Chapter 10 - The Season of Light
By May, the mud was gone.
The earth on Birch Hill Road had healed with that ferocious, indifferent speed that belongs to northern springs. The ruts where Daniel’s Audi had torn through the flagstones were filled with river gravel, packed down hard by the iron roller Emily had dragged behind Arthur’s old International Harvester tractor.
The carriage garage was open.
Both double doors were pinned back with iron hooks, letting the pale morning sunlight pour across the concrete floor where Emily had once sat with a dog bowl at her feet. The concrete had been scrubbed with lye and wire brushes until the grey stone was white as bone. The smell of motor oil and chloral hydrate was gone, replaced by the sharp, resinous perfume of fresh pine sawdust and linseed oil.
Emily was standing at the long workbench Arthur had built from three-inch bridge planks. She was wearing her lucky running shoes—cleaned now, the blue mesh faded, but the laces bright and new. In her hands, she held a small gouge, carving the edge of an ash bowl she was turning on the small wood lathe we had moved down from the attic.
The sound was rhythmic: the hum of the small motor, the hiss of the chisel against the spinning wood, the shavings curling off her fingers like ribbons of dried cream.
I sat on a wooden folding chair by the open door, a ledger on my knees, though I wasn't writing. I was watching the lane.
A blue postal van rattled up the hill, its tires crackling on the dry gravel. It stopped by the mailbox at the foot of the drive, the driver leaning out to drop three letters into the box before giving two quick taps on the horn and rolling away toward the ridge.
Emily stopped the lathe. The silence settled back into the garage, warm and vast, broken only by the bees working the wild blackberry blossoms along the cedar fence.
"Is that the state packet?" she asked, wiping her forehead with the back of her forearm, leaving a streak of ash dust across her brow.
"Probably," I said. "The sentencing order was due for certification this week."
Daniel had taken the twenty-year deal three weeks ago, two days before the jury selection was scheduled to begin. His lawyers had finally explained to him that twelve local people from a county where Arthur Vance had coached Little League for twenty years were not going to be charmed by an investment matrix.
Emily set her chisel down on the oily wood of the bench. She walked to the threshold, her shoes crunching lightly on the gravel, and looked out over the meadow.
The ten acres stretched down to the state road, green and rolling, dotted with the white stars of wild strawberry flowers. In the center, where Daniel had planned his twenty-four-hour loading dock, two red-tailed hawks were circling in the warm thermals, their cries dropping down through the clear air like thin, silver whistles.
"He almost took it, Mom," she said quietly. She wasn't shaking. Her voice had the solid, settled weight of a woman who had seen the bottom of the well and found the stones firm enough to stand on.
"He took nothing," I said, standing up and shutting my book. "He took twenty months of your time, and six months of mine. That’s a high tax, but the title is clean."
She turned and looked at me, the sun catching the silver in her hair—a streak at the left temple that hadn't been there in October, but which she refused to dye.
"What are you going to do with the ledger?" she asked, nodding toward the black-bound notebook under my arm.
I looked down at the oilcloth cover, scarred by rain, its red elastic band stretched loose from months of use. Inside were the times, the dates, the measurements, the tire treads, the serial numbers of Master Locks, and the exact chemical formula of chloral hydrate.
"It goes into box one," I said.
"Which one is that?"
"The one marked *Vance, Family*," I told her. "Right between your birth certificate and Arthur’s honorable discharge."
She smiled—that wide, easy smile that belonged entirely to herself, without a trace of the girl who had knocked on the cedar door in the dark.
"Come inside," she said, taking my arm. "The rhubarb’s up. I’m making a pie."
"Use the brown sugar," I said, walking with her down the gravel path toward the house. "Arthur always said white sugar makes the crust sweat."
"I know, Margaret," she laughed, leaning her shoulder into mine as we climbed the steps. "I have it in the notes."
May you like
We went into the house together, and when the screen door swung shut behind us, it didn't rattle.
It closed with a single, solid latch that sounded through the quiet house like an amen.
