Raft of Stars Andrew Graff (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📖

saw a house with a well-kept lawn or a tidy garden, it gave her a pang of guilt. She’d missed out on college when she thought she’d done the right thing by staying in town with her abandoned mother. Five cool years passed, and then her mom remarried and moved to Tulsa, not a word about inviting Tiffany to join them. Tiffany tried to convince herself that she remained in Claypot so that her mother had a place to return to when her new marriage inevitably failed. It was a noble thought that bore much doubt, but the phone call never came. Once, a few months after her mom left, an envelope arrived from Tulsa with twenty-five dollars in it and no letter. After that—and it was three years now—silence. Except from the bank that held her mother’s outstanding mortgage. Tiffany regularly received dunning letters until the day she had to pack her car with a camp stove and tent and embark on her hungry summer. So here she remained, with no boyfriend and purple hair, working at a gas station, renting a house without a garden and waiting for pig trailers to flip. She couldn’t even keep her cupboards filled with staples. She often ran out of bathroom tissue. When you gonna get a man? Burt would ask, and it would stab her like a pin. Who would want her? Desirable women don’t become homeless and sleep in the ditches of cornfields, or live off stolen eggs, or bathe in creeks at night, or shiver themselves to sleep beneath unwashed blankets. Not even the dog wanted to be with her.

She stepped from the car and walked toward the barn. The sheriff’s truck was parked between the barn and the stable, as was Teddy’s. A small sedan Tiffany didn’t recognize was parked in the driveway near the house. There was no sign of the dog. A cow looked at her from the stable, as if waiting for her to do something interesting, and then it scratched its forehead on a fence post.

Tiffany was losing steam. “You seen a dog?” she asked the cow in a quiet voice. The cow licked the post where it had scratched its head and stepped away toward its feed.

Tiffany began to cry. The wind out here in the farm fields felt cooler than it should have. It stripped the sunlight from her body. She folded her arms around herself as she walked to the house. Maybe she’d sit on the porch awhile, wait for the dog to show up, or for the sheriff to come back so she could tell him she failed. The sheriff would probably be nice about it, which would be the worst part, because she knew he’d never trust her again, and their relationship would forever be reduced to thirty-second conversations about the price of gas and empty coffee carafes. Tiffany’s eyes blurred as she pulled herself up the front porch. She felt her throat tighten. She just couldn’t hold it in.

As she turned to sit, the front door swung open. Tiffany stood and took a startled step backward. A tall woman with dark hair and reddened eyes stood in the doorway. She was holding a balled-up Kleenex in one hand and the box in the other.

“Who are you?” asked the woman. There was confusion in her eyes, as if she’d been woken from sleep, or hadn’t slept at all. There was something familiar about those eyes too, their fierce competence, the way they were set in her face over that slim nose.

“My name’s Tiffany,” she said, wiping a tear from her face with the heel of her hand. She didn’t like for strangers to see her cry. She didn’t like for anyone to see her cry. The woman handed her a Kleenex. As Tiffany reached forward and begrudgingly took it, she realized who the woman must be.

“You’re Teddy Branson’s daughter, aren’t you?” asked Tiffany, pressing the Kleenex against her cheekbones.

The woman nodded.

“I’m so sorry to—” Tiffany paused. She could hardly describe to herself what she was doing here. “I came out here looking for a dog, the sheriff’s dog.” Tiffany waved her crumpled Kleenex out at the fields and her eyes blurred over with tears again. “And I thought he liked me, and I bought his dog a stupid cat, and now he’s not going to talk to me again.” She felt miserable gushing like this, but it didn’t matter. Not much did. All seemed lost in that bright morning light, those brown empty fields. “And you,” she went on, feeling even lower, “you’re here to find your boy.” Tiffany’s voice broke completely as she said it, guilt upon guilt, waves of it.

The woman stepped onto the porch and gave Tiffany another Kleenex. She looked out at the fields and the forest behind them. She looked at the young woman with purple hair crying on her dad’s porch.

“Come inside,” she said.

Tiffany let herself sob, feeling both pathetic and grateful.

“My name’s Miranda,” said the woman. “And I don’t mind company.”

Seven

“STILL TOO SHORT,” SAID FISH. “WE NEED LONGER ONES.”

Bread’s shoulders dropped. He held in his hands a bouquet of spruce roots not much longer than flower stems. He dropped them on the moss, wiped his hands, and trudged back to the small grove of spruce trees to try again. “Longer roots, longer roots,” he mumbled. “I can’t find no longer roots.”

Fish thought better of responding. After his grandpa and the sheriff crossed the river, the boys moved about a mile downstream, until they found a clearing in the cedars. Foot trails no longer existed, and they often had to force their way through brambles and tangles of pine. The woods left little sign of their passage. The wall of thorns and sap closed behind them, and they got to work on their raft.

Fish looked up at the sun. It was high in the sky now, well past noon. He’d busied himself for most of the morning trying to cut down