We dance nose to nose, Walton’s hand low on my waist, a tacit reminder of our moment in the woods. “I’ll miss this,” he says. “I’ll miss you.”
My voice chokes in my throat. I don’t trust myself to speak.
After the last song, we make our way home on the dark road with the others. My legs are tired, but melancholy makes me even slower, like a dog on a leash being pulled where it doesn’t want to go. Walton puts his arm around me and we fall back, away from the others. At the turnoff for the Carles’ we linger by the gate. I lean my head on his shoulder.
“I wish I could reach up and grab a faraway star and put it on your finger,” Walton says. Running a finger over my lips, he bends down to kiss me. I feel in his kiss the weight of his promise.
TEN DAYS LATER I receive a letter postmarked Massachusetts. “Remember a week ago tonight? I shall remember it until I see you again,” he writes. “What promises I make, I keep.”
DECEMBER IS AS gray as my mood. I haven’t received a letter from Walton since September.
Though it’s cold, there’s little snow. A cat has been hiding under the house, a butterscotch tiger-striped Maine coon with enormous ginger eyes. I tempt it out with a bowl of milk. Shivering, it laps the milk hungrily, and when the bowl is empty, I lift it onto my lap. A female. Her skin is loose around her bones; it’s like cradling a bag of hollow pipes. She licks my chin with a sea-urchin tongue and settles on my lap with a purr. I name her Lolly. She’s the only bright spot of my entire month.
For Christmas I give my brothers plaid shirts I’ve sewn out of flannel while they were working outside. Mother knits socks and hats. Papa makes no pretense of giving presents; he says the roof over our heads is present enough. Sam gives me a baking tray, Fred puts a ribbon on a new straw broom, Al carves a set of wooden spoons. Walton sends a thick cream-colored card foil-stamped with a green wreath and a red bow, addressed to The Olson Family. “Sending you warm wishes in this cold season. Happy Christmas and God Bless!” He signs it “Walton Hall.”
Instead of displaying his card, as I’ve done in past years, I take it upstairs to my room. I take the stack of his letters from the shelf where I keep them, untie the pale pink ribbon, and sit on my bed, opening the letters and reading each one. All roads lead back to Cushing for me. What promises I make, I keep. With love. I hold the Christmas card between my hands so tightly that it rips a little. Slowly, I tear it down the middle, then rip the pieces again and again until they’re as small as butterscotch candies, as two-cent stamps, as faraway stars in the sky.
I WRITE TO Walton after the holidays, wishing him a happy 1917, telling him about the presents I received from my brothers and the flannel shirts I sewed. I describe the suckling pig we roasted in a pit Al built in the yard, the blueberry compote and fried apple cake, the chicken stew with squash dumplings and the drink Sam concocts on New Year’s Eve: rum, molasses, and cloves in a mug with boiling water, blended with a cinnamon stick. Whaler’s Toddy, it’s called. I strive to convey the flavor of our humble rituals, the camaraderie and clamor of a house filled with boys, a feeling of well-being and holiday cheer that isn’t so much exaggerated in the telling as enhanced. I do my best to avoid a plaintive undertow.
I don’t understand. Why haven’t you written?
Days pass, weeks. Months. I thought I was used to waiting. This is a new kind of hell. My soul feels coated with tar.
I berate myself for the letter I sent, filled with mindless chatter about our simple rituals. What I have to share is paltry, insignificant, domestic. And yet it’s all I have to give.
As winter turns to spring I slog to the post office, zigzagging through the snow and slush. Bills, flyers, the Saturday Evening Post. “Nothing for you today, Christina,” Bertha Dorset says, her prim voice threaded with pity. I want to lunge across the counter and throttle her until her face purples and she gasps for breath. But I take the mail and smile.
Even when the snow melts and the crocuses bloom I am cold, always cold, no matter how many blankets I pile on my bed. In the middle of the night, I listen to the wind screaming through gaps in the wall. I remember a story I read once about a woman who goes mad trapped inside her house and comes to believe that she lives behind the wallpaper. I am beginning to wonder if I will stay in this house forever, creeping up and down the stairs like the woman in that story.
IT IS A warm morning in May when I see Ramona out the kitchen window, striding toward the house across the grass, head down, shoulders squared. I’ve thought about this day all winter. I sink into my old chair beside the red geraniums. Lolly springs onto my lap and I stroke her back. Ordinarily I would get up, put a kettle on for tea, stand in the doorway to welcome her, but I can’t rally the energy to cover the conversation that I know is coming with the rituals of a friendly visit.
Ramona isn’t surprised to find me in the kitchen. “Hello, Christina. Mind if I come in?” Her smile is wobbly. Stepping across the threshold into the gloom, she squints. “So good to see you.”
I muster a smile in response. “You too.”
“Did I catch you in the middle of something?”
“Just the usual.”
“You look well.”
I know I don’t. I’m wearing an old apron over a plain checked dress. “I wasn’t expecting company.” I start to untie the back of the apron.
“Oh, please don’t change,” she says, adding quickly, “It’s just me.”
“I’m done with the lunch dishes. About to take it off anyway.”
She watches me wrestle with the tie in the back. I can tell she wants to help but knows I wouldn’t like it.
For a moment she hesitates in the middle of the floor. She’s clutching a paper bag and wearing a style of dress I haven’t seen before, yellow and white checkerboard patterned with full white sleeves and three tortoiseshell buttons, a drapey white collar, and a wide waistband. Pale stockings and white leather shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a bun with a yellow ribbon.
“That’s a nice dress,” I say, though her outfit makes me think she must be stopping through on her way to somewhere more exciting.
“Oh, thank you. It’s summery, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
As if suddenly remembering, she says, “I brought you something! Mama had a crate sent from Florida.” She takes three large oranges out of her bag and sets them on the table. “I’d love to get down to Florida one of these days. I can just see myself lying on a beach on a towel with a big straw hat. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Maybe so.”
“How about we go together? In the winter sometime, when it’s so dang cold.”
I shrug. “I’m not keen on burning in the sun.”
“I forget about your Swedish skin,” she says. “Why don’t I peel us an orange and I can dream about Florida and you enjoy a healthy treat?”