Christine Flynn - The Sugar House

“You heard wrong. I know I was mad because I got benched. The coach only did that to spite my dad. But I just wanted out of the locker room. Joe blocked the door so I couldn’t leave, but no one seems to remember what he did or what he said. Not that it would have mattered,” he muttered darkly. “I was my father’s son. Once they’d condemned him, people wanted to believe the worst about all of us.”

Emmy hesitated. “What about the other fights?”

He frowned. “What other fights? The only punch I ever threw was at Joe.”

Emmy’s immediate reaction was to insist that wasn’t true. She didn’t want anything to challenge the conclusions she’d finally managed to put to rest over the years. But Jack had already challenged what she’d believed simply by having come there. By what he had said about his mom. By what he’d said just now, and the quick, barely bridled anger behind it.

“I’d heard there were others,” she admitted quietly.

“Well, there weren’t. I’ve only hit one person in my life. And that was your deputy.”

He had no reason to lie about such a thing. Not after all these years.

“Really?” she asked, anyway.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Really.”

She could practically feel a corner of her old convictions crack. From Jack’s knee-jerk reaction, it sounded as if he’d only been defending his father when he’d hit Joe.

She knew now that Jack hadn’t agreed at all with his father’s actions. And though she hated what his father had done, and while there was no way on God’s green earth she would change her mind how she felt about that, she understood family loyalty well enough. If Joe truly had taunted Jack in such a way, then the man she’d thought of as another victim of the Larkins’ destructive legacy might well have deserved exactly what he’d received.

Uneasy with the doubts Jack caused her to feel, she forced her thoughts to her task. Thick steam was already rising as the evaporation process began, its sweet scent filling the room. It took forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. With over two hundred gallons in the pan, she had a lot of water to boil off, and other work to do before it became syrup. She still had to pack what she’d made last night.

A thermometer hung on the frame outside the multipaned window. Checking the temperature, she frowned. Joe had said the mercury was dropping. She just hadn’t realized it had fallen far faster than she would have liked. With the temperature now below freezing, the flow of sap from the trees into the holding tank would soon stop, if it hadn’t already.

“Joe is right, you know.” She spoke as she moved to the coffeemaker that was on its final gurgle and hiss. She couldn’t deny the conclusion Jack had drawn about the town having condemned them all. In her little neck of the woods, people were judged by their kin as much as they were by their own actions. The inhabitants of Maple Mountain weren’t exactly the Hatfields and the McCoys. To the best of her knowledge no one had ever taken after a neighbor with a shotgun. But once sides were chosen and people decided who was right and who was wrong, it was easier to make a loon fly backward than to get folks to change their minds. “You don’t want to get stuck out there. It’ll just be a minute before your coffee is ready.”

With the clock ticking on his departure, Jack jammed down the irritation that had slipped past his guard. Subtle, she was not. But she had a point. Getting stuck in the middle of nowhere was not something he wanted to do with a storm coming in. He did need to get out of there. He had movers coming at eight in the morning.

“Just answer one thing for me, would you?”

Removing the lid of a small insulated container, she filled it with hot water at the sink. “What’s that?”

“What is it that we’re being blamed for, beyond taking that property?”

For a moment it seemed her motions stilled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

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