Ian worked with us, when it was clearly not his turn, and this bothered me.
I had to eat in the kitchen again. Jamie was there, and he kept the room from total silence. I knew he was too sensitive not to notice the awkward hush, but he deliberately ignored it, seeming to pretend that he and Jeb and I were the only people in the room. He chattered about his day in Sharon’s class, bragging a little about some trouble he’d gotten into for speaking out of turn, and complaining about the chores she’d given him as punishment. Jeb chastised him halfheartedly. They both did a very good job of acting normal. I had no acting ability. When Jamie asked me about my day, the best I could do was stare intently at my food and mumble one-word answers. This seemed to make him sad, but he didn’t push me.
At night it was a different story—he wouldn’t let me stop talking until I begged to be allowed to sleep. Jamie had reclaimed his room, taking Jared’s side of the bed and insisting that I take his. This was very much as Melanie remembered things, and she approved of the arrangement.
Jeb did, too. “Saves me the trouble of finding someone to play guard. Keep the gun close and don’t forget it’s there,” he told Jamie.
I protested again, but both the man and the boy refused to listen to me. So Jamie slept with the gun on the other side of his body from me, and I fretted and had nightmares about it.
The third day of chores, I worked in the kitchen. Jeb taught me how to knead the coarse bread dough, how to lay it out in round lumps and let it rise, and, later on, how to feed the fire in the bottom of the big stone oven when it was dark enough to let the smoke out.
In the middle of the afternoon, Jeb left.
“I’m gonna get some more flour,” he muttered, playing with the strap that held the gun to his waist.
The three silent women who kneaded alongside us didn’t look up. I was up to my elbows in the sticky dough, but I started to scrape it off so I could follow him.
Jeb grinned, flashed a look at the unobserving women, and shook his head at me. Then he spun around and dashed out of the room before I could free myself.
I froze there, no longer breathing. I stared at the three women—the young blonde from the bathing room, the salt-and-pepper braid, and the heavy-lidded mother—waiting for them to realize that they could kill me now. No Jeb, no gun, my hands trapped in the gluey dough—nothing to stop them.
But the women kept on kneading and shaping, not seeming to realize this glaring truth. After a long, breathless moment, I started kneading again, too. My stillness would probably alert them to the situation sooner than if I kept working.
Jeb was gone for an eternity. Perhaps he had meant that he needed to grind more flour. That seemed like the only explanation for his endless absence.
“Took you long enough,” the salt-and-pepper-braid woman said when he got back, so I knew it wasn’t just my imagination.
Jeb dropped a heavy burlap sack to the floor with a deep thud. “That’s a lot of flour there. You try carryin’ it, Trudy.”
Trudy snorted. “I imagine it took a lot of rest stops to get it this far.”
Jeb grinned at her. “It sure did.”
My heart, which had been thrumming like a bird’s for the entire episode, settled into a less frantic rhythm.
The next day we were cleaning mirrors in the room that housed the cornfield. Jeb told me this was something they had to do routinely, as the combination of humidity and dust caked the mirrors until the light was too dim to feed the plants. It was Ian, working with us again, who scaled the rickety wooden ladder while Jeb and I tried to keep the base steady. It was a difficult task, given Ian’s weight and the homemade ladder’s poor balance. By the end of the day, my arms were limp and aching.
I didn’t even notice until we were done and heading for the kitchen that the improvised holster Jeb always wore was empty.
I gasped out loud, my knees locking like a startled colt’s. My body tottered to a halt.
“What’s wrong, Wanda?” Jeb asked, too innocent.
I would have answered if Ian hadn’t been right beside him, watching my strange behavior with fascination in his vivid blue eyes.
So I just gave Jeb a wide-eyed look of mingled disbelief and reproach, and then slowly began walking beside him again, shaking my head. Jeb chuckled.
“What’s that about?” Ian muttered to Jeb, as if I were deaf.
“Beats me,” Jeb said; he lied as only a human could, smooth and guileless.
He was a good liar, and I began to wonder if leaving the gun behind today, and leaving me alone yesterday, and all this effort forcing me into human company was his way of getting me killed without doing the job himself. Was the friendship all in my head? Another lie?
This was my fourth day eating in the kitchen.
Jeb, Ian, and I walked into the long, hot room—into a crowd of humans chatting in low voices about the day’s events—and nothing happened.
Nothing happened.