CHAPTER 2
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The box would not stay shut, so Clara put her knee on the lid and ran the tape across it twice.
Paperbacks weighed more than anybody planned for.
She had learned that in her first week of packing and had gone on doing it wrong ever since, filling the deep boxes to the top and then wrestling them across the floor by the flaps.
Every book had her mother’s handwriting inside the front cover.
Church sale, a quarter, worth every bit.
Ending is no good, don’t waste an evening.
Do not lend this one out, they never bring it back.
Clara had read two boxes’ worth of that handwriting and then made herself quit, because the books had to be out of the house and the reading was costing her the morning.
The kitchen was down to four plates and one pan.
Clara had kept the pan back because it was easier to cook in it than to explain it to a thrift store.
She stacked the taped boxes by the door in the order they would ride, heavy on the bottom and light on top.
Her knees had porch grit ground into them.
She had been at this since February and there was still the hall closet, and the hall closet was going to be coats.
The pot had been on the burner plate since before light and the kitchen smelled scorched.
She poured the last inch of it anyway and stood at the sink to drink it.
Flat white light came through the window over the taps.
Out in the yard the agent’s sign leaned into the wind with the For Sale rider swinging under it, and the ruts along Larkspur Street held standing water the color of weak tea.
The message was still on the counter under the sugar bowl where she had set it Sunday.
She had taken it off the machine in her own hand: an answer on the price by Friday, and a callback number she had known by heart since November.
There were people coming through from Bozeman on Saturday, forty minutes out and forty minutes back, and they would want a number in front of them when they came.
She squared the paper against the counter.
She put the bowl down on it again. Then she went back to the boxes, because the counter was clean and the boxes were not done.
Loretta had said eight weeks. She had said it going out the Six Mile road yesterday and again coming home, with the wipers running and the heater roaring, and Clara had gotten as far as the bottom porch step before a man came off that porch with his answer already made.
She taped the last box. The screen door caught the wind and slapped the siding, and she propped it with the boot scraper and carried them out one at a time, four of them, the mud sucking at her heels between the gate and the curb.
The green hatchback still wore its Colorado plates.
She had not been to the county office about them and she was not going to be, now.
Wet snow came at her sideways for the length of the walk and quit before she got the hatch down.
The Blue Spruce had the counter to itself by half past one. Gemma had the register drawer open and was counting it out in stacks, and she shut the drawer with her hip when the screen door banged.
“Sit,” Gemma said. “Not the second booth. There’s a screw coming up through that seat and Caleb has been going to fix it since Christmas, and now he says before the wedding, and the wedding is July, which is not what I would call a plan.
Soup’s beef and barley. You’re having it.
Don’t make that face, it’s your mother’s exact face and it never worked on me either. ”
“I ate.”
“You did not.” Gemma set the bowl down and a spoon beside it and a stack of crackers she had not been asked for.
“Nora Finch has thirty-one years in this school district and they have handed her the spring program again, which tells you everything about how a town of six hundred and forty people divides up its work. Tate was in at six with mud to his knees. The county has him on the culverts and he says the frost is coming out of the ground early, and then he sat right there and ate two pieces of pie and told me about a heifer he did not own.”
Clara wrapped her hands around the cup. It was too hot to hold and she held it.
“What’s the council doing about the risers, then.”
“Now that is the correct question and nobody else in this town has asked it.” Gemma came out from behind the register with the towel over her shoulder.
“Loretta Gable has the community hall booked the third Thursday for a bake sale, and the bake sale is for risers, and the risers are for a program that is happening in a gym with a roof the church board has been arguing about since the fall. That is Bear Creek. We raise money for the thing on top of the thing that is actually broken. I make eleven pies for it every year and nobody has ever asked me whether I want to.”
“Do you want to.”
“Of course I want to. That’s not the point and you know it isn’t.
” Gemma put a second cup down for herself and did not pour anything into it.
“Sadie’s got the bulletin board at church and she’s put the wedding up on it, in July, with a picture, which I think is a great deal of confidence in July.
