“You’re going to pay for that!” the girl screamed, diving after her phone.
The man swung his grocery bags into the back seat of his car, and Ivy tore off her backpack and got in the passenger seat. “Take me to Eaton,” she begged. “Please.”
“Can’t,” the man said. “It’s an hour out of my way, and a storm’s coming. Plus, I think I got the flu.”
“Shit.” Ivy covered her face with her hands.
“I can take you back the way you came.”
“I don’t want to go back the way I came.”
“I can drop you at the edge of town, but it’s a big storm. Gonna snow all night.” He coughed wheezily, sounding like Ma.
“Shit.”
“Don’t you have a place to stay?”
“I have a place to stay. I just really don’t want to go back there.”
The man pulled out onto the road. “Well, maybe you oughta go back there, least till the storm’s over.”
The crystal swung from the rearview mirror, but the sun had gone behind the low, gray clouds so there wasn’t much light for it to toss around. Sirens moaned in the distance, and Ivy scrunched low in her seat. “Okay.”
She waited until he’d gone a little past the big tree at the turnoff before telling him to stop. “I can walk the rest of the way,” she said, looking around her feet. She groaned. “My Pop-Tarts! Oh my God. I left my food back there. I’m such a dumbass.” She banged her forehead against the window.
The man reached into the back seat and rustled through his grocery bags, then brought one of them up front. “I was gonna give you this anyway. Seemed like you could use it.”
Ivy looked inside the bag, then wound the handle around her hand, embarrassed. “You didn’t have to—”
“It’s okay. I gotta go.”
“Thank you.”
She waited until his car had disappeared around the bend, then backtracked to the turnoff. It was snowing hard now. She should’ve asked him what day it was. Was it Christmas yet? She should’ve asked him for some money. She should’ve asked him what happened to his eye, and why he had that crystal hanging in his car.
Back in the house, she opened the Price Chopper bag and spread its contents out on the counter. Most of the food was from the deli: Egg salad. Pasta salad. A loaf of bread, some slices of ham and cheese. There was a bag of chips and a bottle of store-brand soda. Looking at it all sitting there should’ve made Ivy happy, but instead, it made her heavy with some kind of sadness she didn’t understand. Nobody had ever done anything like that for her before. That man had a heart different from what you’d find in Good Hope: something that took light and threw it back at the world.
Ivy wiped her eyes, then took a spoon and began shoveling egg salad into her mouth. She peeled some slices of ham off the butcher paper and shoved them in too. People back in Good Hope were too caught up in their own problems to help anyone out. And if they did try to help, like McFadden supposedly did, it was only to make themselves look good. “Everyone’s got an angle,” Gran always said, and she was including herself in that. When Ivy’s dad died in the plant explosion down in Big Flats, Gran moved in to help with Agnes and Colin and, three months later, baby Ivy. But she made it clear she was only doing it for the free room and board, her own husband having died of cancer a year earlier, leaving her nothing but medical bills and a scabbed-over gash of grief.
Ivy took after Gran; that’s what everyone had always said, and it was true. In old pictures, Gran was the spitting image of Ivy, pale and thin with stringy blond hair, her squinty-eyed smile held close like a secret.
Ivy was nine or ten when she overheard Ma telling Gran she had a black heart. They’d been fighting about money, as usual, and the money fight had turned into a fight about Ivy’s dad. Gran said, as she often did, that it was Ma’s fault he’d died, because she was the one who’d made him take that factory job.
“You have a black heart,” Ma had answered, her voice low and shaky and full of truth.
It had stuck with Ivy—the image of Gran’s heart like a rotten piece of fruit, oozing sticky juice, a haze of fruit flies all around it. And it was true that Gran never went out of her way to be nice to anybody, that she was tough and mean, her anger like a bird trapped in the house, hurling itself against windows and flying straight at your face if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ivy had inherited it all—the temper, the blackness.
She cracked open the soda cap and chugged half the bottle. She crossed over to the couch and lay down, curling up on her side, watching the snow through the giant window. It didn’t fall so much as it swirled, like smoke, gusting sideways and upward and around in circles.
Ivy had started really understanding the nature of her heart soon after Ma’s sickness got bad. An ugly mood would come over her every time Ma asked her to carry the laundry basket or get the cast-iron pan up onto the stove. Guilt would come next, and then the blame. If Ma would just get better, things could go back to normal. It wasn’t long before the whole uncomfortable swirl of feelings gathered itself into a wicked tornado. She hated Ma for moving so slow; she hated her for hacking up stuff in the bathroom every morning. She hated her for forgetting to ask about Ivy’s math test, and for falling asleep in front of the TV without coming to say good night. Most of all, she hated Ma for making her feel this
