“But why would she have left food there?”
“They were too heavy, she said. All her jams and such. She meant to find someone who could fetch them.”
Ansel opened the lower cupboards again, leaning his long body down to check the back of each one.
“We’ll keep track of how many,” she told Ansel. “Treat it like a loan.”
The cupboard doors were gummy from the layers of paint and dust. They wouldn’t quite close.
He didn’t answer her, but pressed his arms against her and his face into the back of her neck.
“It’s just until spring, anyway,” she added. They had talked about the spring, when he would dig up the kitchen garden and they would plant the seeds that lay small and dry in their capped jars in the kitchen drawer.
They couldn’t eat the sunshine, and they couldn’t eat the air. He had to go. But how to get there, how to get back? They had passed few cars last night, it being so late, but in daylight neighbors would drive to town, do their business, note who was going where and doing what.
“I could drive the tractor,” Ansel said. His fields met Sonia’s eastern perimeter. The only house visible from Sonia’s fields was the Tanners’, and Sonia had told Aldine that Mrs. Tanner had taken her sad, overgrown boy and gone to live in Nebraska with a sister.
When he’d gone, Aldine stood blinking a few minutes in the kitchen, which was dustier than other parts of the house. She found a crack in the windowsill, a place where the outside air breathed in. She worked a ball of wax in her fingers until it softened, then pushed warm plugs of it into the crack. She thought of uncovering the radio and turning it on, but it seemed too much of Ellie, and she left the sheet draped as it was, a ghost in the corner, faceless and eyeless and yet somehow sentient. Aldine turned her back on it and swept up the mouse droppings; then she filled buckets with water and wiped the wooden counters and the black stove with wet rags, wringing and rinsing and dragging until it felt as if her body were a pump handle, and if she bent over one more time the baby would simply plunge out of her. The smell of wet dust was everywhere, and surfaces had a hazy gleam that she couldn’t trust. Each time she wiped a thing, the wetness made it look clean, but as the water dried on the countertops or the red tin canister lids, a streaky whiteness revealed itself, one more invincible layer of dust, and then one more. Ellie and Charlotte had always gotten things clean, really clean, and she wondered what it meant that she could not. Twice while she was working, she glimpsed something moving along the floor and turned to see a mouse vanish under a door or around a corner. When she lay down on the sofa to rest, she heard a scritch-scritching from within the walls, and the ghost radio watched her in silence.
Ellie had not wanted Ansel anymore. She had not wanted this house anymore. That’s what Aldine told herself. Ansel had told her a bit about the café, how happy Ellie was being in charge of it, like a different person entirely.
“What did you tell her about coming here?” Aldine asked.
“I said I was coming to check on the house. To see if things had changed at all.”
Aldine was silent. She didn’t ask, “Did you tell her about me?” but he answered, anyway. “She doesn’t know about the baby,” Ansel said. “I think she knows the rest.”
Ellie was happy where she was, running the café. Ansel was happy here, on the farm. The weather would change and a normal spring would make it possible for her and Ansel and the baby to live here somehow. The exact manner—would a divorce happen, could it happen, could he marry her?—was too hard to figure out. For now, it would be as if the two of them had immigrated to a new and solitary country. The baby would bring them a fresh start and a fresh start was all they needed.
The view from the kitchen window was the same as it had been when she was a boarder: the brown ridge of the hogback, an empty corral, the tiny narrow house that was the bog, leaning a bit since they left, and the barn with its lone cottonwood tree. It was the same and not the same, because Ellie wasn’t here resenting her, unless you counted the radio crouched under the dusty sheet.
With a sharp pang she wondered what Leenie looked out on when she did her dishes, and what she would do when she read Glynis’s letter. Would she try to find Aldine? Would she feel about Ansel as Glynis did?
What have I done? she thought unwillingly when Krazy Kat appeared beside the cottonwood, stalking something in the dry grass.
Leenie would inquire, certainly, would start with Mrs. Gore and Glynis herself. The trail would lead to Sonia and Dr. Stober. To Dr. Stober’s car, to this house, to the two of them hiding like criminals.
Dr. Stober’s car needed to go back, that was the first thing.
Ansel must drive the car to Emporia at night when he was feeling well enough and park it right where they’d found it, then come back by train. Between now and then they would never add a single dent or mile. But when should he go? What if the baby started to come when she was all alone?
He couldn’t leave her.
And yet the car must go back.
She was heating water for a bath when she heard the distant throb of the tractor. Oh, how she hoped Sonia Odekirk’s pantry had been lined with red, green, and amber jars, a rich, gleaming mine of food. The clattering tractor noise rose, and the baby shifted inside her like a stone in a subterranean stream. She went to open the door eagerly, to welcome him home, to replace her terrible fears with his physical being. His back was to her, his colossal, comforting back, and she could see as he steered the tractor toward the barn door that boxes lay in the wagon he was pulling, and in those boxes were gold-lidded jars and plump sacks.
86
The Fallbrook Enterprise reported in the column “About You and Others” that Mr. Ansel Price had gone to his home state of Kansas on a business trip but was expected back for the nuptials of his eldest daughter, Charlotte, that the William Bartlett family had gone to Julian over the weekend to enjoy the snow sports, and that Clare Price had shattered his left thigh and was recovering nicely at home. “Visits, especially from local damsels,” it noted, “would doubtless be appreciated.”