“No. Sugar. I could taste the sugar.”
It was quiet. He wondered how you made a woman want you back. He did nothing except go on feeling his own suppressed, pathetic wanting, and after several more silent moments, she said he should go back to bed. He supposed he should feel upright and gallant for standing up and saying good-bye but all he felt was humiliation.
44
The next day, Ansel sold the last cows and brought back from town a letter for Aldine. That was fast, was his first thought upon seeing the envelope, but he saw at once that something was wrong. Aldine sister’s name was on it—Mrs. Wm. Cooper—but the return address was in Salt Lake City, which didn’t make sense. Aldine said her sister lived in New York. There had been nothing at the post office from the superintendent’s office, which was an aggravation. Why couldn’t they send the girl the money she earned, or at least tell her when they would?
“A letter for Miss McKenna,” he called into the house from the mud porch when he arrived home.
Ellie appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands in her apron. She’d been packing, he knew, and her hair was limp, oily, disheveled. “She’s gone to Newton with Sonia Odekirk.”
He waited.
“They were going to have lunch at Woolworth’s.”
“Good for her then,” he said, and he meant it.
Ellie’s expression was stony. “At least someone will have a good meal and a pleasant day.” Then, with a rigid set to her chin: “Sonia might’ve asked Lottie, too.”
“Lottie’s seen Newton. The girl never has.”
Ellie gave her head an impatient shake, her way of saying, Nonsense. “The truth is, the girl could’ve helped for once.” She looked at her hands, inky from packing plates in newspaper. Then, looking tiredly at Ansel: “What did you get for the cows?”
He looked down. “Less even than I feared.” A lie. He’d gotten exactly what he’d feared, and then slipped half of it into a hidden niche of his wallet. So he told a lie he could never have told if they were staying on—Ellie would’ve ferreted out the truth or stumbled onto it, one or the other—but they weren’t staying on. They were leaving the home place.
Ellie nodded without expression, and why would it be otherwise—she expected nothing from him or his cows or his farm. Her gaze shifted to the letter he held at his side. She extended her hand to take it from him, and he was surprised by his instantaneous impulse not to give it up, but he did. She looked down at it and said, “Money, let’s hope.”
In a low voice he said, “She deserves it, God knows.”
Ellie studied him, saying nothing, until his gaze slid away. When he looked again, she’d turned and set the letter on the center table, where Aldine would see it. From the kitchen he could hear the clink of dishes and a low desultory exchange between Lottie and Ellie.
“What about these?”
“Wrap them and stack them. We can only take so much.”
He was rigging up the trailer behind the car when Aldine came walking up the drive, bundled head to toe, like something in a beautiful, wintry old-world painting. She smiled at the sight of him and it came upon him in a rush, the feel of her against him in the truck, the way all the tension and fear had drained out of her and how he had just held her and closed his eyes and felt all his own troubling worries slip away, too.
“Sonia might’ve brought you up to the house,” he said.
“She wanted to. But I wanted to walk the last little bit.” She regarded the trailer. “You’ll be packing up then?”
“Mmm. Just what we need for a while out there. We’ll come back. We’re not leaving for good.”
She looked at him and said nothing but there was kindness in her eyes, and concern, and—this was the hard part—he didn’t know what else.
“Cold,” he said, just for something to say.
“But peaceful,” she said, letting her eyes rest on him a moment more before gazing back down the lane she’d just walked. “You can almost feel its peacefulness when the wind isna’ blowing everything away.”
And then her keen eyes were on him again. “You know, way inside you, down in the bones.”
He did know—he felt exactly so himself even if he couldn’t have found such a pretty way to put it. He said only, “You enjoyed yourself? In Newton?”
“Oh, yes, very much. We had the grandest time in Woolworth’s. I especially liked the area with a funny name, where they have buttons and stays and such.”
“Notions.”
“Yes! Notions.” She released a small musical laugh. “And then we sat at the counter for chocolate malteds and cheese sandwiches that were ever so—” She must have realized what she was saying, for she checked herself and seemed now, by expression, to be begging forgiveness.
“They make a good malted there,” he said. He knew Ellie was probably watching from the kitchen window, and maybe Lottie, too, but he couldn’t help himself. He let his eyes settle fully on hers. “It would have been a shame if you’d left Kansas without tasting . . .” A malted from Woolworth’s was what he’d thought to say, but instead he said, “something indulgent like that.”
“Mmm,” she said, looking at him, and just that—her gaze and her low murmuring—sent blood stirring through him wildly.
“A letter came for you,” he said, forcing gruffness into his tone. “Ellie put it inside.”
“Well then,” she said, searching his eyes for a moment and then dropping her gaze, and without another word she went inside.
An hour or so later, when they all sat down to supper, Aldine was not among them. Ellie said the blessing, and began to pass a plate of biscuits and a bowl of syrupy apricots, which was all there was, but the room was thick with the girl’s absence.
“Where is she?” Neva said. Her small voice had been coarsened by coughing.
“I’ll go and see,” Ellie said, before anyone else could.
After she’d left, Clare said, “Do you think she’s all right?”
Ansel picked a biscuit from the plate and was surprised by his hand. It was trembling like one of a man sick or aged. Everywhere it was nicked from working in tight spaces with tools, and under the black hair, red scabs and pink scars showed, and there it was, his solid hand, trembling.
“Dad?”
“What?” he said, more sharply than he intended. He set down the biscuit and rested his flattened hand on the table.
“Miss McKenna,” Clare said. “Do you think she’s all right?”
“I think so. She received a letter today from her sister, which might mean good news.”
“But the postmark was from Salt Lake City,” Charlotte said. “I thought her sister lived in New York.”
Neva clacked the Bakelite bangles on her wrist—Aldine must have finally just given them to her—and said, “I don’t want to go to California.”