Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Thomas woke before dawn with Hannah’s hair across his arm.
She was still asleep. Her face was turned toward him, one hand curled between them on the pillow, and her breathing was slow and even, and Thomas lay in the grey light and looked at her and held still, because moving would change this.
He had not slept in a bed with another person since Sarah died.
The thought arrived without apology. It was there, the way the morning was there, and he lay with it.
Sarah’s side of the bed had been empty for fourteen months.
He had slept alone and got used to the alone and stopped noticing it the way he stopped noticing the cold after the first hard frost — because his body had learned to carry it without comment.
Now Hannah was in his bed. Not Sarah. A different woman, with her own room at the front of the house and her own trunk and her own way of breathing in the dark.
But the same kind of thing — a woman beside him, the weight of her against his arm, the warmth — and the having of it again was so much larger than he had expected that he lay still and let it fill the room before he tried to stand up inside it.
After a while he eased his arm from under her hair and dressed and went downstairs.
He built the fire and put the coffee on and filled the wood box and the water buckets, and it steadied him the way it always did: one thing, then the next, his hands knowing what to do while the rest of him caught up. He was standing at the stove when Hannah came down.
She was dressed. Her hair was pinned. Her grey dress was buttoned to the throat.
She came into the kitchen. “Good morning.” She went to the coffeepot.
The steadiness was the same as yesterday — the same economy, the same way she poured without looking at her hands.
Everything was different, and the difference was not in her.
It was in him. Her hands were the hands that had been on him in the dark.
Her mouth was the mouth he had kissed until neither of them could breathe.
He could not look at any of it without remembering it against his.
She poured the coffee, set his cup on the table, asked whether the north fence had taken damage in the storm.
Her voice was level, practical, giving nothing away.
Thomas picked up his cup and kept his mouth on the coffee.
Lucy came down still half asleep, and Hannah braided her hair from the left. Lucy ate her breakfast and talked about the snow, and Thomas ate his breakfast and said very little, and the kitchen was ordinary, and the ordinary was harder than the storm.
Harlan arrived. They had work to do: the herd to check, a downed section of fence, the hay under the west lean-to. Thomas stood and put on his coat.
“I’ll be out most of the day,” he said.
Hannah set his cup beside the basin. “All right.”
“I’ll be back before dark.”
She looked at him. Not a long look, a second, perhaps less, but her eyes were different from yesterday morning, and he felt it in his chest, and he went outside before it showed on his face.
Hannah stood at the sink after the door closed and listened to his boots cross the yard.
The kitchen was the same kitchen — stove, table, sampler on the wall.
Whither thou goest. She had read the same verse in her mother’s Bible on the train, not knowing then that a girl named Sarah had stitched it into linen and hung it beside a kitchen door in Colorado.
Her hands were the same hands. But the house felt different with him gone, the way a room feels different after someone has said something true in it, and she stood there and let the feeling settle before she reached for the next dish.
The cattle had come through the storm well. Two heifers had worked themselves into brush near the creek. A steer had torn part of the north fence. The hay was dry. By noon Thomas should have been satisfied, and he was, and underneath the satisfaction his mind kept turning back to the kitchen.
He mended the fence. He cleared the trough at the lower pasture. He found a gate that sagged and fixed that too, and the fixing kept his hands busy, and his hands needed to be busy, because when they were still he thought about last night and what it meant and what came next.
He stood at the lower trough with the ice broken and the water steaming in the cold air.
Then he picked up his tools and went to find the next thing to mend.
He reached the house before dark.
Hannah was in the kitchen. Lucy was at the table with her arithmetic. The stove was warm. Supper was on. The house smelled like beef and bread. Thomas came through the door, hung his coat, and stood in his kitchen. The two of them, the lamp, the steam on the windows.
Supper was simple. Lucy talked. Thomas listened. Hannah served the plates. They ate. Once, when Lucy was deep in a long story about school, Hannah looked up and caught Thomas watching her. Their eyes held across the table.
Lucy went to bed at eight. Hannah walked her up and came back down, and the kitchen was quiet, and Thomas was standing by the stove because sitting felt like waiting.
Hannah came into the room. She stopped in the doorway and looked at him, the way she looked at things she was assessing, room by room, deciding what worked and what wanted mending. Thomas stood there and let her see whatever she was seeing.
“You’ve been quiet tonight,” she said.
“I’m a quiet man.”
“Quieter than usual.”
She was standing in the kitchen doorway in her grey dress with her hair pinned and her hands at her sides, and she was the same woman who had braided Lucy’s hair this morning and poured coffee and asked about the fence, and she was the woman who had stood against him last night with her hands in his shirt, and the two of them were the same person, and he needed to say something to her before he could go any further.
“I loved Sarah,” he said.
Her face did not change. She stood in the doorway and received it steadily, without flinching.
“I know,” she said.
“I was married to her for eleven years. She was my wife and Lucy’s mother and she died in the room down the hall, and I sat beside her while she died, and I have not said this to anyone since.”
Hannah was very still.
“You aren’t Sarah,” Thomas said. “I don’t want you to be.
I am not standing here wishing you were someone else.
But I need you to know that she was real, and what I had with her was real, and I have not forgotten it, and I will not forget it, and that has nothing to do with what is happening between you and me. ”
Hannah held his eyes. The kitchen was quiet. The stove ticked. Outside the window the mountains were dark against a sky that still held the last of the light.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For telling me. For not pretending she doesn’t exist in this house.”
Thomas held her gaze. “She exists in this house.”
“I know she does. I’ve been living with her for a week. Her sampler is on the wall. Her curtains are in the chest. Her daughter is upstairs. She is everywhere, Thomas, and she should be, and I have never wished her gone.”
Thomas’s chest tightened.
“But I am here now,” Hannah said. “And whatever this is — you and me — it is not the same as what you had with Sarah. It doesn’t need to be the same. It only needs to be ours.”
Thomas crossed the kitchen. He stopped in front of her and put his hands on her face, gently, the way he held things that mattered. She looked back at him. Open, steady, unafraid.
“It’s ours,” he said.
Hannah put her hands over his.
He kissed her. Not the way he had kissed her in the storm. This was slower. This was the kiss of a man who had said the hard thing and been heard and was still standing.
The wind had softened. The house was quiet. Hannah’s hair lay across his arm and her breathing was slow and even, and Thomas lay looking at the dark ceiling and did not move.
At the foot of the bed her trunk sat in the shadows. Closed. She had been in the house for more than a week and the trunk was still closed. Not empty. There were things inside she had not taken out, and he looked at it in the dark and did not touch it.
Hannah stirred. Her hand moved on his chest, a small movement, fingers curling, the unconscious grip of a person holding on in sleep, and Thomas covered her hand with his own.
He lay in the dark and felt the weight of what was happening to him.
He knew what it was. He had felt it before.
With Sarah, slowly, over years, the way a field fills with snow, one flake at a time until the whole ground is covered and you cannot see the dirt beneath it.
This was faster. This had come in weeks, not years, and it was not the same feeling — Hannah was not Sarah and the feeling was not the same — but the danger was.
He was beginning to love a woman. He had already learned what that cost when she was taken from you, and he had spent fourteen months building a life where nothing could cost that much again.
Then he had put an advertisement in a newspaper.
Hannah’s breathing deepened. Her fingers relaxed against his chest. Thomas held her hand and looked at the dark and did not sleep for a long time.