“Two pounds of sugar, please? And one of coffee.”
Cora turned to reach for her paper bags and heaved a sigh as if the movement had wrung the air out of her. One at a time, she punched them open.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. What? What do you mean?”
Rose smiled. “You sound like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. But a carefree young lady like you couldn’t have any problems, now, could you?”
Cora looked up from the task into Rose’s eyes and felt herself all on display, clear as the new ribbons laid out in their case, the half rounds of penny candy in the transparent jars. She couldn’t forget those rumors, those silly ideas about Mrs. Whiting and how she always understood, or guessed.
“No, that’s right,” she said. “I have no problems, of course not. I didn’t realize I made a sound!”
“A sigh.” Rose smiled again. “Just a sigh.”
“I have a crick in my neck, from bending over the accounts. That must be it.”
Rose watched as she hefted the lid off the sugar barrel, put her hand in for the scoop. While Cora was busy filling the bigger bag with sugar, the store went empty. Two little children who had no money for candy looked shyly over at Rose and, when she stuck out her tongue at them, made for the door. A lone woman who’d been fingering fabric decided against buying any and left.
When Cora was done weighing the sugar, she went to the coffee with the smaller bag and started over. The shiny, dark coffee beans blinked at the brightness when she lifted the lid. As she brought the full bag of coffee over to the scale, Rose spoke again.
“You’re not well.”
“I’m just fine,” said Cora.
“I heard you had caught a bug, that stomach flu going around. Did Sam ever look at you?”
Cora’s pale face briefly flushed. “No, it wasn’t anything so serious as that. I just took some water and . . . some rest.”
“So you’re better now.”
“Of course. I’m back at work, as you see.”
Rose put her quiet hand over Cora’s busy one and stilled it. “But you don’t feel well.” She ran her thumb firmly up the inside of Cora’s arm, to her elbow, and the girl’s eyes closed like a cat’s. She kneaded Cora’s hand a little before she released it back to its work, and when Cora realized her hand was free, her eyes opened and she looked at Rose as if she’d never seen her before.
“You need a breath of air. Help me take these parcels outside.”
Cora obeyed, squinting into the light as if she hadn’t left the store in a long time.
“Sam’s going to come around for me in the automobile. Sit down here with me on the bench and keep me company until he gets here.”
Cora set the bag of coffee on the boards beside Rose but remained standing. “I should go back inside,” she said, fingers worrying the front of her dress. She glanced in through the dark window. “I should be minding the store.”
“Everyone left,” Rose reminded her. “Sit here with me and rest yourself. All that standing, in your condition, it isn’t good for the baby.”
Cora stared down at her, waiting for anger to rush up her throat and out her open mouth. But there was something in Rose’s face, the blank way she gazed at the distant fields, that deflected anger. Rose felt sorry for the fields, Cora could see that in her eyes, sorry for the beautiful way they waved at the town and how soon they would be cut down.
Cora moved to the other side of her and sat, deflating as the air held in her chest pushed out, then straining to breathe in against her stays. She didn’t have any anger inside her, she realized, only this leaden heaviness that pulled her down next to the town witch.
“I never thought Evie would tell anyone,” she said finally. “I know you’re her mother. . . . Still, she promised me.”
Rose’s head came around quickly, as if pushed by some unseen hand. “She promised you? How long ago was this?”
“I don’t remember. The time seems so long. It doesn’t matter.”
“My dear, she never said a word. I guessed. It’s not natural, a girl your age to look so tired.” She contemplated the view across the road. “What did Evie say to you?”
“Nothing. I . . . She won’t help me.”
“I don’t see how there’s any way she can help you. You must get married, that’s all. It’s the only thing to do. You must tell your parents and be married as soon as possible. Evie should have told you the same.”
Cora shook her head. “I won’t be married.”
Rose’s voice turned flinty, like she was digging for words down in the earth and could only turn up the sharp ones. “You will. You don’t have to tell me how you’ve got yourself in this condition, but it will only end up one way now.” She held a foot out in front of her and studied it for a moment before letting it swing back. “If you’re thinking it may resolve itself, hoping . . . You’ll soon be past the time when that’s likely to happen. The longer you wait, the faster this baby will come following your wedding. I know your parents . . . well, you wouldn’t want to bring shame on your family, and maybe it’s too late to avoid the talk. But then there’s Sam, I can enlist him. You could hide away after the birth, and he’ll send word around about your resting in your last months. As far as the town need know, you can stay pregnant until the proper time. . . . You understand what I’m saying?”
Cora’s face was worried, pinched in a manner that seemed to deny Rose’s words entry. “Why would you help me?” she asked.
“I’d help anyone in this town, anyone I could, with anything I have.”
Cora turned her head. “But why? Would they do the same for you? You see how people laugh at you, you must know they whisper about you. People who don’t even know you.” She held her hands turned up in her lap and looked at them. “I don’t really know you. Why would you help me?”
