Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER SEVEN





Willow stood with one hand on the back door to the farmhouse and listened to the sounds coming out of the kitchen. It was a Saturday morning in January, the sky was a preposterous blue, and Ruth was singing like a cat in heat. She made up raunchy lyrics to accompany the popular tunes she remembered from her youth, and the boy kept time with kitchen utensils. Not quite music, Willow thought. The song ended and she pulled open the door and stepped inside. More like—cheerful noise.

“Hello, radio listeners.” Ruth grabbed a banana and purred into the makeshift microphone. She winked at Willow over the boy’s head. “That was Methyl Ethyl and the Ketones, doing ‘Get Your Hand Out of My Oven.’ ”

Willow snorted. She looked around at the cloud of dust that engulfed them. “What happened?”

It wasn’t dust, it was flour; and Wrecker was poised at the center of it. He knelt on the stool to be tall enough to lean his weight into the sourdough Ruth had flipped onto the counter. He dug his elbows in and pummeled it with his fists. His eyes flashed blue in a sea of white. Flour ghosted his hair, his exposed skin, the counter, and a good patch of the floor beneath him. He wore a long-sleeved pullover hanging out of a pair of Wrangler dungarees, and a leather belt with cowboy emblems burned into it. They were dusted white, too. “What’s it look like?” he crowed. He was raucous with happiness. “We’re making bread.”

“Mind your manners.” Ruth’s silvery scruff was flour-sprinkled, and a white blaze powdered her ruddy cheekbone.

“Bread,” Willow echoed. “Of course. Need a little more flour, maybe?”

Ruth ignored her sarcasm and shook the paper sack to release a new cloud of white by the boy. Wrecker slapped his hand into the pile and quickly planted a white handprint on the back of her jersey. “You’re it, now.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Keep kneading.” She wheezed her way into a chair and nodded for Willow to pull up another. “He’s a maniac baker, that boy. Better keep your distance.”

“I’ll do that.” Willow wore old work clothes and still managed to look elegant. “I hope you washed your hands,” she called, and his grin showed his front teeth, square and bright and still sharply serrated and enormous in his face. Willow had described them to Lisa Fay. It was a trademark of eight-year-olds, she explained. They looked comical, but they outgrew it. Same way the soft, rubbery flexibility of the boy had turned into compact muscle. Little-animal muscle. Not stretched long like an adolescent’s or bulked up like a man’s, but articulated and vigorous—he was strong, Willow told her. Always had been, Lisa Fay said, her eyes softening with her smile. And, right then, Willow had made up her mind, and handed her the photograph.

She hadn’t been certain she would. Watching the woman’s hungry eyes soak in the sight of her son, she was sure she’d done the right thing. Willow had had to turn away to allow Lisa Fay the privacy of her emotion. It was only later, describing the visit to Melody, that she found herself rethinking her decision. Melody had used words like betrayed. Words like endangered. She had made her sentiments clear.

“Knead that good,” Ruth threatened. Wrecker tore a small section off the dough, rolled it into a lump, and lobbed it at her. She caught it one-handed. “Oh!” She creaked out of her chair and advanced on him. “You are so going to regret that,” and she grabbed him before he could escape. “Bad, bad, bad! And love you for it,” she shouted over his giggles, as she tried to make him eat the dough. It was her steady refrain. The others had leaned on her to choose something more constructive, but Ruth would not be swayed.

Willow had long given up trying. Ruth was on the far side of sixty and was likely to break something if she didn’t quit roughhousing, but nothing would persuade her to change that, either. Her energy with the boy was boundless and deviant and driven by a heart of gold. Not just the clichéd heart, Willow thought, although she was that, too—she was kind, and sympathetic, and a bit of a pushover. But Ruth’s heart was made of something rawer. Something molten and enflamed. The stunts it inspired were epic. The spud gun? An old can of hair spray, a length of vacuum cleaner pipe, a deafening explosion, and a splotch of smashed potato on the side of the tool shed you could still see, five years later, when the sun shone right. The Eliminizer … Jesus. That one nearly brought in the FBI. These were not escapades dreamed up by a person who ran on ordinary octane. Ruth ran hot where she, Willow, ran cool. Willow understood that. Crank the BTUs up to Ruth’s temperature in Willow’s body and you’d have a shimmering oil spot on the sidewalk where Willow had been standing. Willow reached for the bag at her feet. “By the way,” she said drily. “I forgot to give you this. It’s from my trip.”

