*

The sound of the dog barking in the distance caught her attention, and Sadie leaned over the sink again, the steam still coming off the peaches and wrinkling her housedress. Dog was nowhere to be seen, and it’d been a while since she’d heard about the hobos. Maybe they’d moved on already.

The boys’d be fine with the dog, and if they had any trouble, they’d just run home.

Lifting the bowl of peaches onto the counter, she pulled out the cutting board and started chopping, prying out the pits with calloused fingers, and barely feeling the heat coming off them. The knife edge caught the sunlight as she sliced the peaches in half and then again, finally dropping them into a glass bowl.

It must be something in the way the light caught them, she thought,...

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