Chapter Twelve #2
“Very. She gave milk for eight years. My mother cried when she went.” Zoe adjusted the heat, lifting the pot slightly off the element.
“My father pretended not to notice. He had the same expression at Clara’s departure that he had when he sold his best horse, which was the expression of a man managing his feelings with the help of a newspaper. ”
“My father did the same,” Wade said. “With a grey mare he had for twelve years.”
“What was her name?”
“Augusta.”
“Your father named his horse Augusta?”
“My father named everything after presidents and senators. He had a hound named Lincoln. And a bull named Douglas.”
“The Douglas and Lincoln feud must have been interesting,” Zoe said.
“They avoided each other,” Wade replied, and she heard the smile in it.
She stirred the milk. The first small threads of steam were rising from the surface, and she lowered the heat and held it there.
“Your father sounds like a man of opinions,” she said.
“He was,” Wade replied. “He was also generous. Generous and particular, which is a difficult combination in a person. When he gave you something he gave you the whole of it, and when he had a view on a subject he gave you the whole of that, too.” He was quiet for a moment. “He would have liked you.”
Zoe kept her eyes on the pot.
“Why?” she asked, carefully.
“Because you would have answered him back,” Wade said simply. “He liked someone who answered back. He said that answering back meant paying attention.”
She tilted her head slightly, steadying the spoon.
“My mother would have liked him, then,” she said. “She answered back to everyone, on principle. She said it was a form of respect.”
“What was she like?” Wade asked.
It carried more weight than a simple question. More the opening of a door.
Zoe thought about it. She thought about the porch in May, and the lavender water, and the apple butter, and the rosebud sampler. She chose three things out of the wealth of them to hand across the kitchen.
“She smelled of flour and lavender, even when she hadn’t been baking,” she said.
“She sang at the stove. Not hymns, usually. Old Scottish ballads she had learned from her own mother, things about rivers and lost lovers and misty hills, which she sang in the most cheerful possible manner, as though the misery in them was purely a compositional choice. And the hymns she had learned at her mother’s elbow in the front pew of the Albany Presbyterian church, Abide With Me and Be Thou My Vision and the one about the shepherd and the lamb, which she sang at the same cheerful pitch, because her mother had said that the Lord had little need of hymns sung sadly.
And she embroidered everything. Pillowcases.
Handkerchiefs. The edges of tablecloths.
She said idle hands were a waste of good thread. ”
“She sounds like my mother,” Wade said quietly, “by a different road.”
“Mrs. Keller said as much,” Zoe replied. “She said when she read your mother’s letters she heard someone who wanted the same things out of life as Eleanor Preston did.”
“What things?” Wade asked.
“A clean house and a table people came home to,” Zoe said simply. “And enough faith to get through the nights that didn’t cooperate.”
She lifted the pot from the heat. The milk had reached its moment: smooth and steaming, just at the tremor before the boil. She set it on the tile and reached for the straining cloth.
“My sister-in-law,” she said, without entirely intending to, “would say that was a small ambition.”
She felt the words land heavy the moment they were out of her mouth. Sister-in-law. The weight of those three syllables in a kitchen like this, where everything was warm and no one said anything unkind. She set the straining cloth over the second pot and began pouring.
“Would she?” Wade asked, evenly.
“She would,” Zoe replied, keeping her voice level. “She is twenty-one and very beautiful, and she has a certainty that comes from never having been told no. She believes, in all sincerity, that my mother’s manner of living was quaint.”
The word sat in the kitchen.
“I should not have said that,” Zoe added, quietly.
“Why?” Wade asked.
“Because it sounds...” She stopped herself before she said like complaining.
She knew what it sounded like. It sounded like the Albany kitchen.
She had spent six months in that house learning to take up as little space as possible, and here she was in a different house in a different territory of the country, and the old instinct was still running: don’t take up too much room, don’t burden anyone with the full weight of it, fold it smaller.
Wade was quiet. The kind of quiet that meant he was holding something back.
“You are allowed to say it, Wade,” Zoe answered, her hand stilling on the wooden spoon. She set down the straining cloth and turned around.
He was sitting at the table with his hands folded on the pine. His attention sat on her, steady and unhurried, and it carried no hint of inconvenience at all.
“You left a house where someone wanted you smaller than you are,” he said, quietly and evenly. “You came here. You don’t have to be smaller here.”
Zoe held very still.
“I have been making you smaller sometimes,” he added, “by explaining the milk and the salt pork and Sadie. I know that. I am working on it.”
“Wade,” she said, looking up from the pot with the small private smile coming forward. “That is the most direct thing you have ever said to me.”
“I’ve been saving it,” he replied, and the corner of his mouth moved.
She let out a breath that was half laugh and half relief. She sat down across the table from him and looked at him in the early morning kitchen light.
Something at the back of her chest, which had been set tight across her ribs since she had walked out of Brody’s kitchen with her trunk at her hip, let go.
The letting go was a slow and careful one.
It came down in pieces. The kitchen at Albany went first. Bonnie’s voice across the kitchen table went second.
The careful folding of her own shoulders inside her own dress to take up a smaller space went third, and the third piece took the longest to lay down.
“I am not smaller here,” she confirmed.
“No,” he answered, low. “You are not.”
Zoe’s hand, on the table at her right elbow, was three inches from his at the center of the pine.
She thought about the warmth of the back of his hand in the barn and about the careful arm’s length he had kept at the barn door when the three inches between his face and hers had been the only thing in the barn worth measuring.
Three inches of pine sat between them now.