The two stopped tussling and watched her draw a brand-new baseball cap from the bag. “Man,” Wrecker muttered, drawing out the syllable. A Giants cap. He reached for it, but Willow tugged it away before he could touch it.

“You’re covered in flour,” she said. “Let me do it.” Willow situated the cap on his head and compressed his hair—thick, unruly hanks of it, buzzed by Ruthie each spring and fall and left to tangle and fall in his eyes the rest of the time—into the woolen dome. She watched him closely for his reaction, but caught nothing more than simple pleasure at the gift. She brushed the white powder from his cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt and stood back to take a look. “Hey, batter, batter. Best-looking player in the lineup.”

“Go get your mitt, hot shot,” Ruthie said, and he slid from the stool and ran to find it. She glanced at Willow. “What’s up for today?”

“Len needs help with something. Wrecker can come with me.”

Ruthie nodded. Unless Johnny Appleseed was around, the boy spent his Saturdays with them. Melody couldn’t get out of her Saturday shift at the Mercantile, and Dreyfus had eighty-sixed Wrecker from the place on days when he didn’t go to school. Too much time on his hands led to trouble, and there’d been witnesses to his misadventures.

The screen door banged shut behind the boy. “It wasn’t there.” He was breathing hard.

“Where?” Ruthie asked.

His eyes shifted to the side. “Where it was supposed to be.”

She yawned. “Oh,” she said. “You mean out in the middle of the yard where the rain would have soaked it?” She tossed her head toward the wobbly sideboard that stood in the corner of the kitchen. “Check the junk drawer. Next time put it where it belongs.” They watched him yank the drawer open and fit the glove to his hand. Secondhand, broken-in dark leather that reeked of neatsfoot oil—Melody’d found it for him at a yard sale the summer before. Wrecker pulled the hardball from its pocket and started driving the ball back into the webbing. He could do it for hours. Thwap, thwap—it drove them insane.

Still, Willow had to admit, he was a good boy. Noisy, messy, smelly, as eight-year-olds were made to be, but with a goodness that was particular to him. He cried hard when the smallest of Sitka’s pups picked a fight with a wolverine and couldn’t be mended. He was some kind of physical freak, climbing and leaping and lifting like a kid twice his age. And he was smart, although that wasn’t always easy to see. Willow had identified extraordinary strengths in spatial reasoning, in relational thinking, that overshadowed his weaknesses in more traditional fields of study. He could improve in those if he ever got interested. He wasn’t the dunce his teacher thought he was.

Willow liked him, even. It was a terrible feeling. She couldn’t get over the thought that this made her at least in some part responsible for his unexpected childhood. Not that there was anything bad about the life he had happened into. It was odd, but odd was no crime. He was safe, he was loved, he was well cared for. Melody saw to it that he had everything a kid could need and a hefty portion of the things he simply wanted. There was even a way that you could look at his life and think: the perfect childhood. Rousseauian—if Rousseau’s noble savage had a pirate manqué for an aunt, an abandoned Willys Jeep for a rocket ship, and the run of the forest.

And still there seemed to be something unforgivable, something almost reprehensible, about condoning the way things had worked out. He’d been deprived of a past. That was it, wasn’t it? His mother pined for him in a cell six hundred miles away—and it might as well have been the moon. She might as well not have been, Willow thought with a chill, for all he knew of her. Sure, she’d made mistakes. She had failed him, even. But Lisa Fay had conceived him, bore him, raised him as well as she could for as long as she could—and that was worth something, Willow thought. Surely it was.

