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

Chapter 9

She put the children to bed herself that night, and she took her time about it, because she had begun to understand that a house keeps its best hours in the hour before sleep, and that she was lucky to be allowed into it.

She read Jesse two fables — the one about the tower, which he demanded by title now, and a new one about a river that changed its course and built itself a new bed through the valley. And the river changed its course and made the valley glad, and he was asleep before the water reached the sea. She tucked the blanket around him and left the lamp low.

June was in bed but not asleep, and she looked up when Ada came to the door. In the lamplight her eyes were dark and serious and very old.

“Good night, June,” Ada said.

“Good night,” June said. And then: “I’m glad the sweet peas came up.”

“Me too,” Ada said.

“My mother would have liked you.”

Ada stood in the doorway and looked at the girl in the lamplight. Something in her throat made the next breath come up crooked, and she let it, because children can see through a composed face the way they see through weather.

“That means a great deal to me,” Ada said. And she meant it entirely.

June turned over and closed her eyes. Ada pulled the door to and stood in the dark of the hall for a moment, in the quiet that went all the way down to the floorboards.

Then she went to the kitchen.

Silas was already there. He was standing at the window with his coffee cup in his hands, and he had not poured anything into it — she noticed that, the cup held like a thing he needed his hands to do something with. He turned when she came in. She sat down at the table. After a moment he put the cup down and sat across from her, in the chair where he had sat the night he asked her about the tower. The lamp was the same. The stove was the same. The house was quiet around them in the particular way it was quiet when the children were asleep and the mill was stopped and there was nothing between the hour and the two of them.

He looked at the table for a moment. Then he looked at her.

“I want to tell you,” he said, “what I’ve seen since you came.”

She waited.

“I’ve seen a house that was cold and quiet become something else. I’ve seen my son learn to want to know things — to walk around with questions in his pockets, waiting to ask them. I’ve seen my daughter plant seeds in a place she had given up on.” He stopped. “I’ve seen you stand in the middle of things that would have broken other people, and not break.”

He said it plainly, without ornament, the way he said everything. His hands were still on the table, and she noticed that he was not looking at her now — he was looking at his own hands, as if the words were coming up out of them.

“I know this started as work,” he said. “I know I hired you, and you came because you needed work, and that was the whole of it. That was the honest shape of it, and I’ve known it all along.”

The stove ticked. The wind moved outside, somewhere low, under the door.

“It isn’t the whole of it anymore,” he said. “Not for me.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up at her.

“I’m asking you to stay on — permanent — as my wife,” he said, “if that’s what you’d want. That’s for you to decide. And I want you to know that if it isn’t — nothing changes. You have work here as long as you want it, and I will not make it strange between us. I’m not asking because I need an answer tonight. I’m asking because it’s what I want, and you deserve to know what I want, and then the choice is yours, and you can take whatever time you need.”

He stopped. The kitchen was very quiet. The stove ticked. Somewhere out past the ridge, the wind moved through the pines, and the sound came in low and even, like a woman breathing.

She looked at him across the table — at the man who had fixed the porch step without saying so, and carried her sleeping child to bed, and stood between her and the county clerk and said that’s not what I want. She thought about the bench at the end of the road in Morrow Creek, and the letter folded in half in her bag, and the four dollars and sixty cents, and the long way she had come down from Holman County. She thought about June’s face in the lamplight saying my mother would have liked you. She thought about Jesse asleep against her arm, and the book open on the table, and the whole house standing around them in the dark.

“Yes,” she said.

He looked at her.

“That’s what I want,” she said. “I’m not going to need time to consider it. I’ve been considering it — the whole of it — all week. It’s yes.”

He was still for a moment. Then something moved across his face that was not quite a smile, but was in the same country as one — a thing that had been kept on a shelf too long and was being brought down carefully, to see if it still worked.

He put his hand on the table. Not reaching for her — just placing it there, open, like a door standing ajar.

She put her hand over his.

They sat like that for a while in the quiet kitchen, with the lamp burning low and the stove warm and the house around them holding its breath — and then letting it out, slowly, the way a house does when it has finally been given permission to be a home.