“I have to do this.”
They stared at each other. She didn’t look as brave as he knew she wanted to. There was ambivalence lurking behind her attempt at confidence.
If he could read her this clearly, he wondered, what did she see when she looked at
him?
Worry that he hadn’t done enough to persuade her? Fear for her safety? Or, worst of all, some splinter of relief that she was no longer his daily problem, that he could go about his life undisturbed, work the hours he was accustomed to, stop trying to transform her into the person she had been?
He dropped his hands. “I have a little time. I can make you something for dinner. Help you unpack.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll take it slow. But everyday stuff is the best form of therapy.”
“And you feel well enough to do that everyday stuff?”
“I’m okay.”
He was emptied of protest. “Then I’ll leave you to it. If you’re sure.”
“I am.”
“Just remember, I’m only a phone call away, K. C.”
Her expression changed into something sadder. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
Ten years ago she had been introduced to him at a party as K. C. Dunkirk, her byline at a small suburban weekly. He hadn’t gotten around to calling her Kendra for a year. K.C. had slipped away sometime after they were married. A lot of things had slipped away.
“Maybe it’s because I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said.
She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. “I love you, Isaac. Everything else is changing, but that never will.”
He kissed her; then he pulled her close. She felt as hollow-boned as a bird. He was afraid that the moment he released her she would take flight.
“I don’t know when I can come again,” he warned.
“I’ll be here when you do.”
When he was behind the steering wheel of his car, he looked up and saw that she was still standing where he had left her. He wondered if she would make it up the steps. He wondered when or if he would stop worrying.
She could always change her mind.
Kendra watched Isaac’s Prius disappearing into the woods and felt panic pulling her down for the third time.
“I don’t have to stay.” She closed her eyes and tried to imagine where she would go instead. Nowhere.
She took deep breaths and, minutes later, opened her eyes. The sun shone, and the air was alive with birdsong. Try as she might, she could not hear a single car. Isaac’s high-efficiency engine was silent at the low speed he would use on these roads. Besides, even if he’d been driving a diesel truck, Isaac was probably too far away to hear her call.
Isaac was gone.
“Welcome home, Kendra.” She started back to the porch, but once she was at the steps, she thought better of trying them. Instead she hiked herself to the edge and used her hands to move her left leg. The effort cost her every drop of strength she had left. She broke into a sweat, and for a moment she was afraid the subtle nausea she’d experienced all day was going to overwhelm her. She lay down carefully and gazed up at the porch roof.
Her physical therapist had told her that recovery was a fine balance between pushing herself and not pushing herself. Today she had landed heavily on the side of the first.
Kendra had spent very little time asking herself why the carjacking had happened to her. She didn’t believe in a universe that protected one person at the expense of another. She didn’t expect favoritism from God, but she
had
asked herself how she had let anger at Isaac lead her into that dark parking lot when she had been too sick to fend for herself.
The answer hadn’t pleased her. She had been angry at Isaac for a long time. Angry that he held no new aspirations for their marriage. Angry that the man who could sense every undercurrent at work had no idea she was unhappy. Or, worse, that he knew it and thought the unhappiness would simply pass without intervention.
The night she’d been shot, she had set out to prove something. By doing so, she had set in motion a chain of events that now had her staring up at a beadboard ceiling.
“Well, who’d have thought it?”
She liked the sound of her voice here. She was soft-spoken, easy to miss in a noisy newsroom, easy to ignore when the man she was speaking to had more important things on his mind. Here her voice seemed to fill the silence between the calls of cardinals and the chittering of chickadees. It sounded important, as if there was every reason to sit up and take notice. It sounded at home, as if it belonged with the rustling of treetops, the scurrying of squirrels.
“I will make myself happy here.” She liked the sound of this. She could almost believe it.
The panic was subsiding. The air was growing cooler. A breeze through the dogtrot played with her hair and cooled her cheeks. The nausea diminished. She wasn’t on a timetable. Sam and Elisa had made the bed. She had towels, food, water. She was okay. She could count nailheads or knots in the timber until sunset was a memory. She had nowhere to go and nothing to do. No one expected anything of her now.
