Chapter 9
The Crystal Lake railway station was a modest brick building with a single platform and a green-painted tin roof that rang like a drum when it rained.
On that gray September morning, the platform was mostly empty.
A porter was loading milk cans into the goods van at the far end.
An elderly couple sat on a bench, a cloth-topped basket between them.
The eleven o’clock train to Pittsburgh, with a connection onward to Houndsville, stood at the edge of the platform, waiting.
Lloyd Kauffman stood beside Susan’s trunk, trying to understand precisely how he had come to be in this position.
The morning had begun simply. Susan had mentioned the trunk over breakfast. She had asked if he would drive her into town to pick it up, and he had said yes, because saying yes had been the path of least resistance for five days.
The alternative was to stay at the farmhouse and not look at the kitchen window where Jodie stood, and that was costing him more than he could afford right now.
Looking at the window meant looking at Jodie, and looking at Jodie meant feeling the thing he had been trying, for five careful days, not to feel.
The low, steady pull of a man drawn toward something he was not certain he had the right to want.
He could still feel the weight of her in his arms in the barn.
The warmth of her against him. The startled blue of her eyes looking up into his, so close he could count the darker flecks in her irises.
He thought about her at night, lying on the cot in the front room, staring up at the ceiling.
He thought about her in the morning, while working in the barn.
He thought about it now, standing on a platform beside another woman’s trunk, and it sat in him like a stone at the bottom of a clear stream—visible, immovable, and impossible to pretend away.
Susan had talked on the drive into town.
She had spoken of Houndsville, of her parents’ farm, of the stand of sugar maples that produced the sweetest sap in the county.
She had spoken without pause, filling any vacant gaps.
Lloyd had listened, nodded in the right places, watched the green hills on either side of the valley, and said very little, because saying anything at all had become dangerous.
Now, Susan was standing very close to his elbow. She was forcing a ticket toward him, holding it in her gloved hand, and saying something he had not been expecting.
“I have purchased two tickets,” she said. “For the eleven o’clock. Through to Pittsburgh, connecting to Houndsville at four. The trunk is loaded. I spoke with the porter. We can be deheem by tomorrow evening.”
Lloyd looked at her. “Two tickets.”
“Yah.”
“Susan, I did not agree to go to Houndsville.”
“You did not disagree.” Her voice was pleasant and steady, the voice of a woman stating a conclusion she had reached long before the conversation began. “And there is nothing here for you, Lloyd. You must see that.”
“I see a farm that needs work. A family that has been kind to me. I see?—”
“You see her.” Susan’s voice did not waver. “Do you think I have not noticed? You do not look at the kucke window, Lloyd. You have avoided doing something.”
The words landed with the quiet precision of stones placed one by one across a stream. Lloyd said nothing.
“I am not angry,” Susan said, though her jaw had tightened in a way that suggested anger was at least somewhere there.
“She has been kind to you. You were hurt, alone, and she took you in. It is natural. But she is a widow carrying another man’s kin, with debts to half the valley, and she will not be able to give you wat I can. ”
“Susan—”
“Listen to me. Pliese.” She turned to face him fully, and for the first time since she had arrived in Crystal Lake the composure cracked, just slightly, and beneath it he saw something that was not anger at all but fear—the raw, bright, desperate fear of a woman who could feel the last of something slipping through her fingers.
“My leits’ farm will be mine when they pass.
Four hundred acres. It is gut land, Lloyd.
Strong land, with a creek through the pasture and timber on the ridge.
It will be ours. You will be a landowner.
You will have a deheem. You will not spend your life as a hired hand mending another mann’s chicken coop. ”
“That is a generous offer, Susan.”
“It is not an offer. It is a life. It is the life we talked about.”
“Did we?” he said quietly. “Or did you talk about it, and I did not say ‘nee’ clearly enough, and the silence became a promise I never made?”
Susan went very still. Her dark eyes searched his face. “You’re not remembering, Lloyd. Your head?—”
“You are right. I do not remember. But I know who I am. I know the kind of mann I am. And I do not think I am the kind of mann who makes a promise and then runs from it in the middle of the night.”
