by Beverly Bird
His voice trailed off. Kim stood at the stove, watching him go. She stood there for a long time after he was gone. Then, finally, she moved for a chair and she sat hard.
What had they done? she asked herself, as he had asked last night.
Then she thought of another better question, much more intimidating. What were they going to do?
Chapter 14
Kim bounced back and forth all day on the advisability of taking everyone to Adam and Mariah’s for supper. She wanted to. God knows, she wanted to. She wanted to escape the woodstove. She wanted to escape the warm pleasure and companionship of facing Joe across the supper table, at least for tonight. Suddenly, that companionship had become volatile and dangerous.
So she watched the kids critically, but by four o’clock she still hadn’t come to any real decision. She finally wandered out onto the porch. Joe was working across the road. He was no help, she thought irritably. Somehow she was sure he would go whichever way she decided on this. Just leave it all up to the little woman.
Her heart thumped. It felt entirely too much as if they had been living together for an eternity, she realized. As if they had been juggling these kids side by side through a lifetime instead of just a few weeks.
Matt had finally come home after school and a quick game of field hockey. Along with Bo, he was helping his father bring in the cows—cows, for God’s sweet sake—and once she even saw Joe laugh when Matt’s heel hit a slick spot of mud. The boy didn’t fall so much as he did a graceful slide, a good seven or eight feet until he lay under a cow’s belly. The animal stepped over him unperturbedly. Kim felt one spasm of fear that he would be hurt, then she smiled, also.
With the cows in the barn—she knew they had already put hay in there for them because she had watched that, too—Joe took his hat off and waved the boys into the house. He followed at a much slower pace. When he found her on the porch, he stopped short.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.
“You’re turning into a real pessimist, Joe. Why should anything be wrong?”
He grimaced and put his hat back on. She watched and remembered how those hands had felt on her body last night, so briefly, too briefly, before Dinah had interrupted them. She shivered, her tummy rolled over, then she got angry with herself.
It had been a kiss. That was all. Well, okay, technically it had been a lot of kisses. It was still no big deal. Unattached men and women kissed all the time. They were two adults living in proximity and they both had needs that they’d ignored—obviously for too long—in the face of their own problems. She had worked hard all day to convince herself that making more of what had happened would be a very big mistake.
Joe watched her eyes move and try to find a place to settle. Sometime during his long afternoon in the barn, he had convinced himself that the fact that she had wanted him, too, wasn’t all that amazing. Though he had not looked into a mirror since he had married Sarah and moved to this settlement, he knew he had never been unattractive. It was entirely possible that that had changed, but apparently not. He had just begun to accept that a mutual attraction was not so overwhelming after all, when he found her here on the porch with her eyes just a little bit wide. Amazement and wonder hit him all over again. He brought his mind grimly away from it. “Did you talk to Dr. Coyle?” he asked. “Did you learn anything new?”
“Yes. And no,” Kim answered, gratefully distracted from her thoughts. “I called him, but there’s nothing on the donor lists yet.”
Joe leaned his back against one of the porch posts. “With so many people in this country, that’s hard to imagine.”
“Not too many people actually take the bother to register to donate marrow. Or anything else for that matter,” she noted. “Only a small segment of the population is listed.”
Joe scowled. “That’s what’s wrong with your society. They tend to be selfish.”
Kim stiffened. “At least we have most general appliances,” she snapped.
“Still, the more I learn of your world, the more content I am with my generators.”
She wasn’t sure why that threatened her so. She turned away abruptly.
“Are we going to Adam and Mariah’s?” he asked, following her, aware that the we had come far too easily.
Kim stopped and shook her head. “I don’t know. Dinah’s fine, Gracie is showing signs of life and the baby has stopped fretting. I’m pretty sure the period of incubation is over. I doubt if it’s contagious any longer.”
He waited. None of his own children was the most important consideration, and they both knew it.
“It’s a double-edged sword, Joe.” Kim sighed, reading his eyes. “On the one hand, I so desperately want to protect her. I’d put her in a bubble if I could. And on the other...” She had to swallow carefully. It struck her in that moment that she had never spoken the words before. She took a deep breath. “I keep thinking, what if she doesn’t have much time left?”
He felt the pain for her, a horrible protest pushing his blood right up the surface of his skin. “Then you want her to be as happy as possible right now,” he said quietly.
“Exactly.” She realized almost distantly that she was shanking again. “She loves spending time with all this...with her...our...family.”
“Well, then.” He slung an arm over her shoulder as they went back inside. If most of the day had been awkward between them, now she was only a woman on the verge of intolerable loss, and he was only a man who had already lost the person he’d thought had mattered most. “I think we should go to Adam and Mariah’s.”
Kim leaned into him, needing him, telling herself it was okay for just this one second. “You just want some decent cooking,” she accused.
“There is that.”
They both startled themselves by laughing.
