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

Chapter 3

She took stock of both without letting her face say anything about what she thought.

The house was a practical structure of good timber gone slightly tired. A covered porch. Four windows that looked out like a face deciding whether to be friendly. Along one side, a kitchen garden that had surrendered to weeds. A woodpile stood at a reasonable height, which said the man was never more than a day from needing heat, and the top step of the porch had come loose from its nail and rocked when you put your weight on it.

She noticed the step. She did not say anything about the step. It was the kind of small wrong thing she always noticed, because small wrong things were the only thing she had ever had the power to fix.

June came to the door when the wagon pulled up. She did not come out. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and looked at Ada the way a person looks at weather they haven’t decided about yet. She had her father’s stillness and a pair of eyes that gave Ada an odd sensation — like reaching for a stair and finding the floor a step sooner than expected. She could not have said why. She set it aside.

Jesse came around the house from behind with mud on his boots and a stick in each hand, and stopped dead when he saw her, and then said, “Are you staying?”

“For a while,” Ada said.

He considered this with the terrible gravity of a five-year-old at a crossroads. Then he walked up and held out one of his sticks. It was, she recognized, an offering. She took it with both hands and examined it with the seriousness the object deserved. It was a good stick, she told him. It had heft.

“Where’d you find this one?” she asked.

“The grove,” he said, and his whole face unsealed into a smile that had apparently been waiting for this exact question all day.

June said nothing at all and went back inside. The door did not close with a slam. It closed slowly, as if the door itself was thinking about her.

The kitchen was large and cold and had not been properly cleaned in some time. That was not a judgment; it was a fact you could test with your finger. Ada set her bag on the chair by the door, rolled up her sleeves, and started the fire before she looked at anything else, because a cold kitchen cannot answer questions. She found the larder and took stock of what was there — flour, salt pork, a sack of potatoes, coffee that had gone tired in the tin. She found the pump and made its acquaintance. She found a pan and she set about the rest of it.

By the time Silas came in from unhitching the horse, there was water heating, and something beginning to happen with the flour that would be ready before dark.

He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment. His face did not move, but something in the way he stood said he had been holding his house a certain way for a long time — a coat worn to his own shape — and that here was a new hand at the seams.

He went to wash up, and nothing was said between them, and supper was ready when he came back.

The four of them sat at the table, and Jesse answered three questions without being asked any, and delivered a full account of the stick, which had apparently been involved in a project of significant engineering that afternoon. June ate in silence and watched Ada with the careful attention of someone taking measurements for a garment.

The food was good. Ada knew the food was good because she had made it with her hands and watched the proportions — but the proof came when Silas, who said nothing, went up the table for a second helping.

Nobody said anything about the second helping. It was not the kind of thing that needed saying.

That night, in the small room off the kitchen that would be hers, Ada sat on the edge of the narrow bed and looked at the window. The glass was cold when she touched it. Under the glass, the dark was full of the mill settling — the creak of timbers, the tick of cooling iron — and beyond that, the wind moving through the pines on the ridge, patient as an argument that knows it will win eventually.

She thought: four dollars a week is enough to begin with. She thought: the porch step needs a nail. She thought: June will come around or she won’t, and either way there is work to do in the morning, and work is a thing that answers back.

She was not hopeful, exactly. She had learned to be careful with hope, the way you are careful with a match in a dry season. But she was not afraid, and that was its own kind of solid ground, and she had learned to stand on it.

On the windowsill above the washbasin sat a small glass jar, washed clean, standing open to the air as if waiting for something. She had not put it there. She could not say why, but she was careful not to touch it — the way you don’t touch a thing you might be expected to understand.

She banked the fire. She lay down. The mill settled around her and the wind came down off the ridge, and somewhere in the dark the river that ran the mill’s wheel kept making its one note, over and over, like a woman humming to a child in another room.

She slept.