Chapter Three
The morning after supper with Dorothy and the children, Albert went straight to the mercantile.
Mrs. Johnson was sweeping near the door and looked surprised to see him again so soon. “Forget something?”
“A few things,” Albert said. “Cheese. Coffee. Butter if you have it. More flour. Oats. Molasses. And something sweet.”
Mrs. Johnson paused with one hand on the shelf. “For yourself again?”
Albert met her eyes this time. “Put it on my account.”
He did not know yet how to help Dorothy accept what she needed without making her feel small. He only knew one delivery was not enough. One full wood box was not enough. One night of regret could not mend six months of absence.
Henry’s family would be warm. They would be fed. They would be cared for until Dorothy could stand without fear of the next empty shelf or cold morning.
Albert had failed his friend once. He would not fail him again.
Albert began leaving milk and eggs before dawn on Monday.
He set them on the narrow step outside Dorothy’s door and was halfway to the mill before anyone inside the cabin stirred. On Tuesday, he did the same. By Wednesday, he had just straightened from placing the covered pail beside a small basket of eggs when the door opened behind him.
Dorothy stood there with her shawl wrapped tight and her hair in a long braid over one shoulder. “Albert Travis, do you mean to sneak about my doorstep every morning like a thief who leaves things instead of taking them?”
Albert glanced at the milk, then at her. “I suppose there are worse habits.”
“I cannot repay you.” Dorothy’s voice was quiet because the children still slept, but there was nothing quiet about the pride in it. “Not for milk. Not for eggs. Not for wood. Not for all the things you have already brought.”
“Then feed me breakfast,” Albert said.
She blinked. “What?”
“I’m tired of mill breakfasts. You cook the eggs, I eat some, and we call it square.”
“That is not square,” Dorothy said. “That is you inventing numbers until they suit you.”
“I was never much good with numbers,” Albert said. “But I know when a man is hungry, and a woman has eggs in her hand.”
He kept his tone light because lightness seemed to help Dorothy keep her pride.
If he sounded too earnest, she would hear charity in every word and shut the door against him.
Albert was learning that helping Dorothy required more care than lifting lumber.
A man could bruise a person’s dignity without ever meaning to.
Dorothy tried to look stern, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her. “You are very troublesome before sunrise.”
Dorothy looked down at the basket. It was not charity if she fed him in return. It was still more help than she could ever repay, but it gave her hands something useful to do besides taking. “Come in before the eggs freeze,” she said.
She told herself she was only accepting a bargain.
That was safer than admitting how much she had wanted to open the door each morning and find the pail waiting there.
Wanting help felt dangerous. Wanting Albert’s help felt worse, because Henry’s name stood between them like a grave marker she could not step around.
The cabin was crowded with Albert inside, but the children made room for him as if he had always belonged there.
Clara sat close to the table and watched Dorothy crack eggs into the pan with the careful attention of someone witnessing a miracle.
Tommy climbed onto a stool and asked Albert whether chickens minded giving eggs away.
“I never asked one,” Albert said. “But if I do, I’ll bring you the answer.”
Tommy considered that with great seriousness. “Ask nice.”
“Chickens don’t talk,” Clara said from her place near the table.
Tommy frowned. “How do you know? Maybe they talk when people aren’t listening.”
“Then I shall be extra polite,” Albert said. “I would hate to offend a chicken with influence.”
For the first time in weeks, breakfast smelled like more than watered meal.
Dorothy cooked the eggs with a little salt and warmed milk for the children.
She gave Albert a plate because that was the bargain, but she noticed he took less than a hungry workingman should have and pushed the rest toward Tommy when he thought she was not looking.
“Henry used to say you could make a feast out of two eggs and a heel of bread,” Albert said.
Dorothy’s hand stilled over the stove. “He said that?”
“More than once. He bragged about your biscuits, too. Claimed no man at the mill had tasted anything worth eating until he married you.”
Dorothy looked down before Albert could see too much in her face.
She had been afraid to speak Henry’s name except in whispers to the children, afraid the sound would tear open what little healing had begun.
Instead, the memory warmed her in a place grief had left cold.
“I burned the first biscuits I ever made for him,” she said.
