truly! Can you believe how hot it stil is? Do you want some water?"

"No." The air in the cottage was thick, and I immediately broke out into a sweat. Amelia's death was stil too heavy. I didn't want to be inside, where the wal s seemed to press and accuse me.

"Let's go for a walk," I suggested. "I need to talk to you about some things."

"Sure. Let me grab a hat." Bobbie plucked a straw boater off the coat tree and swung the door shut behind him, then immediately cringed.

"I forgot the keys," he moaned. "Let me just see if I can squeeze through one of these windows."

"No, no." I stopped him. "It's okay. I've got a set."

"Oh." Bobbie wrinkled his forehead. "Um, fine. Why do you have Marcus's keys?"

I blushed, but Bobbie didn't seem to notice. I steered him down a shaded lane and toward the Morgan section of the cemetery. My footsteps fel heavy and leaden, matching my heart. I felt my way slowly forward into conversation.

"Bobbie, what do you remember when you think of your mother?"

He stiffened beside me. We rarely ever discussed Serena Jane. Robert Morgan never had, and I'd merely sighed and rol ed my lips like the lid of a sardine can whenever Bobbie had asked. Serena Jane's favorite color, her favorite song, her favorite movie-those bits of information were never revealed to Bobbie, I realized. Instead, what was pressed home was the simple moral of her. She was a black sheep too uppity for her own good. A peac.o.c.k strutting in a henhouse. A swan that had it coming.

"I think of her blue dress, mostly," he said. He bowed his head as he walked. "It's the only thing I have left. I think of the way her hair smel ed like talc.u.m powder. I remember her singing to me when I was sick."

My throat tightened. I had never tried to do that, I realized. It had never occurred to me. I remembered my first week in the house and my attempts to feed Bobbie. Don't you want your eggs?

I would ask every morning, my brow furrowed, and Bobbie would simply shrug. An image came to me of him kneeling in the plants shortly after I arrived, the crouched figure of Marcus at his side like a benevolent gnome. They'd spent hours digging, Bobbie squatting on his heels, striking the tip of a spade in the ground over and over again.

That's good, Marcus used to mutter, stealing a glance from the corners of his eyes.

You're aerating the soil real well. Bobbie never answered back. He looked as though he didn't care what he was doing as long as it didn't involve his father or my hulking shadow. He didn't know yet if he could love me, only that I was different from his mother in every possible way, huge where Serena Jane had been delicate, rough where she had been as soft as a goose feather. Every day at the breakfast table, he examined the crags and hol ows of my face, seeking a family resemblance, and every day he went away hungry. The only one who never asked anything from him, I suddenly realized, not even a single sound, was Marcus. Occasional y, he would put his fist over Bobbie's fingers and show him where to prune back a flower or direct him to burrow in a new patch of ground, but mostly he let him be, watching as Bobbie combed through handful after handful of dirt.

We arrived at the Morgan plots. The earth around Robert Morgan's marker stil looked tumbled and raw, as if the doctor were having some trouble settling into the afterlife. Bobbie edged away from me and looked as if he were trying to think of some appropriate eulogy, but the only words that came to his lips were "I'm sorry," whispered as faintly as a moth grazing a pane of gla.s.s. It occurred to me as I watched him that he was Aberdeen's last Robert Morgan, and that thought made me shiver a little.

Maybe he real y wasn't so different from any of the men lying in the ground around him, I thought, but I sort of thril ed to the idea of him being historical. It made me appreciate the gravity of the late summer sun fal ing across the gra.s.s and the first traces of red and gold sneaking into the trees. It made me wish he would stay in Aberdeen forever. It made me wish I had given him life.

"Bobbie..." I angled around to Serena "Bobbie..." I angled around to Serena Jane's headstone. "Come here a minute. I have some things to tel you, but I don't quite know how."

Bobbie stepped careful y across the gra.s.s, avoiding the graves. "Wel , the first thing is"-I put my hands in my pockets-"I feel I ought to explain something to you about how your father died."

Bobbie was a good listener. He let me tel him about the quilt, and how the mixture was first Priscil a's idea and then his father's, and how I foraged for al the herbs and boiled them myself. "So I guess I'm as guilty as anyone," I explained. "It doesn't matter that the idea wasn't mine if my hands were in the pot, so to speak."

Sensing I had more to tel , Bobbie remained silent, waiting for me to continue. "The thing is," I went on, "that stuff's turned out to be kind of like a genie escaped out of a bottle. It gives people choices they shouldn't always make. For Priscil a and your father, it was the right decision. But for Amelia"-I watched as a shadow of comprehension began to cross Bobbie's face-"it wasn't."

