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My jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer. Of course I wasn’t okay. How could I possibly be okay, when he had told me he meant to do to me what the guard on the bus had done to Frannie? And maybe even worse—I had the distinct feeling, though without any exact knowledge, that a whipping would differ from a whuppin’ in some important and painful way. Mr. Garrison spanking Frannie with his hand had apparently represented a whuppin’. Mr. Carpenter had threatened to whip me right there in the street. What my ‘foster father’ planned to do to me seemed like it could well involve something worse than his farm-callused hand.
As these desperate, terrifying, pseudo-logical thoughts ran through my head, another voice, somewhere off in the distance of my mind, started to scream. Crazy. Fucking insane. Lunacy. What the ever-loving fuck are you even thinking about? Stop trying to figure out exactly what this fucked-up nonsense means and start trying to get the fuck out of here.
He had called me honey. That part hadn’t really sunk in at first—probably because I had not the slightest idea what to make of it. Apparently a man like Mr. Carpenter could call a girl honey despite having every intention of baring her ass and whipping her until she couldn’t sit down.
Yes, the screaming voice continued. He’s insane.
I turned my eyes to the truck door. If I managed to slip out of my seatbelt quickly enough, I might be able to open it and jump out. Mr. Carpenter wasn’t driving more than thirty-five; I could probably roll with the impact and not get hurt. The sky might have gotten dark enough that I could slip into the cornfield, where the stalks seemed about as high as my head, and conceal myself as I ran in a direction he wouldn’t see.
Thankfully the screaming in my head found that plan almost as crazy as my situation.
No, idiot, the voice said, changing its tone from disapproval to disgust and seeming to soften a little. Just don’t think you’ve somehow landed in a midwestern paradise.
“Grace?” he asked again. I turned back to look at him, and saw an apparently genuine look of concern on his face.
He’s probably getting some sort of subsidy to ‘care’ for you, the disgusted observer in my brain told me. He doesn’t want his cash payment to suffer because you got sick or anything.
“I’m fine,” I told him. Then I remembered about what he had told me to call him, and I added, “sir,” with what felt like just enough emphasis to leave a bit of doubt about whether I intended it to sound sarcastic.
Mr. Carpenter turned off the paved main road—it couldn’t be Main Street, at this point, and probably had a number rather than a name—onto a dirt one. Up ahead, a few hundred yards away, I saw a house. I almost rubbed my eyes, because at first it looked way too much like a farmhouse in a picture book to be real. Porch, check. Porch swing, check. Glow in the windows, check. Next to it, an honest-to-God weathervane. I thought I could even see a pump handle. Farther off, of course, lay a barn, which seemed like the most modern part of the place. It was red, but it was also much bigger than a picture-book barn, and clearly made of stronger, newer materials—aluminum, if I had to guess.
“You didn’t sound fine a moment ago,” Mr. Carpenter commented, his voice neutral, his eyes fixed ahead of us at what was obviously his home, the place where the faceless megacorp executives who ran the world these days had sent me to live, for my crime. “You sounded like you needed help.”
The disgusted observer tried to stop them, but the tears seemed to burst out of my eyes. I hated that this tiniest possible bit of kindness from a man who meant to teach me an old-fashioned lesson or some bullshit made me cry, but some part of me simply responded that way out of sheer emotional reflex.
“What the fuck?” I sobbed, just as the truck pulled into the little parking area next to the farmhouse. “How can you even ask me that, when… when…”
I covered my face in my hands, completely losing it and not minding anymore. At least for the moment I didn’t have to try to keep it together, or to think at all, really.
I felt his big, warm hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, honey,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. Today, and probably before today, too, if you ended up on the wrong end of the law that way.”
The hand squeezed gently, and the soothing feeling brought another heaving sob from my chest. I took my hands away from my face and clasped them in front of my chest. I looked at Mr. Carpenter with teary eyes and pleaded with him.
“Please… please, sir?” I begged, looking into his dark eyes.
He nodded slowly.
“It’s about your punishment for sassing me?” he asked. “You’re scared of the family strap?”
I felt my breathing speed up in my chest. There, said one of the many voices in my head, that’s why he said whip. I nodded frantically.
“Well,” he said, “you earned a whipping, and you’re going to get a whipping, but I’m going to let you choose whether you’ll have it tonight or tomorrow morning.”
CHAPTER 5
Grace
Mr. Carpenter didn’t ask me for my choice right then. After he had offered it to me, he immediately started to climb out of the truck. He opened my door for me, and I got out numbly, trying not to think about anything at all.
He led me to the door of the farmhouse. There, a slightly plump woman about Mr. Carpenter’s age, with honey blonde hair in a slightly disheveled bun, opened the door to us.
Shelly Carpenter—ma’am, Mr. Carpenter had told me to call her as soon as she had given me an unexpected hug—had supper ready. In a kind of daze at her direction, I helped get it onto the table. Chicken and dumplings. I blinked when I realized that my new foster mother had actually made the food that sounded to me like the most old-fashioned country meal imaginable.
And it tasted amazing. Part of that came from having only had a candy bar in the previous twelve hours, but most of it came from just how incredible a cook Shelly clearly was. Plus, sitting down with the Carpenters at an actual, honest-to-goodness wooden kitchen table in their cozy farmhouse made the food taste like nothing I’d ever eaten before.
“You come from the city, Grace, honey?” Shelly asked me, after I had taken a few bites.
