Chapter 5
It was around a thirty-minute easy walk into town, but as the sun grew hotter and the cheap fabric of Anna’s uniform began to cling to her skin, sweat curling the loose hair at the base of her dark ponytail, she wished Grandma had lent her some of her nest egg to buy a car instead of telling her how good walking was for the soul.
Maybe the walking thing was true, but not in this heat when Anna had an eight-hour shift coming up. All Grandma ever cared about was the soul—how to be your best person for the next life, as if this one didn’t warrant a little attention too.
Harper’s Creek was Grandma’s hometown and she claimed to have had a happy childhood here, but as Anna walked the length of Main Street to get to Jeannie’s Diner, she reached the same conclusion she had every time.
The place was a dump. After growing up in Boston and then having her year at Columbia in New York, this rural town was alien.
There were some crops in the distance, but the majority of the fields she passed were hardly lush and full as they should be at this time of year.
She knew from what she’d heard in the diner that more and more farmers were weighed down with debts and no chance of paying them off because even when they’d had good years, they didn’t make enough, and then the drought returned.
She didn’t understand why they didn’t all cut their losses and move somewhere with jobs. And hope.
At the edge of town she passed the first couple of too many closed stores with faded For Lease signs in their windows.
The first was a boutique, Rags to Riches, and the other, Party Time!
, had grime coating the inside windowsills where a mannequin in a cheap nurse’s outfit leaned heavily to one side, staring out, woefully forgotten.
The quiet sidewalks were cracked and uneven, dry dirt filling the gaps.
America’s breadbasket now a dust bowl. Struggling to stay alive but dying all the same.
The noise and wealth of the city—the constant energy of it—was a different universe.
The quiet was the only thing she liked about it here.
It made her feel almost safe. Out of time.
On Main, she passed the small supermarket and the hardware store and heard the strains of a hymn. A congregation in full voice filled the air even though the church doors were closed and it was a Saturday.
You teach us through the growing grain, the price of life eternal, plain
No paradise built by idle hands, no love without some pain
Where fear has scarred the land, let his word be our decree
We shall be called to bleed ourselves, that others might be free.
She tried to zone out the singing. There wasn’t much evidence of grain growing in this small town. Still, the voices inside swelled, a wave of sound in the quiet. A farmers’ service, that’s what the board said was happening inside. Maybe prayer was all they had left.