Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
On Monday morning Lucy came into the kitchen with the brush in her hand and her hair hanging loose.
Hannah checked the clock. “You’ll be late.”
“I know.”
Lucy held out the brush and sat down. Hannah took it and began dividing the hair, starting from the left, the side she had been starting from since the first morning, the side Sarah had started from, the side Lucy had told her about one morning and never mentioned again.
She had the first section separated when Lucy said, “Mama made them tighter.”
Hannah tightened the braid.
“Not that tight.”
Hannah loosened it. She tied the ribbon and started the second braid, and Lucy sat rigid beneath her hands.
“The ribbon goes lower,” Lucy said.
Hannah moved it. Lucy reached back and touched it.
“That isn’t right either.”
Hannah untied it. “Show me.”
“I can’t when I’m sitting here.”
“Then tell me.”
Lucy tried. Hannah tied it again. Lucy touched it.
“Mama knew how,” Lucy said.
Hannah’s hands stopped.
“I expect she did,” Hannah said.
Lucy twisted around. “Can’t you do it like her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am not your mother.”
Lucy stared at her. Hannah set down the ribbon. “Turn around. Let me finish.”
Lucy’s chin lifted — the same chin Thomas lifted when he had been told something he did not like.
“I know you’re not my mother,” Lucy said.
“I know you do.”
“Then stop changing everything.”
Hannah went still.
“What have I changed?”
“The pantry. And the curtains —”
“The curtains are still brown.”
“You said we could put up the blue ones. And you moved Mama’s jar.”
The blue crock. It had stood on the pantry shelf when Hannah arrived, empty, glazed, with a small chip at the rim. She had moved it to the upper cupboard to make room for flour. She had not known it was Sarah’s.
“I didn’t know it was your mother’s,” she said.
“It was.”
“I can put it back.”
“I don’t want you to put it back because I told you!
” Lucy’s voice broke on the last word, and her face crumpled.
Not all at once, but in stages, the way a child’s face crumples when she is trying to hold it together and cannot.
She pushed away from the chair and stood in the kitchen with her fists at her sides and her half-finished braid hanging over one shoulder.
“I don’t want you here!”
The words hit Hannah in the chest. She stood beside the chair with the brush in one hand and the ribbon in the other and felt them land, and they landed hard, harder than she had expected, because she had been in this house less than a week and she had begun to think she belonged in it, and a ten-year-old girl had just told her she did not.
Lucy stared at her, frightened by what she had said, too angry to take it back. Then she ran, and Hannah heard her boots on the stairs, and a door slammed, and the house went quiet.
Hannah stood in the kitchen a long time.
She put the brush on the table. She put the ribbon beside it.
Sarah’s sampler was on the wall, the stitched words facing her: Whither thou goest, I will go.
Sarah had stitched that verse as a girl and hung it in a kitchen she would live in for eleven years and die in, and now Hannah was standing in that kitchen with flour on the shelves and a child upstairs who did not want her there.
Sarah was here. Hannah had known it getting off the train, and walking through the front door, and standing in the pantry with the sacks on the floor.
Known it, and moved the flour anyway, and moved the coffee, and moved the salt, and moved the blue crock with the chip at the rim, because the things needed moving and she was the woman who moved things now.
So busy making the house work that she had not stopped to think about what it meant to a child to watch her do it.
Less than a week, and she had rearranged the pantry, discussed the curtains, made the coffee differently. Lucy’s hair braided on the wrong side and then the right side. She had been practical, and the cost of the practicality had cost her something she had not known she was spending.
Upstairs, Lucy’s door was closed. Hannah knocked.
No answer.
“Lucy.”
“Go away.”
Hannah leaned her hand against the door.
She could insist. Lucy was a child, late for school, sitting in her room with half-braided hair.
But insisting would not undo what had been said, and what had been said needed time, and Hannah had learned a long time ago that some things could not be rushed.
From Mrs. Corliss, from her own mother, from every woman who had ever let a hard thing sit until it was ready to be picked up.
“I shall be downstairs,” she said.
She went back to the kitchen and put the kettle on and washed the breakfast things and stood at the window looking out at the garden, and after twelve minutes Lucy came down with her coat on and her schoolbooks under her arm.
She had finished her own hair. Badly. One braid was thicker than the other and the blue ribbon sat somewhere near her shoulder, and Hannah saw it and let it be.