She wondered how Isaac was feeling as he drove back toward D. C. Sad. She truly believed that would be part of it. He had closed his eyes to the problems between them for so long that all this had come as an unwelcome surprise. Angry. That too. Isaac wanted his world to be governed by rules and logic. Now he suspected mental foul play and didn’t know how to find the culprit.
Relieved.
Relief was the one that was an ache inside her. But she knew this was not something she imagined. This new wife, with the injured spine and the damaged organs, this wife who required waiting on and hand-holding, this wife who he apparently considered too fragile to make love to…This wife was someone he wasn’t certain how to cope with. Isaac would never refuse to try. But having taken that decision out of his hands, she was certain he was grateful.
She sighed. This, too, sounded natural here. She thought that perhaps Isaac’s grandmother had indulged in many such sighs on this porch. If it was true, Kendra was sorry.
In the late afternoon she slowly unpacked the boxes, noting all the things she hadn’t had room to bring. For this first trip to the cabin she had chosen only the most practical items, and others, like the quilts, that had sentimental value. She planned to ask Isaac to ship some of the small antique pieces she had defiantly collected to offset the institutional furniture that had come with their condo. The carpenter’s chest, the pie safe, the yellowware bowls she’d had no room to display in the condo’s galley kitchen. The moment she felt strong enough to drive, she would shop for more antiques in the Valley and fill the old cabin with them.
She wondered when that would be.
By six she knew she wasn’t going to have the energy to cook dinner. There was no microwave to heat frozen food. She had a narrow four-burner stove, a dorm-size refrigerator and no small appliances. She decided to buy a slow cooker as soon as she could, so in the mornings she could fashion a dinner for later, when energy was only a memory.
She settled on an apple and took it to the front porch. There was no furniture there, but she would remedy that, as well. As soon as she was able.
She was sitting on the edge, back against a pillar, when she heard a car approaching. The sky was still light, and she suspected friends, but her hands began to perspire despite the cool air of evening. She was completely alone here, and even if she called for help, it would take a long time to arrive.
With relief she noted that the old pickup that finally chugged its way up to the clearing held two women. The relief turned to pleasure when she recognized one. She got clumsily to her feet.
“Helen…” She looked at the steps and realized she wasn’t up to negotiating them to greet her closest neighbor.
Helen Henry swung her legs over the passenger seat of the truck and dusted off a printed sack of a dress. “I heard you were coming today. No reason to think that rascal of a preacher would get it wrong.”
A pretty young woman with a cloud of red-blond hair got out on the driver’s side and came around to help Helen. Kendra remembered that this was Cissy, who, along with her husband and baby daughter, lived with Helen. Kendra had met the girl briefly at the church where Sam Kinkade was the minister.
Helen, a woman in her eighties, was still vigorous, and she brushed aside Cissy’s attempts to help her down. “Day comes I can’t get myself out of this pickup, I’ll just lie down and die. I’m not down yet, am I?”
“Ms. Henry, you’ll probably die standing up giving somebody a lecture.”
Helen couldn’t suppress a smile, although clearly she tried. She slid down and landed with a
thud
, but it didn’t seem to faze her.
She turned, then spun around and held up a cardboard box. “Brought you supper. That’s what neighbors do around here when somebody moves in.”
Suddenly Kendra’s apple seemed even less appealing. “That’s so kind of you.” She looked down at the steps. “I’d come and help, but I’m afraid these stairs just don’t look too good to me right now.”
“You stay right where you are. We made enough to keep you in leftovers until you get on your feet.” Helen thrust the box at Cissy and started up to the cabin porch. “Where’d the railing go?”
“Rotted through. I think Dabney was planning to put up a new one and didn’t get around to it.”
“Man snuck out of town like a snake-oil peddler. We’ll send Zeke over to put up a new one. That boy can build anything—can’t he, Cissy. Maybe Caleb could help.”
“Zeke’s my husband,” Cissy explained. She took the steps carefully, since it was hard to see around the box. “Zeke Claiborne. Caleb’s my little brother, Caleb Mowrey. I don’t think Caleb knows which side of a hammer is which. But Ms. Henry’s right about Zeke. He’ll be glad to do it, but he might not be able to get to it right away. He’s going out of town in a day or two.”
