Chapter Five #3
George looked at his brother across the table. Whatever he saw on Wade’s face made him pick up his spoon, slowly, and resume eating.
Wade picked up his spoon last.
He finished his second bowl in full silence, and he did not look up from it, but Zoe, with Sadie’s small warm weight against her shoulder and one hand laid steady on the child’s back, watched him over the top of Sadie’s yellow braids.
What she saw was a man learning, in real time, that the cost of his own coldness had been paid by a child.
After supper, when George had taken his coffee out to the porch and Sadie had been carried up and put to bed, the kitchen held only Wade and Zoe and the long pine table between them.
Zoe cleared the dishes.
She filled the dishpan from the kettle. She shaved a curl of lye soap into the hot water and set to. The kitchen was warm from the stove, and the brass oil lamp threw its steady gold across the pine boards, and outside, the September wind moved through the cottonwoods at the edge of the yard.
Wade pulled on his coat at the back door.
“Zoe,” he said quietly.
She kept her hands in the water.
“You overstepped.”
Zoe stopped washing.
She set both hands flat against the rim of the dishpan and stood there for a long moment with her back to him. She drew one breath. Two.
She turned.
She looked at him across the kitchen with her chin lifted and her eyes very steady, and she let the silence stretch until he had to feel the weight of it.
“I disagreed with you, Wade,” she said evenly. “Those are different things.”
The line of his jaw worked.
“She spilled the water because she was showing off,” he said. “She does it at every meal when there is company, reaching for things she should ask for. She has been warned about it.”
“I believe you,” Zoe replied.
She drew the corner of her apron up, dried her hands carefully on it, and crossed the kitchen until she stood three feet from him with the lamp between them.
She softened her voice deliberately.
“Wade Collins,” she said gently. “I believe she does it. And I am telling you, as we agreed I would, that a child who has lost both her parents in one afternoon, and who has spent three years measuring whether the adults around her will stay, requires a kinder hand at the supper table. She needs to be shown how to clean up her own mistake and be welcomed back. There is a difference. I have not overstepped, Wade. I am doing the work you brought me here to do.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
Wade stood at the back door with his coat in his hand. His pale blue eyes held hers for a long, measured moment. Zoe, who had braced for anger, saw, instead, something far more difficult.
She saw him hearing her.
She kept her own face steady. She kept her hands folded in front of her. She held his eyes, and she did not look away. Her heart was doing something behind her ribs she had no intention of letting him see.
“Goodnight, Zoe,” he said at last with gravel in his voice.
“Goodnight, Wade,” she replied softly.
He went out, and the door closed gently behind him.
Zoe turned back to the dishpan. She pressed both hands into the warm water and breathed slowly through her nose.
Lord, she prayed silently, staring at the pine boards above the sink, why did You send me this stubborn man? I am asking for my own information. I trust You have a reason. I would appreciate Your patience while I work it out, and his.
She washed the dishes.
She dried them and put them away in their proper places, which she had memorized during the morning tour, and rinsed the pan clean. She blew out the lamp and climbed the stairs in the dark with her hand on the smooth pine rail. The third stair from the top creaked under her foot.
At the top, she stood for a moment in the hall.
From Sadie’s room came the soft, deliberate murmur of a small voice.
Zoe took two quiet steps toward the door and listened.
“...and thank You for Auntie Zoe,” Sadie was saying. “And thank You that she did not let Uncle Wade send me away from the table. And please help Uncle Wade to be less cross. I know You know why he is. But I think he has been cross for long enough now. Amen.”
A pause.
“Also, please bless Henrietta. Amen again.”
Zoe stood in the dark hall with her hand flat against the pine wall.
She is praying for him, she thought, and she has been praying for him all along.
She went to her room and sat on the edge of the patchwork quilt in the dark.
“Lord,” she said softly to the dark and the mountains and the sampler on the wall above the writing desk, “that child is the bravest small person I have ever met in my life. Please give her uncle the wisdom to see it. And please give me the patience to stay long enough for him to learn.”
She lay down under Mary Collins’s quilt.
Twenty-nine days remaining.
From downstairs, very faintly, came the sound of a chair being pulled away from a long pine table. Then silence. Then the small thump of a Bible’s cover being lifted.
Zoe lay in the dark and listened.
She was still listening when she fell asleep.