The boy resembled his mother, and now Willow could not get the face of that woman to leave her mind.

“Willow?” Ruth looked at her funny.

“I said thanks,” Wrecker said, peering at her.

“You’re welcome, buddy. Let’s go shell some beans.” Willow glanced at Ruth. “That crop of Jacob’s Cattle beans Len put in last summer? He hung the plants to dry in his sauna. Hasn’t used it in years, but now he’s got the itch to get it going again and he has to get them down, first.” Len planned to move a wringer-washer into the small room and run the plants through it. “I guess you run them through the rollers and that pops the dry beans from the pods. It’s new to me.”

“That’s the old way.” Ruth nodded. “Bring me a handful when you come back. I’ll plant a row in the garden this spring.” She tugged on the brim of Wrecker’s cap. “You? Come back hungry. There’ll be fresh bread waiting for you.”

He had changed quite a bit since he’d arrived. He could read, write, tie his shoes, choose his clothes, button his shirts. He was too big to pick up (unless it was urgent, and then it took two of them), and too old to send to bed before dark. He showered on his own. He had learned to swim. He could use logic as a tool of argument and he asked more sophisticated questions. Walking to Len’s, passing Willow’s yurt, he gestured to the small wooden shed that housed her power generator. “I get how cars run,” he said offhandedly, and Willow smiled, thinking there might still be some distance to go on that subject. “But how exactly does gas make an engine go?”

Combustion, she told him, and described in detail the interaction between gas and oxygen in the presence of a spark, and the role that process played in driving pistons and, when properly geared, propelling a shaft.

He listened closely. There was a period of silence when she finished. And then he asked how he could get himself some gasoline.

He had changed considerably, Willow thought, but he still harbored that same dangerous mix of curiosity and enthusiasm and utter lack of caution that he’d come with.

“Len,” he said, when they arrived. “I need some gasoline.”

Willow tipped her head toward Len and walked over and crouched beside Meg to greet her.

“Hello, Wrecker,” Len said. He grinned at the boy, but his gaze followed Willow.

“Do you have any?”

“Gasoline? I keep that under lock and key.” He tapped the boy’s head. “Nice hat.”

“Willow got it for me,” Wrecker said. “Come on, Len. Gas?”

“None today,” Len said, and the boy drifted away toward Meg.

Willow looked up at the mention of her name. Len caught her eye and she moved to stand beside him. They watched Wrecker and Meg play together in a small rivulet of mud. That was a change, too. Meg adored the boy, followed him around the yard, batted her eyes at him, brought him little gifts of pine needles or spare buttons or the lemon drops Len carried around in his pockets. Wrecker spoke softly to Meg, and she seemed to understand him. He let her put her arm around him and warble in his ear, and he answered her with sympathetic noises of his own. Even Meg’s goose treated him with deference, honking and flapping its wings when he got too close but never opening its beak to bite.

He was a good boy, Wrecker was. He had a sweetness Willow couldn’t deny, and an innate sympathy for creatures smaller or weaker than himself. It made him furious to see them mistreated. But he was a big boy, extraordinarily strong, and when he took matters into his own hands all hell broke loose. A few months back he’d beaten the bejesus out of another boy, a ten-year-old he had accused of removing the legs of a frog at the banks of the creek behind the schoolyard. A live frog? Serves him right, Len murmured, when Willow told him. Maybe, she said. Only the boy had spent two days in the hospital with a detached retina and another week recovering at home before his parents packed up and moved down to Mendocino. Melody was lucky they didn’t press charges, they said. Willow agreed. If her son had been hurt that badly—no matter what he did to cause it—she would have dragged the other boy’s parents straight to hell by their hair.

Bet that boy won’t be bothering frogs any more, Len had said, and chuckled softly.

He’s a loose cannon, she’d told Len.

