Chapter 2

To get down the mountain, I needed something to keep us alive.

The shack had nothing but a cracked pot, two worn-out quilts, and a dull knife for chopping kindling.

Grandma had survived all those years on two things: wild greens she pulled from the hillside, and the scraps I managed to beg off folks in the hollow whenever I went down.

But I was nine years old. My head barely reached the counter of a proper stove.

In my previous life, I scraped by picking through trash. Back in 1968, times were so lean that people held onto anything with a shred of use left in it.

Glass soda bottles, scrap wire, old newspapers, I could haul them to the junk dealer in town and get a few pennies.

A few pennies bought a little paper sack of salt, enough to boil wild greens into something warm for Grandma and me for a whole month.

But that was keeping your head above water. That wasn't living.

After all those decades in my previous life, the thing that ate at me most was never setting foot in a schoolroom.

When word came up the mountain that the county was helping poor kids to get to college, I was already eighteen. I couldn't spell my own name.

All I could do was stand in the doorway of the shack, listening to the far-off noise from the hollow below, watching those schoolkids leave one by one with their faces lit up like Christmas morning.

After Grandma died, that door swung shut and stayed shut.

This time around, I wasn't letting it close.

From now until I turned eighteen, I had nine years. Nine years was more than enough.

I searched every corner of the shack and found a rusty tin box tucked against the base of the wall.

It was all that was left of my mother.

In my previous life, I always figured it held nothing but a handful of old clothes.

But when I lifted the lid this time, I found a book hidden beneath the clothes. It was a beat-up dictionary, the cover hanging on by threads, the pages yellowed and soft as old bedsheets.

Mom had known how to read once.

I held that dictionary and sank to the dirt floor, my tears dripping onto the worn-out pages.

Grandma heard me crying and crawled over, feeling her way along the ground. "What is it, child?"

I wiped my face and pressed the dictionary into her hands. "Grandma, it's a book. Mom left it for me."

Grandma's bony fingers moved across the pages, back and forth. "A book? For reading out of?"

"Yes," I said.

Grandma smiled then.

Her burned-up, twisted face pulled tight with the smile, and it looked almost frightening. But to me, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Grandma said, "Your mom had a good head on her shoulders. Sophie, you learn to read, you won't turn out like the rest of them."

When she said "the rest of them," her voice went cold as the draft through the walls.

I knew exactly who she meant.

Down at the Miller family place, there was Grandpa's new wife, Linda Parker.

And there were Grandma's two ungrateful sons, my uncle Charles Miller and my own daddy, James Miller. Plus their wives and their young ones.

That whole bunch lived in a big farmhouse with a proper roof and a woodstove, ate the commodities the county handed out, and wore store-bought clothes.

Not a single one of them ever climbed this hill to see Grandma in twenty years.

"I'll learn," I said, hugging that dictionary to my chest. "Grandma, once I can read, there's something I mean to do."

"What's that?" Grandma asked.

"I'm going to report every last one of them."

*****

Reading wasn't going to fill my belly. Before anything else, I had to find something to eat.

Before the sun broke the ridge the next morning, I grabbed my burlap sack and started down the hill.

The path was frozen solid in the depths of winter, and my shoes were nothing but worn-out canvas with holes in the soles.

Every step felt like walking on jagged glass, pain shooting up through my feet into my legs.

But I couldn't slow down. I had to reach the junk dealer in town before anybody else was stirring.

As I walked, I turned over every scrap of memory from my sixty-two years before.

Back in 1968, everybody was scraping by any way they could. The shelves at the general store sat half empty all year long.

I needed food stamps for most of the flour, sugar, lard, and kerosene, and the rest took cash that nobody had. I had no stamps and no money, so my only shot was trading under the table.

In my previous life, I never had the nerve to go anywhere near those back-alley deals. But things were different now. Who would look twice at a nine-year-old girl?

At the junk yard, I traded three glass bottles I'd picked up for nice cents.

Nice cents got me a tiny sack of salt at the general store. But at the trading spots tucked away in the hollows and back roads, I could get more.

I closed my fist around the nice cents and turned down the dirt alley.

Back in my previous life, when I was in my twenties, I'd come this way with Garvey from the next hollow over.

By then, the back-alley trading was mostly dried up. But I still remembered how it worked.