Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Thomas woke to the smell of coffee.
Coffee, and a cupboard door closing below him.
Thomas lay in the grey light and listened to the sounds of someone moving through his kitchen, and the sounds were wrong — too quick, too light, a different rhythm from the one his house had kept for fourteen months — and then he understood.
Hannah was downstairs. His wife was in his kitchen making coffee, and the smell of it was already through the walls.
He dressed and went downstairs.
Hannah stood at the stove with her back to him.
Her hair was pinned up, though not as severely as she had worn it at the depot, looser, as though she had done it quickly, without a mirror, and a few shorter strands had escaped at the back of her neck.
Her sleeves were pushed above her wrists.
She was cooking something in the skillet and the kitchen smelled like coffee and bacon and a morning that had been started by someone who knew what she was doing.
He stopped on the last stair. He had kissed her yesterday, barely, in a church full of people.
He had touched her hair last night in this kitchen and said goodnight and gone upstairs and lain awake listening to every creak in the house and knowing she was on the other side of the wall.
He had done the right thing. He knew that.
The knowing did not make it easier to stand on the bottom step looking at the back of her neck.
Hannah turned. “Good morning.”
“Morning.”
Her eyes went over him, quickly, not lingering. Thomas became conscious that he had not shaved.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“So are you.”
“I usually am.”
“So am I.”
He came into the kitchen. There was bread on the table and eggs in the skillet and the coffee was poured and the whole room had been rearranged — not in any way he could point to, nothing had been moved, but the air was different.
A woman had been working in this kitchen. He had forgotten what that felt like.
“You didn’t have to make breakfast this early,” he said.
Hannah glanced at him. “What time would you like it?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean?”
Thomas considered the question and found he had no useful answer for it, because what he had meant was something closer to you didn’t have to do any of this, and what he meant by that was something closer to I am standing in my own kitchen and it feels like someone else’s house and I don’t mind, and none of that was a sentence he could say out loud at six in the morning without shaving.
Hannah’s mouth curved. “You haven’t had your coffee yet.”
“No.”
“That may be the trouble.”
She poured him a cup. Thomas took it and drank. Stronger than he made it. Better. Hannah was pleased with herself, and he could see it, and the seeing did something to him that the coffee did not help with.
Footsteps thudded overhead. A moment later Lucy came down with one stocking wrinkled at the ankle and her hair hanging loose, and she walked into the kitchen and saw Hannah and stopped.
“Morning,” Hannah said.
Lucy came down still half asleep. She looked at Hannah at the stove, and at her father at the table, and a slow grin spread across her face.
“Morning.”
Lucy went to Hannah. “Will you braid my hair?”
Hannah looked at Thomas. “Does she usually wear it braided?”
“Sarah braided it for school,” he said, and the name came out before he could think about it — because it was the truth, and the truth lived in his mouth alongside everything else about Sarah, in the same place where he kept the way she folded the towels and the side of the bed she slept on and the song she sang when she thought no one was listening.
He could not take Sarah out of his own house. She was in the walls.
Hannah’s face did not change. “All right. Bring me the brush.”
Lucy ran upstairs. Thomas sat with his coffee and wished he had simply said yes.
Hannah took the skillet from the stove. “You needn’t look so troubled.”
“I shouldn’t have said it that way.”
“Why not? She braided Lucy’s hair. Now I’m going to braid Lucy’s hair. Those are facts.”
Thomas studied her. She was right. They were facts. The trouble was not the facts: it was the weight he kept putting on them, the way a man keeps testing a board he’s already checked because he can’t quite believe it will hold.
Lucy returned with the brush and a blue ribbon.
Hannah sat her on a chair and began dividing the hair, working quickly, her fingers moving through it the way they had moved through the bread dough — sure, practiced, knowing what they were doing.
Thomas watched. Sarah had braided Lucy’s hair every morning for years, standing in this kitchen, in this light, and the braiding had been so ordinary that Thomas had never watched it, and now he was watching it and it hurt in a way he had not expected, because Hannah was doing it and Sarah was not, and that was a fact too.
Halfway through the first braid Lucy said, “Mama started on the other side.”
Hannah’s hands stopped. Thomas put down his cup.
“Lucy,” he said, and the word came out harder than he intended, harder than the moment required, because he had been sitting in the hurt and Lucy had walked into it, and he could not explain to a ten-year-old that the problem was not which side the braid started on.