The whistle sounded—a long low warning note that rolled along the platform and echoed off the station bricks. The stationmaster called out one more time. Susan reached for Lloyd’s arm.
“Komme, Lloyd. Now. We can talk on the train. We can talk all the way to Houndsville if that is wat you need, but komme now, because this train will not wait for us.”
She pulled on his arm, and Lloyd was carried forward.
He did not mean to step forward. He meant to step back.
But his body obeyed the pull of her hand and five days of polite compliance.
His boot caught the uneven lip of the platform edge, and he went down—hard, one knee striking the cinder, the heel of his hand slamming into the coarse gray gravel, and his head bumping into the side of the train.
The pain was immediate and clarifying, as if he were plunging into cold water.
The door in his mind, closed since his accident, suddenly swung open.
Aaron came first. His brother’s face in the summer light—the ordinary Wednesday morning, the harness in his hands, the surprised look, then the slow, quiet folding into the dust of the yard.
Lloyd remembered kneeling beside him. He remembered his hand already cooling.
He recalled the impossible week that followed—the funeral, the casseroles, and the silence of the cabin afterward, where Aaron’s boots still stood by the door and his coffee cup sat on the shelf.
Houndsville came next. The cabin on the Fisher farm. Their pastureland. The wild cherries in July. Eleven years of honest, hard work, side by side with his brother, and then the sudden, terrible absence of the man he loved, beside him.
Then there was Susan. Not this Susan, the composed woman on the platform.
The Susan from before he left—in her parents’ kitchen, her hands folded, her voice bright with plans.
And his own voice, halting and clumsy, trying to say the words: I do not love you, Susan.
I am sorry. I cannot give you what you want.
And her voice speaking over his, and his own failing, his own cowardice, his acceptance of the silence that became the lie she mistook for an agreement.
Then—flooding back with the clarity of cold water over stones—Jodie.
Jodie in the doorway of the front room, a cup of broth in her hand, saying: It is enough to start with.
Jodie at the far fence line, the golden September light reflecting in her hair, saying: He preferred plans to execution.
Jodie laughing—really laughing, the sound sudden, full, and warm as something breaking open—Jodie in the hayloft, falling toward him, the weight of her in his arms, the blue of her eyes so close he found breathing difficult, and the certainty, the terrible, wonderful certainty, that he was falling in love with her.
He looked up from where he lay, on the platform.
Susan was staring down at him. She had seen something change in his demeanor.
“Lloyd? Lloyd, are you hurt?”
He got to his feet slowly. He brushed the cinder from his trousers.
He looked at her—really looked at her, with the full weight of everything he now remembered—and he saw her.
Not the determined woman with the tickets.
The frightened girl beneath, the one who had mistaken persistence for love because the alternative was admitting she had been wrong and wouldn’t get her man.
“Yah, I’m fine, but I remember, Susan,” he said quietly.
Her face went white. “Wat do you remember?”
“Everything. I remember the conversation in your parents’ kucke. I remember trying to tell you, but you spoke over me. I was too tired and too grieved to try again. I remember leaving without saying goodbye, which was the coward’s way, I know. I have not been proud of it for a single day since.”
“Lloyd—”
“Es dutt mer leed. You deserved better from me than silence. You deserved a mann who could look you in the eye and say plainly: I care for you, Susan, but I do not love you, and I cannot build a life on something that is not there. I should have said that. I should have said it clearly. I owed you that, at least, and I failed.”
Susan’s hand, still holding the tickets, was trembling. Her chin was up. Her eyes were very bright.
“You are choosing her,” she said. “A widow. A frau with a dead man’s kin and a dead man’s debts.”
“I am choosing myself, Susan. I am choosing to be honest, for the first time, about wat I can and cannot feel. I should have done it months ago. I should have told you in your kucke.”
“And wat do you feel?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “For her. Say it plainly, since you are suddenly so fond of plainness.”
Lloyd fell quiet for a moment. The train hissed. The stationmaster checked his watch.