In the Appalachian highlands, the year a daughter is born, her mama brews seven jars of cider.

When the girl comes of marrying age, she opens one jar a year, waiting for the man she loves.

If all seven are emptied and she still isn't wed, the jars get smashed, and she waits no more in this life.

The first six, I drank alone.

Because every year, Luke Weiss said: not this year.

He was a musician who'd come to our town to collect the old heritage folk songs, and he stayed three years.

I taught him to sing the old mountain harmonies. He taught me to record sound on a phone.

He said once the album was finished, he'd come back to marry me.

The day I broke the seal on the first jar, he went to the next county.

Said a folk singer named Mavis Pruitt had ruined her voice, and he had to take her to the state capital to see a doctor.

The second jar, Mavis was cutting a record.

The third jar, Mavis was touring.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, I can't remember the reasons anymore.

I only remember that every time I called, I could hear her laughing in the background.

The seventh year, I carried the last jar up from the cellar.

Twenty-three years it had aged, the mouth sealed by Mama with a twist of straw rope, my handprint still pressed into the clay from the day I was born.

That evening I dialed his number.

He said he was at the airport, that he had to fly with Mavis to New York to sign a deal.

"Wait for me. Soon as it's signed, I'll come back."

"I mean it. This is the last time."

The last time.

He said the last time every year.

But I only had this one jar left.

I broke the clay seal and bent to the mouth of the jar, breathing in.

Twenty-three-year cider, so rich it had gone bitter.

When Mama brewed it, she surely never imagined her daughter would drink it down alone in the end.

I lifted the jar and poured it into me, mouthful by mouthful.

Cider no one comes to share, you don't keep.

When it was gone, I set the empty jar in the yard.

Moonlight dropped inside it and trembled.

It held nothing.

……

Before light, I carried the other six empty jars out of the kitchen.

I lined them up beside the seventh I'd finished the night before, all in a row across the yard.

The oldest one had a chip out of its rim, moss crawling up the side.

I scratched at it with a fingernail. It wouldn't come off.

The phone buzzed once in my pocket.

Luke Weiss, 2:47 a.m.: "Aria, it's signed. First flight out. Wait for me."

A second line under it: "I mean it. Trust me."

I pressed the screen dark and put it away.

I went inside, took two changes of clothes, locked the door, and started down the flagstone path toward Mama's.

Fog lay heavy over the town. Passing the bell-tower hall, I could see only its peak.

Mama was at the stove, simmering porridge.

When she saw me come in with clothes in my arms, her spoon didn't stop.

She glanced at me once.

She asked nothing.

A second bowl appeared on the counter.

I set the clothes in the back room and came out to tend the fire.

The wood snapped in the firebox.

Mama's spoon tapped the rim of the pot. "Aria."

I stirred the coals.

"Your uncle just came by. Said there's a man standing in your yard."

"Dragging a suitcase."

The tongs paused in my hand.

Mama said no more.

She turned and ladled out the porridge.

I ate two bowls.

She sat on the threshold stitching a shoe sole, then looked up at me. "All seven jars, gone?"

"Yeah."

The needle stopped against the sole.

She said quietly, "Then it's over."

Mama couldn't read, but no one knew the town's customs better than she did.

After the porridge I remembered my ID was still in the cabinet at home.

And a few heavy coats I needed to bring over.

I went back down the flagstone path. The sun had just climbed over the ridge.

I pushed open the gate.

Luke Weiss was crouched in front of the seventh jar.

His suitcase tipped over by the door, not yet pulled inside, his coat thrown over the back of a chair in the front room.

A wrinkled white shirt, sleeves pushed up to the forearms, mud on the cuffs of his pants.

He heard the door and stood, turning around.

His lips were dry and cracked, like he'd come a long, hard way.

When he saw me, his voice came out a little rough. "Aria."

I didn't answer.

I went around him into the house and started digging through the cabinet.

My ID was in the second drawer, wrapped in a cloth pouch.

He followed me in and stopped in the doorway. "I bought the ticket the second she signed. Red-eye into Nashville, then a bus, then a bike the rest of the way."

"I didn't stop anywhere."

I bundled the ID together with my heavy clothes.

His voice came from behind me. "The jars in the yard. I saw them."

"Aria, listen to me. I'm not leaving."

"This time it's real."

I shut the cabinet.

He blocked the doorway, one hand braced on the frame.

I stood up and looked at him.

Close.

Close enough to smell the leather of an airplane seat on him and the diesel off the bus.

I said, "Move."

He didn't.

"The thing with Mavis signing the deal, it's not what you think."

"Let me explain."

His phone went off inside the jacket slung over the chair back.

The ringtone was a few bars of folk guitar.

I knew that tune.

A mountain ballad, the melody I'd taught him, the one he'd later rearranged for guitar.

It rang twice.

He turned to reach for the jacket, too quick, and knocked something out of the pocket.

A folded piece of paper dropped to the floor.

He swiped the call away first.

The name that flashed on the screen was Mavis.

"See? I didn't pick up." He turned back to me.

I wasn't looking at him.

I was looking at the paper on the floor.

Print showed through the fold.

"Letters in Folk Song — Track List"

First line at the top: "01 Song of the Cicada, words and music: Mavis Pruitt"

Song of the Cicada.

