Soundtrack: 'Creation song' - Josh Garrels

{Kadee}

Tru's roast chicken was amazingly juicy, with new potatoes and dill, and a bottle of wine she produced from somewhere. Kadee couldn't stop exclaiming over the meal, until Tru's eyebrows were high and relaxed and an honest-to-god smile was on her weather-beaten face.

At dusk, Cary and Kadee climbed back into the haymow to watch the stars come out, Cary with a sleeping bag slung over his shoulder to make a nest of their own like the kittens. Kadee curled against the warmth of his body, listening to the slow thump of his heart as she gazed at the indigo sky framed by the window.

She could hear the smile in his voice as he said, "There's so many more stars out here. I used to lie on my roof in the city and look up and think the night sky was empty and black—but it's so full of light."

She remembered the boy she'd seen on the bus to school, with the bulky jacket and the stone face, and imagined him spread out on his rooftop, searching the sky while God knew what kind of hell was going on in the house underneath him—while she had been just blocks away, painting her toe nails or texting her girlfriends, completely unaware. Her hands tightened on the soft flannel of his jacket, her heart aching.

"I have something to tell you," she whispered.

"Mm?" She felt the rumble through her cheek and buried her face against him. She should have put it off another hour—or until the next morning.

He stirred underneath her. "Kade? What is it?"

She sighed and pulled out her phone, pulling up the online listing with a few strokes of her fingers. She handed the glowing screen across to him.

He was silent, and she pushed herself up on one elbow in the hay to see his face. His expression was still and blank, lit by the screen, looking at the real estate listing of his old house.

"Did your mom tell you she was selling?" Kadee asked in a small voice.

He shook his head once. "Is she gone already?" He asked, his voice low.

Kadee sighed. "I don't know. I think so? I drove by and there was no one there that I could see. But you know...with those houses. She could have been inside."

He handed the phone back without looking at her, his expression impossible to read in the dark. "The last time we talked, she said...live my life. Move on without her." His exhale sounded thin. "I guess she took her own advice."

"I'm so sorry, Cary." He turned his face away, silently pulling her back down to lie against his chest. She listened to the thud of his heart, counting the stars as they appeared. Twenty-one, she thought when he spoke again. "You come to tell me that?"

She breathed out, nodding against his shirt. "I didn't want you to be alone when you heard," she whispered.

The catch in his breath was so slight she almost missed it, and his hand tightened around her shoulder.

After long minutes of silence, he spoke, his voice rough. "Look—Ursa Major—do you see it?" His arm was a darker shape against the night sky, tracing the big dipper. "If you draw a line up from those two stars in the tail, you can find Polaris, the north star." Her eyes followed his pointing finger to one bright star in a spread of hundreds, now many more than she could count. "Sailors and explorers used to use it to find their way because it stays steady. All the other stars in the sky swing around it."

She drew the blanket more snugly around their shoulders, considering that. "My parents are like that," she said as she realized it. While she might feel impatient with the way they seemed stuck in their ways, she knew she could count on them to care about her. They stayed steady in her sky.

Cary made a soft sound in his chest. "Yeah. Mine aren't."

"You need a new north star," Kadee said reflectively, tucking her chilly fingers under the warm spread of his ribs.

It was quiet again a long time. "There's a wobble," Cary said, his voice low. "Depending on the time of year. It's not perfect. So you have to adjust for that."

She laughed softly, her eyes dazzled by the sky. "Sounds about right."

The thing she would never tell her parents was that they did sleep together. Cary fell asleep first, curling on the hay with his forehead against her shoulder and his arm over her stomach. And she fell asleep shortly thereafter.

They woke up, shivering, as dawn pinked the sky, and tried to get warm under one sleeping bag with straw poking through their clothes. Finally, giggling, they climbed down the ladder and staggered sleepily across the yard to the house. Cary tucked her into the bed and she was asleep before she figured out where he was going to sleep.

The room was stuffy and warm when she woke up again. She blinked at the unfamiliar cedar plank walls, then rolled over. Cary was stretched on his stomach on the floor beside the bed, his arms drawn up under his body. His breath snored lightly. She propped her cheek on her arm, smiling as she watched him sleep. She couldn't resist dropping her hand over the edge of the bed and stroking the thick line of his eyelashes, dark against his cheek. He twitched and grumbled, yanking the blanket over his head. She laughed softly and stretched, luxuriating for a minute in every memory from the day before. Even the parts that left her aching and sad—she wouldn't have traded any of it.