Helen was tall and broad, and, judging from the leathery texture of her skin, much of her past had been lived outdoors. She had thin white hair that was plumped up by a good perm and eyes that sparkled behind thick glasses. Cissy was small boned, with fragile features and Kendra’s propensity to freckle. The two women made an interesting pair.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the offer,” Kendra said, “but I’m afraid I need a lot more than a railing. I’m going to have to find somebody who has at least a couple of weeks to help me get things in better order.” She tried to remember details about Cissy and her husband. “Zeke makes musical instruments, right? He has his own shop.”
“If you can call a part of his daddy’s barn a shop,” Helen said. “But the boy is showing a lot of promise. His banjos are something to behold.”
“He sold a guitar to one of the Statler Brothers,” Cissy said proudly.
“Sounds like he’s really on his way,” Kendra said.
“We…I was sorry to hear about you being shot and all,” Cissy said. “We were all real worried.”
“We put you on the prayer list at church. Never thought that did much good,” Helen said. “But it gave us all something to do when you were so far away. I mean, even if the Good Lord does what He has to when He has to, at least He knew you had a lot of friends who were worried.”
Kendra felt a familiar choking sensation. Tears waiting to be swallowed. “Something worked. Here I am. Thank you for that.”
“Glad you’re better.”
“Cissy, I didn’t mean to leave you standing there,” Kendra said. “The kitchen’s this way.”
She led them inside, and Cissy put the box on the table in the corner. “There’s chicken potpie, Valley style,” Cissy said. “That’s one of Ms. Henry’s specialties. A green bean casserole Zeke’s mama made for you. A lime Jell-O salad with pears. I made that, and I made you a loaf of pumpkin bread, too. Marian, that’s Zeke’s mama, she also put in half a dozen chocolate cupcakes and a dozen sugar cookies.”
“See that you eat every bit of it,” Helen said. “You’re going to be a country girl, you got to get some meat on those bones.”
Kendra had not seen so much food in one place since she’d gone to one of Community Church’s potluck suppers. “This is so much. Thank you both. And you’ll thank Marian for me?”
“We’re your closest neighbors,” Helen pointed out. “Me over that way—” she pointed “—the Claibornes in that direction. It’s been a right long time since anybody lived in this house, and I’m glad to see it in use again.”
“Would you like to see the rest of it?”
Helen shook her head. “Looks good enough to live in, though it could do with some spit and polish, or maybe a bulldozer. But you’ve had a big day and need some rest. We’ll be back.”
Kendra followed them back to the porch and watched as Cissy helped Helen down the steps. This time Helen made no protest.
At the bottom, the older woman turned and looked up at Kendra. “I knew the woman who used to live here, you know. Leah Spurlock, that was her name before she married old Tom Jackson. That’s how we all think of her, as a Spurlock. She raised a daughter here, but it was always a little bitty place.”
Kendra had never told anyone that Isaac had inherited this property from Leah, or why. She had wanted to know more before she made that announcement, and she had hoped to overcome Isaac’s resistance first. Now she was tempted to tell Helen, to see what tales Helen could recount. But she was too tired to start that conversation.
“I’d like to add on,” she said instead. “But I don’t know quite how. I don’t want to build a modern house onto this one. I’d want something rustic.”
“There’s an old barn for sale down the road, not far from where it crosses Carter’s Mill. Log barn, maybe even chestnut. You might could use the timber.”
Kendra liked the sound of that. “I wouldn’t know how to go about it.”
“I know just the man to talk to. Manning Rosslyn. Lives up not too far from the church. Got his own company. They take down old buildings people don’t want anymore, number the pieces like some kind of puzzle, then put them back up in different places. He does additions, too. Preserves whatever he can. Knowing Manning, he’s probably already bid on that barn.” Helen smiled a little. “And this place, it would surely appeal to him. He used to be sweet on Rachel, way back in the fifties. Rachel, she was Leah’s daughter.”