He answered, He’s a kid. He’ll outgrow it. Len relied on time to cure everything wrong with Wrecker, Willow thought. He treated the boy with a kind of affectionate bemusement, as if the very fact of his presence was something surprising and delightful and at the same time too thorny to address in any but the most formal way.

They all treated him as though he had descended from the heavens. As though his life had begun, day one, when he arrived at Bow Farm. Only Johnny Appleseed understood the danger of that. Johnny, whose own past was a mystery to her—and who kept his present largely under wraps, as well. He had begun to speak out for the trees, for preserving the forest, in a way that set Len off. It had forced a wedge between them, and Willow could feel Johnny begin to drift away from Bow Farm, leaving for long periods, reappearing unexpectedly, leaving again. There were rumors about what he did while he was gone.

Len’s hand took light hold of her elbow, now. “You hungry yet? I’ve got lunch on.” He steered her to the small fire he had banked in a rock-lined pit. Several foil-wrapped lumps roasted in the coals.

“Potatoes?”

“And onions and carrots and turnips. And lamb chops in the kitchen.” He looked both abashed and secretly pleased with himself. “I’ll go get them.” Willow watched him jump the steps to the porch two at a time. Blue jeans and a chambray shirt today. And yesterday, and most likely tomorrow—Len kept a drawer full of them, washed and pressed and identical so he wouldn’t waste time in the morning choosing what to wear. True, he was a rough, chapped, stubbly, angular, dense, and stringy man, but even when he was covered in forest dirt and chain saw oil he was the most tucked-in man she knew. Len returned with a plate full of tiny chops and tenderly arranged them on a grate he placed close to the coals. He glanced up at her. Tucked in physically, Willow corrected herself. Emotionally he still had some loose flags flapping in the breeze.

Willow hadn’t felt hungry, but the smell of seared meat made her suddenly eager to eat. Meg and Wrecker had edged close, and they all waited for Len to declare the chops done. A wood fire for a kitchen, some splintered porch steps to dine on—she’d come a long way from Bellingham, where every night she’d laid real silver for the family dinner and made a serious effort to teach her kids good manners. For one fleet second she wondered how much further she’d be willing to go. She glanced at Len and quickly looked away. No. She’d shut that thought away years ago.

Len filled the plates and passed them out and the four of them sat in a line on the second step and tore into the food with their fingers. Len helped Meg open the foil wraps and used his pocketknife to divide her vegetables. He let Wrecker cut his own. Willow watched with concern, but the boy managed well enough and then handed the knife to her. Len looked on approvingly. Wrecker had turned the knife to offer her the handle, the way Len had passed it to him.

Willow chewed slowly. The chops were tiny—two bites each—and unbearably succulent. “Oh my God,” she said. A dribble of meat juice ran down the side of her mouth, and she stopped its escape with the back of her hand. “You could be arrested for this.”

“Good?” Len grinned.

“Good doesn’t come close.” She felt half drunk with the meat and its savor.

Forget Bellingham. There were moments in this life that more than made up for all of its hardness and rough edges. The clarity of a blue sky in January after weeks of rain. The dense flavor of vegetables grown in local gardens, the smell of young lamb chops fresh off the grill. Every August, Willow waited for the sheer ambrosial sweetness of wild blackberries, sun-warmed and ripe to bursting. It took effort to collect them, to pluck the berries from the brambles while steering clear of the thorns. She’d learned to value patience. It had not come easily to her.

When Willow first arrived, she’d been overcome by the physical bounty of the place. Len was a part of that. He was exotic to her then, a man who made his living from the land, who muscled his way with sweat and skill toward the things he wanted—he was the opposite of Ross, and attractive to her in a way that had nothing to do with ambition or social standing. And she’d taken right away to Meg, who was matter-of-fact and funny and shyly offered friendship. They had made her feel at home when her heart was broken. It was painful to see how Meg had been damaged by the surgery, to see how it had changed things between them. Still, Willow reminded herself. They were married. And she was not the kind of woman to take their marriage lightly.