"I love you." The words that had been quietly beating inside her for days went out into the air, real.

When she rolled over, his dark eyes were looking sleepily at her. "What'd you say?" His morning voice rumbled and creaked like an old man's.

She smiled her slow, dimpled smile at him. "You're cute when you first wake up," she said, and bent closer.

He pulled the sheet over his head defensively. "Smoker's morning breath isna' cute," he said, muffled.

She relented, finger-combing her hair up into a ponytail as she padded to the door. "Brush your teeth then," she said. "I'm leaving in an hour."

{Cary}

After Kadee's car bumped out of the yard and turned, disappearing into the trees, Cary felt as if the temperature of the air against his skin dropped 10 degrees. The flash of Kadee's laugh, the energy in her voice and hands when she talked, her eyes crinkling at him when he spoke, had been like a heat lamp pointed right at his chest the last 24 hours. He felt colder now than he had before she'd come. He tucked his chilly fingers in his pockets and pulled his arms close to his body, listening with his head down until the last sound of the car faded, then turned and went into the house.

"What are we doing today?" he asked gruffly.

Tru had her sock feet up on the couch, a dog on her knees. She peered at him over a pair of reading glasses. "I don't work on Sunday, sweetheart. Fed the animals when you were sleeping. A body has to rest sometimes."

He looked blankly around the room, the emptiness of the day ahead deepening his sense of loneliness. He got his drawing book and buried himself in the wicker chair on the front porch. There were only four pages left—he turned them one after another, touching their blank surfaces, planning the shape of the drawings he could make on them. Only four. He had to make them count.

He was growling to himself about the shitty smudge that had made Kadee's face look wobbly, the shitty nub of an eraser at the end of his pencil, the shitty, dull pencil he had to work with in the first place—when Tru came onto the porch.

"I'm getting some things in town. You coming?"

Cary chucked the book under his chair and stumped down the stairs behind her.

"Town" was a single street with a post office, a gas station/hardware store and a tiny grocery mart. Cary kept looking down the side streets expecting to see more. Tru filled her grocery basket with cans of beans and two loaves of bread. She bought a pouch of tobacco at the till and handed it to Cary. "Know what to do with this?"

His eyebrows lifted, and he nodded. He didn't usually roll his own smokes, but he could if she had papers.

"Good," she said shortly. "Take the edge off that mood of yours."

When he pulled himself up into the truck, she was just sitting with her gnarled hands on the wheel, frowning up the street. "There's no school here," she said. "You just planning to quit?"

Cary folded his arms, his eyes on the dusty dashboard. "Dunno." He didn't like school, but it would livened up his days with new people and activities. Weeks on the farm seemed long and lonely just now.

"I think there's a bus what runs to the nearest one. But I'm snowed in pretty good a couple weeks of the year." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Your girlfriend have a four-by-four truck I don't know about?"

He shook his head, slouching a little lower in the seat.

She sighed. "I can use you for a couple more weeks, but when winter rolls in I don't do much but keep myself and the animals fed and clean. Doesn't seem like much of a life for a young man like you. Cooped up with an old woman and her dogs."

He exhaled, trying to squeeze the tension out of the back of his neck. "If you want me to go, I'll go, Aunt Tru. I'm old enough to look for work. I'll find something."

"I don't like your chances out there neither," she grumbled, and the truck engine made a louder version of her grumble as she started it. It only took a second for the town's buildings and stoplight to disappear, swallowed up by trees and a two-lane highway.

"I'm coming around to having you," Tru said, almost to herself. "You don't talk over much and you're a good worker. I just don't see a future for you here."

He watched the road wind through stands of pines, listening to his thoughts unspool about that. "I don't care, Aunt Tru," he finally said. "If this is all I got. I'm alive. I'm not getting the shit beat out of me one more time. That's more'n I had last year." He looked at her from under his lowered eyebrows. The lines were drawn deep on her wrinkled face, and her big-knuckled hands gripped the wheel hard. "I appreciate you worrying about me, but I'm okay," Cary said. "If this is all I get."

"You don't think you and your mumma"— she began, her voice gruff.

"No." He cut her off. He tried to get his breath back—she'd caught him with his guard down, and he felt like he'd been punched in the chest. "She's gone. She fucking...sold the house and left without telling me where. So that's—the end of that. It's just me now." He turned his face to the window, blinking hard.

There was a long silence. "You and me both," Tru finally said, her voice low. "She never did like lookin' back."