“If not Uncle Jonathan, then who?” Willa asked, her voice reedy with fear.
“Willa, sit down. Let’s talk about this. There are things that—”
“I know enough,” she said, turning away. “I don’t want to know any more.”
When Willa slammed the door to her makeshift bedroom, the sound of it reverberated for a long time in Juniper’s chest.
CHAPTER 14
SUMMER 14 AND A HALF YEARS AGO
Every summer, right in between Jonathan’s birthday and mine, we go camping at Lake Munroe. This isn’t a family thing, it’s friends only, and it’s this dreamy little weekend that celebrates the several weeks that my brother and I are the same age. Mostly it’s an excuse to leave work early on a Friday afternoon and spend a couple of days on the lake with our favorite people.
I was born on the night of summer solstice, when the sun had just slipped beneath the horizon and fireflies were beginning to spark in the fields. Mom doesn’t recall much about that night—she claims she was in too much pain to remember anything past the blinding agony of childbirth—but she does remember the shocking purple of the night sky and the twinkle of lights that shimmered over the field outside the second-story window of her hospital room. Every other detail is lost to a fast and unmedicated delivery. I’ve never asked Mom if her pain was physical or emotional. I don’t dare. I’m afraid of her answer.
From what I do know of the story, Rebecca Connor had arrived in Jericho, Iowa, just six months before, following the promise of a job at the door factory. She’d circled the ad in a newspaper in Rapid City and driven into Jericho the very next day with nothing but her car and the contents of the backseat: some clothes and a pair of hiking boots, a shoebox filled with photos, the Braga, and two sleeping bags that zipped together but were now bundled apart. She had just under three hundred dollars in cash, and nowhere else to go. Rebecca’s family was from another small town in eastern Iowa, but after a whirlwind romance lured her west, she returned to the heartland penniless, alone, and thirteen weeks pregnant. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. It’s probably for the best—neither I nor Jonathan have ever met our maternal grandparents.
My mother met Lawrence Baker a week after she arrived in Jericho, at the counter in Cunningham’s. She’d gotten the job on the production line at the door factory, and was renting a furnished one-bedroom apartment above the cafe. It was dark and smelled of grease, but Patricia—the owner of both the cafe and the apartment—kept her mug full of hot coffee in the mornings and refused to charge her for it. Law found Rebecca nursing a cup at the farthest end of the long cafe counter early one Saturday morning. He watched her from his booth for the better part of an hour, and when he worked up the courage to finally slip onto the sticky green stool beside her, she rewarded his moxie by letting him buy her a caramel pecan roll for breakfast.
To hear Mom tell it, their courtship was quick and practical, nothing like the passionate affair that caused her to abandon her life and drive across the country for love. Of course, that’s my spin on it, not hers. But I have to be right. When I was twelve years old and desperate for every scrap of information I could glean about my father—my real father—I found a small, cream-colored envelope hidden inside an empty cello case in my mother’s music room. In my desperation to leave no stone unturned, I tipped it forward and realized it was hollow. Or, almost. The envelope was inside, tucked into the very bottom.
When I lifted the flap, there wasn’t much to see. A pressed flower that turned to dust in my fingers was lying on top of a small sheaf of letters. I unfolded the first one and was surprised to find it written in a dignified, upright cursive. I read the first few lines, but even as a preteen I knew I was trespassing in an unforgivable way. Still, I turned the sheet over to find a signature. A name. They were all signed the same: Love, me.
Me. I wanted to take my mother by the shoulders and shake her. Who was me? I was so desperate for answers, I felt like my heart had been scooped out of my chest. But as I was replacing the envelope, something slid and tapped against the side. When I looked again, I found a necklace coiled in the corner. It was a tangled mess, the chain knotted in so many places I wondered if it could ever be undone. But the charms hung free, and it only took me a second to realize what they were. Juniper berries.
I didn’t think twice: I grabbed it. Obviously, it was mine.
The knots took me hours to unravel, and I had to work with straight pins that pricked my fingers and left tiny dots of blood on my skin. But the next morning I walked downstairs with the necklace hanging bold against my T-shirt. When my mother saw it, she looked as if she had been punched. Her eyes went huge and hurt, and then she blinked and the expression was gone as quickly as it had come. She gave me a soft smile and never said another word about the necklace. But the next day when I looked for the envelope of letters, it was gone.