Page 18 of Harvest Moon

But really, was I doing any good at all being there, if half the time I barely saw her? I had come to help her, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t doing that, unless cooking her one meal a day counted. Two if I was lucky.

She did seem to be eating, so that was something.

After the dishes were done, we walked over to a house on the next street. A nice older lady answered the door, and Claudia introduced me to Mrs. Morgan, then her daughter Harmony, a pretty brunette woman about my age.

Then Claudia led me down a hall to a quiet room where a guy sat in front of a big TV set. “Heya, Brook. I thought I’d bring my cousin Alexis by, introduce him around. We few, we proud, we sucker omegas, right?”

Brook’s age was hard to place. Omegas tended to look young well into their forties, but I could tell he was older than me. The dark circles under his eyes stood out like bruises. He pressed a button on a thing he was holding, and that... was weird. It wasn’t shaped like a remote—more like it was intended to be held in both hands—but it had buttons like one. The screen had frozen when he pressed it, like the pause button on a DVD player.

It was a game console. Or... something like that. I’d seen them on TV before, but no one back home really had time or money for things like that. I’d had a friend who had his mom’s Atari from the eighties, but that had looked way different.

Brook gave me a nod without meeting my eye. “Alexis.”

“Hi,” I offered back. I started to extend my hand to shake, but behind Brook, Claudia threw up her hands and shook her head, so I dropped it again. That didn’t really seem to help. The lines around his mouth tightened, and he stared down at his hands.

Okay, we tried it her way. My turn. I spun to face the TV and dropped onto the couch next to him, looking at the frozen screen. “So this is a, what, Nintendo?”

He turned a confused side-eye on me that was pretty impressive. “Um, no. It’s a PlayStation.”

“And that’s different from a Nintendo how?”

This time, he actually turned in his seat to look at me, face incredulous. He glanced over his shoulder at Claudia, who shrugged. “Alexis grew up in a really small town. You think Grovetown is small, but it’s kind of a metropolis, comparatively.”

I shrugged. “I mean, technically I didn’t grow up in town. We were about a mile outside of town. But town was smaller than Grovetown too. We have a gas station and a hardware store, and, um... that’s about it.”

His mouth fell open, brows knitting together. His horror was a palpable thing; like he absolutely couldn’t conceive of a place smaller than Grovetown. “And you’ve never seen a PlayStation.”

“Nope,” I agreed. “What’s it do?”

Yeah, Birch wanted me to drag the guy out of his house for a hike or whatever, but that didn’t feel right. They said Brook had been through something, and I figured he’d chosen this nice, quiet, soothing place, and this video game thing for a reason. It was his happy place.

Maybe they were right and him being alone wasn’t helping—I had yet to meet a fellow omega who actually liked being alone—but dragging him out into nature wasn’t going to help. Not any more than trapping me in a tiny dark room would have helped if I were the one going through a tough time.

From the ultimate beginner question, it wasn’t a huge leap to ask if two people could play his game, and if Brook very much minded teaching me, and half an hour later, we were playing something called Sackboy. It was cute, and something about the soft, colorful world of the game was soothing. I could see why he was playing it.

“For some reason I thought video games were all about stealing cars and shooting people and stuff,” I said, without taking my eyes off the screen.

Next to me, he shrugged. “Some of them. It’s not really my thing.”

“Cool. I like this.”

He turned to look at me, meeting my eye for a second before going back to the game. “Me too.”

10

Ridge

“When should I plant these?” Ms. Creery lifted a bag of ranunculus bulbs in front of her face, squinting at the little print on the top flap.

“Just make sure the temperature’s regularly below fifty degrees, and you should be all right. Considering how warm things’ve been lately, I don’t think you’d do any harm waiting until late October, maybe even start of November.”

“If you’re sure,” she warbled, sticking her bottom lip out.

I gave her my best smile. “Just keep an eye on those temperatures, Ms. Creery. Better they be a little cooler than a little warmer when you get ’em in the ground.”

She nodded, clutching the little bag to her chest, and scuffled her feet across the concrete outside, through the sliding doors, to check out inside.

“Young man?” A middle-aged lady with a perfect blond coif raised her hand and waved at me.

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