The linoleum down by the sink had that one loose square that always clicked if you stepped on the corner just right, and it clicked four times while I stood there waiting for the kettle to give up. It was six in the morning, but the sun hadn’t figured out how to clear the ridge behind the mill yet, leaving everything the color of a wet slate shingle. My thumb was still resting against the glass of the old cordless phone on the wall, right over the speed-dial button I had punched in with a black felt-tip pen twenty years ago when my eyes started giving me fits.
Mark, it said in my own shaky handwriting. Just Mark. Not my boy, not his title down at the brick church where he carried the offering plate like it was made of blown glass. Just Mark, three letters that felt like a fistful of dry gravel every time I had to say them out loud.
Upstairs, the floorboards didn’t make a sound because Rilla was sixteen and light as a lint speck, but I knew she wasn’t sleeping either. I had heard her up there at two in the morning, walking back and forth from the iron bed to the window, the soft squeak of the bedsprings telling time like an old clock that needed its oil changed. She had come down the back steps at midnight wrapped in her heavy blue winter coat, even though the furnace had been kicking on every forty minutes to fight the October damp.
She didn’t knock on the screen door because I never locked it, not since Raymond passed away back when the paper mill still had both shifts running. She just pushed it open, her face the color of skim milk, and sat right down in the Windsor chair with the scarred arm where Raymond used to clean his fishing reels on Sunday afternoons.
She didn’t start with a hello or an excuse about the hour. She just dropped her schoolbag on the floor with a dull thud that made the salt shaker jump an inch, and then her hands went to work on a yellow paper napkin she had pulled from the holder. She tore it once, right down the middle, and then into quarters, and then into long, thin ribbons until there was nothing left on the grain of the wood except a little heap of white fuzz that looked like dandelion seed after a heavy frost.
I didn’t rush her because I knew what waiting looked like. I had seen her aunt Deb do the exact same thing to a paper sack back in November of 1994, right before the snow started piling up against the back porch steps and Mark helped our father carry her cardboard boxes out to the gravel drive.
“Please, Nana,” she had whispered, and her voice sounded like dry leaves scraping across a concrete driveway. “If you tell them, Daddy will put me out like he did Aunt Deb.”
Those words didn’t just sit in the room; they stayed there, heavy as a sack of wet feed, poisoning the air between the stove and the icebox. I remembered Deb’s coat. It was a cheap thing from the catalog with fake rabbit fur around the hood that got matted down in the rain, and she had worn it out into the dark without a hat because she hadn’t been given time to pack one.
Mark had stood right where the broom was leaning now, his arms crossed over his chest, looking down at his boots like he was checking them for dog manure while our father told Deb that she had made her bed and now she could go sleep in the dirt. I had kept my mouth shut back then. I was a different woman then, or maybe just a weaker one, scared of my husband’s voice and the way he could clear a room with just a shift of his belt buckle. I let them drive her out into the dark because I didn’t have the stomach for a fight that would tear the parish apart. Deb went down to Bangor, lived in a room over a dry cleaner’s for three years, and then drifted out west where the trees were too tall to see over. We got a postcard once with a picture of a bridge on it and no return address, and after that the mail slot stayed empty.
Now Rilla was sitting in that same chair, her belly barely showing under the thick wool of her coat, telling me she was sixteen weeks along and terrified that her father would smell the sin on her before she even made it to her locker at the consolidated school. Mark ran his house like a barracks. Every Sunday dinner started with him rapping his knuckle against the water glass until everyone stopped chewing so he could say a blessing that sounded more like an indictment. He believed the Lord spent most of His time keeping a ledger of who stepped off the narrow path, and Mark saw himself as the head clerk. He didn’t love his kids so much as he managed their reputations, making sure the grass was cut short and the Sunday clothes were pressed sharp enough to draw blood.
