Chapter 10 #3
“She doesn’t get to speak badly to you.”
“She is ten.”
“Old enough to know better.”
“Old enough to hurt.”
Thomas looked away, toward the barn, the mountains, anywhere that was not Hannah’s face. She let him look, because she could see him putting it together, the pieces she was about to give him.
“You told Dell that Lucy needed a woman,” she said.
His head turned. “When?”
“I don’t know. Lucy heard you.”
Thomas’s face changed. The hardness went out of it and something worse came in. The understanding of a man who has just learned that a thing he said in passing had reached his daughter and stayed.
“I didn’t mean —”
“I know what you meant. But Lucy is ten. She heard her father say she needed a woman, and she has had to make her own sense of that. And the sense she made of it was that she had failed at being without her mother, and you went and found someone to fix the problem.”
Thomas dragged a hand over his face. He stood at the woodpile in the afternoon light with the axe buried in the block and his daughter inside the house, and Hannah watched him feel it.
“I should have talked to her,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at Hannah. She had expected him to defend himself, to explain what he had meant, to say it had been different in context, to do what people did when they were told they had hurt someone without meaning to.
He didn’t. He stood there and took it the way he took everything, straight on, without flinching.
“I’ll talk to her tonight.”
“Not about what she said to me.”
His eyes narrowed. “Hannah.”
“That is mine to settle with her. I am asking you to let me.”
He was quiet a long time. Then he nodded.
“All right.”
Hannah turned toward the house.
“Hannah.”
She looked back.
Thomas had left the axe in the block. His hands were at his sides.
“You didn’t have to take that on. Her being angry.”
Hannah met his eyes. “Of course I did.”
“No. You could have sent her to me.”
“I could have. And then she would have learned that the woman in her kitchen handles the flour and the coffee and the braids, and sends everything hard to her father. And the next time she was angry she would have gone around me, because I would have taught her she could.”
Thomas held her gaze a long moment, and Hannah watched him hear it, turning it over, setting it beside everything else he was learning about the woman he had married.
“You’re right,” he said.
Hannah went inside.
She sat at the kitchen table and opened her account book. The columns were empty. Thomas had offered egg money and she had turned it down, and she was not sure she had been right to, and she was certain she could not have taken it as though it were enough.
She had left one house where everything belonged to someone else and come to another. The marriage changed the law. It did not change the feeling of standing in a kitchen where every pot, every pan, every cup on every shelf belonged to a man who had bought them for a woman who was dead.
She closed the account book.
She put the book away and went to the upper cupboard and took down the blue crock.
She held it a moment. It was lighter than she expected, empty, glazed, the chip at the rim small enough that you would not notice it unless you were looking.
She did not know what Sarah had kept in it.
Dried herbs, perhaps. Or buttons. Or nothing at all.
It did not matter what had been in it. What mattered was that it had been on the shelf, in its place, where Sarah had put it, and Hannah had moved it without knowing what she was moving.
She set it on the windowsill above the sink, where the morning light would catch the glaze, and where Lucy would see it every day.
Then she went to Lucy’s room and knocked.
“Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Where did your mother keep her recipe book?”
A pause. Then Lucy’s door opened. She was in her nightgown, her hair loose, her face still carrying the day.
“In the drawer by the stove,” she said. “The one that sticks.”
Hannah nodded. “Thank you.”
Lucy looked at her a moment, the long, measuring look of a child who is deciding something and has not yet decided. Then she said, “Good night, Hannah.”
“Good night, Lucy.”
Lucy closed the door.
Hannah went downstairs. She opened the drawer by the stove. It stuck, just as Lucy had said. She took out the recipe book and set it on the table and opened it to the first page.
Sarah’s handwriting. Small, neat, practical. Measurements in the margins. A note beside the bread recipe: double for winter.
Hannah closed it and put it back in the drawer, the one that stuck, and pushed it shut.
Outside, she could hear Thomas splitting the last of the wood. The axe fell steady and even. After a while it stopped, and his boots came across the yard, and the kitchen door opened, and he stood there looking at her with sawdust on his sleeves and his face was different.
“Lucy all right?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. He stood in the doorway a moment longer. Then he came in and put the kettle on, and neither of them spoke about it, and the kitchen held them both.