Kim would not have believed it possible for two adults, one teenager, four kids and one infant to fit into that buggy. But fit they did. She hadn’t noticed the first time she had ridden in it, but there was a...well, a back seat. It was sort of a benchberth, flat, upholstered. Dinah, Matt, Bo and Gracie were more than comfortable back there. Bo had opted to wait and come home with them. Kim held Hannah and Susannah sat in the front between her and Joe.
The impact of being part of their family hit Kim. It made her feel claustrophobic for a moment, almost dizzy. She wondered when she had last been part of a...well, a group. She wondered if the people she worked with counted and decided they didn’t. Oh, she had felt a certain camaraderie there, but it was still each man for himself. Just as it had been when she was growing up. Try as she might to shake it, there was a certain uniformity of goals to her time with Joe. They both wanted the same things. An orderly existence, peace, a healing of wounds and to be able to trust in a future. And, of course, the well-being of their children.
Their respective children, she corrected herself.
She listened with half an ear while Joe reprimanded Matt for bouncing on the back seat. Dinah talked about the fact that the generator had had a brief spell of irritability that morning. Kim heard herself volunteer the information that the hen with the red spot on her beak seemed to consider herself above laying one egg a day.
“Then she’s getting old,” Joe said, turning into Adam’s drive. “She should be supper one night soon before she toughens up too much.”
Kim felt her stomach roll over. “I’ll have a talk with her,” she said quickly. “I’m sure she’ll do better.”
He laughed.
“I mean it, Joe, I’m not cutting up another half-dead chicken. And I’ve gotten to know this one. I can’t eat her.”
“Well, now, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that.”
“Why?” she demanded as they stepped down out of the buggy. If he wanted chicken that badly, she would damned well find a supermarket and steal one if she had to.
“You do know that we’re going to have to feed all those people on Sunday?”
“Feed them? On Sunday? When th
ey come to give blood? Those roast things? We’ve got to make them? Hundreds more again?”
The pure panic in her voice, rising with each question, made him laugh again. “It’s the easiest way to feed hundreds of people,” he remarked.
“No, that’s not so. Seventy-five or so pizzas would be even easier.”
“Well, we’ve got a few days left yet to decide what we’re going to do.”
Matt and Bo bulleted along ahead of them.
“Hi,” Kim said tentatively.
Adam gave her a quick hug. She worked hard not to jerk back, and actually managed it.
“Come on in,” he said. “Mariah has a great idea for feeding everyone on Sunday. We were just talking about it.”
Was that all anyone could think about? “Please don’t tell me roasts,” Kim responded.
“Fried chicken,” Mariah called out from the kitchen. “We can set up sort of an assembly line. Deborah Stoltzfus said she would help. Just run them through the batter, into the frying pans and out again. Fried chicken is good even when it’s cold.”
Kim found her way to the kitchen door. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but this still involves dismembering them, right?”
“Right. But not in teeny, tiny pieces.”
Good enough, Kim thought. She figured she would just volunteer for the batter end of things.
The kids had already gathered in the kitchen and Mariah wasted little time in getting dinner—supper, Kim reminded herself—on the table. Another difference from the real world, she thought. No cocktails first, no TV. The kitchen was at the heart of the family.
She had just been getting used to the table at Joe’s—seven people, most of them young and boisterous, passing food, chattering nonstop. Now they were back to ten again, and it was even more boisterous.
Kim put one slice of meat on her plate and carefully trimmed the fat. She glanced unobtrusively at Joe. He said not a word as he piled food on his plate. He chewed. And chewed. He swallowed and chewed some more. His expression was downright blissful. And slowly she began to understand.
He was sitting beside her. She turned a little in her seat to look at him. “You don’t like Chinese,” she accused.
He didn’t glance up from his plate. “It’s fine. Mariah, would you please pass the biscuits?”
“I’ve never seen you eat like this,” Kim persisted. “I mean, admittedly my cooking isn’t the greatest, but you just picked at the Chinese food, too.”
“You weren’t watching me at the wedding,” he said, then he could have kicked himself. He finally looked at her to see her eyes blazing.
“Joe, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say something?”
He put down his fork. “What is it that you would have liked me to say?”
“How about, ‘I don’t like Chinese, Kim. Why don’t we try something else’?” Then she realized that he—and he atone—always called her “Kimberley.” Her head got that swimming feeling again. Her full name was somehow more intimate for its formality.
“And then what would you have done?” Joe countered.
“I would have bought pizza!”
“Kimberley, I can’t afford takeout every night with a farm full of food right beyond my doorstep!”
“Kim. My name is Kim!”
They had both turned in their chairs. They were nose to nose now. The rest of the table plunged into wide-eyed quiet, watching them.
“‘Kim’ doesn’t suit you,” he said levelly, but there was an underlying heat to his voice.
“You don’t know me well enough to say,” she argued.
“Oh, I think I’m coming to know you pretty well.”
“That...incident...was a mistake.”
“I won’t disagree with you there.”
“So drop it, Joe. Just drop it.”
“Can you? My guess is that you’ve been thinking about it all day, too, no matter what you said this morning.”
