From
My Own LightningI watched as he tipped his hat and turned toward his truck, which was parked along the edge of the dirt road that led through Wolf Hollow and out, eventually, to the hardtop and on toward places like Aliquippa with its gas stations and coffee shops and beauty salons and all the other things we didn’t have in our hills.
Compared to such places, the glen where we lived was like a cradle.
“You can always go visit somewhere else,” my father liked to say, “but then you get to come home.”
So far, home had been plenty.
But as Mrs. Taylor and I watched Mr. Graf pull away, a part of me wanted to see what else there was to see.
“He must really love his dog to go driving around the countryside like that,” Mrs. Taylor said. “And to offer such a big reward!”
“He must,” I replied.
And then, just before she shut the door, I caught sight of a boy on the other side of the road, a bit down from the schoolhouse, standing in the tall weeds, watching us.
Despite the trees casting shadows along the road, despite the way he had pulled his hat down low over his forehead, I knew who he was.
Andy Woodberry.
“What’s he doing here?” Mrs. Taylor said, and I could hear that she was frowning.
“I don’t know. He’s hardly ever in school when he’s supposed to be, but now it’s June and here he is.”
Mrs. Taylor responded by closing the door and, with it, the subject.
But I stayed where I was for a long moment, wondering what had brought Andy this way. There was nothing much along this piece of road except the school and, a bit farther down toward the flatland, our old potato house where we stored the crop until we could sell it. A distance beyond that: the Woodberry farm. Where Andy should have been.
But Andy wasn’t my business anymore. And I was not his keeper.
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Wolk. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
