“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All

Chapter 17

April came in green and soft, and with it the first trip to town that Ada made alone.

The errands were plain ones — coffee, salt, the seed order called in at the mercantile, a length of webbing for the pump handle — but every woman in Morrow Creek who saw the wagon come down the road understood the actual errand, because a woman who has been turned on the post office steps walks back into town eventually, and the town holds its breath the first time, the way a river holds its breath before a dam.

Mrs. Platt saw her come through the mercantile door and began before the bell had stopped.

“The biscuit maker herself,” she said, at full carrying volume. “Walk in, Mrs. Wade. Come see what your girl ordered — every penny accounted for, I’ll say that for the Wades. That one’s got her father’s count and her mother’s eyes and she’s going to run this town’s books before she’s finished with arithmetic.”

Ada set her list on the counter. Mrs. Platt went down it item by item, narrating the merits of each, and the mercantile performed the small miracle that mercantiles perform when a life has turned: the conversation at the back stopped, and picked up again one decibel lower, and this time it was not the low decibel of judgment. It was the low decibel of adjustment — of a town’s story revising itself, the way a river revises its bank.

The door opened, and Enid Holbrook stepped in from the boardwalk.

The room went the way rooms go. Mrs. Platt’s pencil stopped. The conversation at the back ran down like a clock. Even the door seemed to hold its breath in the jamb.

Enid Holbrook looked at Ada across the length of the mercantile. She had the same hat, a slightly newer one, and she had the same face — the face of a woman who required her stories to hold their shapes, and who had been contradicted by the facts of this one at every turn: by the clean kitchen, by the county man’s closed notebook, by the wedding that most of the town had attended, by the winter that had passed without a single scandal.

She looked at Ada.

“Good morning, Mrs. Holbrook,” Ada said.

Enid Holbrook’s mouth worked once, the way a mouth works when it is deciding between a thing it has rehearsed and a thing it has learned.

“Mrs. Wade,” she said.

That was all. She bought her thread. She went out the door. She did not look back.

The conversation at the back of the mercantile resumed, and Mrs. Platt leaned across the counter and said, in a voice loud enough to be witnessed by the whole store, “That’s the closest that particular woman has ever come to an apology in the whole history of this town. Put it in the ledger, girl. It’s the only one you’ll get from her, and it cost her dearly to give it.”

Ada walked the length of the boardwalk back toward the wagon, and on the way she stopped.

The bench stood at the far end of the road, under the maple that had been bare on her first day, now in full green leaf. She had not sat on it since the morning she walked away from it behind a stranger’s wagon. She sat down on it now, in the spring sun, and put her hands in her lap, and looked at the road where it curved out of town and became the dirt track heading into the hills.

The boy who swept the post office steps — taller now, but still the boy — came out with his broom and saw her, and gave her a wave that had cost him some nerve, and she waved back, and the town of Morrow Creek, in its own good time, got on with its Thursday.

She stood up before the bench could mean anything, and she drove the wagon home with the coffee and the salt and the seed order, and that evening at the table, when the children were in bed and the lamp was between them, Silas said, “You went to town today.”

“I did,” she said.

“Did it hold?” he asked. It was not a question about the town.

“It held fine,” she said.

And the house was quiet around them in the particular way it was quiet when a thing was settled, and outside the ground along the south fence lay dark and turned and ready, and in the dark under the turned edge of it the saved seeds waited — patient as a thing that knows what it is for.

Three weeks later, the sweet peas came up in rows.