"Amelia's dead?" Bobbie's face was white.

I nodded.

"You mean, she drank the herbs?"

"I'm so sorry." I wasn't sure anymore to whom I was apologizing, and no matter how much I wanted to, I found I couldn't look up. For the first time in my life, I found out what it was like to feel smal .

"But, why?"

How do you tel a boy who's grown into manhood without his mother that she was real y there the whole time? And how do you do it without making him hate the people who kept her from him?

Truth, I was discovering, is like a blunted hoe.

Inadequate for hard ground.

"Bobbie," I said, "you know what it's like to keep a secret so big that it presses every inch of you until you can't stand it anymore." Bobbie lowered his own head and didn't answer. He knew I was referring to his penchant for makeup and the women's clothes in the attic while he was growing up and to his boyfriend-al of which we thought we'd hidden so wel from his father. "Wel ," I continued, "it turns out Amelia was hiding something from you and me, something about you and me. It turns out that your mother isn't buried under that stone after al ."

Bobbie's head snapped up. "She ran away years ago. I guess for your father, it was just easier to pretend she was dead."

Bobbie's breathing was shal ow. "How do you know this?"

"She wrote to us. Years ago. Your father hid the letters in his office, but Amelia knew they were there."

"So why didn't she say something? Why didn't she give them to us?"

I folded my hands. "I think your father would have made things difficult for her if she had.

You know the farm was the thing she cared about most in this life."

Bobbie rubbed his palms over his eyes.

"I don't believe this."

"I know."

"Is there an address? Does anyone know where she is?"

I shook my head. "Amelia and your father burned the letters."

"Oh."

We were silent then, contemplating the various graves around us. I searched Bobbie's eyes, anxious for his reaction to everything that had come to pa.s.s, but there was none. He was simply too stunned to process what he was hearing, but later, when it final y did hit him, I resolved that I would be right by his side, along with Marcus and Salvatore.

"There was this," I final y said, pul ing the sc.r.a.p of envelope out of my pocket and handing it to him. "I found it in the bookshelf. Maybe it's enough to start a search."

Bobbie reached out and plucked the paper from my hand with trembling fingers.

"Eleven Palm," he read. "It's not much to go on."

"It's al we have," I said.

"True." He shoved the paper in his own pocket.

We stood a moment longer, watching the tops of trees toss and crows swoop in and out of them, then Bobbie said he had to get going. "Work,"

he explained. "And Salvatore."

"How is he?" I vaguely remembered the width of the boy's shoulders, and it pleased me now to imagine how wel they would shelter Bobbie.

to imagine how wel they would shelter Bobbie.

Bobbie nodded. "Fine. Better than fine."

We set off back to the cottage. The light was very strong, and it dazzled us a little. "Do you think it's this bright in California?" Bobbie asked, and I looked up, shading my eyes with one hand.

"I don't know." My poor sister, I thought.

She never could seem to resist the featherweight lure of glitter and glare. She never understood that love-especial y that of a child-was the most necessary weight you can endure in life, even if it hurts, even if it tugs bags under the skin of your eyes.

Without it, the soul skitters to edge of the world and teeters there, confused.

"This light's like heaven," Bobbie sighed, and I pondered on that. Maybe heaven real y did exist, I thought. Maybe it was just the perfect realization of al one's dreams-an impossible realm of suntans and muscles, where a magic elixir could heal you and make you strong, where men could make roses bloom with the single touch of a thumb, and where the bigger the women were, so much the better.

When we reached the cottage, Marcus was framed in one of the windows. He was washing dishes-his hands making soapy circles with a sponge, then rinsing everything clean. I watched him fetch plates and lay them on the table with a savage solidity, as if to prove that he wasn't going anywhere.

Not today, and not tomorrow, either. The smel of stew drifted out across the gra.s.s, and Marcus turned and saw us. I watched him straighten. He appeared to consider and then thought, What the h.e.l.l. He stumped his way to the door, the change in his pocket rattling along with the beats of my heart. My mouth was dry, but I swal owed hard and knocked, knowing he was setting one more place at the table.

There was just time for me to breathe one last wish down into the roots and worms under my feet, where it would either flourish and survive, I knew, or sink into the afterlife. But I hoped not. I hoped it would grow. Love always seemed to.

Epilogue.

Death almost always rearranges life, sometimes for the worse, many times for the better. A month after Amelia's death, Marcus and I moved into the farmhouse together. No one wanted the place, so after half a lifetime, I final y found a use for al the earnings from August's screwbal horses. I got to scrawl my name in the s.p.a.ce above Owner on the Dyerson deed, Marcus sitting next to me, my pen making the perfect loops and whorls Priscil a Sparrow had taught us so long ago.

