The Roots of the Olive Tree Read Free Page B

off the couch. She had her father’s height and his chin—pointed and heavily angled, although he’d always worn a beard, which softened his face. Bets didn’t have that option and as a result, people often felt accused when she spoke to them. “We could have stopped it if we’d known. I’m not going to let this become another festering secret we keep because it’s easier to tell ourselves that privacy is important. To hell with privacy.”
    Anna listened to the front door slam and the heavy crunch of Bets’s feet on the gravel. “She’s not going to find anything,” she said to Callie. “I got a good look when our girl jumped out of the car crying and I didn’t see a bit of luggage and not so much as a burger wrapper.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Mom thinks you took my side again.” Callie glanced down the hall at the closed door to Erin’s room.
    “There aren’t any sides,” Anna said, reaching for her granddaughter’s hand. “There’ve never been any sides. It’s all just one big endless circle.”
    “I don’t want to be sitting here when she comes back in,” Callie said.
    She sounded petulant, like she had at fourteen when her hair was a tangled mess and her feet were summer-browned. As a girl and then as a teenager, she’d been a blur running from Bets, running from Hill House, never wanting to be contained. Every spoken wish tied inextricably to leaving Kidron. Callie had thought the big wide world was holding its arms open for her. “Come down to the orchard with me. I need another basket of olives to get enough oil pressed,” Anna said. The orchard had a way of calming people.
    Callie rubbed her leg through the stiff denim. “In too much pain to do any serious walking. I’ll start lunch, I need to figure out another vegetable, since Erin won’t eat any of that ham we’ve got baking.”
    Anna rose and thanked God that her body functioned well enough for her to move around. She’d never been one to be idle. Not that her granddaughter’s leg kept her idle, but it allowed her to hide in kitchens and storerooms doing only the work she wanted to. Anna pulled a sweater from the front closet, grabbed her basket, and headed out the back door to the orchard. With Erin’s arrival, the day seemed cooler to Anna.
    The house would be in disarray when the geneticist arrived. Anna wondered what sort of man Dr. Hashmi was and whether he’d notice the chaos around him. Men weren’t blessed with the same intuition as women. At the bottom of the hill, she turned to look back at her house. It was a home built in stages, with rooms added as their family grew in size and in wealth. Like many of the homes in the Sacramento Valley, it had been patterned after the missions that the Spanish abandoned when they lost the war. It was one story with an adobe roof and stucco walls. From the back you could see the two wings that ran perpendicular to each other off the main structure. The kitchen, which for many years had served as a place to process the family’s olives, took up most of the north wing. The south, comprised of three bedrooms and a bathroom, was slightly longer than its counterpart. The main building held a master bedroom, renovated most recently, a sitting room, a dining room, and a library.
    This home, which had always been called Hill House, had been built by Anna’s father, Percy Davison. Over the years, she’d often wondered how a man had constructed such a perfect home for the women who’d come to inhabit it. When they moved from the canvas tent where they’d lived waiting on the fledgling orchard to sprout, providing enough collateral for the bank, her father told them their temple awaited them. Hill House was not the oldest home in Kidron, but because it was one of the few plots of elevated land in this part of the valley and the orchard was still family owned, it was one of the stops on the tourism route drawn up by the town. The brochure, which Anna had hanging on her refrigerator, called