Chosen Last, So This Ends Here

The coarse sandpaper caught my thumb again, and I pressed the sting into my apron before any blood could mark the pale birch. Two weeks of carving, sanding, and sealing, and the disc still had one rough crescent only my fingertips could find. It was no wider than a silver dollar, with a branching cut through the center so morning light could pass through it. On one face I had carved a peach blossom. On the other I had burned my initials and my mother's maiden name, Marsh, because in this valley a charm without a family name was only a pretty piece of wood. In Hollow Creek, that was how a woman declared herself ready. Every July seventh, unmarried women of the valley hung their charms on the old white oak behind the town hall, and every unmarried man who intended to marry climbed the tree before sunrise to take one down. If your charm was chosen, you were betrothed by noon and married before the frost. If it wasn't, you waited two years for the next Selection Day, because the town council only opened the rite on odd years. My mother had four months, maybe five. The doctors in Ridgeview had used the word aggressive twice in one sentence and then handed us a pamphlet about pain management. When we walked out of that clinic, she held my arm and said, "All I want is to see you settled, Thea. That's all I want." So this year, she would see it. I blew the sawdust off the charm and held it up to the window. The peach blossom looked good in the light. Not perfect, but good. My brother, Danny, had offered to carve it for me, since he's better with a knife, but I wanted my own hands on it. That mattered to me, even if it didn't matter to anyone else. "It's pretty," Danny said from the doorway. He had his work shirt on, the one with the company logo on the pocket, and dust on his boots from the lumber yard. "You going to hang it tonight?" After dark was the custom. Charms went up the night before Selection Day, and the men climbed at first light. Nobody watched. That was part of it. You hung your charm and went home and lay awake, and in the morning, either your branch was empty or it wasn't. "Tonight," I said. "You'll be there, right? You said you'd help." "I'll be there." He crossed his arms and leaned on the doorframe. "Lowest branch, like you said. And I'll tell Wes to keep an eye on it." Wes Carter was my best friend since second grade and also the closest thing this town had to a main hand on Selection Day. He'd been the one to oil the old climbing ropes for the last three years, the one who handed out the numbered tags, the one who made sure nobody snuck up the tree before dawn and cheated by taking a charm off the branch before the proper hour. Everybody trusted Wes. "Tell him directly," I said. "Not just in passing." "I'll tell him directly." Danny rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. "You're worse than Mom." "Mom is dying. Somebody in this house has to be difficult enough for both of us." His face changed. He looked down at his boots, and when he looked up again, he wasn't smiling. "Thea." "Don't." I turned back to the window. "Just do what I asked." I didn't want to spend the day before Selection Day crying. I had a shift at the diner, and I needed the money, and I needed to be somewhere other than this house with its smell of hospital soap and old carpet. So I put the charm in my jacket pocket, wrapped a scarf around my throat, and walked to work. The diner sat at the corner of Main and Sixth, across from the feed store and the pharmacy. It was called the Bluebird, and it had been run by the same family since before I was born. I'd worked there four years, mornings and afternoons, and I knew every regular by their coffee order. Today, the place was full of the usual pre-Selection chatter. The men, mostly. The unmarried ones, talking about who they might climb for. I stood behind the counter and poured coffee and pretended not to listen. "I heard the Adler girl's family is putting up a bonus," one of them said, a guy named Ray who worked at the quarry and had a laugh like a truck engine. "Fence-line acres. That's what I heard." "That's the Adlers," said another. "They'd buy their daughter a husband if they could." "That's what the charm is for, isn't it?" They laughed. I set down the coffee pot harder than I needed to, and they looked up. "Thea," Ray said, grinning. "You hanging a charm this year?" "Maybe," I said. "If I can find a man who can reach a branch without a bonus attached to it." That got a laugh out of the others, and Ray's ears went red. But there was a real question under his joke, and I know he meant it. Everyone in Hollow Creek knew my mother was sick. Everyone knew I was twenty-six, which was old for this town, old enough that people whispered about it. If I didn't get chosen this