I looked down at the little stack of bills held together with a rubber band in the kitchen drawer, right under the drawer with the twine and the spare keys. Three thousand and forty-two dollars. That was what was left from the insurance payout after Raymond’s marker was set in the churchyard. It wasn’t enough to buy a used car that wouldn’t throw a rod before it hit the county line, but it was enough to keep a girl in groceries and prenatal vitamins for six months if she stayed quiet and kept out of sight. Upstairs, the spare room had the old maple double bed with the quilt my mother pieced together out of feed sacks during the Eisenhower administration. The curtains were faded blue, and they smelled like cedar blocks and laundry soap that hadn’t been washed out all the way. It was a good room for hiding in, if hiding was what you needed to do to stay alive.
The kettle finally whistled, a thin, wheezing hiss that made me jump because the kitchen had been too quiet for too long. I pulled it off the burner and let it die down on the back iron. My hand stayed on the handle of the phone for a long minute while the gray light outside turned the kitchen window into a mirror where I could see my own face, old and lined like a dried apple, staring back at me with the same look of useless guilt I wore thirty years ago when Deb walked out that door. If I didn’t call Mark, I was stealing his right to know, or at least that was what the church ladies would say if they ever found out I kept a grandchild hidden behind their backs. But if I did call him, I was handing Rilla over to a man who didn’t know the difference between mercy and a meat cleaver.
He wouldn’t hit her, Mark was too civilized for closed fists, but he had a way of looking at you that made you feel like you were taking up space that belonged to someone better. He would pack her bags before the coffee got cold, and he would do it with a Bible verse on his tongue to make himself feel righteous while he broke his own daughter’s neck.
My thumb moved. I punched the button before I could talk myself out of it.
The phone rang four times, long and hollow, before a voice answered that sounded like it had been gargling with cold well water. Mark was already up, probably down in his basement study with his sermon notes spread out under the gooseneck lamp, making sure his three points for Sunday morning were tight enough to keep the deacons from dozing off.
“Mother,” he said, and he didn’t sound worried about why I was calling at six in the morning. He sounded annoyed that I was interrupting his quiet time with the Lord. “Is something wrong with the furnace again? I told you I could come over after office hours and look at the pilot light.”
“Mark,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake the way I thought it would. It came out flat and dry, like someone dropping shingles off a barn roof. “You need to get in your truck and drive down here right now. Don’t stop for coffee. Don’t wait for your wife to finish her toast. You get in that Ford and you drive down this road before I call the sheriff to tell him you’ve got a girl hiding in my spare room who won’t come out until you explain to me what you plan to do with her.”
There was a silence on the line that lasted long enough for me to hear the hum of his refrigerator three towns over. When he spoke again, all the preacher was gone out of him, and it was just my boy, the one who had helped his father carry Deb’s boxes through the slush without looking her in the eye once.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, and his voice dropped down into that low, dangerous register he used when one of the deacons questioned the church budget. “Who is in your house?”
“Your daughter,” I told him, and I didn’t wait for him to answer. I hung the phone back on its cradle so hard the plastic cracked right across the little reset button.
The next twenty minutes went by like molasses running uphill. I didn’t go upstairs to Rilla. I didn’t want to look at her through the door because I knew if she saw me shaking, she’d start packing those bags herself, and I wasn’t about to let her run off into the woods like a stray hound. I cleaned up the little pile of shredded napkin she had left on the table, picking up the white bits one by one with my thumb and forefinger and dropping them into the stove’s ash pan where they would burn up the next time I got a fire going in the range. My hands were stiff from the damp, and every time I bent my knuckles they popped like dry twigs. I kept thinking about the way Mark used to look when he was eight years old and had broken one of his father’s good fishing rods out by the creek.
He hadn’t cried. He had just stood there with his chin tucked into his collar, waiting for the strap, because he believed that if you took the punishment without making a sound, the sin somehow went away. That was what his father taught him, and that was what he had been teaching Rilla ever since she was old enough to hold a hymnal. You don’t fix a crack in the cup by throwing the whole thing in the trash, but nobody had ever told Mark that the china was already broken before he even picked it up.
