“Yep. It’s a little flower. That’s what my daddy used to call me. His little flower. Until I got tall. Then he called me his sunflower.”

“Where’s your daddy now?” Poppy’s eyes misted for an instant.

“He’s far away.”

“Is that where you grew up? Far away?”

“No. I grew up right around here.” Now that was like a total lie but it ought to throw off anybody coming around later looking for a Poppy who grew up in northern Virginia. No worry about her real home popping out. Poppy never told anyone her real home town.

Really, how could you tell someone you grew up on Sooy’s Boot, New Jersey? Sooy’s Boot! How could you let those words past your lips?

“I grew up far away,” Katie said. “In Georgia.”

“I figured you were from somewhere down South.”

“How come?”

“Yo‘ axent, hunny,” she said, mimicking Katie’s drawl. “Lank Joe-jah.”

“I don’t have an accent.”

“Oh, yes, you—” Poppy stopped as her hand found a depression in Katie’s scalp on the left side of her head— in her skull. “Hey, what’s this dent in your head?”

“I… I had an accident.”

“What sort of accident?”

“I broke my head.” Poppy’s stomach turned.

“Shit! I mean, shoot! When did that happen?”

“When I was little.”

“When you were—?” Poppy had to laugh. “You’re not so big now. At least you weren’t born that way. If you were I might think you were an Appleton.”

“What’s a Appleton?”

“They’re some weird folks from back around where I grew up. Lots of them got weird-shaped heads.”

“I thought you said you grew up around here.”

“Yeah,” Poppy said quickly. “Yeah, well, somewhere not far from here.” Not far in miles, she thought. Probably less than two hundred. But so very far in every other way it might as well be like Mars or someplace.

Sooy’s Boot… a hiccup on one of the roads running through the heart of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. She was born and raised there, which made her like a fullfledged Piney. Which meant “poor hick” to most people.

But she didn’t remember feeling poor when she was growing up. Mom had the Kmart job in May’s Landing, and Dad worked the pineland’s annual cycle: He cut sphagnum moss in the spring, picked blueberries and huckleberries in the summer, then cranberries toward fall, and cut cordwood through the winter. They had everything they needed.

Until Mom died. She’d been bothered by the veins in her legs forever, and one day one of her legs got red and sore. She should have seen a doctor, but she put it off and put it off, and then one day at work she grabbed her chest and keeled over. She died on the way to the hospital. Coroner said a giant clot had come loose from one of the veins in her leg and clogged her heart. Or something like that.

That left Poppy and Dad. She was all he had, and he doted on her. And no doubt Poppy would like still be living in the pines, would have grown up to be another Piney girl married to a Piney guy, raising a bunch of little Pineys… if it hadn’t been for basketball.

Still brushing Katie’s hair, Poppy smiled. Jesus, she’d been good. Dad had drilled all the fundamentals into her before she was ten, and by middle school she was playing with the boys at recess and giving them a run for their money.

The coach at the regional high school took one look at her in tryouts and put her in the starting five of his varsity squad. She had to put up with some heavy resentment until they started winning like they’d never won before.

All because of me, she thought.

No brag. Truth. She’d been totally awesome in the paint—could dribble circles around anyone who got in her way. And when they walled up to block her out, she hung back and dropped in three pointers. And when they got so frustrated that they started fouling her, she’d sink two for two on her free throws—ninety-five percent from the line.

By junior year she’d already been offered a full ride at Rutgers. Dad had been ecstatic: Not only was his little flower All State, but she was going to college. That big round ball was going to be her ticket out of poverty and the pines.

Then she did a real Appleton thing: She fell in love.

With Charlie Pilgrim, of all people. Even now she couldn’t help wincing at the whole thing. How could she have been so totally stupid?

Well, one thing leading to another, as it so often does, Poppy had found herself pregnant. And since there was no way she’d have an abortion—after all, this was Charlie’s baby and they were in love—she had to quit basketball.

Dad was crushed, of course. And seeing his face every day when she came home right after school instead of practicing with the team became a total torture that finally got to be too much to take.

So she and Charlie had run off to New York City where Charlie was going to find a job and they were going to get married. Except Charlie never did find steady work and they never got around to like getting married. They wound up on welfare, sharing a filthy Lower East Side apartment with two other couples.

And then the baby had been born. She was beautiful, she was glorious, and so that was what they named her: Glory.

But soon Glory had started having fits, and the doctors at NYU Medical Center said she had a brain defect, something wrong in her head that gave her epilepsy. They tried all sorts of medications but she kept on having fit after fit after fit—the doctors called them seizures— until her eighty-ninth day of life when she went into a final unstoppable fit that lasted until she died.

All the doctors had been sorry; some of the nurses even cried. They all said they didn’t know why she had all those fits, but Poppy knew. It was Appleton blood. Some of it was in her. Dad had always said there wasn’t, but what had happened to Glory was proof. Poppy had bad blood. Appleton blood.

She hadn’t been too easy to be with after that. She totally hated the doctors, hated everyone around her, hated Charlie for getting her pregnant, but like hated herself most of all. Charlie couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted to take her back to Sooy’s Boot but no way could she face Dad again. Not after losing the baby because of Appleton blood.

So Charlie had left without her. Probably told all sorts of tales about her when he got back. Poppy hadn’t cared. She totally wanted to die. And she damn well might have killed herself if she hadn’t discovered the unholy trinity: grass, speed, and coke. They hadn’t killed the pain, but they’d eased it, made it like bearable.

Some long, dark years had followed, years that were mostly a blur now.

She tried not to think about the things she did to get by. She fell in with some bad people, even turned tricks when she was desperate, OD’d a couple times, got beat up more than a couple times, and just might be dead by now if she hadn’t found Paulie.

Paulie had changed her life, and she liked to think she like changed Paulie’s—for the better, of course.

Her only regret was that she hadn’t gone back home, just for a visit. She’d been so wrapped up in herself, she never imagined something could have been wrong with Dad… that he wouldn’t always be there. And then… he wasn’t there… would never be there again… and she never knew until he was six months in the ground.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do when this is over, she thought as she finished weaving Katie’s French braid. Tending to Katie had awakened a longing in her. She’d thought she never wanted to see Sooy’s Boot again, but now…

She felt like going home. She still had family in the pines. Maybe she could like reconnect… if any of them would speak to her.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Katie said.

“Sure thing, honey bunch. And you can check out your braid in the mirror while you’re at it.

She had her halfway there when the phone rang.

Poppy hurried her into the bathroom. “Now, you stay in there till I come and get you,” she told her, then dashed for the phone.