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

Chapter 5

The reading became the fixed point of the boy’s day.

It had happened without anyone deciding it, the way the week had arranged itself around it: Jesse organized his afternoons around the evening page hours. He would appear at the kitchen table after supper with the book, or sometimes with a question he had been saving up like a stone in his pocket, and Ada would answer the question or read to him, or both, and more than half the time he would be asleep against her arm before the finish, and Silas would come and carry him to bed.

June never admitted to listening. She said nothing about it. But the stool by the kitchen window acquired an occupant in the evenings now, a small presence pretending to be occupied with her own hands, and when Ada read the story of the tower, the small presence grew very still indeed.

The fable went like this: there was a man who built a tower to reach the stars, and he built it faithfully, stone by stone, and when he got to the top of it he found the stars were farther than he had ever imagined they could be. And there the story stopped in every telling, because the man had to decide, with the whole sky in front of him and all that stone behind him, what a tower was for.

One evening Silas came in early and Jesse was already asleep and Ada was still at the table with the book open, reading ahead to see what came next. And Silas sat down across from her, which he had not done before. The lamp was between them. He looked at the book.

“What is it tonight?” he asked.

“It’s the one about the man who builds the tower to reach the stars,” she said. “He finds out the stars are farther than he thought.”

“How does it end?”

She looked at the page. “He builds the tower anyway.”

Silas was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That seems right.”

She looked up from the book. He was looking at the table, at his own hands, and there was something in the set of his face that was not quite what it usually was — something less defended, the way a house looks different when it’s thought the street is empty. She looked at it for only a moment before she looked back at the page. Some things change the moment you look at them straight on; she had learned that early, and she respected it.

She also learned, in those weeks, that his regard had a geography.

Coffee left on the counter at a particular hour. The noon meal packed before he came in from the mill. The porch step, which she had never mentioned and he had never mentioned, repaired one morning — the nail set, the board planed flush — and she stepped on it going out to the garden and felt the difference and kept walking, and nothing was said about the step by either of them.

He began to linger, in the evenings, at the kitchen door. Not long — three minutes, sometimes five. He would pour his coffee and stand at the window, and sometimes they would talk about the mill, or the children, or what needed doing, and sometimes they would not talk at all, and the silence was the comfortable kind, which is rarer than it sounds and worth more than most paid-for things.

She learned that he had moved her bag, the first night it rained hard, off the floor of her room and onto the chair, so the damp wouldn’t climb it. She found out from the way it had been shifted, because he never mentioned it.

And she learned that the house had a name it did not say.

She had heard the hands say it, once, speaking low at the noon table out in the yard: that the mill had carried a curse on it since the wife died four years back. That was the kind of thing people said, she understood, when they didn’t want to think too carefully about what they meant by it — the way a man calls a run of bad weather a judgment and not a season.

She did not ask Silas about it. She did not ask about the wife. But one afternoon in the third week, in the garden, scraping at the corner where the weeds had made their claim on the last stretch of fence, her knife turned up something under the loam — a rusted seed tin, the lid gone, the seam gone, and in the hollow of it a few old husks that had once been something. She held them up to the light. Sweet pea hulls, gray with age, and inside a small collection of seed round as pebbles, still whole, still patient.

She did not know whose they were. She put them back where she found them and covered them, the way you cover a thing you intend to come back to.

That night, at the kitchen window, standing with his coffee, Silas said — out of a silence that had been running for several comfortable minutes — “You’ve been digging along the south fence.”

“I have,” she said.

“That’s where—” He stopped. Then he said, “She always kept the garden along that side. The flowers, I mean. She said the light was good there.”

It was the first time he had spoken her name-adjacent, the first time the missing window had opened enough to let the air through, and the house observed it with the same stillness the two of them observed it with.

Ada said, “It’s good light,” and did not push at the door he had just cracked.

But that Tuesday — the third Tuesday since she’d come — June found her in the garden, and stood at the edge of it, and watched for a long while, and then said, in a voice that came out smaller than she meant it to:

“My mother had sweet peas along that fence.”

Ada sat back on her heels and looked at the fence line. The old stems were still wound in the wire, gray and dry and faithful.

“They’d likely come back,” Ada said, “if the ground was cleared. Seeds don’t lose patience like people do.”

“My mother saved them,” June said. “I know where they are. From last year.”

“Then we’d better put them somewhere worth going,” Ada said.

And June went and got them.