We both need cheering up, Ruth had said. She gnawed her fingernails down to the quick, staring at the shed as if it held the answers when it really only confused her even further. Why would Ellen’s sweater be in her father’s shed? She had to ask her mother. Tires rolled onto the driveway. Junie listened as one door, then the other, opened and shut. “Come on. Let’s show Mommy what you got,” Ruth said. Sarah didn’t respond. Junie looked up at the sky and wondered just how much God wanted to test her and why. She thought she’d dealt with Ellen’s disappearance long ago, and she now knew that she had just blacked it out, like a bad dream. She had no idea how to help Sarah, and today’s round of changing sheets had just about put her over the edge. Had she become so complacent about Sarah’s regression that she was actually enabling her? Junie jammed her throbbing finger back into her mouth, cursing the splinter that had pricked it in the shed.
