Ruth had a different way of carrying worry. She hummed while scraping the last of a jar into a saucepan, and she hummed while pulling the dead leaves from her tomato plants. The tune might change, but the habit did not, even on mornings when the bank envelope lay beside the sugar bowl. Eli once asked her how she could sing when she was frightened, and she had smiled at him without pretending the fear did not exist. "Because the fear doesn't get to decide whether there's music in this house," she said.
Nana Vera lived in a small room off the rear of the house, where the afternoon light fell across a quilt she had made long before Eli was born. She was seventy-eight, with narrow hands, silver hair she braided each morning, and a patient way of looking at things that made other people slow down without understanding why. Her husband had died years earlier, and she had outlived enough seasons to distrust both sudden despair and easy optimism. She did not claim to know how to repair the drought, but she knew that land, like people, gave warnings before it failed completely.
Eli loved the three of them in different ways. He loved his father through the familiar sound of tools in the barn and the rare satisfaction of being asked to help with work that mattered. He loved his mother through the warmth of the kitchen, the repaired seams in his school clothes, and the way she always left a portion for him even when she insisted she was not hungry. And he loved Nana Vera through the stories she told without trying to teach a lesson, stories that left something inside him to consider long after she had gone to bed.
By early summer, the farm's accounts were becoming difficult to look at. Ruth kept the figures in a blue ledger with a loose cover, recording feed, seed, fuel, taxes, and the interest accumulating on a loan Thomas had taken after the second poor harvest. Eli was not supposed to worry about the numbers, but walls in old houses were thin, and his parents did not always remember that the boy was awake upstairs. He heard phrases like extension, insufficient collateral, and perhaps after the harvest more often than he heard anyone discuss a holiday.
One night Thomas said the word sell. He said it so quietly that Eli almost thought he had imagined it, then he heard the chair creak as Ruth leaned forward across the kitchen table. "Sell to whom?" she asked. Thomas did not answer immediately, and that pause frightened Eli more than the word itself.
The next morning Eli asked whether they were moving. Thomas looked at him across the breakfast table for several seconds, his spoon resting beside a bowl of oatmeal gone cold. "Not if I can help it," he finally said. Eli wanted to ask what happened if he could not help it, but he saw Ruth's expression and held the question back.