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

Chapter 4

The first week went the way first weeks go — a learning of seams.

Ada learned that the pump needed not just a firm hand but a particular angle, slightly to the left of what seemed right, and that the oven ran hot on its right side and needed watching, and that Jesse would eat almost anything put in front of him but that June had a complicated relationship with beans, which Ada understood was not about the beans but about a previous housekeeper, and which she did not ask about.

She did not ask about the previous housekeeper. She did not ask about the wife, whose name she did not yet know, because a house does its best speaking in what you don’t say about it.

The wife’s absence was present in the house the way a missing window is present. Not as a thing you can point at — nothing so tidy. As a change in the light. As a difference in the temperature of certain rooms. As the way certain small objects in the house — a grain scoop on a nail, a child’s coat hung at a certain height — had been exactly where they were for four years and would have been moved a thousand times over in any other house.

Ada did not ask. She cooked, she cleaned, she kept the kitchen garden from getting worse, which was the best that could be said for it in that season. She mended what could be mended. She spoke when spoken to and not otherwise, which was not timidity. It was strategy. And it was the right one.

By the end of the first week, June had begun to linger in the kitchen in the mornings.

She did not help. She sat on the stool by the window and watched Ada work — watched her fold biscuit dough, watched her split kindling with a hatchet she handled like she’d known it since childhood. She was there, and being there was something, and both of them understood the arithmetic of it.

It was on Thursday of the second week that Jesse came in from outside with a piece of paper in his hand, a notice of some kind that had blown off the supply wagon and come to rest against the fence.

“What does it say?” he said, holding it up.

And Ada read it. It was a notice about the price of timber at the yards in Millford, which was not interesting to Jesse, but the reading of it was. He watched her mouth move, studying it the way he had studied her stick that first afternoon — as if by watching closely enough he could learn the shape of the words for himself.

“Can you read anything?” he asked.

“Most things.”

“Everything?”

“Nearly,” she said.

He considered this. Then he went back outside, and she thought that was the end of it, until after supper that evening he came and found her in the kitchen with a book in both hands.

It was a small, battered thing. The spine was broken and had been re-pasted at some point by a hand that hoped. The cover had no title left to speak of. He held it out to her, and his face was doing a complicated thing a five-year-old’s face is too young to be doing on purpose: it was daring to want something and pretending not to.

“Can you read this to me?” he said.

She took it. It was a book of fables. Old ones, with woodcut illustrations you could trace with your fingertip — a man with a tower, a river changing its course, a fox in a hole. The pages were soft with use, the margins holding faint pencil marks she recognized the way you recognize a stranger’s voice on a road — familiar, and not yours.

She didn’t know where the book had come from. She decided it was not the kind of question that needed answering before the first story.

She sat down at the kitchen table, and Jesse climbed up beside her and hooked his elbow through hers as if she had always been there, and she read him three fables. She read the one about the tower, and the one about the river, and a short one about a lamp. And he was asleep against her arm before the lamp one finished, his mouth open, one hand curled against the page.

She sat there a moment in the lamplight. The sleeping weight of him against her side. The book open on the table. The fire low in the stove. And something moved through her that she did not examine too closely — because it was too new, and the house was too quiet, and she was not ready to give it a name yet.

She heard a sound and looked up.

Silas was standing in the doorway. He had come in from the mill without her hearing him — he moved like that, like a man who had learned that sound travels before he does. He was looking at the table: at the boy asleep in the crook of a stranger’s arm, at the open book, at the lamp — and his face was doing something that he set aside before she could read it, the way a man sets down a tool he doesn’t want to be seen carrying.

He crossed the room and picked up Jesse without waking him — the boy’s head came up once and settled against his father’s shoulder — and carried him out.

Ada closed the book. She ran her thumb along the broken spine. The fire ticked. Outside, the mill had stopped for the night, and the quiet that came in its place was a different quality of quiet, and she was still new enough to her to feel the seam.

Silas came back through the kitchen on his way to his room. He stopped at the stove, poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot she kept warm for him, and stood at the window and drank it, not looking out, just standing.

“Where did you learn to read like that?” he said at last.

“A woman named Sister Honora taught me,” Ada said, “at the county home in Holman County.”

“County home,” he repeated. It wasn’t a question, but it opened a door.

“Orphanage,” Ada said. “I was there from seven to sixteen.”

He didn’t say he was sorry, which she appreciated more than she could have explained. He nodded once, the way a man nods when he has filed something away to be considered later, and set the cup down.

“Good night,” he said, and went out.

She sat at the table a little longer in the quiet, with the book in her hands. The wind came down off the ridge and the house held the dark around it the way houses do when they are used to being held in it.

And she looked at the flyleaf of the book, and did not open it, and put the lamp out, and went to bed.