Rose put her hand on Cora’s arm again. “It doesn’t matter what people say about me. I’d help because it’s the right thing to do.”
Cora looked into her eyes. “But don’t you think I’m bad?”
“No. No, I don’t think you’re bad.”
Cora thought about that. “Anyway, you don’t understand me. I can’t marry the father.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed, then widened. “Are you trying to tell me . . . Is he already married?”
Cora made no answer.
“I’ve heard some of the gossip about you and Mr. Owens. I admit, if he has done this, I’ve been mistaken about him. I thought . . . I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was married before, is still married . . . but this. This beats all. I did think there was a limit to . . . and Evie . . .”
Cora began to wake to what Rose was saying, and her head started to shake with it. “No, no, you misunderstand,” she said. “Robert—Mr. Owens . . . Oh, he can’t be married, is he already married? Where is his wife, then? It’s not him, I never said it was him, you can’t think that. He loves me, he would never—” She clamped a hand over her mouth.
“I see,” Rose said softly. “I made a mistake. I see.”
Cora stood. She touched the back of her hand to one eye, to see it came away dry. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
She moved toward the door just as it swung open and Toby peered out. “There you are,” he said. “You can’t just leave the counter like that. Dad would be mad.”
“There’s no one in there right now. I wasn’t feeling well. I just came outside for some air.”
Toby’s slow grin began to rise across his mouth. “Out here? In the air like a hot, wet blanket?”
Rose stood, calling his attention to her. “It was my idea, Tobias. I suggested she come outside.”
Toby colored.
“I need a walk,” Cora said.
“What about—”
“Just go inside and mind the
store for me, Toby.”
When Toby was gone, Rose opened her mouth to speak, but she was interrupted by Sam gaily honking his Klaxon, churning up the dust around his wheels.
* * *
* * *
He saw Evie’s lips moving but couldn’t hear her words. He imagined the things she might tell him, about her cake that fell yesterday or the new litter of barn cats born into the hay-smelling dusk, one floury line of light wriggling over them as they nudged their mother for milk. How she watched George at work through her kitchen window, the perfect music of his movements as he shucked corn along the rows. Even though Robert had never farmed, he thought he understood it, the putting into the land and later harvesting. Only because you surrendered to it everything, all your muscled hope, did it yield you anything, the beaded pours of grain and the dark wrinkled vegetables, the bend of the wheat fields up against the tall, straight flutter of the corn. Maybe she would tell him what it felt like to see him coming. That now she wanted him to put dreams inside her, like small scraped parts of himself.
“I need to talk with you.”
She looked so serious he dropped the smile, like something he’d just realized was too hot to hold. Reached across and pulled out her hand to place the vial within it, just because he wanted to touch her. She didn’t seem to notice the touch, put her prize in the pocket of her dress absentmindedly, as though she were thinking of something else entirely.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and since she was not really paying attention to him, he kept hold of her free hand.
“I had a visit from Cora Jenkins.”
He studied her. “I didn’t know she was a friend.”
“She isn’t.”
He let go of her hand and waited.
“What I tell you is going to be . . . in the strictest confidence.”
“All right.”
“She came to me because she’s pregnant.” She looked for his reaction, waiting for it to ripple across his features, but he kept his face still.
“I see.”
“I think she only came to me because . . . because she thought I might be willing to take the baby. She hoped we could hide her somehow, pretend it was my pregnancy, and then . . . The whole idea was crazy. I told her it was impossible, that she should marry the father. But she kept insisting she couldn’t marry him, and she said the strangest thing. That she only wanted to prove to him she was a woman.”
This time her words hit. She watched his face change. “What did you tell her?”
“I said no.”
He looked away. “Did she make you think it was me?”
“She wouldn’t say who it was.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Evie bit her lip.
“I’m not the father.”
“Of course not. I didn’t think you were.”
“Tell me,” he said. “You said no right away to Cora’s proposal. Why did you do that?”
“Because it would be wrong. It would be a lie. And it’s not my child.”
“Does that really matter? If Cora doesn’t want it, if you could help her . . . would it be so terrible? Think about that.” He reached out and pulled a stray curl from her face. “You could have a baby again.”
“I have thought about it. But it wouldn’t be mine and George’s. It wouldn’t be the same. Babies should be with their mothers.”
“Are you sure that’s the reason?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe you’re afraid.”
“I don’t feel afraid. It’s just that I don’t feel . . . anything.”
Robert sighed. “Is this how you plan to go on? Feeling nothing? Drinking my potion and walking around half asleep?” Evie was backing away as he spoke, each footstep taken as if to bring him into focus, as if she’d been too close to see him clearly. “How can you live like this?”
Evie made a choked sound, almost like stifled laughter. “You’re one to talk, aren’t you? How many years have you been running from your own life? Don’t tell me you’re not afraid. No one needs the stuff you sell. But instead of going back home, you just press on, town after town, taking advantage of all the people foolish enough to think you could sell them something real. You.”
