“Okay, then,” he said, instead of Very well, then, which was what he’d learned to say from his father-in-law. “I’ll see that you get what you need, for the press.”
She stood. She was older than he’d realized, maybe eight or ten years his senior, and taller, too, and he was struck, looking up at her (her mistake in standing before he’d stood irritating and attracting him), at how completely unknown she was to him. He loved Susannah. She was as essential, as inextricable from his life as his own hands or feet; it was the roll of her body toward him each morning, her long, horsey braid in his face, her Lady Esther Four-Purpose Face Cream–scented skin that righted him and sent him out into the day whole. He loved Susannah as much as he ever had—it wasn’t the amount but rather the nature of his love that had changed. He felt for her now what he imagined one might feel for a sister. Most days, that passed in his mind as enough.
“I may come myself,” he said to Emma Murphy.
“You oughtn’t.” Finally, she looked away.
“True,” he said, opening the door and showing her out with a sweep of his arm that would appear dismissive to an onlooker. “But I may.”
Two
Washington Street wound through Lanesville as close to the coves as a road could run, rearing up with the hills, skidding this way and that as the stone walls dictated. The earliest walls had been built before the road. You could still see where they had been taken apart to make way for the new lanes that climbed from Washington Street to the woods. These—among them Leverett Street—were not so new anymore, though many of the houses lining them still looked temporary: built hastily for quarrymen, their walls were thin, their doorsteps missing roofs to shield a person from the rain, their roofs cheap paper requiring frequent patching, lending the houses a disheveled appearance, even if they were well cared for.
The Murphy house was somewhere in the middle, better or worse cared for depending on the year, and Roland’s mood, and how old the oldest boys living at home were at a given time. At this time it was suffering one of its more neglected moments because Emma Murphy and her children were spending all their energies on the perry shack and Roland was away. Seven paces from the house—a few more, if you were a child—in the small yard that separated their house from the next, shaded by an old, swaybacked oak tree and assorted beech and bramble that had grown up alongside it, an outline of a cellar had been knifed into the dirt. Here Liam and Jeffrey dug with their father’s big shovels while Janie and Anne, using the oak’s trunk as a vertical sort of sawhorse, measured pine planks for the shack’s walls, and the youngest ones, Maggie and Joshua, dug with shells at the cellar’s boundary. Their other sister, Lucy Pear, had taken them to Plum Cove Beach to find the shells. She was the one who had measured the cellar’s outline and thought of using a knife—their hoe was too dull—and then cut the outline herself. She was the one who had bushwhacked through the trees dividing their yard from the next and asked Mr. Davies if he was planning to use the pile of knotty pine boards behind his house.
The boards were discards from a barn he was done building, and Mr. Davies was kind. Still, the girl’s audacity astonished Emma. Lucy had always seemed older than her years, but she had not always seemed capable of brashness. As an infant she had been so calm that Emma worried she would get trampled—for a time, she even convinced herself that Lucy might be dumb, that she had been left because of a defect or injury and that no one but Emma would ever want her. This was when Roland was still telling Emma to find the baby another home: Drop her at the orphanage at Salem, come on now. As a mother of five, soon to be six, Emma knew he was right. She was sorry—she saw how hard he worked, saw his daily, degrading amazement: it was never enough. But Lucy’s calm, the way she looked at Emma as she sucked, not tugging or bucking, only looking, her fawn-colored cheeks sighing in and out, her dark eyes locked on Emma’s until, without warning, they rolled gratefully back, opened up a hole in Emma, a new, bloody tunnel through her heart.