Lucy went to the door.
“You need breakfast,” Hannah said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You may be angry with me and eat at the same time.”
Lucy glared at her. She dropped the schoolbooks on the table. Hannah put bread and butter on a plate. Lucy ate half a slice standing up, her jaw set, chewing as though the bread had personally offended her. Neither spoke.
At the door Hannah handed her the schoolbooks. Lucy took them without looking up.
“Come home directly after school.”
“I always do.”
“I know.”
Lucy left. Hannah watched from the window until she disappeared along the road — small, angry, badly braided, walking fast — and then she turned back to the kitchen and stood in it.
The blue crock was in the upper cupboard where Hannah had put it.
She went to the cupboard and looked at the crock. She could put it back. Five seconds. But putting it back would mean one angry morning was enough to undo her.
Hannah closed the cupboard.
She left the crock where it was.
She went back to work.
The kitchen door opened at noon.
He came through the kitchen door differently. He normally came without ceremony: hat off, boots loud, straight to the coffeepot. Today he opened the door and stayed in it, and his face was tight.
“Where’s Lucy?” he said.
“At school.”
Thomas took off his hat. “She didn’t go.”
Hannah put aside the knife she was using. “What?”
“I saw her near the creek when we brought the heifers down. She was sitting under the cottonwood.”
The creek was nearly a mile from the school road. Hannah felt the fear come in, cold and quick under the anger, because Lucy had walked out the door three hours ago and said I always do and Hannah had watched her go and had not followed her, and the child had been alone at the creek the whole time.
“She told me she was going to school,” Hannah said.
Thomas waited. He could see there was more, and he was giving her room to say it.
“We had a difficult morning,” she said.
Harlan appeared outside with Lucy walking ahead of him, her boots muddy, her face closed. Thomas opened the door and Lucy came in with her eyes on the floor.
Harlan handed Thomas the schoolbooks. “Found those under the cottonwood.”
“Thank you,” Thomas said. His face had gone hard. Not angry yet, but the anger was close, held behind the hardness the way water is held behind a dam.
Harlan looked at Lucy, then at Hannah. “Ma’am.” He left.
Thomas closed the door. “Sit down.”
Lucy sat.
Thomas remained standing. He looked down at his daughter, and Hannah watched him choose. Between the fear and the anger, between the father who was relieved she was safe and the father who needed her to understand what she had done.
“Why weren’t you at school?”
Lucy looked at the table. “I didn’t want to go.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
No answer.
“Did you tell Hannah you were going?”
Lucy nodded.
“Look at me.”
She did.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
Thomas’s voice remained quiet. “You don’t lie to Hannah. You don’t lie to me. And you don’t go off alone without either of us knowing where you are.”
Lucy’s eyes filled. Thomas saw it. He did not soften. Hannah watched him hold the line, the same way he held a fence post, straight, not giving. This was how Thomas loved his daughter. Not gently. Steadily.
Hannah stepped nearer. “Thomas.”
He met her eyes.
“May I speak to her?”
For a moment she thought he might refuse. His jaw was set, and she watched him weigh it: his right to discipline his own child against whatever he saw in Hannah’s face that told him this was hers to handle.
He nodded. “I’ll be outside.”
He put on his hat and left. The door closed behind him, and the kitchen was quiet, and Hannah sat down across the table from Lucy and looked at her.
Lucy’s eyes were on the closed door. “You’re going to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“What I said.”
“No.”
Lucy stared. “Why?”
“Because you said it to me. What happened between us this morning is between us.”
Lucy stared at her, and Hannah watched her trying to understand. A child who expected the adults to close ranks, to share everything, to present a single wall she could not get around, and instead the woman across the table was telling her there was a space that belonged to the two of them alone.
“I don’t hate you,” Lucy said.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I said I didn’t want you here.”
“Yes.”
“I did mean it.”
Hannah looked at her. “Thank you for making that clear.”
Lucy looked uncertain. “I meant it then.”
“I know.”
Lucy rubbed one muddy boot against the other. She was working toward something — Hannah felt her working, the way she could feel dough when it was almost ready, the resistance giving way — and she waited.
“You moved Mama’s things,” Lucy said.
“One thing.”
“You’ll move more.”
“Yes.”