Willow finished her plate and leaned back to rest against an upper step. Wrecker showed no signs of slowing down. He devoured the two remaining chops and polished off the rest of the vegetables. When Len let him know there was a slice of squash pie waiting for him on the table inside, he got up and went in and returned a few moments later, dragging the sleeve of his shirt across his mouth.

“Sure can eat,” Len murmured.

It was no stretch for Willow to remember back to her own sons at that age. Not just the size of their appetites, but their intensity. When hunger struck she’d had a small window to satisfy it, and if she failed that they fell apart, turned from fairly reasonable human beings to beasts out of control, raging, accusing, carrying on until a critical mass of calories had been processed. Kids that age were as biological as slime molds. Kids only? People just learned to cover it better as they aged. Willow glanced sideways at Meg, tipped over on the step and snoring lightly. Meg was as subject to her body’s demands now as any kid. Len had related the time—it happened a few years back—when he’d brought Meg along to run some errands in Eureka. Nothing unusual about that, he said; not until she grew tired and needed to lie down. Right then. Len’s voice was quietly jocular, but the wrinkles around his eyes had deepened. In the shampoo aisle of the Fred Meyer supermarket Meg fell supine to the floor, and no manner of beseeching would convince her to sit back up until she’d napped for half an hour. A sympathetic checkout girl sent a stock boy with a blanket to cover her and a folding chair for Len to perch on while he waited for her to rise.

“If you can’t beat ’em …,” Len said now, and tipped the brim of his cap to shade his eyes while he napped.

Willow hadn’t meant to sleep, but when she opened her eyes next she found that the sun had moved a noticeable distance in the sky and that Len’s arm had shifted in his sleep to lie pressed against her thigh. She blinked and sat up. She moved away from him, worked a kink out of her neck, and smoothed her hair back into place. “Len,” she said brusquely. “If we’re doing this, let’s do it.”

Len rose quickly and stretched. Meg and Wrecker squatted together a short distance away, building a small city out of twigs. He called to them, and together the four of them walked to the back of the cabin, where Len had dragged the wringer-washer onto the back porch. “Here,” he said, guiding Willow’s hand to the best place to grasp the galvanized frame. “Heavy son of a gun. If we can get it down the stairs, we can use the hand truck to move it toward the sauna. Then we have to haul it up into there.”

“I can do it,” Wrecker insisted.

“You’re strong, but you’re short, my friend.”

Willow edged the disgruntled boy away from the machine and gripped the rolled edge. “Tell me again why we don’t do the beans outside? It would be a lot easier.”

“You’ll see.” Len grinned. “They fly everywhere. We’d lose them all and end up with a bean patch there in the spring.”

Down wasn’t so bad. Len wrestled the machine onto the cart and wheeled the wringer along the short path from the cabin. He stopped before a tiny redwood cube. A stovepipe jutted from its roof and the entrance threshold sat two feet above the ground. “You’ve never been inside?” Len wiped the thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and pulled open the plank door. “Let me give you the tour.”

Wrecker rested his hands on the floor and leaned his torso in. “Dark in here,” he reported. “Dusty.”

Len grabbed him about the waist and swung him in. He handled Meg with greater care, helping her situate her foot on the high step and then getting behind to boost her up. He turned to Willow. “Ma’am?”

She could manage, she said, but she took his hand to support her up the step and felt the palm of his other strong on the small of her back.

It was tightly packed. Hundreds of plants hung by their roots from the rafters and littered the floor with their dry leaves. The beans rattled in the pods when Willow ran a hand through them. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the murky light. Len kept a running commentary. He had milled the redwood, sanded it butter-soft, pegged it so there’d be no hot metal to burn skin. “Every stick of it’s from a single tree, so they’ll all expand the same. Should hold up.” He patted the woodstove. “This one cranks, too. Warm as you want. You should come try it some time.”

“Maybe,” Willow said thinly. It was hard to picture the sauna in action. It was a dark box with perimeter benches, a musty, vegetal smell, and a small, high window that let in a little light—but Willow knew it meant something, something good, that Len had decided to use it again. “How do you want to do this?”

