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

Chapter 27

The county’s annual visit came in the middle of summer, and Aldous Tolliver came with it — but he was not the visitor this time; he was the guest.

That was Beck’s formulation, delivered at the noon table with the ceremoniousness of a man pronouncing a verdict on history: “Last year the county came to look at us. This year the county comes to dinner. That’s progress, and I’ll thank Mrs. Wade for cooking it.”

Tolliver ate two helpings, walked the fence line with June to receive her report on the fourth sweet pea (which had, she conceded, come into standard), sat with Silas on the porch long enough for the two of them to solve some piece of the mill’s future between them, and on his way out he took Ada’s hand in both of his at the gate.

“The first time I came,” he said, “I had a notebook full of caution. I want you to know I’ve closed that notebook. The county’s business with you is done, Mrs. Wade. What’s left is the part that isn’t the county’s business — which is that it was a pleasure to see the note I wrote fifteen years ago come true.”

He unhitched his horse, and he went down the road, and the dust settled, and the summer went on.

The church, on a Sunday late in the season, closed the story the way such stories close: quietly, in a doorway, without ceremony.

The Wade family — all four of them — went to the service as they always did now, and afterward, in the knot of people on the steps, Ada found herself face to face with Enid Holbrook. The hat was older now. The face had lost a little of its architecture. The two women stood in the light with the town’s attention bent on them the way it had been bent on the post office steps, two years and a county’s worth of story ago.

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

“Mrs. Wade,” said Enid Holbrook.

It was the same exchange as the mercantile, the same two sentences, and the world did not stop — but something in the town’s story took its last stitch, and Enid Holbrook went down the steps to her wagon, and the Wades went down theirs, and the two stories did not meet again.

Because people who have been watching a story need to see how it ends — and Morrow Creek had seen its ending, and found it to its liking, and had gone back to the daily round of living in it, which is the only honest verdict a town can give.

The summer went out gold. The harvest table was full at the long table in the yard — two years running now, and Beck had stopped counting it as news. The morning glories June had planted for her mother came back along the east wall, blue as June had promised, and she cut one and put it in the jar on the kitchen table without explanation, the way the jar had first appeared on a windowsill in a house she did not yet live in, and nobody mentioned it, and the family let the small completions stand where they landed.

The first snows of the season came down off the ridge — quiet, steady, making the world new — covering the mill, covering the fence, covering the rows of turned ground where the sweet peas had stood at attention all summer and would stand again.

And the house held its warmth around all of them, not waiting for anyone.

Not anymore.