Declan doesn’t want to hear what Lena’s saying. He wants to haul on the reins of Time itself, like his grandfather hauling back on the plowing team. In the days before tractors, the old man was oak-tall, the horses copper giants. They could’ve slowed Time now, Declan thinks, except the horses are long gone, and Grandad’s hands were light as straw at the end.

“I’m taking the scholarship.” The news marches at Declan through the warm air. “I’m going to Smith in the fall.”

Lena’s shoulder to shoulder with him on the worn porch step. When they were kids, that summer when they’d both outgrown her tire swing and he first started waking up with her smile like a lamp in his head, her parents joked how he’d shot up tall and she stayed behind. Now, standing, the top of her head comes up to his chest. Sitting, he could look her in the eye, except he can’t. Her eyes are like the first spring green on the fields.

“I’ve got to do it,” she says. “This place is…” She laughs, waves a hand like she’s brushing it all away, Grandad’s fields and the old farmhouse and Declan too.

He’s known her laugh since he first knew anything. Home, he thinks. This place is home. She squeezes his arm. “I’ll miss you.”

Now she’s telling him she’ll send him fat letters every week. She’ll camp by the mailbox waiting for his answers. “Don’t let me down,” she says. “I don’t want Hi-I’m-fine-see-ya. Send me real news.” He thinks about her sitting behind a stack of books, drinking words like lemonade, and wonders if she’ll want to hear about his pumpkin harvest or the Christmas trees. He thinks about hauling on those reins, slowing Time down so much it backs up and lets him say what he’s never had the guts for. He never could, when she’s the sister he doesn’t have, and he’s planted on this farm like a scrub pine. I love you. I love you.

“Dex,” she says. He doesn’t have to look around to see her smile. “You there?”

When he was tiny, he’d itched to drive the plowing team. Granddad handed him the reins, but the rough leather straps cut into his hands and the horses felt nothing. Grandad laughed and promised he could try again. He didn’t get big enough before the tractors came in.

Now he forces his mouth open, pushes the right words out into the sun. “I’m glad for you.” Wondering if, when she’s hundreds of miles away, the fields will still turn green.