On our first drive out to the farm together, Marcus told me he had a surprise waiting. "Close your eyes," he bossed, and led me across the b.u.mpy ground toward the barn. "Okay, open them,"

he said, and when I did, I saw a leggy brown colt standing in the newly repaired paddock, its lithe neck bent down to the rich gra.s.s. Startled, it reared its head, and I saw the unusual marking spread across its forehead-not a star, exactly, more like a pair of feathered wings. Angel wings.

I put a hand over my mouth and made a I put a hand over my mouth and made a smal sound. I reached for Marcus's hand to say thank you, but he had dropped to his knees in the dirt in front of me. "Truly," he said, looking up at me with his warm eyes, "we're not exactly a match made in heaven, you and I, but I figure we're good enough for here on earth. Wil you have me?" He reached into his pocket and pul ed out a rough-hewn gold ring. "I had it made special"-he blushed-"so it would be sure to fit."

"Oh," I breathed, sliding the ring over my k.n.o.bby knuckle. "Yes. A hundred times, yes. But there's someone I have to ask first."

"What took you so long?" Bobbie grinned when I told him that evening. "You two should have gotten together years ago."

"But what about you?" I blushed. "Won't you be lonely living here al alone?" After Amelia's death, Bobbie had moved back into his father's house, but it was different with just the two of us- more peaceful, certainly, but a little empty, too.

"Don't worry about me." Bobbie smiled. "I have some plans."

And he did. The first thing he did was move Salvatore in with him, which ruffled more than a few feathers in town, but not as many as when the carpenters descended on the house and began tearing up the clinic in the back. "What in thunder hil is going on behind that tarp," Vi Vickers scowled, trying to peek around the blue sheets of plastic that blocked everyone's view. "You can hear the noise al the way out to Hinkleman's. It's a d.a.m.n distraction."

"You'l just have to wait," I said, smiling. I knew, but then, the work going on was partly my doing. Bobbie had needed money for his project, and after al these years, I had been more than happy to find a permanent home for the bundle of bil s under my bed.

A month later, Vi got her answer. Bobbie had transformed his father's office and clinic into a smal restaurant. Bobbie cooked, and Salvatore worked the dining room. The Dispensary, it was cal ed, and soon the boys had critics traveling al the way from Manhattan to swoon over their recipes.

Incandescent, his food was cal ed, and a tonic for the soul. Marcus provided al the fruits and vegetables, and many of Bobbie's dishes included local y foraged herbs. Diners were always charmed to find that the front of the menu was printed to look like an antique quilt.

I took the real thing with me to the farm, intending to hang it as decoration, but I quickly discovered that my days meddling with the quilt were hardly finished. People in Aberdeen were more stubborn than I gave them credit for. I guess they were so used to having a Morgan tend to their aches and pains that they were ful y prepared to brave the potholes and dirt road out to the Dyerson farm. Soon I had a regular stream of visitors knocking up a storm on the front door. At first I was a little hesitant about treating them.

"I'm not a doctor," I reminded Sal Dunfry, who'd come out to see if I could do something about the liver spots on her hands. "Not even close."

"I know," Sal answered, plopping herself down in the kitchen and helping herself to the coffeepot, "but whatever you're doing is working, and besides, this isn't brain surgery." And then she made the most sensible suggestion of al . "You lived with Robert Morgan for al those years. You must have picked up a little something from him. Why don't you just find yourself another doctor around here and see if he'l help you?"

So I final y phoned Dr. Redfield, who turned out to be not at al what I was expecting. He was almost as tal as me, for one thing, and had the easy laugh and manners of a harlequin. He was fascinated by the remedies on Tabitha's quilt and agreed to check up on the people I treated, taking the cases I couldn't solve and making sure the ones I did stayed that way. Once again, my pantry began to fil up with infusions for everything from ulcers to general despair, and the pots on the stove were always bubbling. There is one cure I never show anyone, however. The last jar of Tabby's green liquid is stowed in the darkest corner of the root cel ar, tucked under a shelf, where the glow of it can't get into anyone's thoughts. I'm not saying I would never do it again, but ending an existence, I know now, isn't like closing the covers of a book. It isn't as simple as folding down the top corner of a page and putting it aside for later.

There are some things in life, however, you can do that with, and the letter I received from Serena Jane was one such item. Bobbie and I hired a private detective to help us find her, and after a few a private detective to help us find her, and after a few weeks, he hit pay dirt with a working address.

"Should we send one letter between us, or separate ones?" Bobbie puzzled, his pulse racing. Salvatore put a calming hand on his shoulder.