Chapter Nine
Pete came back on Monday morning.
He stood in the kitchen doorway with his clipboard against his hip and looked at the dark square in the floor where the burned boards had been. The new tongue-and-groove was bundled by the wall, waiting for me to call him about the install. He had been waiting for that call for a week.
“You did this yourself,” he said.
“Saturday night.”
He nodded slow. “Could’ve had Mike do it. Took twenty minutes with the right saw.”
“I know.”
He scratched at his jaw and did not look at me. “Burn?”
“Burn.”
“Through the boards?”
“Through the boards.”
He stepped into the kitchen and walked once around the hole, careful around the edges, his eyes on the dark exposed subfloor like a man reading something.
The smell was thin around him. The house had pulled itself back in when his truck came up the drive, the way it always did during the workday — quiet, polite, gone behind the wall of dust and noise.
Pete’s boots were the only sound in the room.
“What did the burn look like,” he said.
“Round.”
His shoulders moved a little. He kept his back to me a second longer than he needed to.
“Mrs. Holloway,” he said, still looking at the hole. “The widow. Margaret. She lived here forty years after Tom went. I knew her some. She’d call my dad for the furnace, the gutters, that kind of thing. I used to come along when I was a kid.”
“You never said.”
“Didn’t think of it.” He turned around finally. “She used to put down rugs in strange places. Right in the middle of a room, away from any of the furniture. My dad asked her about it once. She said the floor was cold there.”
I waited.
“She was a careful woman,” Pete said. “Real careful, you know what I mean. Wouldn’t have people in.
Wouldn’t let my dad past the kitchen most visits.
He said one time she had the back of her hand burned, a little ring of it, and she wouldn’t tell him how.
” He shook his head. “Real careful. Real tired. It broke her, this house. She lived in it forty years and it broke her and I don’t know what else to call it. ”
The kitchen was still around us. I could feel Sam behind me listening.
“She was old,” I said. “She was alone.”
“She was alone,” Pete agreed.
He looked at me a long moment then, and I had the strange sense of being measured against somebody I had never met.
He did not say anything more about it. He told me he could get Mike out tomorrow afternoon for the install if I wanted, and I told him yes, and he wrote it on the clipboard and went out to his truck.
I stood in the kitchen after his truck had gone.
The house came back around me slow. The smell rolled in from the corners, sweet, warm, careful. The warmth pressed close at my back, my arms, the soft underside of my jaw.
“Emma.”
It went through me from the top of my head down. Not a sound. Lower than sound. The shape of my name in the warm air against my skin, the two syllables of it spoken without lips or breath, and the kitchen settled around it like the word had always been waiting there.
My hand went to the counter to steady myself.
“You said my name.”
The warmth tightened, pleased, and held.
I stood there a long time with my hand on the counter and the kitchen breathing softly around me.
I thought about Margaret Holloway with a burned ring on the back of her hand, putting rugs over cold places.
A careful, tired woman alone in a big house for forty years.
People love what hurts them. I had said that to Rachel once about somebody else’s marriage, sitting at a wine bar with a glass between us, easy in the way you are easy about other people’s wreckage.
I had not thought of the line in a long time.
The warmth waited.
“I’m here,” I said, and the house drew in around me, close as a held breath.