Caleb’s had that feed truck since the day he turned twenty-one.
Nora Finch taught your grade and taught his and taught half the people who eat in here, and she’ll tell you to your face she’s not retiring, and she’ll tell the wall something else. ”
“Harlan Cobb hasn’t been in since the last week of February,” Gemma said.
“That’s not like him. His hands are bad in the cold and he won’t say so, and he’d rather sit in a bunkhouse with a thermos than let anybody watch him work a mug handle.
Sadie’s been driving out that road three nights a week already and it’s only the fourth of March.
Everybody’s short. Everybody out there is short. ”
“Everybody out where.”
“You know where.” Gemma took the ladle off the hook and put it back on the hook.
“Two hundred and forty pairs to calve and one man to do it, and Harlan is seventy-one years old and one hard morning from being no help at all. That’s arithmetic, Clara, I’m not being dramatic.
I own a café. I hear the arithmetic before the bank does. ”
Clara ate the soup. The fork of the man in the far booth went against his plate twice and then the screen door let him out, and then it was the two of them and the coffee maker ticking.
Gemma cut a piece of pie without asking and slid it over on a white plate with a chip out of the rim.
“Daisy Miller stopped singing the spring her mother died. Not a note since. Do you want the pie or don’t you?”
The cup was still in Clara’s hands. She had not put it down and the burn had gone past the point where it registered as heat.
“Gemma.”
“She talks. I want that understood, because the whole town says it wrong. She talks fine to her father and to Harlan and to the Dawson girl and to Nora Finch. She reads at a fourth-grade level and she corrects grown people about birds. She has not sung one note in four years and that child used to sing walking down this street with a sack of flour on her hip.”
“No.” Clara set the cup on the saucer. “No to the job. Ask me a second time and it’s still no.”
“I didn’t ask you a first time.”
“You were going to. You had the pie out.” Clara pushed the plate back an inch and left her hand on it.
“I buried my mother in November and I’ve been back since February to sell the house, and the agent wants an answer.
There’s a box of my mother’s books in my car right now that I have to get rid of before I can even sweep that kitchen.
That is the whole of what I’m doing here. ”
Gemma leaned on the counter with the towel bunched under her forearms. Flour was up past her wrists. “Twenty years thick as thieves and four years of nothing, and I’ve stopped asking which of you started it.”
“That’s a kind way to put it.”
“It’s not kind, it’s tired.” Gemma pulled the pie plate back to the middle and left it there, halfway between them, which was a thing she did instead of arguing. “I’ll tell you one thing and then I’ll leave off. He doesn’t remember that spring. He’ll tell you so himself.”
“People remember.”
“He doesn’t. He was in and out of here forty times that April and I don’t believe he could tell you the color of this counter.
Nora says the same. Harlan says it with his mouth shut, which is how Harlan says everything.
” Gemma picked up the ladle again. “Weather’s supposed to turn Thursday, for what that’s worth, which is nothing. ”
Clara looked at the coffee instead of at Gemma, and the catalogue ran anyway, without her consent, item by item, like a woman counting a drawer she has no business in.
Gray at his temples that had not been there.
His shoulders heavier. His voice pitched lower than it used to sit, or only quieter.
And his hands on that gate exactly, precisely unchanged, down to how he set them, and the cup went unsteady enough that a slop of coffee came over her knuckles and onto the saucer.
She put both hands under the counter and wiped them on her jeans.
The saucer had a brown ring in it now and she turned it so the ring was on the far side.
Twenty years of standing next to somebody buys you a list you cannot put down, and she had gone up that lane at dusk and stood in range of him for the length of one sentence, and she had not gotten close enough to see whether his hands were cracked from the wire yet.
That was the cost of it. She had driven home not knowing a thing she used to know without asking.
“Half past,” she said. “You’re closing.”
“I’m closing.” Gemma boxed the pie without being told and pushed it across. “Take that to Caleb. He’s been on that dock since noon and that boy will eat drywall if you let him.”
Clara was out the door before two.