"Song of the Cicada," one of the old mountain harmonies.

I'd taught it to him line by line.

The credit said Mavis Pruitt.

I bent down, picked up the paper, and put it in his hand.

"Yours."

I slipped past under his arm and walked out into the yard.

Seven empty jars, lined up neat and straight.

The sun caught the mouths of them but couldn't reach the bottoms.

I carried my clothes toward the gate.

He called after me. "Aria, I can explain that song."

I didn't look back.

A figure flickered at the mouth of the lane, a bundle of timber on his back, walking steady.

Mama wouldn't let Luke Weiss in the door.

He stood outside the yard for two hours.

From the back room I could hear him, every word squeezing in through the cracks in the wooden door.

"Ma'am, I just want to say two things to Aria."

"Let her come out. Five minutes, that's all."

Mama sat in the main room stitching a shoe sole, her hands never stopping. "Go on home."

"She doesn't want to see you."

His footsteps went back and forth outside the door.

In the end he left.

The sound of him faded off down the flagstone path and folded into the crowing of roosters somewhere far off.

Once the footsteps were gone, I dug out my phone.

I searched three words: Letters in Folk Song.

Mavis's new album, not released yet, but the pre-order page was already up.

The cover was a bell-tower hall.

Wooden flared eaves, gray tile pitched to a point, terraced fields stacked behind it.

I knew that bell-tower hall.

Three autumns ago, Luke Weiss sat below it and took a whole stack of photos.

I scrolled to a promo interview and tapped it open.

In the video Mavis wore a long linen dress, sitting in a recording studio, her voice soft.

"The inspiration for this album comes from the Appalachian highlands. Luke took me through so many mountain towns, and we collected so many folk songs."

She gave a little smile. "He was my guide."

She said, "took me through so many mountain towns."

The three years he spent in the village, I was the one who took him around.

I led him down the mountain trails, across the rope bridges, through the rice paddies, all the way out to Pine Ridge and Hollow Creek, to hear the old song-masters sing.

Under the video there was a preview link.

I tapped the first track.

The intro was insects chirping and water running.

My finger stopped.

That chirring was the summer cicadas from the hill behind our village.

Luke Weiss had stood under the old oak with his phone, recording a whole evening of it, and I'd sat beside him afraid to move.

In that recording you could even hear me holding back a laugh, the catch of my breath.

Then Mavis's voice came in over it.

The tune was the melody of "Song of the Cicada," with a new arrangement, the words rewritten in plain English.

She sang it beautifully.

But when the chorus came in, a harmony was laid underneath.

Faint, buried in the backing track, almost impossible to make out.

A woman's voice, humming the original ballad in the old dialect.

That voice was mine.

I set the phone face-down on the bed.

I lay there a while, staring at the dried peppers hanging from the rafters.

Mama pushed the door open. "Hungry?"

I shook my head.

She didn't leave. She stood there a moment. "That Weiss guy is back. Sitting on the stone bench at the mouth of the lane."

I didn't move.

Mama sighed. "He's got a notebook in his hands. Says it's the songbook. Says he wants to give it back to you."

It was that songbook.

The one I'd copied out by hand, every harmony the village knew written down in it, over a hundred songs, three months of copying.

Back then he'd said he was taking it to use as a reference for the arrangements, and he'd return it when he was done.

Seven years.

And he brings it back today.

I rolled over to face the wall. "Tell him to leave it by the door."

"He doesn't need to come in."

Mama made a small sound and went out, pulling the door shut behind her.

After a while, Luke's voice came from outside. "Ma'am, I'll set the songbook here."

"There's a USB stick too. The demos for the album. I wanted Aria to hear them."

He paused. "Some of the recordings on it are her voice. When I recorded them, I never told her they'd end up on the album."

"That's on me. I'll deal with it."

It went quiet outside for a stretch.

Then he said, "Aria. If you're in there, you can hear me."

I could hear him.

He said he never told me.

He said he'd deal with it.

He'd lived in this village three years. He'd recorded my voice, recorded the songs I taught him, recorded the cicadas here and the running water.

And then he'd carried all of it away and put it inside another woman's throat.

He never even asked me.

Outside the window, the sun had crept up the wall.

The phone screen was still lit.

That harmony seeped out of the speaker, thin as water slipping through your fingers.

It was the voice I'd sung at seventeen.

Luke didn't leave.

He took a room at the old inn in the village, the timber lodge at Martin Lambert's place down by the creek mouth.

Mama went out to buy rice and came back saying he was helping Martin split firewood.

The next day, that he was nailing down loose boards on the bridge at the village edge.

The third day, Mama said nothing at all.

At dusk I went down to the creek to wash clothes, and from far off I saw lights on over by the bell-tower hall.

In the old days the hall was only lit for the song gatherings.

There was no gathering this season.

I carried my wooden basin closer and heard someone inside, singing.

Singing rough, the pitch not quite true.

But I knew it.

It was "The Old Song."

One of the old mountain harmonies, six verses in all, and the last two only the elder song-masters still remembered in full.

I'd taught it to him.

He stalled on the fourth verse.

Stopped a moment, then started again from the top.

I stood behind a pillar of the bell-tower hall, the basin set down by my feet.

He was sitting alone by the fire pit, that songbook open across his knees.