Elizabeth DelConte

Milly didn’t want to save Mazie Pinkerton. She wasn’t even sure she was capable of saving her.

Still, she yanked her dress over her head and kicked off her shoes. Dove into Jones Pond and skimmed across the water the way she’d seen the muskrats do. Head watching above and below and to the sides like an alligator’s. Limbs churning onward with a mechanical drive, like she was a wind-up toy and a string had been pulled somewhere on her body. She would thrust forward with exhausting speed and regularity until the string started to retract and what was determination devolved into choppy exhaustion.

It wasn’t because she didn’t love Mazie; she did. She loved her the way all New England farmers loved their neighbors. With a fierceness born from hard work and isolation and the need, sometimes, for help: a home-cooked meal or for someone else to drive the tractor and roll the field over in its sleep, so it was neat and furrowed and alert for spring.

Milly had learned this New England code when she was still young, shortly after coming to the farm. Mazie Pinkerton was only just now old enough to help in such ways. Sixteen, though the day had come without any fanfare. Milly had baked her a lopsided cake—July had been thick with humidity, the air something tangible she had wanted to wring out—and done her best to coax the icing into a cursive message across the top. But by the time Milly had walked down the gravel road and found Mazie behind her house hanging laundry on the line, Mazie’s name had slid and pooled on the cake platter. That was the first thing Milly had thought about when she registered the empty, flipped canoe. That somehow she had made this happen, all the way back in July, like her inadequacies as a baker were a curse, her shoddy icing a spell. For Mazie’s plunge into the water had been graceful—of course it had—and somehow sweet despite its morbidity. Like the world, for once, had gotten an ending right.

She hadn’t baked the cake out of affection. It was more an act of obligation. Though Milly had spent years now trying to convince herself that the two were one and the same. That though her aunt and uncle had had no choice but to clear out the spare room for her—in the heart of February, no less, when moving junk to the barn was a numbing proposition—and teach her obstinate teenage fingers how to milk a cow and separate seeds, they’d grown to love her.

Mazie’s father—known to the small Gouldsboro community only as Mr. Pinkerton—celebrated nothing. He’d never been a particularly nice man, but he’d gone as icy as the Maine winters when his wife died ten years ago. She’d taken his small slice of good with her, Milly’s Aunt Bernice liked to say. Now he sat on his porch, screened behind a ratty, woolen jacket. He wore it buttoned to his throat despite the weather—further proof, Bernice said, of his transformation into ice—and watched still-beautiful Mazie tend to their increasingly shrinking gardens, the few pigs and cows she’d managed to keep alive.

Milly’s cousin Ernst had gone with her that day. His offer to come, a surprise. Milly had grown accustomed to the idea that he never left the house and attributed it partly to defiance and partly to constitution. He walked half a step behind her, and though she couldn’t see him in her periphery, she knew what he must have looked like: awkward and too thin in the face. So tall his shoulders curved a bit, making him look hunched, already defeated. He was twenty-two but skulked about like a moody teenager, and Milly was old enough now—on the precipice of her thirty-eighth birthday—to chafe at his unspoken criticism of their way of life. Shutting himself in his attic room. Only coming downstairs for meals. Tugging his windows closed at dawn to mute the white-throated sparrow’s optimistic whistle. His parents had banished him to the farm between graduate semesters in Boston. Not as a reprieve from books and his violin and academia, but as an antidote. To give him a taste of their rural childhoods, the lessons they’d learned out in the sun-soaked blueberry fields, like how to bow their backs and rake and sift for hours, and how to stand straight again despite an ache in the lower spine that would haunt them into their eighties.

Milly had wished Mr. Pinkerton good afternoon when she’d passed him on the porch, her voice creeping higher than usual, her smile spread too thin. Ernst hardly looked at the man, gave the rocking chair a wide berth, jerked at Mr. Pinkerton’s barking cough. Mazie’s father said nothing to them. Just pushed himself forward and backward with his feet, a movement so slight it was almost imperceptible. Almost stasis.

Ernst shifted his feet and shadowed Milly inside. Only spoke when Mazie could finally be persuaded into the kitchen and only then to push a plate of cake into her hands with a soft admonition to eat.

Milly had watched their interaction with a mix of jealousy and disdain. Mazie’s shy acceptance of the dessert, the way her eyes stayed on Ernst’s face while she ate it. How though Ernst clearly couldn’t have baked a cake had he wanted to, she thanked him for it, reassured him that it was delicious. Exactly what she needed after the morning she’d had. How Ernst’s eyes had traveled the outline of Mazie’s body. Hers was a farmer’s body, sturdy and tight, wide in all the right places. Of good stock. A foil to Milly’s straight lines.

She’d taken Mazie’s empty plate to the sink and washed it, uncomfortable in the presence of their obvious attraction. Watched the smudges of pink icing twirl around the drain before disappearing.

She’d thought it was only innocent flirting. That she didn’t need to warn either one of them. Remind them how young Mazie was. How transient Ernst’s stay here.

But it was another one of her failings.