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The morning the carnival came to Citrus County, Pip was out in the grove before the sun had finished climbing over the tree line, picking up the fallen oranges the way her daddy had shown her. You never left the drops on the ground. Not if you wanted to keep the flies away. Not if you wanted to keep what little the land still gave you.

Sissy had slept through the sound of trucks on the highway—that low thunder that came from the west and moved toward them like weather. Pip had not. She had lain there in the half-dark of their shared room and listened until the sound faded and the grove went quiet again, and then she had gotten up and walked out into the orange light because she could not sleep and there was always work to do.

The fruit that summer was small and bitter. The freeze the winter before had done something to the trees that nobody talked about out loud, but everybody felt. Her mother moved through the kitchen with a new kind of silence. Her daddy was gone more than he was home. And the grove—which had been in their family since before Pip was born, since before her mother was born—smelled different now. Still sweet, still that thick blossom-and-citrus that she had breathed her whole life. But underneath it, something else. Something that had no name she knew.

She was setting the last of the drops into the bucket when Sissy appeared at the edge of the grove, barefoot and squinting, her hair loose around her shoulders.

“You hear those trucks?” Sissy said.

“Yes.”

“Mama says it's the carnival.”

Pip looked up. The sky above the tree line was the color of a peach left too long in the sun. Beautiful the way things are beautiful when they are on the edge of going bad.

“I know,” she said.