Chapter Six #2
At noon, he rode down the slope, put the gelding up, and crossed the yard on foot. He rounded the corner of the house and stopped.
Zoe was crouched in the dirt between the rose bushes and the garden fence, with a wooden laundry bucket between her and Sadie.
Sadie’s small hands were elbow-deep in the bucket, wringing out a cloth with concerted effort.
Zoe was wringing out a cloth of her own, saying something low that he could not hear.
He had come upon them quietly. Neither had looked up.
He held still at the corner of the house.
Sadie finished wringing and looked at the cloth, then at Zoe.
“Auntie Zoe,” she said, “this is a great deal of work.”
“It is, sweet girl,” Zoe agreed, wringing her own cloth against the bucket’s edge. “That is the lesson.”
“What is the lesson?”
“That cleaning up is harder than making a mess. So we think before we make the mess.”
“Oh,” Sadie said. Her eyes narrowed a quarter at the corner. Her tongue moved once against the inside of her cheek. “That is a very practical lesson.”
“Your grandmother,” Zoe replied, draping her wrung cloth across the fence rail, “would have approved of it, I think.”
“Grandma Mary was very practical,” Sadie confirmed.
Sadie wrung the last of the water from her cloth with great determination and draped it on the rail beside Zoe’s.
“Auntie Zoe?”
“Yes, sweet girl.”
“Are you and Uncle Wade still fighting?”
A pause.
“Uncle Wade and I are thinking,” Zoe said gently.
“Oh,” Sadie replied. “That is good. It is better when you think rather than fight.”
“Yes,” Zoe agreed. “It is.”
Wade stepped back around the corner of the house.
He stood in the side yard with the gelding’s fence post at his shoulder.
His hand closed around the rough pine rail. The wood took his weight, and he gave it more weight than he had meant to, and the splinter at the end of the top board pressed a thin line against the inside of his thumb.
Through the gap between the chapel and the kitchen garden, he could see them.
Sadie at the fence rail with another small grey square of cloth wrung out in her hands.
Zoe at her elbow, sleeves still pushed up to the forearm, her dark hair coming loose at the temple in the wind.
Sadie said something Wade was too far away to hear.
Zoe laughed—quiet, low—and turned her face down toward the small yellow head.
A laugh changed the shape of her mouth in a way that landed somewhere under Wade’s collarbone and stayed there.
He stayed at the rail. His eyes stayed on the two of them at the fence, and his chest was warm and tight under his coat. For the first time in a long time, he let the warmth be warmth instead of putting another name on it.
The cloths on the rail lifted and settled in the wind between the rose bushes his mother had planted twenty-three years ago.
His niece had taken the lesson and filed it correctly.
Zoe had been in this house eight days, and she had already found the key Wade had been turning the wrong way for three years.
He wanted to cross the gravel.
He wanted to stand at the rail beside them with his hand at the small of her back, and to tell his niece that she was a good girl and that he had been a poor uncle to her and was going to do better.
He stayed where he was.
He lifted his hand off the rail. The splinter had drawn a thin red mark along the side of his thumb. He looked at it once, set his palm against the front of his shirt, and turned back toward the south corral.
The trial wasn’t in the letter, brother, George’s voice came up at him from a kitchen table four nights ago, low and dry. You thought of it on the street.
Wade had told him at the time that the trial was for the child.
Walking now between the kitchen garden and the corral fence with his thumb at his shirt and his eyes on the gravel, Wade understood, at last, what George had been telling him.
The trial had been for him.
He had been the one who needed the month. The trial had been Wade’s all along, and Wade had been hiding behind his niece for eight days.
He stopped at the corner of the kitchen garden.
“George,” he said aloud to the gravel, “you were right.”
Trial. A clean word. A useful word. A word that left him a door at his back.
He went around to the back of the house, where Sadie was now counting the red hips on the nearest rosebush with great seriousness.
“Sadie,” he said, the word coming out rough.
She looked up. “Uncle Wade?”
“Where is Auntie Zoe?”
“Inside. She went to get more cloths.” Sadie studied him. “Are you still thinking?”
“I am,” he smiled. “Yes.”
“Good,” she said, and turned back to the rosehips.
He went up the back steps and through the kitchen door.
Zoe was at the pine table, folding clean cloths in a neat stack. She looked up when he came through the door, and her eyes held his.
Wade stopped at the threshold with his hat still in his hand.
Three seconds passed. Then four.
“Zoe,” he said low. “I owe you an apology.”
She set down the cloth. She waited.
“You were right about Sadie,” he said, keeping his voice even. “A spilled water cup is a spilled water cup. I have been sending her from the table for lesser things, and she has learned to watch for my reaction before she reaches for anything, and I had stopped seeing it. You were right.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
The folded cloths sat on the table between them.
“Thank you, Wade,” she said, at last, softly. “That was plainly said.”
“I am not practiced at apology,” he smiled. “I will ask your patience with the delivery.”
Something behind her dark eyes warmed.
“The delivery was fine,” she said gently.
He reached for the kettle on the stove, found it still warm, and poured water into a basin at the counter.
“I’ll wash up and start the lunch fire,” he said.
“I can start the lunch fire,” she replied.
“You’ve been wringing laundry for the last hour.”
“You’ve been stringing fence wire for the last four.”
He turned from the basin.
“We’ll start it together, then,” he said. His eyes held hers a beat. “If you will have me.”
The kindling was in the box by the back door, and the paper was on the shelf. There was no particular reason for it to be a complicated operation. Wade had started this stove alone every morning for eleven years. The task was entirely manageable.
They did it together, anyway.