Кристина Клайн - A Piece of the World

I don’t know how much time has passed when I hear Al’s car crackling up the drive. The door creaking open, slamming shut. Footsteps to the kitchen stoop, the squeak of the screen door.

He flinches when he sees me. “Didn’t know you were in here.”

“Yep.”

“It’s dark.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Want me to light the lamp?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He sighs. “Well, okay, then. Guess I’ll turn in.” He hangs his cap on the hook beside the door and turns to leave.

“She’s been married three times,” I say. My heart is thumping in my chest.

“What?”

“Did you know that?”

He inhales sharply. “I don’t think—”

“Did you know that, Al?”

“Yes, of course I know that.”

“And I hear she’s . . . ambitious.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Her motivations are questionable. I’m told.”

He winces. “Who told you that?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” I know I’m hurting him, but I don’t care. I like the sharpness of the words. Each one of them a dagger. I want to wound him for wounding me.

“What ‘motivations’ could Estelle possibly have?” he says quietly, hands on his hips. “I have nothing to offer. Except myself.”

“She probably wants this house.”

“She doesn’t want this house!” he spits. “Nobody wants this house. I sure don’t.”

I feel like I’ve been slapped. “You can’t mean that. We have a responsibility. Our family . . . the Hathorns. Mother—”

“Mother is dead. To hell with the Hathorns. And damn it, we should’ve sold this house when we had the chance. It’s become a prison, can’t you see that? We’re inmates. Or maybe you’re the inmate and I’m the warden. I can’t do this anymore, Christie. I want a life. A life. ” He slaps himself on the chest, a dull thwack. “Out there in the world.” He sweeps his arm toward the window.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him string so many words together at a time. I hold my breath. Then I say, “I never knew you felt that way.”

“I didn’t used to. But now I see . . . I see that maybe things could be different for me. You know what that feels like, don’t you?”

Al has never spoken to me so directly. I think I’ve assumed he didn’t feel things as deeply as I do—but obviously I was wrong. “That was a long time ago. This is different.”

“Why? Because it’s not about you?”

I flinch. “No,” I snap. “Because we’re older. And this is where we belong.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s just where we ended up.”

His voice sounds choked. I think he might be crying. I’m crying too. “So what about me? I’ve spent my whole life cooking and washing and cleaning for this family. And now you’d just—throw me out with the trash?”

“Come on,” he says. “Of course not. You’d be welcome with me wherever I go, you know that.”

“I’m not a charity case.”

“I never said that.”

“This is my home, Alvaro. And yours.”

“Christina . . .” His voice is weary, leaden. By the time I realize he isn’t going to say anything further, he has already left the room.

IN THE MORNING I wake to silence. My first thought is: Al is gone. But when I look out the window, I see the Ford in the same place where he parked it last night. I go about my morning routine as usual, and as usual Al comes in from the barn for the noonday meal. He doesn’t say a word until he clears his plate, and then he says thank you and heads back outside. As I’m setting newly churned butter in its earthenware pot in the shed, my eye is drawn to the dory, high in the rafters.

We should’ve sold this house when we had the chance. You’re the inmate and I’m the warden. The words hang in the air between us. But as long as neither of us mentions them, we can pretend they were never said.

For the next few months, each morning when I wake up, I think he’ll be gone.

Al doesn’t bring Estelle to the house again. He doesn’t speak her name. One day Sadie casually mentions that she heard Estelle met a man with two kids and moved to Rockland.

Over time, Al and I settle back into our old ways. But he is changed. A bird flies into a windowpane on the second floor, breaking the glass, and instead of fixing it he stuffs a rag in the hole. He leaves the old Model T to rot behind the shed. He rarely cleans out the woodstoves anymore, just shoves the ashes back to make room for new logs. Long winters strip the white from the house, exposing gray boards underneath, and he doesn’t bother to paint. One after another the fields go fallow, farm equipment abandoned to rust. Within a couple of years, Al is farming only one small patch.

It’s as if he has chosen to punish the house and land for needing him. Or maybe he’s punishing me.

In the middle of the field the earth smells like sourdough. Each sharp blade of grass is separate and distinct. Dainty yellow cowslips hang on their stems like tiny wilting bouquets; a yellow-and-black tiger swallowtail butterfly hovers overhead. It’s a mild May afternoon, and I’m on my way to visit Sadie in her cottage around the bend. She offered to come and get me in her car, but I prefer to make my own way. It takes about an hour to get there, pulling myself along on my elbows, hitching my body forward. My cotton knee pads are frayed and grass stained. This close to the ground, the only sound is my own rough panting and the chirp of crickets. Blackflies circle, nipping my ears. The air tastes of salt and lavender and dirt.

I can’t walk at all anymore. My chair has worn a deep groove into the kitchen floor between the table and the Glenwood range. I will not use a wheelchair. So I have a choice: I can stay inside, in the security of the kitchen and my pallet on the dining room floor, or I can get where I need to go as best I can. That’s what I do. Once a week or so I visit Mother and Papa, crawling through the yellow expanse of grass to the family graveyard where they are buried, overlooking the sound and the sea. On mild afternoons I take a small pail with me and pick blueberries. I like to rest in the grass and watch the fishing vessels as they pull away from Port Clyde, out past Monhegan Island and into the open ocean.

When I arrive at Sadie’s, she’s on the front porch waiting for me. “Mercy,” she says with a wide smile. “Look at you. I’ll bet you could use a glass of iced tea.”

“That’d be nice.”

Sadie disappears inside the cottage while I drag myself up the steps and lean against the wooden railing, breathless from the effort. She comes back out with a bowl of berries, a pitcher of iced tea with mint, two glasses, and a wet washcloth on a large tray.

“Here you go, my dear.” She hands me the cool cloth. “So glad you came for a visit, Christina.”

“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” I say, wiping my face and neck.

“It surely is. I hope we have a temperate summer like last year, not like the one two years ago. Remember that? Even nighttime was miserable.”

“It was,” I agree.

Sadie and I don’t talk about much. A lot of our time is spent in companionable silence. Today the water in the cove shimmers like broken glass in the late-afternoon sun. The lilacs beside the porch smell like vanilla. We eat the raspberries and blackberries that she plucked earlier in the day, and drink the iced tea, the cool tingle of mint leaves slipping into our mouths like wafers.

The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.

ANDY HASN’T ASKED me to pose since I complained about the portrait in the doorway. But one mild afternoon in early July, out of nowhere, he comes into the kitchen and says, “Will you sit for me in the grass? Just for twenty minutes. Half an hour at most.”