When he finally did notice, he stopped in the middle of a sentence. We looked at each other for a minute, and then he said, “Eff?”

“I’ll think on it,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, a little uncertainly. Then he grinned, and I could see his confidence coming right back. “While you’re thinking, I’ll mention it to Papa, so that —”

“If you say one word to Papa before I’ve had a good long think, I’ll sew the tops of all your socks together before I pack them.”

“Eff!” Lan laughed, but he looked a little worried, too. “It’s a great opportunity. You have to grab it while you can.”

“I’m not grabbing anything until I’m sure whether I’m grabbing a fire nettle or a sprig of mint,” I said. “You’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks at least. I can tell. I want time to do some thinking of my own.”

Lan tilted his head sideways and narrowed his eyes at me. Then suddenly he nodded. “All right. But don’t take too long. And don’t go getting all tangled up in worries about what it’d be like. Hardly anybody back East is like Uncle Earn.”

He left, and I went back to my work. Weeding is a good job to do when you need to think about things, and I needed to think even more than I’d let on to Lan.

Papa had moved the family — well, the younger half of it, anyway — to Mill City when Lan and I were five, but I still remembered what it had been like before. Most of my aunts and uncles and cousins hadn’t liked it one bit that I was an unlucky thirteenth child, and they’d taken it out on me every chance they got. We’d gone back East for my sister Diane’s wedding when I was thirteen, and none of them had changed much except for being eight years older and eight years meaner. Uncle Earn had been ready to have me arrested or worse, just because I happened to be thirteenth-born.