“He told me the black bottoms added flavor.”
Albert smiled. “That sounds like Henry. Loyal even when a biscuit threatened his life.”
Albert had meant only to give her a memory Henry would have wanted shared.
He had not expected the small smile it brought to Dorothy’s face to affect him so strongly.
For a moment, she looked less like a woman bent beneath winter and more like the Dorothy Henry used to describe with laughter in his voice.
Albert felt the warmth of that look and then the guilt of noticing it.
Dorothy surprised herself by smiling back.
The smile frightened her almost as much as hunger had. It had come without permission, called up by Henry and carried in Albert’s voice, and it settled over her shoulders like a quilt warmed near the stove. She did not know what to do with comfort that came from Albert.
After breakfast, Albert stepped outside to check the stacked wood and looked up at the roof. From the ground, he could see a sag near the back corner and two places where the shingles had lifted. When the spring thaw came, water would find every weakness.
“Does it leak?” he asked when Dorothy came to the doorway with Grace on her hip.
Dorothy followed his gaze. “Only when the sun is warm enough to melt what has frozen above us. It drips near the children’s pallet sometimes. I move them when I can.”
Albert’s stomach tightened. “That roof needs fixing before thaw.”
“I know.” Dorothy’s tone said she had known for a long while, and knowing had not made lumber appear. “I cannot pay for materials.”
Albert looked down at his sleeve. “I have two shirts that need mending.”
Dorothy narrowed her eyes. “Two shirts will not buy a roof.”
“They will buy my time,” Albert said. “Everett has scrap boards. I can make do.”
“If I mend your shirts,” Dorothy said, “you will not decide afterward that the roof took three more shirts and a pie.”
“No pie,” Albert said solemnly. “I would not put such a burden on a roof.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he said, gentler now. “Two shirts for the roof. No more owed between us.”
He wanted badly for her to believe him. Not because the shirts mattered, but because the bargain did.
Dorothy needed to stand on her own feet, even while accepting a hand.
Albert understood that too late, perhaps, but he understood it now.
If he pushed too hard, she would turn away from the very help that might keep the roof over her children dry.
He thought of the way Henry had trusted him without ever asking whether the trust was safe.
Henry had handed him tools, shared wages when another man was short, spoken freely of Dorothy and the children as if Albert belonged to the circle of people who cared for them.
Albert had accepted that place when it was easy.
Now he had to earn it when every nail he drove reminded him how late he was.
Dorothy studied him for a long moment. She knew he was arranging the bargain to ease her pride, and he knew she knew. Still, there was a difference between taking and trading, even when the trade favored her. “Bring the shirts,” she said.
Dorothy accepted the bargain because refusing would have been foolish and because accepting made her feel less helpless.
Still, as she watched Albert walk away, she wondered when she had begun measuring safety by whether his boots appeared on the path.
She did not want to need that sound. She did not want to listen for it.
Albert brought them that evening. One truly needed mending. The other had needed only a few stitches until he stood outside his cabin and made the tear worse with his pocketknife. He told himself Henry would have laughed at him. He also told himself Dorothy never needed to know.
The next afternoon, Albert climbed onto the roof with a hammer, a small stack of boards, and more determination than skill at staying balanced on frosted shingles. Tommy stood below announcing every nail as if he were foreman of the job. Clara watched more quietly from beside the woodpile.
“Mr. Albert?” Clara called.
Albert paused with the hammer in his hand. “Yes, Clara?”
She twisted the end of her sleeve between her fingers. “Are you going to disappear again?”
The words struck him harder than the hammer ever could have.
Albert looked down from the roof at Henry’s little girl, standing with her boots in the snow and her face tipped up toward him.
She had not accused him. Children rarely knew how to make accusations sound proper.
She had only asked the question that mattered.
“No,” Albert said. “I’m not going to disappear again.”
Clara studied him as if deciding whether he was the sort of man promises could stick to. “Mama says folks get busy.”
“Folks do,” Albert said. “But I can be busy and still come by.”
“Will you come even if it snows?” Clara asked.
“Even if it snows.”
“If Tommy is loud?”
“Especially then. A man should know what he is walking into.”