year, people would talk about me the way they talked about the Adler girl, like a woman whose family had to make up for her. I finished my shift at three, walked home, and found my mother awake and sitting by the kitchen window. She had a blanket over her knees and a cup of tea she wasn't drinking. She was thinner than she'd been a month ago, and her hands looked like something borrowed from a smaller, older woman. "Tell me about the charm," she said. I sat down across from her and described it. The birch. The peach blossom. The size and weight of it in my palm. She closed her eyes while I talked, and I knew she was seeing it, picturing the tree and the branch and the morning light. "Your father's charm," she said. "It was oak. With a star cut through it. I still have it somewhere." She'd told me that story a hundred times, but I let her tell it again. How she hung her charm on the third branch and how my father climbed before any of the other men, so early the dew was still on his shoulders. How he didn't even look at the other charms. How he went straight for hers. "He knew," she said. "Some men just know." I reached over and took her hand. Her fingers were cold, even under the blanket. "Wes is going to watch the branch for me," I said. "And Danny. It's on the lowest branch. Anybody could reach it." "The lowest branch," she repeated, and she looked at me with her pale eyes, still sharp underneath the tiredness. "That's smart. No climbing. You're making it easy for him." That was the whole plan. No climbing meant no risk of a man missing his footing or losing his nerve. No climbing meant the choice was simple: step up, take the charm, cross the square to our house, and say my name. On the lowest branch, my charm would be the easiest choice on the whole tree. What I didn't know was that the man I was making it easy for had already looked at the tree, in a manner of speaking, and already decided he wanted to do something else. That night, I hung my charm. I waited until the last light left the sky, and then Danny walked me to the town hall. The old white oak stood in the square behind it, branches like arms held out. A few other charms already hung in the dark, pale discs catching the moon. Danny lifted me to the lowest branch, and I slid the cord over the wood and tied it twice. Then I stood back and looked at my peach blossom in the moonlight. "You sure about the lowest branch?" Danny said. "Positive." He nodded. "Wes already rigged the ropes. He said he'd check on your branch first thing in the morning." "Good. Tell him I said thank you." We walked home. I didn't sleep. I lay in bed with my hands folded on my chest and listened to the house creak and the wind in the poplars, and I thought about my mother's face at my wedding. I thought about the bonfire and the fiddle music and the borrowed white dress that every bride in our family had worn. Around midnight, bored and hollow, I picked up my phone and scrolled the town forum. I don't know why. Maybe because the quiet made me nervous, and reading the usual noise about the rite made it feel more real. And then I saw it. An anonymous post, timestamped ten minutes earlier. The title was simple. "Second thoughts?" The body said: "Location: my fiancee's hometown. The women here hang a carved charm for a betrothal rite on the seventh of July, but I don't want to marry early. Everyone in town will be watching the tree tomorrow. Any advice from people who have gotten out of this? Asking for a friend." I read it twice. Three times. Then I sat up in bed with my heart pounding like it had somewhere to be. Because nobody in Hollow Creek called it "a betrothal rite." Nobody in this town wrote that way, like they were describing us to strangers. The post read like someone standing at a window, looking at us, deciding what to do with us. I scrolled down. There were three replies already. The first said, "Just don't climb." The second said, "If she's hanging it low, she's desperate. Don't let her trap you." The third, from a user named RoanokeGirl, said, "You already posted on her town's forum. You're not sorry, you're bragging." I stared at that last reply longer than the others. Then I looked at the clock. Ten minutes past midnight. In six hours, the men would climb the oak, and someone would reach for the lowest branch, and I would know. If not, my mother would not live to see the next Selection Day. I put the phone face down on my nightstand and lay back down. I told myself the post was from a stranger. Some boyfriend visiting for the festival. Some man who'd gotten engaged in a hurry and gotten scared. It didn't have to be anyone I knew. But I kept seeing the words. I don't want to marry early. Fiancée's hometown. Asking for a friend. I lay awake until four, when the sky went gray, and then I got up and got dressed.