And had the next morning not been a Sunday, perhaps he would have told her she couldn’t stay. But it was Sunday, and he rose before dawn because he was too awake to do anything else. Ellie didn’t stir. Nobody did. It occurred to him that they all slept soundly now because they’d all been kept awake in the night with their altered thoughts of the house and the world, and what had altered their view of the house and the world was nothing more than the girl’s intrusion into it. Rocinante. Now that was something unexpected. All the way from New York City, coming by train and asleep even now in their very attic, a Scottish girl who knew the name of Quixote’s horse.
By the time he had fed and milked, the morning’s stillness was like a magnifying glass. The cottonwood leaves were yellow as daffodils against a bluest blue sky, and every feather of every chicken in the yard seemed a different shade of red. Indian summer had been his father’s favorite season here, and it was his, too. It was hard not to feel hope on such a day, when the wind was not blowing, and the sun was not burning. He found button mushrooms by the creek and brought in late tomatoes from the garden and knew that the smell of them pan-frying in butter would draw the others downstairs.
He tilted the bowl of mushrooms into the buttery pan. He hoped the girl would come down first. There was no easy way of saying to her what needed to be said, but telling her when she was alone would steal less of her dignity, and dignity was something he felt sure the girl cared something about, and the circumstances of her arrival—no one to meet her and a long ride behind Tanner’s mules—left her so little of it. But just then Ellie came in from the chickens with a small bowl only half full of brown eggs and frowned at once at his profligate use of butter, and then Neva and Clare were tumbling down the stairs, and after them Lottie, so he rearranged his planning. They would feed the girl properly, and afterward he could draw her outside for a private word, and this, too, was a plan that might have worked had the girl not come downstairs in a pink dress looking altogether freshened and laying her sober brown eyes on Ellie to say in a slow, practiced manner, “Thank you, Mrs. Price, for giving me the particular room that you did. I looked out the window this morning to the most marvelous rising of the sun.”
Which anyone in the world would see as a pleasant sentiment, but Ellie just gave the girl’s good manners a solemn nod and went back to mixing her pancake batter. The Scottish girl had brushed her hair and her face was pretty and smooth and freckled and the pink dress ornamented with a brown bow at the collar became her in a way that made you think she was spunky and fun despite the worried look that lay back in her eyes, which anybody could see and was probably why Neva was already holding her arm and asking if there were kittens in Scotland. Aldine stood awkwardly by the table until Neva begged her to sit in the chair touching hers, and after one sip of the coffee Ellie poured in her cup, she just stared at her plate.
Ellie had begun serving pancakes with frosty efficiency. Ansel stirred heavy cream with the mushrooms, then wrapped the pan handle with a towel and went plate to plate spooning out portions.
“Yum,” Neva said, and the Scottish girl, upon tasting hers, looked up smiling thoroughly and said, “Well, isna’ that divine?”
At which he, a grown man and thinking himself well past such things, felt a thrill of self-satisfied pleasure move through his body. He said, “Wait till you taste Ellie’s plum syrup,” and after tasting the syrup, the girl said that it, too, was divine, though he could tell that Ellie, unmoved, believed that the girl had only taken a cue. He also saw her observe how much of the syrup the girl had poured over her pancakes.
“It’s the last of it,” Ellie said, as if to Ansel. “No more till the plum bears again.”
“We used to get lots,” said Clare, who, it was clear, had been sitting in wait of something to say to the girl. “But not so many the last two years.”
“Not so many?” Charlotte said. “Zero plums is a lot less than not so many.”
They ate in silence for a moment, tasting the distilled purple sweetness and feeling the life seep from the room.
“The more reason to savor it,” Ansel said and wondered why salvaging the meal seemed so important to him. “And rest assured there’ll be more plums next summer, I guarantee it.”
“I guarantee it, too, one hundred percent,” Neva said, trying to sound somber and adultlike, which made everyone but Ellie smile. When the Scottish girl smiled, you could see the cheerful person she must once have been, or could yet be, given something to cheer her.
“I like that color,” Neva said of Aldine’s dress. “It’s pink as a piggy bank.”
The Scottish girl gave out a quick, pretty laugh. “And don’t you look glad yourself then,” she said in return to Neva, who was wearing her church dress, a yellow cotton as bright as the leaves outside.
He noticed Charlotte smiling and said, “Charlotte made that for Nevie. Lottie sews like there’s no tomorrow.”
“It’s bonny indeed,” the girl said, and Charlotte answered, “It is, isn’t it, if I say so myself,” and sipped from her water.
He was still hungry, and eyed the platter at the center of the table. One pancake left and no one wanting to take it.
“I don’t like church,” Neva announced to Aldine, her mouth full with pancake. “Do you?”
Ansel didn’t have to see it. He could feel Ellie’s eyes rising and fixing on the girl.
Aldine held her full coffee cup with both hands, the tendrils of steam lit up by the morning sun. “I love the singing,” she said. Luve, she said, making the word more powerful, original almost, as if she’d coined it.
“Me, too,” he said before he knew it.
There was a silence, and he took a big swig of coffee. He doubted the girl had money to turn around and go back. If she had money, she wouldn’t have come at all. He watched Ellie slice her own pancakes into small triangular chunks, hardly sweetened with plum syrup; then he let his gaze drift out the window to the slanted line the barn roof made against the blue sky. He could hear a small wind feeling its way through the cottonwood, finding the weak leaves. He closed his eyes for a moment and watched them fall free.
“Look at the time,” Ellie said, and all at once was pushing back her chair and saying to Aldine, “You can come or stay as you like. There’s St. Anne’s, if you’d rather, but it’s in the other direction and you’d have to walk.” She was piling plates and untying her apron, tucking a strand of curly hair behind her ear.
Ansel looked around. The buttery mushrooms in heavy cream were gone; the breakfast was over. The smallest kind of sadness but a sadness still. He said, “If she wants to go up to St. Anne’s, the Eckerts could take her. They’re Catholic.”
“They’ve probably gone already,” Ellie said, pushing things ahead. Always, in her little ways, pushing.
“Well, next time,” Ansel said.
Ellie shot him a look that said there wouldn’t be a next time, but Aldine set down her cup, half full and no longer steaming, and said she wasn’t Catholic, anyway, and that she’d much rather see where they went, if they didn’t mind.
“Of course we don’t mind,” he said, wiping his mouth and pushing back his chair as Ellie picked up Aldine’s cup of unfinished coffee and set it in the sink.