Amy flung herself into the creaking wooden chair across from her sister. “What are you doing, anyways?” But she instantly forgot her question upon spying a ceramic bowl in the center of the table. “I didn’t know there were oranges! Oh, Jo! Such fancies we have now!” Oranges were a rare delicacy, shipped all the way from Florida or raised in a greenhouse, and only the wealthiest households were able to afford them.
It was true. Though it was still a bit soon for Jo’s royalties to make the March family much in the way of actual dollars, Jo’s career now brought certain niceties into the house on a regular basis. And Jo had to admit, the more-than-modest success of the book had been satisfying, if bewildering, to acknowledge. It had completely taken her by surprise, and if a few obnoxious reviewers had dismissed her work as slight feminine rubbish, her pride was somewhat assuaged by the very real physical comforts said scribblings had brought them.
Jo pulled the fruit bowl away from her sister, thumping it back to the table, where it had been holding a pile of letters down. “Mama’s saving those for preserves,” she scolded.
“Hannah hasn’t let Mama Abba make preserves in years,” the youngest and blondest and prettiest of the March sisters answered back.
Youngest and prettiest and by far the most irritating, Jo thought. At least I got that part right.
“So what’s gotten you all up in arms?” asked Amy.
Jo turned back to the table in front of her and motioned to the pile of mail with a touch of incredulity. “These are letters from my readers.”
Amy was making a little pile of orange peels on the table. “All those? For you? You’re no fun at all! Why would anyone write you?”
“Precisely the question.” Jo quirked an eyebrow. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because they feel that I write to them . . . well, for them.”
“You mean in the book?” Amy had gone wide-eyed, as if the idea of Jo’s newfound regard—or more specifically, her little tome’s—had only now struck her. “At least they aren’t thronging to our actual house, I suppose. Your readers.”
“Could you imagine their disappointment? Upon learning the home of the Great American Authoress was this damp and earwiggy place?”
“I suspect they’d be more shocked by your earwiggy curls,” Amy sniffed, with a self-satisfied toss of her own neat braids. “And what do these letters say?”
Jo stared at the pile. “Some begin by asking for an auto or a photo—neither of which I can afford to send. But really, they want the very same thing. All of them.”
“Well, what is it?” Amy asked, impatient now.
Jo sighed. “They want to know how it all ends, which apparently means who marries who.”
“Well, they have a point. How does it end?” Amy cocked her head, sucking juice from her delicate fingers.
Jo snorted. “It ends the way it ends! Isn’t it enough the way I left it? That I become a writer? That Laurie goes off to college, and our father returns from war? That a very serious boy proposes to our very pretty sister—and that you, scamp, learn the error of your ridiculous ways?”
Amy smirked. A curl of orange peel fell to the tabletop.
“You’re hideous.” Jo flicked the peel gingerly off an envelope. “You should live in a barn.”
“I’m hideous? While you’re the one telling the whole world about the time Mr. Davis struck me and made me throw away my pickled limes?” Amy leaned forward and pinched the soft white bit of Jo’s wrist.
It was true; some of the more popular chapters of Jo’s little book had involved Amy’s misbegotten transgressions at their old school—in particular, a scene of the littlest March smuggling a sack of concealed treats into her desk and being punished as a result.
Amy had sworn to never forgive Jo, though she’d enjoyed her newfound fame all the same. “Of course that character is inspired by me,” she’d say to anyone who asked. “Really, I created her myself.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be such a ravening little pickled piglet every second of every day. Besides, those limes did, in point of fact, fund the purchase of those very oranges,” Jo teased, “so I assumed you approved of those sorts of things.”
“And so I do, those things. Most things. Though Meg was right that it was a curious choice to invent a neighboring dowager aunt who absolutely despises us all . . .”
Not this again.
“You know why.” Jo frowned. “It was just, everything was a bit too—”
“Treacly, I know, I know. The great and temperamental Jo March can only handle so much sugar in her spice.” Amy looked at Jo sideways. “If only we did have a rich aunt.”
“Anyway, it’s not about me,” Jo tried to explain, as she had a thousand times before. “It’s about the story. They all come with their own shape and spirit, you know. I can’t control how they turn out.”
“Why not?” Amy demanded, shoving a section of lime-funded orange into her mouth. Even the scent was intoxicating, especially within the rather more pedestrian walls of Orchard House. The smell of adventure and faraway lands.
Well worth the price of the limes, Jo thought.
Amy kept going, dribbling juice as she spoke. “You’re the writer, aren’t you?”
“I am, and use a napkin, you monster.” Jo pulled a folded square of cloth from beneath the pile of envelopes, brandishing it at her sister.
“What? This?” Amy grinned with an orange-peel smile instead of teeth. Still, she took the napkin, spitting her peel into it. “I still don’t understand.”
“I only write the characters for what feels like a moment, until the characters sort of . . . take up the quill on their own . . . and begin to write each other. Tell each other their stories. They breathe on each other, and make each other live. And from then on, I’m just an eavesdropper, Amy.”
“But you crawl upstairs with your quill and your ink-pot, and that’s when the story begins. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”
“That’s where it all starts. But the early bits are just, I don’t know. Pantomimes made with paper dolls . . . paper dolls and promises, I suppose.”
A final wedge of orange halted in mid-flight as Amy shot her big sister a look. “What about Beth?”
Two pink spots appeared in Jo’s cheeks. “What about her?”
Amy put down the orange. “You changed what happened to her. You let her live. You wrote her, Jo.”
Jo looked at the orange peels in the palm of her hand. She couldn’t bear hearing Beth’s name mentioned, not even by Amy, who had loved her as much as Jo had. “That was Niles’s idea. He said the book was too sad otherwise.”