Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Pascal, sensing the shift in her energy before she even moved, hopped off her lap. “I’ll be back every weekend,” she promised to his retreating form as he slunk away from the pigpen and disappeared under some brush near the barn. “Go make me some kittens.”
With a grin, Ren gathered her buckets and gave Frank one last pat on the head before heading back to the cabin to load up the truck.
But for the very first time in her life, she didn’t feel like leaving the homestead.
Hesitation was the last thing she’d expected to feel today. She’d made a countdown calendar last month and pinned it to her wall. She’d even started packing up her hand-carved trunk a week ago—and she barely had anything to put in there to begin with. In the days leading up to the move, she’d driven her parents to exasperation with the singing and the dancing and the What ifs. There had been something about this brand of her excitement that couldn’t be muted.
Until now, she supposed.
All that was left was to lift her new trunk into the bed of the old truck and climb in, right into the middle, where she’d be sandwiched between Gloria and Steve all the way to Spokane. But Ren couldn’t seem to make her legs move.
It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like she’d never left the homestead before. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the family would go to the farmers markets over in Troy and sell their honey, jams, and every kind of seasonal fruit and vegetable imaginable. Every Monday, Ren would take the truck by herself up to the library in Deary, where Linda would hand over the new stack of used books that had come in. And once a quarter, the three Gyldens would drive to Moscow for fuel, feed, and any other business they’d need to get done.
But this time, getting in the truck felt different. It was a permanent rip down the page. Ren had never spent a single night away from the land since they’d moved here when she was three, and now she’d be living five days a week in a college dormitory with a stranger, home only on weekends. Every day she’d be sitting in a room full of people—different rooms, full of different people—who had spent their whole lives in situations that were completely foreign to her. This—going to college—had been Ren’s dream ever since she was little, but now that she was standing there facing it, anxiety gnawed at her gut like a termite on a fence post.
Would her parents truly be okay without her? Gloria had never been good at getting the pilot light back up when it went out overnight, and Steve couldn’t easily bend to reach it anymore. It was late January, and as cold as it would get all year; the firewood was budgeted for heat, not cooking. What if the stove went out and they didn’t have any way to light it until Ren came home? Would they go down to the Hill Valley Five and Dime to use the phone? Would they even know what number to call?
And the pilot light was only one small thing. When there was work to be done—and there was, always—it was all hands on deck. The garden and fields didn’t check the calendar; they wouldn’t care if it was finals week. The old milk cow, Callie, wouldn’t care if Ren had a paper due. And what if Steve poured both slop buckets into the highest part of the trough, where the piglets couldn’t reach? What if he forgot that Gloria’s old chestnut mare, Poppy, was allergic to alfalfa and accidentally threw a few cubes into her feed?
For as long as she could remember Ren had wanted to attend school, but it had only been recently—when the desire for deeper knowledge had grown into a living, pulsating shadow in her chest—that she’d finally wondered what on earth was stopping her. Her parents’ unwillingness to enroll her in school growing up had mostly been rooted in their philosophy about living free of society’s influence and a general mistrust of the ways of the modern world, but they’d taught her well, hadn’t they? Ren knew what mattered: honesty, humility, hard work, and self-sufficiency. And she was an adult now; in theory, she could make her own choices. But Ren knew she was too tightly woven into the life of the homestead to unthinkingly do whatever she wanted.
It was only as she was standing there beside the truck, ready to pack up, that Ren felt the more practical weight of her parents’ longtime hesitation: They needed her. On a homestead of this size, six hands were always better than four, especially when two of those hands—Ren’s—were younger and could do over half the work. Leaving might be the most selfish thing she’d ever done.