The House Girl

Morehead Brothers’ Surveying were the first words Nedda learned to read. She and Wesley were sitting cross-legged in the Bermuda grass, sucking nickel candies Nedda had snatched from the pantry. At the bottom of the hill, two men staked a level rod into the ground while a third jotted in a notebook. Wesley had risen to leave, spooked, when their truck came into view. At first, Nedda was scared, too, sure that the poof of dust barreling up the road was Mr. Leighton, Wesley’s father, returning from town. Wesley was still unsettled when the men parked beneath the sycamores on the lip of the estate, but Nedda begged Wesley to finish her hair.

Wesley continued to cinch Nedda’s coarse, unruly locks with woody stems from the dying briar flowers that girded the porch. Soon though, Nedda realized that Wesley’s attention was divided between her and the men working diligently in the thinning dawn haze. Nedda turned to get a better look, and Wesley tightened her grip, yanking Nedda back by the roots.

“Be still if you want me to do this right,” she said, her tone milk-warm.

It was just after daybreak; blades of pink-orange light pierced the horizon. An icy mist coated the grass, the thaw sparkling like steel in the early hours. Since dusk, the girls had been playing pretend in the moldering slave cabins on the brushy outskirts of the estate, taking turns in the roles of mother/daughter, and issuing whimsical assignments as teacher/student that would only garner praise. They had sweated through their collars and dirtied their dresses scraping against the chalky clay walls, gutted from time. If Nedda’s mother were alive, she’d have thwacked Nedda’s calves with a broom for running through the cabins, reminding her that their past wasn’t pretend. But all week Wesley had woken Nedda early, coaxing her from the suffocating heat of the basement, insisting that the two play in the fields until sunrise.

“What they want?” Nedda asked.

“Don’t matter.”

“Tell me what the truck says.”

Wesley’s fingers worked faster, her hands swallowing up clumps of Nedda’s hair, straightening them into a crosshatch and fashioning them into a plait. “Trucks don’t talk.”

Nedda smiled. “Now you said you’d teach me to read.”

“Right now I’m teaching you to braid.”

Nedda tore up a fistful of dew-soaked grass and flung it back at Wesley. “I know how to do that. Now what’s that say?”

Wesley laughed and loosed Nedda’s hair. She pointed to the truck. “More-head Brothers Sur-vey-ing.” She read slowly, a long, single breath, then told Nedda to repeat her. Nedda spoke softly, as if just breathing an outline of the words.

“More-head Bro-thers Sur-vey-ing,” Wesley said again. “More-head, come on. I don’t know if you’re saying it right if I can’t hear you.”

Nedda’s face warmed, the syllables stumbling off her tongue, the sounds fat to her ear.

“Like this,” Wesley said, and started again.

Wesley had already taught Nedda to Turkey Trot and had entrusted her with the secret to the family’s cornbread recipe (a teaspoon of honey and vanilla for every cup of flour). She taught Nedda addition and how to say “thank you” in six languages. Everything she had learned from her tutors and had thought enough to share. The girls had taken to each another shortly after Nedda’s mother took a job with the Leightons five years earlier. Aside from Wesley’s brother Bryce, they were each other’s only option for playmates.

Wesley kissed the back of Nedda’s clammy neck. “That’s good enough.” Nedda repeated the words several times. One of the men flapped his arms, shaping the air between his hands as if describing something colossal.

“What they want?” Nedda asked.

“How should I know? Daddy must have hired them.”

Mr. Leighton had driven off late last night. Nedda had heard the pebbles spitting out from under his tires when she was in the pantry, tonguing the...