They hauled it inside in one big heave that broke a nail on Willow’s left hand and almost pinned her against a bench. With the wringer inside there was barely room for them to stand. Len was delighted by their success. He reached up and unhooked a few of the dried stalks. The leaves crumbled into a dust that floated in the air and tickled their lungs. “Let’s try this. Close the door,” he instructed, and when Willow reluctantly pulled the door shut they were thrust into a dusky silence. Len gave Meg’s shoulders a reassuring squeeze and climbed around her to position himself in front of the machine. Willow maintained her post by the door. She wanted to be able to exit quickly, if it came to that.

Len showed Wrecker how to spin the handle of the wringer. Then he carefully fed the plant into its rollers.

The machine spit dry beans like little pieces of shrapnel in every direction. Meg and Wrecker burst out laughing as the beans ricocheted off their skin. They cackled and hooted and Len joined in, casting a shy glance at Willow. “Victory,” she proclaimed, and laughed because he was laughing, and it happened so rarely. And then the boy started to sneeze. “You all right, sport?” Len asked casually after the third or fourth explosion. But the sneezes continued, and Wrecker abandoned his post to stumble past Willow to the door and out. Meg slipped out with him. He’d had enough, he said, when the sneezes slowed enough to let him speak. He wasn’t going in there again. Meg planted herself by his side in solidarity.

Len agreed. It was a good start. He glanced wistfully at the machine. Willow could take a sauna here any time, he said. He guessed she’d earned it.

“Nobody’s taking a sauna as long as you’ve got these things hanging in here.” Willow rubbed her itchy nose. “We could see what we could get done.” She gestured to the door. “Meg’s fine with Wrecker, isn’t she?”

Len’s eyes widened, and he laughed. He stuck his head out the open door. “Meg, honey. Will you stay with Wrecker?” He had a swimmer’s build from behind, with muscular shoulders and a narrow waist.

“Stay,” Meg said.

He looked from her to the boy. “You’re sure, now?”

“Sure.” It sounded like shore, but it was a miracle that Meg had come so far with her speech.

“I’ll stay with her,” Wrecker promised. “We’ll work on the fort.”

Len looked at him closely and nodded. “You know where we are. Come get me if you need anything,” he said, and he pulled the door softly shut and turned to Willow in the dim light.

There was a rhythm to the work. As they went along they fine-tuned the motions, Len reaching up for a plant with one hand as he fed another through the rollers with the other, Willow adjusting the speed of the crank to match his movements. The beans caromed about, bouncing from the walls, the ceiling, the floor, their bodies. The temperature rose from their body heat. Len paused and fingered the buttons of his shirt. “Getting warm,” he said.

Willow stopped turning the crank and fanned herself. “Hot.”

“We can quit.” Len glanced at her with concern. He reached a hand to lift the collar of his shirt. It was glued to his neck. Large patches of sweat darkened his blue shirt to navy.

“Go ahead, Len,” Willow said. Len looked startled. “It’s too hot to leave it on.” Willow peeled off her sweat-spotted work shirt. Beneath it she wore an opaque camisole. It was modest enough, and the light was low. She stood up. She wanted to try feeding, she said.

Len moved awkwardly around the machine to let her switch places.

They began again. The beans—creamy white, kidney shaped, with maroon splotches that made them look like the coat of an Appaloosa horse—sprung from their pods and covered the floor in shallow drifts. Willow liked the rough scratch of the plants against her skin. There was something satisfying about working in tandem at this. They were making good progress. If they kept at it, they would finish well before dusk.

Len raised a hand to get her to wait. He moved to the high window and grinned. “Meg’s got Wrecker cooking with mud,” he said. With his back turned to Willow, he removed his shirt and folded it and set it on the bench behind him. Stiffly, without looking at her, he returned to his task.