Robert held up his hand. “I have always stood by my products. I offer—”
“Oh, I know, I remember. A money-back guarantee.” Now she made the start of a laugh, but it veered off hysterical. “What a shame we can’t get these for everything in life, isn’t it? Motherhood. Friendships. Dissatisfied? That’s no problem. We have a guarantee for that. Your wife could have had one for you.”
Robert spoke quietly. “There is no way to give back whatever my wife lost by choosing me.”
He could feel that his calm infuriated her. And she honed her next words, trying to make them sharp enough to pierce it. “I don’t understand you. There must be something wrong with a person who lives like you. So you were a drunk. So you made a mistake. That gives you no right to just leave. Your little girl. Every day you don’t go back, you leave her again. You’re a coward.”
“Many of us are cowards, I think. But most of us don’t ever recognize what it is we fear.”
Evie’s hand twitched at her side. “I don’t know who you think you are . . . to come here and talk to me about my fears? About my feelings? The man who lives a few months in this town, a half year in that one . . . and never anywhere long enough for real feelings, friendships, or love. You’d rather be the stranger. But you still think you can sit in judgment on me.”
Robert took a step forward into her space. He saw her brace herself, but he kept his voice low. “If you think I’ve never stayed anywhere long enough to have feelings . . . never stayed anywhere long enough to love . . . then you are mistaken.”
They stared at each other. Then Evie turned on her heel and walked away, marching through the tall grass.
She got herself home, went through the kitchen into her pantry, and took down what she had been keeping in an old brown vanilla bottle. She went out again and wound through the woods to the bay. Standing stiff at the edge, she heaved the bottle as far as she could out into its quivering deep.
When she reached home again, George was already there, and he asked her where she had been.
“I walked down to the bay,” she told him.
“There aren’t any answers there.”
“But I needed to go.”
He held out his arms to her, and she went into them. “Come back to me, Evie.”
“I’m trying,” she said.
Chapter 24
Evie was known in town for her bumbleberry pie, and she was bringing one in to the county fair to enter the pie contest. The finished pie had come out of her oven perfectly golden and burnished with an egg-white wash. She’d baked up the scraps of crust as well so she could sample them, and she was pleased. George hitched the cart, and they rode early into town with June and Harold, the mare’s head testing the day before them and her tail twitching the flies. George’s best pig squealed and grunted in the back, while Evie’s pie sat silent under its dish towel in her lap.
Evie had been wondering and worrying over Cora every day. She hadn’t told George about their meeting. She didn’t want him to start thinking about raising Cora’s child—what if he wanted to say yes and Evie couldn’t do it? She convinced herself it wasn’t her secret to tell. And as she was already keeping too many of her own, this one slipped in so easily among them that she never noticed. She knew, though, that Cora would soon begin to show. Staying silent Evie could do, but she was not smart enough to think of anything more.
Part of her was tracing the future along like a riverbank, if she should say yes to Cora and take the baby as her own. She wished she had refused because she was selfless, or honest, or righteous, but she knew that Robert had understood the truth—she was only a
fraid. To heal its wound, some part of her heart had closed over itself and would not open again. She hadn’t even been aware of its happening until Cora had come to her, and then when she searched within herself, she found the mass of twisted, unyielding scar.
From time to time, George reached over as he used to do, to take her hand or rest one of his in her lap, but each time he did, the pie was there and Evie’s hands busy holding it.
At the fairgrounds the Dawsons were tugged away from one another, as different neighbors greeted them and pointed out their finest work. The pies and preserves and cakes were displayed in rows, while the fat, bristly pigs and clean, spongy sheep wandered in their pens, poking their noses at the edge of freedom and then backing away. Inside barns the quilters had hung their Garden Gates and Drunkard’s Paths, waiting for the judges who would pull up their corners, searching for untrimmed loose threads.
As well as the offerings for judgment and prizes were all the wonders for sale: lemonade and taffy apples; popcorn and sausages; animals, leather goods, and guns. George went to examine the horses while Evie carried their picnic basket and searched for a quiet place in the shade to unpack the lunch. Coming through the crowd, she saw her parents and waved them over.
“How are the flowers this year?” she asked her mother. Rose always participated in the flower-arranging contest with blooms from her garden.
“Beautiful. Mine are not behaving for me, but the table is lovely. We’ll walk over and see them after we eat.”
“Where’s Dad going?” After pecking Evie on the cheek, he had ambled away, and the crowd had already closed over him.
“Off to watch the shooting exhibitions, I expect. He always must comment on that, even though he could never hit the broad side of a barn himself.”
Evie smiled. Her father had a long history of prizeless duck-hunting excursions. The one time he’d brought home a dead, flopping duck for them, he admitted, with a big laugh, that he had surprised a fox who’d already killed the thing, dropped it in confusion, and run from him.
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