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

Chapter 25

The thaw came in the deep of the winter, and with it a day when the road opened far enough for a wagon.

Silas had business at the wheelwright’s on the far side of Morrow Creek — the mill cart had gone a wheel over in the cold — and he said, at breakfast, in the flat voice he used for important invitations, “You could come and see the town while it’s green under the melt.”

She went. She knew a wheelwright’s errand could have been done alone in half a day, and she knew the road was not so long that the mill cart required company, but she climbed up onto the seat beside him anyway, and they drove the two miles through the dripping pines with the thaw water running in the ditches and the whole world gray and green and breathing out.

The wheelwright took the wheel, and the afternoon arranged itself into errands that were mostly walking, and at the end of it, coming back down the street with the light going long and gold, Silas stopped at the far end of the road.

The bench stood under the maple, still bare with the tail end of the season, still holding its ground.

“Let’s sit a minute,” he said.

Ada looked at him. He had never once asked to sit on the bench. She had sat on it alone, in the spring, in the April sun; she had sat on it in her mind a hundred more times than she would have admitted to anyone. But he had never come near it.

They sat down on it together, side by side, the way the town had first seen them — him standing, her sitting, neither of them looking at each other — and now, the town could have seen, if it had been watching, the whole of it turned around: the two of them on the bench together, in the evening light, looking at the road where it curved out of town and became the dirt track heading into the hills.

“I’ve never told you what I saw,” he said, “the day you came.”

“You didn’t see anything,” Ada said. “You were leaning against the post office wall with your hat down. You looked like you had decided not to be involved.”

“I had decided not to be involved,” he said. “And then she came out of the post office with her speech — I’d heard that speech three towns wide, everyone had, she’d been practicing it on the church steps all week — and you stood there with your letter folded, and you listened to the whole of it, and you didn’t argue, and you didn’t cry.”

He was quiet for a moment. A jay called from the maple, and then was quiet too.

“I’ve watched a lot of things in my life,” he said. “Watching costs nothing and speaking costs something, and I’ve always been careful with what I spend. I watched you fold that letter — twice, down the same crease — and I thought to myself: a woman who folds a letter twice while the whole town is watching isn’t trying to hide anything. She’s keeping something. And I knew before you ever sat down on this bench that the talk was a lie. A woman who keeps things instead of hiding them doesn’t bring ruin to a house. She brings the keeping.”

Ada looked at the road.

“So when you sat down,” he said, “I made a decision. I decided that if you could cook, I was hiring you. References be damned — I’ve never had a reference that told me the truth about a horse or a man, and I wasn’t going to start trusting them about a woman. And if you couldn’t cook, I was going to teach you, which I’ve since learned would have been a waste of both our seasons.”

“That’s a long speech for a man who doesn’t spend his words,” Ada said.

“It’s been waiting since Wednesday,” he said.

They sat on the bench together in the long gold light, with the town behind them and the road ahead, and the boy who swept the post office steps — grown another inch, holding his broom in the new confident way — came out and saw them, and made a decision of his own, and waved. Ada waved back. Silas raised a hand a quarter of an inch, which from him was a full salute.

“Was it worth the walk?” she said, when they stood to go.

“Sitting on it was different,” he said. “I thought it would feel like her day. It feels like ours.”

He said it plainly, the way he said everything that cost him, and she did not answer, and they drove the two miles home through the dripping pines with the thaw running in the ditches, and the mill came around the last bend, and the house stood behind it with the lamp already burning in the kitchen window because June lit it at dusk and no one had ever once asked her to.