Kim paled. Her heart went crazy. Even her skin felt suddenly hot. And she knew, God help her, she knew that if they had been anywhere else, if they had been alone, their mouths would have found each other all over again.
So much for letting off a little of the frustration, she thought.
The wanting in Joe’s blood was so fierce, so delightful and new in that moment, it almost overpowered him. He almost didn’t care where they were, who they were with. How in the world did they expect to keep ignoring this...this tension? It couldn’t work. No matter what he had shared with Sarah, this was different, this was something he had never experienced before in his life. Because Sarah had never pushed him. Sarah had never provoked him. Sarah, God rest her soul, had never gone nose to nose with him.
And he liked it. He realized that he liked it very much.
“I thought we were talking about Chinese food,” Bo said, confused.
Kim felt her breath rush out of her. She inched backward in her seat cautiously. “We were.”
“You know, Pa, every time your kin gets involved, things get weird,” Bo added.
“Don’t they, though,” Adam murmured.
Joe felt as if someone had just doused him with cold water. He picked up his fork again very carefully.
“The biscuits, Joe?” Mariah was holding them out to him. He wondered crazily if she had been sitting like that, extending the basket, the whole time.
By the following weekend, Kim and Joe had fallen into a pattern of cautious and exquisite avoidance. They were, quite simply, never caught alone. They had the buffer of Dinah and Susannah, Matt and Gracie. And, to some extent, there was Hannah. Their arms couldn’t easily go around each other if Kim’s were holding an infant. They used the kids with a smooth vengeance.
Somewhere along the line Susannah had decided that she wanted to go to Mariah’s school. Kim suspected that it had less to do with her love of learning than with the fact that she was bored out of her mind staying on the farm all day, waiting for the others to come home. Kim thought that as long as Susannah was able to nap when she chose, it was probably good for her. And it worked. It worked well. Outside of the fact that Susannah was gone from 8:30 until three o’clock, she began to get up early enough to...well, to cover Kim in the mornings.
Where once Susannah had languished in bed until everyone else was gone, now they took to using the bathroom together, since there was only one and a good many people had need of it when the day began. That way, when Kim emerged to tangle with the woodstove, she had Susannah’s company. Susannah set the table while Kim struggled to make something for everyone to eat.
They subsisted on a lot of boiled eggs until Kim discovered that poaching them was easier, given the slow heat. Then she settled into a routine of eggs Benedict. Even the hollandaise sauce worked out okay, again because high heat would curdle it. She was learning that those things that naturally cooked slowly were her best bet.
By the time the kids streamed out the door for school, Joe was invariably on his feet, as well. He seemed to make it a point to time his departure perfectly.
She took lunches out to him at the cattle barn so he wouldn’t have to come inside at midday. She usually left a tray for him at the big, sliding doors. When she went back an hour or so later, the plate was always bare. At first she worried that some of the ever present animals were getting to it—the horses more or less grazed freely. Then she realized that the utensils were always used. And though she had suffered a lot of shocks to her system these past weeks, it seemed safe enough to assume that a horse was incapable of using a fork.
Matt rarely came home until four o’clock, just in time to help his father with the last of the chores. He and Bo always did that together, since Adam did not have a farm and he didn’t need his son’s services there. Dinah generally waited to reacquaint herself with her friends until he and Susannah and Gracie came home. Then Kim took care of the baby, and gladly gave the girl her freedom once so many of the other kids were around.
Someone was always around. They were never alone. And things
were going well.
There was even something to be said for the lack of electricity, Kim figured. When dark fell—usually sometime during supper—she cleaned up the kitchen by lamplight and used the excuse to go directly to her room. She read. She started keeping a journal. And she found the writing to be surprisingly healing—a slow, steady, daily outpouring of emotion. The only thing that troubled her was how often she found herself spelling out the letters J-O-E.
He had no more spats with Dinah. But, then, he avoided her as much as he avoided Kim. And he had no more scraps with Kimberley, because they were both unfailingly polite, even though it often set their teeth on edge. Everything worked fine until it came time to draw blood from the community.
Part of it, Kim knew, was her own desperation. The donor lists still hadn’t kicked off any matches. She was acutely and painfully aware that they were getting down to their last chance. If this didn’t work—and she had every reason to believe it was a long shot—then she had no clue what she would do next, how she would proceed to save her daughter’s life. And that was, quite simply, intolerable.
Joe felt her panic and terror in the air around her. He didn’t have to be alone with her to sense it. It was palpable, something thick and tightening that built as the days went by. And he was tormented, because he needed to comfort her as badly as he needed to keep away from her.
On Sunday morning, as he watched her dismembering her share of the chickens to feed everyone with later, something hit him. He knew the hell of having lost Sarah. But they had had years and years after the birth of Matt to think that everything would work out okay. She would take the pills. There would be no more children. Even when she had conceived, they had both clung to the possibility that everything would be all right this time around. Even the doctors had told them that there was only a small chance that the horror of Matt’s birth would be repeated. It was nothing they would have deliberately taken a chance on, but the slim possibility had been there all the same.