Florida FAST Practice Test 15

Passage 1: The Lost Son

¹There was once a landowner who had two sons. The younger one grew tired of waiting for his inheritance. "Let me have my portion now," he told his father, "while I am young enough to enjoy it." His father did not argue. He split what he owned between the two brothers.

²Before the week was out, the younger son had sold off his portion for coin and taken the road to a far-off country. There he lived as though the money would never run out, buying whatever caught his eye, until one morning his purse was empty. That same season the rains failed across the whole region, and food grew scarce. Desperate, he went to work for a local farmer, who put him in charge of the pigs. Some days the husks in the pigs' trough looked good enough to eat, and still nobody offered him a meal.

³Sitting in the mud one evening, he finally saw his life plainly. "Back home, even the laborers my father pays by the day eat until they are full," he thought, "and I am wasting away out here. I will walk home and tell him the truth: 'I have done wrong, against God and against you. I have no right to call myself your son anymore. Hire me as one of your day laborers.'"

⁴He started the long walk back. His father spotted him while he was still only a speck on the road, and pity and joy rose up in the old man together. He did not wait. He ran, caught his son in both arms, and held him close. "Father," the young man began, "I have done wrong, against God and against you. I have no right—" But his father was already shouting toward the house. "Hurry! Fetch my best coat and wrap him in it. Find him a ring, and boots that fit. Kill the calf we have been saving, and set every table in the yard! I had given my boy up for dead, and here he is, breathing. He wandered off where I could not find him, and he has come home."

⁵The older son had spent the day out in the fields. Walking back at sundown, he heard fiddles and the stamp of dancing feet coming from the house. He stopped one of the servants and asked what all the noise was about. "Your brother is back," the servant said, "and your father has ordered a feast because the boy came home unharmed."

⁶The older son's face went hot, and he would not set foot inside. His father came out to him and begged him to join them, but the son burst out, "I have worked beside you since I was a boy, as steady as any servant you pay, and I have not disobeyed you once. Has there ever been a single goat roasted so that I could have a party with my crew? Yet he throws away half of what you built, and the moment he turns up, the calf is on the fire!"

⁷His father answered gently. "Child, you have never been away from me a single day, and all that remains here belongs to you. But how could we do anything except rejoice? We had given your brother up for dead, and tonight he is breathing under our roof. He wandered off where none of us could reach him, and now he has come home."

Passage 2: The Second Harvest

¹The peaches came in early that June, and Tamsin Rowe was on the third ladder of the morning when she saw the truck turn off the county road. It was a rusted blue pickup she didn't recognize, and it rolled up the orchard lane so slowly that she thought at first the driver was lost. Then it stopped beside the packing shed, and her brother climbed out.

²Two years earlier, Noah had stood in the same spot with a guitar case and the four thousand dollars their father had set aside for his first year of college. "Nashville doesn't wait," he had said, as if Nashville had been calling the house. Tamsin, who was nineteen then and already running the farm stand, had watched the dust of his bus settle on the road and gone back to sorting fruit.

³Now he was thinner, and the guitar case was gone. He stood by the truck with his hands in his pockets, studying the gravel, until their father came out of the shed. Tamsin watched from the ladder. She saw her father stop, saw his hand go to the doorframe as if the ground had tilted, and then saw him cross the yard faster than she had seen him move in years. He did not let Noah finish whatever speech he had prepared. He just held on.

⁴By evening the kitchen smelled of fried chicken and peach cobbler, the dinner their mother used to make for birthdays. Their father had called the neighbors. Someone had brought a fiddle. Tamsin stayed in the packing shed long after the last crate was stacked, scrubbing a sorting table that was already clean.

⁵Her father found her there at dusk. He stood in the doorway, the noise of the party spilling out behind him across the yard.

⁶"Come eat," he said.

⁷"I've eaten." She didn't look up. "Somebody has to have the crates ready for the six o'clock truck. Somebody always has to."

⁸"Tam."

⁹"Two years, Dad." The brush stopped. "Two years of the stand and the books and the frost nights, sitting up with the smudge pots till four in the morning. Nobody ever cooked me a cobbler for showing up." She heard her voice crack and hated it. "He spent the money. All of it. And you're throwing him a party."

¹⁰Her father was quiet for so long that she finally looked at him. In the gray light he seemed older than he had that morning.

¹¹"You're right," he said. "Not about the party. About the cobbler." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I counted on you so long I forgot to tell you so. That's on me, and I'm sorry." He looked toward the house, where someone was laughing. "But your brother came home, Tam. A year ago I wasn't sure he would. Some things you celebrate because they happened, not because anybody earned them."

¹²She turned the brush over in her hands. Through the open door she could see Noah at the kitchen window, not dancing, not laughing—just standing at the sink with his sleeves pushed up, washing the cobbler dish as though he did not know where else to put himself.

¹³Tamsin set the brush down. She walked across the yard and through the screen door, past the fiddle and the neighbors and their father's watching eyes, and stopped beside her brother at the sink.

¹⁴He looked at her the way he used to when they were kids and he had broken something.

¹⁵"Truck comes at six," she said. She took a dish towel from the hook and began to dry. "Ladders are in the north shed. Don't be late."

¹⁶Noah swallowed. "I won't," he said, and for the first time all day, she believed something he said.