Lucy stared at him. Hannah looked up.
“I only said —” Lucy began.
“I heard what you said.”
Lucy lowered her eyes. Thomas regretted it immediately, the sharpness of it, the way Lucy’s shoulders pulled in. Lucy had been remembering her mother. There was nothing wrong with that. He had been doing the same thing all morning.
Hannah tied the first braid without speaking. “Turn your head, Lucy.” Lucy obeyed. Hannah began the second braid, and her hands moved through the hair with the same steady sureness, and no one spoke until she had tied the ribbon and smoothed the ends.
“There,” she said.
Lucy touched both braids and said nothing.
Thomas finished his coffee. The kitchen was quiet in the way a kitchen goes quiet when something has happened and no one wants to be the first to name it.
Hannah rose. “Breakfast.”
That was the end of it. Thomas ate. Lucy ate. Hannah ate. The braids were on the wrong side, or the right side, depending on who was counting, and nobody mentioned it again.
The next morning Thomas came down and found Hannah braiding Lucy’s hair from the left. He had braided from the left — Sarah’s side — and Lucy sat still. Thomas stayed on the bottom step and watched.
Harlan came in before they had finished breakfast. He knocked once and opened the kitchen door the way he had opened it every morning for three years, and then he saw Hannah and stopped with his hat in his hands.
Thomas had told him about the marriage. Harlan had been moving cattle on the far side of the property yesterday and had missed the ceremony.
“Morning,” Thomas said. “Harlan Pike, Hannah.”
Harlan removed his hat. “Mrs. Avery.”
Hannah looked up at the name. There it was — the small catch, the half-second of adjustment, the name arriving like a coat she had not yet worn enough to recognize.
“Mr. Pike,” she said.
“Harlan’s enough.”
“Then Hannah is enough.”
Harlan glanced at Thomas. Thomas buttered his bread. Harlan sat down.
Hannah went to the stove and brought him a plate, and Harlan thanked her and ate, and the four of them sat at the table — Thomas, Hannah, Lucy, Harlan — and the kitchen held all of them the way it had not held anyone beyond Thomas and Lucy for fourteen months.
Thomas ate his bread and listened to Harlan talk about the north fence and watched Hannah pour coffee for a man she had met thirty seconds ago, and it was ordinary.
The wedding had mattered, the vows, the kiss.
But this was the thing. A table with four people at it and a woman at the stove who knew where the coffeepot was.
They discussed the day’s work while they ate.
A section of fence on the north pasture needed seeing to before cattle were moved closer for winter.
Hay still to bring under cover. One of the barn doors had begun dragging and would be worse once snow came.
Hannah listened without interrupting. When Harlan finished eating, he thanked her and left.
Thomas stood and reached for his coat. “I’ll be up north most of the morning. We’re riding the fence line.”
“All right.”
“If you need me —”
“I shall come and find you.”
Lucy looked between them. “Can I stay home?”
“No,” Thomas said.
“But Hannah’s here.”
“Which has nothing to do with school.”
Lucy appealed to Hannah. Hannah shook her head. “I have been your stepmother less than a day. I am not beginning by helping you play truant.”
Lucy sighed. Thomas fetched his coat.
At the door he looked back. Hannah had begun clearing the table.
Lucy stood beside her, complaining about arithmetic.
Thomas stood in the doorway with his coat half on and looked at it the way he had looked at the valley when Hannah first saw it, as though seeing it through new eyes had made it new.
He went outside before she caught him at it.
He came back shortly before noon for a tool he had left in the barn, and found the kitchen empty. He could hear Hannah in the pantry. He went to the doorway and stopped.
Half the contents were on the floor. Sacks, jars, tins, two baskets: everything that had been on the shelves was now on the pine boards, and Hannah was on her knees with her sleeves pushed up, taking stock of it with the expression of a woman who has opened a ledger and found the columns do not add up.
“What happened?” he said.
She looked over her shoulder. “Nothing happened. I am putting things in order.”
“They were in order.”
Hannah straightened. “No. They were on shelves. That is not the same thing.” She pointed. “You have flour in three places.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
Thomas looked. She pointed behind a crock. There was a smaller sack he had forgotten about.
“Three,” he said.