Worms wriggle against Lucy’s fingers as she digs. She’s kneeling down in the soil, the shadow of Pop against her back.

“What your Momma did ain’t right,” he says, shaking his head. “Bargained you away. All for what? Half a spell and a few kisses from the man next door?” He turns, his cloudy eyes trained on the line where the sky meets the hill. His disappointment feels like the underside of a rock, unyieldingly cold. “It always ends in a bed of soil.”

Her knees are damp, and her fingernails are black with earth. She sits on her heels and looks up at him, tucking a strand of hair behind her rounded ears, so unlike his.

Not that she has any physical traits that resemble Pop.

They are as different as worms and crows.

A puff of smoke from his pipe hides his face. “I ain’t much better,” he adds, softly. “Whole reason we can't leave this land. Tied to this place now.” The ground crunches under the toe of his boot as he tests the ground. “It was a bad bargain.”

It’s the first time Lucy has heard him admit this, his voice sodden with regret. She looks down at his boots, covered in scuffs and remnants of the lands he’s walked before. She half-expects to see a chain snaking out from his pant leg and disappearing into the ground, like the roots of the clementine tree in front of her.

“That’s why we haven’t been able to eat the clementines,” he continues, nodding toward the tree. A fly buzzes in his face, and he shakes his head gently to dislodge it from the tip of his nose. “Fruit’s too bitter. Blood will do that, if too much soaks into the soil.”

Even at twelve, she doesn’t think that is entirely true, but she recognizes that he’s trying to tell her something, in his soft, sparse way.

Pop’s voice has a finality to it.

It’s hard to argue with him.

“Pennies,” he says with a nod, not for the first time. “Only thing for it.” He digs a copper penny out of his pocket and looks over at Lucy’s handiwork, a small round hole in the ground right at the base of the tree. A section of root is exposed, a pale moon in a dark sky.

He nods his approval and lets the penny fall into the hole. Lucy covers it up, pats the earth solid, then looks up at Pop.

“Next one,” he says, and she shifts a little to the left, hands already sinking into the dirt, muscles pulling taut with every shove forward and back.

“Your Momma…” he begins, and then shakes his head, words dead before they even take a breath. “You’ll be different, though.”

His assurances are far from comforting. They weigh on her shoulders especially now, so thin with youth. She has the same bones as her Momma, bird-brittle, with harsh cliffs of skin and creeks of muscles.

She is a graceless collection of lines and angles.

Her digging is elegant enough though. Fluid. She understands this. The soil, the worms, the sweat that trickles down the back of her neck.

They bury nine pennies altogether, the copper gleaming like a smile, each acquired through various means.

Nine pennies for good fortune.

Nine nods.

Nine turns of her slim, square shoulders as she circles the tree.

Nine whispered pleas.

Pop digs into his pocket, looking at the last penny resting in his weathered palm, considers its etched face, and then slips it back into his pocket. “One more for the threshold,” he decides.

Lucy stands, brushing her hands against her thighs, her stockings already lost to the whims of branches.

“Come on,” he says. “Before the sun sets.”

She slips her hand in his. As they walk toward the house, the air pink in the fading light of the day, Lucy looks back and glimpses a sudden shock of emerald atop the spindly skeleton of the tree.