Stolen Honey by Nancy Means Wright

people feel about farming. That it’s the kind of job you don’t need an education for, just to milk cows. When that’s not true at all.” Emily was warming to the subject. “You have to know about nutrition, and milking machines, and artificial insemination. My mother works all day at it. And we’re still living on the edge!”
    “I know,” murmured Donna, feeling she should make a noise of some kind after that impassioned speech. And she did know what living on the edge was. Her family was a good example of it. Milk and honey, she thought. It sounded romantic, but you couldn’t make a real living off it. Herself, she’d do something one day. She’d be a professional, like Ms. Wimmet.
    She got out of the pickup and slammed the tinny door behind her. It popped open again.
    “Damn the thing,” Emily said. “I mean, this is what I’m talking about. We can’t afford a new pickup because my mother is trying to buy my father out—and so she keeps patching together the old machinery. Frankly, I’d be just as happy if she’d let him buy her out. Move us to town. Then I wouldn’t have to share this old truck. Alyce has her own Volvo, you know; she looks at me like I’m just a local hick—an outsider.”
    “Somebody painted Squaw on my bicycle,” Donna said, suddenly blurting it out, then reddening with the confession. “It was one of those ZKE boys, I’m sure, I saw them afterward, laughing.” Emily looked at her.
    “It was worse than that. It was horrible. It said, Squaws Fuck. Squaws Kill. Like they really think I killed that boy!” The tears were crowding her eyes again.
    “Hey,” Emily said, “the ones that count know you didn’t hurt that guy. The frat boys are just looking for a scapegoat. Not to mention a good lay. That dumb Bozo thinks I’m a lay ’cause I’m a town girl. Well, you can’t give in to them or they’ll take advantage.”
    “I know,” Donna said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s what Mother says. I mean, that’s what she’d say if she knew what I’ve been going through. But I don’t tell her everything. She’s in trouble enough with the police for planting marijuana.”
    Emily laughed. “My mother plants hemp illegally. They’re a pair, your mother and mine. Mom’s getting to be a living example of civil disobedience. Now she’s burning her trash out in the pasture, and that’s against the town ordinance.”
    Emily got Donna blowing her nose, laughing about their unruly mothers. Donna told how her mother burned her trash, too, because she couldn’t afford to pay thirty dollars a week to have it carted away. “Now Uncle Olen’s found out about it, but he doesn’t say anything because he’s in love with her.”
    “Really?” Emily sat down on the porch steps and Donna sank down beside her, shrugged her book bag off her back. It felt good to do that; her shoulders straightened and she felt lighter.
    “Sure, he is. Of course, he’s ages older than she is. I mean, like fifteen years. He’s ready to retire, practically. Mother’s forty-six.”
    “She’s younger than my mother. Mom just turned fifty and she doesn’t like it.”
    “Who would? Anyway, Uncle Olen’s a bug about obeying the law, but because of Mother he has to make compromises. He’s having a struggle.”
    “Does your mom like him? I mean, you have a father, right?”
    Donna glanced at her friend. She knew that Emily’s father had left the family for another woman. But Emily’s face was expressionless.
    “As a family friend, that’s all. Mother knows how he feels. She just ignores it. But he’s helping now to clear our names. So I want him to keep coming around. I want to get this behind us. I want to go on with my life.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    The girls sat in silence a few minutes. Donna heard a tractor grinding up from the pasture. It was pleasant here, with the pear trees in delicate white bloom, the mountains rising lavender-blue across die road. At home Donna lived in