Chapter Six #3
He crouched at the iron door and set the crumpled paper.
She fed the smaller pieces of kindling in behind it, kneeling beside him at the same angle.
Their elbows came up against each other once at the iron lip of the stove, and she did not draw hers back, and he did not draw his back.
The contact stayed where it was for the count of a breath before the work moved them both forward an inch and broke it.
He struck the match.
The light of it caught the side of her face and threw a brief, warm shadow across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were on the paper. His own eyes went, by a path he had not exactly chosen, to the small dark strand of hair come loose at her temple, and stayed there a count longer than required.
She set a larger piece of wood across the smaller. Her hand passed an inch in front of his at the door of the stove, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin against the back of his knuckles and the warmth was no longer only the fire.
The fire caught.
He stayed crouched. She stayed kneeling. Neither of them moved away, and the inside of the kitchen began to fill with the smell of woodsmoke.
“Good,” Zoe murmured at last, her eyes still on the flame.
She turned her face a quarter inch toward him. Their eyes met at the level of the open iron door, with the firelight on the underside of her jaw and the warmth of the stove between them, and the look held a second longer than it should have held, and another second longer than that.
Her shoulder was a quarter inch from his.
Neither of them closed the quarter inch.
“Wade,” she breathed, her hand coming up briefly to tuck the loose strand of dark hair back behind her ear.
Outside, through the kitchen window, Sadie’s small voice carried up from the yard, counting rosehips.
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen...
Wade picked up the towel beside the basin and dried his hands.
Zoe was still at his right elbow.
Her shoulder was still a quarter inch from the line of his own, and her breath moved at the level of his collarbone, and the smell of the rinsing soap came up off her wrists in the warm air of the kitchen. His left hand, set down at the edge of the basin, lay an inch from the cuff of her sleeve.
He turned his head.
She had already turned hers.
Her dark blue eyes came up to his face at a level three inches below his own, and the look held. Wade understood clearly that if he leaned down, she would meet him in the middle, and the morning would change shape between them.
He stayed where he was.
His heart beat hard for the count of four.
Then, Sadie’s voice came up from the kitchen garden, high and pleased, addressing Henrietta on the matter of an earthworm she had found, and Wade’s eyes moved off Zoe’s and went to the south window.
Sadie was crouched in the dirt. The rose bushes at the foot of the chapel wall stood behind her in the morning light. The two cloths from the laundry hung on the fence rail between the bushes, lifting once and settling.
Wade kept his eyes there.
Beside him, Zoe drew a slow breath of her own. The cuff of her sleeve moved an inch from his hand at the basin.
“Sadie has the worm now,” she said, her voice careful. “I should take her the bowl.”
“Yes,” Wade answered, his eyes still on the south window. “I’ll see to the corral.”
After a count of three, Zoe stepped back from the basin. Wade set the towel down on the rim. The kitchen returned to its usual size around them, and the morning kept on with its business. She stepped away from him, heading out.
Something behind his breastbone eased the smallest fraction, like a door settling on a newly oiled hinge. Nothing else changed yet, but the ease was there.
He stayed at the window.
He let out a breath he had been holding longer than he had known.
That was close, he told himself. That was close, and it would have been the wrong morning, and it would have been a poor first kiss for a woman who has been eight days under your roof.
Through the window, he saw that Zoe had come around the side of the house and was standing at the garden gate, looking at the rose bushes. Her dark head was tilted slightly. Her hands were in her apron pockets. Sadie was at her feet with the worm in a cupped palm, presenting it for inspection.
Wade watched them.
He kept his eyes on the garden gate until the bowl in Zoe’s hand was set down on the fence rail and the earthworm was placed inside it with the small ceremony Sadie had decided the occasion required.
Then, he picked up his hat from the peg and went out to the corral. Three rose bushes. Three plants from one Iowa cutting, his mother had said, propagated in the second spring after they arrived.
They were twenty-three years old now. The bases had gone thick and knotted, but they bloomed every June without persuasion. His mother had called them her three sisters. She had kept the names of the sisters in a letter in a tin on the parlor shelf.
The tin was locked.
Wade had left it that way.
No one had read the letter since the day she died. He crossed the yard in six strides, stopping just as close to Zoe as he had been while they lit the stove.
“The tin on the parlor shelf,” he said, “has a letter in it with the names of the rosebushes. My mother kept the key inside.”
Zoe looked up.
He had told no one else. Not George, who had lived in this house for thirty-three years, or Inga, who had wept at the funeral. But he was telling Zoe.