Read Stones for Bread for Free Online Page B

concentrated silence—him staring out the windshield, me counting trees on the side of the road. Cecelia talks enough for all of us, about anything and everything. Kindergarten. Her rabbit she gave away when theymoved from Massachusetts. All the things she wants to do this summer. And then, her mother.
    “She left us.” Her legs jiggle faster.
    Seamus tightens his grip on the shifter, skin thinning over his knuckles until I worry the bones will burst through.
    “I’m sorry,” I say.
    “Daddy says she doesn’t know how to love us ’cause she never learned it.” The girl’s cheeks tremble. “I didn’t know loving was something you hafta get taught.”
    “My mother died when I was young,” I tell her. “It still hurts not to have her around.”
    “Did she love you and your dad?”
    “Very much.”
    Cecelia chews the end of her ponytail. She pokes the buttons on the cassette player without turning the radio on. Fiddles with the tuning knob and opens the vents, blowing her bangs back with stale, barely cool air. “Have you been married before? I know you’re not now.”
    “Oh really?” I give her a little pinch in the side. She giggles. “How, may I ask, do you know that?”
    “Because you don’t have a ring on. Daddy says you always hafta look for the ring.”
    “Okay,” Seamus says, his fleshy ears glowing pink. “We don’t have to tell Liesl all our secrets at once.”
    We turn, and turn, and turn again, each time my elbow banging against the metal door, on farm roads now where the pavement has been all but driven away. The truck bounces us through ruts and potholes, churning loose stone up beneath it.
    Cecelia continues her chattering, now about the small garden she planted all by herself, stressing those words. All. By. My. Self . She has snap peas and two bean bushes, a couple of cucumber vines, and one tomato plant. Leaning close to me, she holds her hand up to hermouth and whispers, “I didn’t grow the tomato from a seed. Daddy bought it for me from the market. Does that still count?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Okay, everybody,” Seamus says, coming to a stop on the shoulder, a steep embankment on my side of the truck. “You might want to get out over here.”
    “I’m good,” I say, pushing open the door. It swings wide, handle out of reach, so I cling to the seat belt and lower myself into the tangle of grass below. Cecelia scrambles out backward on her father’s side and he catches her. With them out of sight, I take a moment to brush at the scuff mark on my pants. It doesn’t come off.
    Outside the cab of the truck, silence grows over Cecelia, thick as ivy on the walls of a manor house, and she melts into her father’s thick body, behind it the stone wall surrounding the home. The sparkling, talkative girl from the previous hour is gone, replaced with this nearly invisible one.
    We wander around the farm for a little while. Cecelia feeds the goats, cranking quarters into the red machines and catching handfuls of pellets for the billies to nibble from her fingers. Then we move on to the sheep, who seem bored with all the attention they’re receiving, the petting and baby talk animals inevitably bring. They chew and stare in calm, ordered lines against the fence. “Aren’t you a pretty girl? Yes, you are. So pretty,” coos the woman next to me.
    “Gross,” a boy with her says. He’s about twelve. “They smell like sh—”
    “Gregory.” The mother grabs the skin of his upper arm and twists. “Watch your mouth.”
    The boy pulls away. “Ow, geez, Mom. Don’t be so psycho.”
    Quietly, Cecelia lifts her hand from the ewe’s back and creeps it up toward her face. Wrinkles her nose. Her father pumps liquid sanitizer into her palm. She rubs and then flaps her hands in the air.
    “What next, pumpkin?” Seamus asks. “Thirsty?”
    “Not yet.”
    We pass a gray-haired woman at a spinning wheel. Its compact style and blond wood look nothing like the wheel next to it, one of