At Home on Ladybug Farm by Donna Ball

said, poking at a knot of granite with the tip of her shovel.
    Noah, who was chopping at the ground with a hoe a few yards ahead of her, favored her with a disparaging scowl over his shoulder. “If you’re having trouble working that shovel, you can come up here and work this hoe. What kind of girl don’t know how to dig a hole, anyway?”
    “The kind who’d rather get her workout in a gym,” Lori grumbled, but Noah either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He went back to swinging the hoe, breaking up the weeds and root-webbed ground, and Lori resignedly dug her shovel into the ground and turned up another rock.
    They had been at the chore of clearing the garden spot for almost two hours, and Lori was dismayed by how little ground had actually been cleared. While Noah went ahead of her, turning over earth with the hoe, her job was to gather up the big clods of grass and weeds and carry them to the wheelbarrow, as well as dig up the rocks when the hoe struck one, and carry those to the wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was full, Noah would roll it to the edge of the woods and dump it. Even though it had sounded like a fair division of labor when Bridget had first spelled it out, Lori soon began to suspect she had gotten the worst of the job. Her short denim overalls, stylishly accented with rhinestones on the back pockets, were smeared with mud, her work boots were clogged with it, and her leather work gloves were grimy and damp. She wore a wide-brimmed straw garden hat over her long copper braid, which only made her sweat. Moreover, every time the hoe opened up a section of ground, it seemed as though another swarm of tiny insects clouded the air. It was miserable.
    “This is why man invented the plow,” she said, heaving the rock out of the ground and carrying it, double-handed, to the wheelbarrow.
    “Will you stop your griping? It ain’t that hard. Half the plot is already cleared from last year. If you’d shut up and work we’d have this done before noontime.”
    Now it was Lori’s turn to scowl as she waved away a cluster of gnats. “What’s your hurry? Have you got an appointment?”
    “Gotta get your taters and peas in the ground before St. Paddy’s Day, or you won’t get a crop.”
    “Who told you that?”
    He tossed a sneer over his shoulder. “Everybody knows that.”
    Lori carried more grass clumps to the wheelbarrow. “You know why she’s making us do this, don’t you? It’s The Little Red Hen all over again.”
    “What hen?” He did not look around. “We ain’t got no chickens.”
    She made a grimace of impatience. “You know, the story about the little red hen who was going to make bread and she went around asking all the farm animals to help her gather the wheat and grind the flour and bake the bread and everyone said, ‘Not I!’ but when she said ‘Who will help me eat the bread?’ everybody who couldn’t be bothered to help make it lined up and said ‘I will! I will!’ ”
    Noah turned around, leaning on the hoe, and stared at her. Sweat dripped from his lank dark hair and left rivulets in the dust on his face. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were twisted with contempt and disbelief. He demanded, “Something wrong with your head, girl?”
    “Don’t tell me you never heard the story of the little red hen!”
    “There ain’t no such thing.”
    “Come on, didn’t your mother ever read it to you when you were a kid?”
    He turned back to the hoeing. “Ain’t got no mother.”
    He said it with such casualness, such an utter lack of interest, that Lori was compelled to pursue the subject a wiser—and perhaps more sensitive—person would have dropped. She took a step to follow him. “Everyone’s got a mother!”
    “Not me. Ain’t got no father, either.”
    “Well, I know they’re dead,” Lori said with a touch of impatience. “But that doesn’t mean you were hatched. You have a mother and a father, and you need to claim them.”
    “What for?” He kept