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won’t move away.”
    “I can’t picture this farm without a MacKenzie on it,” she said vaguely. “We’ll see.”
    “I’ll come back.”
    Mrs. MacKenzie searched his firm, tear-streaked face silently. She looked sad. “Good-bye, Artie. Stay this sweet, and you’ll do fine.”
    “I will come back, I swear.” He bent over and kissed Lily’s red hair. “I caught you,” he whispered to her. “You’re mine.”
    Before he got into the car, he turned and looked at them all one last time. Confusion, love, and grief hollowed him. They didn’t believe he’d never forget them. But they didn’t know how stubborn he was, or how possessive of the people he loved. Lily was his. They had a covenant.

Three
    Mama said the Old Brook Prince had helped her get born and named her and promised to come back and marry her someday, and that he’d left his home in her keeping, and that made Lily the only bona fide princess-in-waiting in the town of MacKenzie.
    Not that Lily cared about boys or getting married, but she supposed that after she got rich and important and old she might want a boy as strong and sweet as Daddy around to help do the farm chores. She’d heard the only way a girl could get a boy for good was to marry him.
    The girls in her Sunday school class said nobody else would want to marry her anyway, because her daddy had a hook for a hand and her mama came from white trash, and even if the MacKenzies had a town named after them, she was too big and ugly and mean. The Old Brook Prince wouldn’t mind though. He’d promised.
    So there it was. When she needed to get a boy, she’d marry the Old Brook Prince.
    Flat on her stomach, Lily hugged the thick willow limb and stared, wide-eyed and fascinated, through the drooping blue-gray leaves. A stranger was coming . Sassafras, mired in the weedy grass far below her, her shaggy yellow coat dotted in runny brown splotches from the rotten crabapples Lily had dropped on her, sucked her dripping pink tongue in and woofed softly, watching him too.
    Didn’t he know this was the main driveway through Blue Willow? How had he gotten past the giant old gate? Only MacKenzies could walk on this road or play in this big tree.
    The tall, unsmiling boy sidestepped cracks in the pavement, where weeds jutted up. He wore a green uniform like the soldiers on TV, and it looked just as dirty and rumpled. Maybe he’d been fighting Vietcong too.
    Lily crept like an inchworm farther along the limb, her bare toes digging into the crevices of the rough bark, her overalls snagging on a twig. It was hard to move; she had the last of the mushy crab apples in her hands. She’d gotten them from the bottom of the barrel stored in the barn since last fall. Their slimy juice squeezed between her fingers.
    Who was he? His hair was black and short as a scrub brush. He had a pack on his back. Below one eye was a big, ugly bruise.
    The hackles rose on Sassafras’s ruff. Her good ear—the one that the bobcat hadn’t chewed on—flattened against her head. She ran out from under the tree, roo-roo-rooing at him. He stopped and frowned at her. He didn’t know that Sassafras hadn’t ever bitten anything but fleas.
    “Nice dog,” he said. “I remember you. Big, dumb, nice dog.” He had a voice like the boys in high school. It cracked from up to down in two words. But it wasn’t like their voices, or Lily’s. It was fast even when it was slow.
    But Sassafras wagged at him and sat down, convinced. He walked past, his near eye squinting at her over the bruise. Then he looked at the huge willow, and Lily bunched up, hoping he wouldn’t see her. He walked into the weedy old park around it, sighed, took off his backpack, then dropped it on the ground. He patted the rusty sign on the stone post there, the one that had a lot of words she was just beginning to learn on it. MacKenzie. Colebrook. Blue Willow. One-nine-oh-oh. Rubbing a long,skinny arm across his forehead, he ducked under the low-hanging