His eyes slowly opened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—the pain is coming back.”
“Oh,” Lavinia said, because, really, that changed everything. It wasn’t her that made his face clench. It was the pain. “What should I do?”
“Just tell Charlotte,” he said in a low voice.
“I think she left,” Lavinia said. “Should I get your mother?”
He kept his eyes closed and teeth clenched as he nodded.
“Okay,” Lavinia said, and nearly ran out of the room.
87
Aldine and Ansel drank juice Sonia Odekirk had made from black summer grapes and soup she’d made from summer vegetables. At night Ansel built a fire with wood he brought in from the barn, pieces of lumber and broken down furniture to which nails and cobwebs clung. At the hearth he broke the pieces down under his boot (a messy business Ellie would never have allowed) and fed the lengths into the stove until the air began to roast and the iron ticked around a belly of roiling flame. Krazy Kat slept in the armchair, curled into the nest of stuffing she had ripped free her first night indoors. Ansel had brought in the cat when Aldine had talked about seeing mice, and so her heart fell when she saw what the cat had done to the armchair, but Ansel just shook his head and said, “Well, I invited her in and she just felt at home.”
They left the radio covered and Aldine felt it watching them in the dark when there was a moon and the sheet glowed dimly in the corner. Ansel brought out the fretted dulcimer and she sang in a soft voice while he played, trying to forget Dr. Stober’s car and the letter her sister would receive soon and the impossible questions of the future. When he set the dulcimer aside, she leaned into his chest, feeling the animal nature of herself, momentarily blind to anything but her own warmth and hunger. She wanted to kiss him but he directed her kisses away from his mouth, saying “Doctor’s orders.”
“But you seem fine.”
He nodded. This morning he had felt tingly and energetic, invincible. Sometimes he felt tired again and his lungs had the old crackle. “Still,” he said, “just to be safe . . .”
She said, when his hand lay warm on her belly, “I want to call the baby Ansel.”
“Naw, you hadn’t ought to do that,” he said. “Too confusing. What else do you like?”
“What was your father called then?”
“Lucian.”
She shook her head decisively, as if finding the right name would make everything normal. “Unless you want to.”
“Not especially.” He seemed to feel it, too, the triviality of the name compared to their other problems. “And what if the baby’s a girl? What then?”
She couldn’t help thinking that if she were married to Ansel, she would name a girl after her sister. “I used to like the name Vivien,” she said. Outside the cold deepened and the stars shone. It had been three nights now since they took Dr. Stober’s car. She wished she could just decide to have the baby. To begin pushing and have that part over and then Ansel could drive the car back and park it in front of Sonia’s house and go away from there without being seen.
“What if someone comes here?” she asked. “To see Ellie?”
Ansel was quiet for a moment. “Just say the truth. She’s staying with her sister until Neva’s better.”
“And this?” Aldine asked, pointing to her belly.
“Say you got married in Emporia, and your husband is looking for work.”
She looked doubtfully at the fire, seeing the spaces between flames, the crumbling red between crumbling white.
“No one’s likely to come,” he said, and she reminded herself that Sonia Odekirk had left the farm because the houses that had once been lit were all going dark. She tried to feel nothing but the warmth of the fire, the warmth of the quilt, and the warmth of Ansel’s body that made a cave around her. Inside, the baby shifted but then lay quiet, as if he, too, was in no hurry to meet the future.
88
Charlotte placed a square of white satin under the metal form of the button, checked to see if it was centered, and pushed hard on the shank. The fabric crimped with a satisfying poof and then she held up a metal knob sheathed in satin, the fifteenth of the thirty-five buttons that would hold her dress primly closed during the ceremony (and would let it fall open afterward, which she knew Mister would like whether she did or not)—an excessive number of buttons, her mother said, but if Charlotte was doing all the work, what did it matter? Clare was sleeping, and Neva had gone outside to play with her friend Marchie, which meant she wouldn’t keep asking if she could help.
Charlotte got up from the table and started downstairs to see if there was any more leftover applesauce cake, the yummy one with raisins, cloves, cinnamon, and brown sugar (she’d had the girls bake several of them in the Practice House, along with four lemon jelly cakes, and by offering them at the Elks Club bake sale collected a handsome sum for the school). Today, when she reached the bottom of the stairs and pushed open the door to the café, she was relieved to find the room deserted. Her mother frowned on her personal raids because the cakes and pies were for customers, but now that Clare was laid up, she was a little more generous, permitting Charlotte to cut a big piece of whatever Clare would eat, and keeping her peace when Charlotte cut a small slice for herself.
The day was blue-green and warm, like most days, and although the front door was propped open, the café was closed. It was Sunday, the day her mother used to restock and deep clean and make everything just so for the week to come. As she moved toward the covered cake stands on the counter, Charlotte could hear muted voices in the kitchen, her mother’s and Aunt Ida’s, along with the clink of the bucket and the shush of the mop. Wedding. She heard the word wedding, and stood perfectly still.
“Why not push it back a bit?” Ida was saying. “Give Clare time to get up and around, give Ansel time to get back.” A sloshing sound—her mother kept mopping. Ida said, “You don’t want to stand there in front of the whole town without your husband there, do you?”
The mopping stopped. Charlotte could imagine her mother straightening her back, taking a deep breath. “He knows the wedding is the day after Thanksgiving. If he doesn’t come back for it, he might as well stay gone.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do, Ida. I truly do.”
The words closed over Charlotte’s head like water. She waited for Ida to talk sense into her mother. She waited to hear bitterness or anger or hurt in her mother’s voice. But her mother just said flatly, “I don’t need him anymore. He’s gone now, yes, but he’d been gone, even when he was here.”
Neva’s voice interrupted from the back door, and something clanked on the floor.
“Well, hi, Miss Marchie, hi, Neva!” Ida said in a loud, enthusiastic voice. “I thought you two were going to the creek!”