His modesty amused her. As if Willow had never seen a man’s bare chest before. She kept the plants steadily entering the rollers. He had small tight curls that spread beneath his collarbone like decoration, and the hair on his back was a delicate downy stream that followed his spine into the waistband of his jeans. She glanced up at the hanging plants. “Halfway through, you think?”

“Would’ve taken me five times as long, working by myself.” He glanced at her. “I’ll bring you a bag.”

Ruth would like that, Willow said.

Len stopped turning and eased back onto the bench. His eyes were the color of rich dirt, loamy and reliable. He kept his gaze on her.

“What?”

After a moment Len said, “That cap. That you gave the kid.”

Willow cleared herself a spot to sit amid the beans. “I figured you’d notice.”

“Did he?”

“He didn’t seem to.” She flexed and fisted her hands, stretching them. “I don’t know. Do you think he remembers any of that?” And when Len shrugged, “What I guess I mean is,” she said slowly, “don’t you think he ought to?”

Len removed his cap and ran his hand through his thin hair. “If he remembers, that’s one thing.” Willow had shown him the photo Lisa Fay had given her for Wrecker: the boy, barely three, wearing a Giants jersey and cap. Melody hadn’t wanted to see it. They figured it best just to hold it for Wrecker; wait until he got older. Len tilted his head to the side and frowned. “But if he doesn’t? I don’t see how it can help to push him that way. We’re his family, now.”

“It could prepare him for later.”

Len gazed at her steadily. “What later.”

It was dangerous to ignore the truth, Willow thought. “The later,” she said carefully, “when Lisa Fay comes up to get him.”

“If.” Len held her gaze. “Not when.”

But Len hadn’t been to the prison. He hadn’t seen what she saw. The look in Wrecker’s mother’s eyes as she drank in the sight of her son. It was part of Willow, now, the afternoon she sat beside Lisa Fay and handed her the photograph and spoke to her of her son. Willow hadn’t told Len about that photo. She hadn’t told any of them. It might have been—she wasn’t sure, any longer. But maybe she’d made a mistake.

Willow and Len stood and switched places, careful to keep a safe distance from each other as they passed, and went back to work. There was something hypnotic about labor like this; something soothing, unexpectedly sensual, that reminded Willow of the clack and slide of the loom as she worked the shuttle over the yarn. They worked without talking and let the swish and crackle of dry leaves stand in for speech. An hour later, only a few plants remained to be hulled. Willow could feel her body weary with the effort. It was a good kind of tired and she noticed it in him as well, his body slowing slightly. “I can finish,” she said, sinking onto the bench. “Just let me take a break.”

Len nodded. He retrieved the last plants from the rafters and stacked them on the bench. When Willow started to stand, Len waved her away. She eased down the bench a bit and watched him feed them in, one plant at a time, as he turned the handle. Each revolution sent the mildest breeze in Willow’s direction. She tipped her head back and let it play against her skin.

The last plant emerged, its pods exhausted of its beans, and Len sent it to lie with its fellows on a tall stack that covered the opposite bench. He got up and gazed out the tiny window. A smile broke across his face. Willow rose to see. Wrecker and Meg were lying on their backs in the cleared dirt in the front of the house, laughing as the goose waddled in circles around them. When he turned to consider the beans that carpeted the floor, Len’s shoulder brushed hers. He didn’t move away. Tired, she thought. “Look at that,” he said, his voice rich with content. “Not bad.”

“Not bad, nothing,” she said, flushed with accomplishment and the feel of him close. “We did it.”

Len turned toward her and an amused smile tilted the corners of his mouth. He reached forward and brushed away a scrap of bean pod she had stuck above her eyebrow. “There,” he said. “You couldn’t go out in public like that.” But he held her gaze, and Willow saw something unexpected enter his eyes as he smoothed her hair behind her ear and let the palm of his hand glide down her cheek.

Oh, she thought. There was a pang—a pain, almost—of clarity, a sharp note rising through a pool of warm water.

Willow reached up and laid her own hand over his. With the lightest pressure she guided its path over the planes of her face. When his fingers grazed her lips she let them fall open. The rough tip of his first finger fell between her teeth, and her tongue rose to cradle its callused pad. She felt the shock of it surge through them both.

If they didn’t look at each other, Willow thought, it was possible they were imagining this. Imagining that she slid from the bench to kneel on the floor. That when she faced away from him and stretched forward on her knees like a cat to scoop the beans toward her, stretched and scooped, that’s all it was, gathering the shelled beans into a pile before her. That when he dropped to his knees behind her, leaned over her to stretch, to scoop, one arm supporting himself and the other snug around her belly, her ass drawn hard to his hips and his hand reaching toward the warm center of herself, he was helping her collect them, mound them into a hill beneath her.

Willow rolled to face him.

Len looked terrified. She wondered if she looked that way, too. Her legs in the soft wool trousers lay gripped between his. Len’s chest was bare and he was trembling. Willow laid her spread hand against his breastbone and felt his breath swell against it. Slowly she ran her fingers down his chest. When the bottom of her hand rested on the waistband of his jeans, Willow curled her fingers against the tight muscles of his belly.

The muscles pulsed and he drew a sharp breath and tore his gaze from hers.

Willow placed both hands on the knobby bones of Len’s hips and drew him toward her as she lay back into the beans. The pile rustled and gave as they surrendered their weight to it. So they were going into this, Willow thought. They were crossing the line they had stumbled close to and withdrawn from a hundred times since Willow first arrived at Bow Farm. Willow felt Len press against her and wanted him then with something close to fury. She did not give a damn about any line. She reached down for his belt buckle, slid the leather from the keeper. Her fingers fought the button of his jeans as her hips arched hard toward his.

A sound outside startled them.

Len’s head jerked forward. They heard the rapid slap of footfalls approaching.

Len leapt from her, banging his elbow hard against the wringer-washer. Willow felt her body shudder at his sudden absence. She scrambled awkwardly from the floor, her face hot, and reached for her shirt. Len grabbed his own, thrust his arms into the sleeves, and threw open the door.

The late-afternoon sun flooded in. “Len!” Wrecker said. He pulled up short and looked at the man.

“What is it, son?” Len said. His voice shook.

The boy sounded casual. Meg’s foot was stuck, he said. He couldn’t get her loose. He glanced back and forth between them when Willow appeared at the door.

Len stepped down and put a hand on Wrecker’s shoulder. “Let’s go see about that,” he said, and the two of them walked together. Willow waited long enough to catch her breath, waited for the heat to recede from her face, and followed behind.

Meg wasn’t far. She lay on the ground amid blackberry brambles and made small whimpering noises. Willow felt her heart sink. Somehow Meg had crossed into middle age while they’d had their backs turned. Her cardigan was twisted and her dress had a tear Willow knew she would offer to mend. On her feet were sturdy brogans that laced up and tied, and Willow was sure that her socks matched—Len would have seen to that. She sounded like a frightened child. One foot was trapped in a tangle of berry canes. Len squatted beside Meg, and Willow watched the easy way he talked with her, calmed her, gently worked her foot free of the brambles. He reached and adjusted her spectacles to sit comfortably on her nose and smoothed the errant hairs away from her face. He leaned in and whispered something in her ear. She stopped whimpering and Len rocked back on his heels and smiled. He ran his hand expertly down her calf, flexed her ankle, made sure nothing was broken, and then he carefully untied the shoe and removed it and massaged her foot. He said something to her that made her laugh. Then he replaced the shoe and tied it firmly, and the two of them sat there with their knees pulled up to their chests and their arms wrapped around them, their heads inclined toward each other, and on Len’s face that look he reserved for Meg, a look so open and intimate Willow had never seen him turn it to another person.

He didn’t even look back at me, Willow thought, stunned.

Wrecker sidled up beside her. He looked unsettled. Willow reached down and took his hand to stop herself from shaking.

“Let’s go see about that bread,” she said.