The sound of his truck tires on the loose gravel outside was something you could hear coming from half a mile away, that old six-cylinder engine with the bad muffler rattling like a tin can full of bolts. I didn’t move from the table. I just sat down in Raymond’s old Windsor chair, pulled my sweater tight across my chest, and waited for the screen door to bang.
It didn’t bang. Mark knew better than to slam things in my house, even when he was mad enough to spit nails. He pushed it open with the flat of his hand, and he looked smaller than he did behind the pulpit, his hair sticking up on one side where he must have been running his fingers through it while he drove down the state road in his pajamas under his church coat. His face was the color of a wet turnami, gray and pinched around the nostrils, and his eyes kept darting toward the stairs like he expected Rilla to come flying down them with a knife in her hand.
“Where is she?” he asked, and he didn’t take off his mud-caked boots. He just stood there on my clean linoleum, tracking little bits of red clay right across the place where the square clicked.
“She’s upstairs in the blue room,” I said, and I didn’t get up to meet him. I stayed right where I was, my hands folded in my lap over the dish towel I had been using to wipe the counter. “She’s sixteen weeks along, Mark, and she’s shaking so hard she can’t even get her shoes tied. And before you start reaching for your Bible to find the chapter where you get to throw her out on the road like you did your sister thirty years ago, you need to sit your carcass down in that chair and listen to me tell you about what kind of father you turned out to be.”
He didn’t sit down. He took two steps toward the stove, his shoulders hunched up around his ears like he was walking into a head wind out on the salt marshes. “You don’t understand what this does, Mother. The church board is voting on the roof repair fund next Tuesday. If word gets out that my house is living in open defiance of, “
“To hell with your roof!” I yelled it, and it came out louder than I meant to, rattling the blue jars on the top shelf over the sink. “To hell with the board and the deacons and every last one of those hypocrites who sit in the fourth row every Sunday morning looking for someone else’s daughter to gossip about over their potluck chicken! Your sister Deb has been living in a trailer outside of Klamath Falls for thirty years because you and your father didn’t have the stomach to look at her without seeing your own pride staring back at you in the mirror. And now you were fixing to do the exact same thing to the only child you’ve got left who hasn’t already learned how to look right through you when you walk into the room.”
Mark’s mouth opened once, like a fish pulled up out of the deep water, but no sound came out. He reached out and grabbed the back of the empty chair across from me, his knuckles turning white until the skin looked like yellow parchment. “She broke the law of the house,” he muttered, and his voice sounded thin, almost like a little boy’s who had been caught behind the barn with a stolen cigarette. “We have an agreement in that family about how we live. If we don’t hold the line, everything falls apart. That’s what Father said when we put Deb out in the snow. He said if you let one branch go rot, the whole tree comes down.”
“Your father was a hard man who didn’t know how to love anything that didn’t come with a pedigree and a receipt,” I told him, and I stood up then, because I wanted him to see that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, no matter how tall he stood in his church boots. “And you spent thirty years trying to be him because you were too scared of his voice to find one of your own. Well, Raymond’s gone, and your father’s been in the ground since the first Bush was in the White House, and if you walk out that door right now and tell Rilla she has to go find somewhere else to bleed, you won’t have a mother left either. I’ll sell this house. I’ll take that three thousand dollars in the drawer and I’ll move into a room down in Portland where nobody knows your name, and you can explain to your congregation why your mother hasn’t spoken to you since the day you traded your own flesh and blood for a seat on the church committee.”
The room got so quiet you could hear the water dripping from the eaves outside where the frost was starting to give up under the pale morning sun. Mark didn’t move. He stood there by the table, his head down, looking at the grain of the wood where Rilla had torn those napkins into little white dust specks. I saw his throat move as he swallowed, once, twice, like he was trying to choke down a dry crust of bread that wouldn’t go down right.
“She’s just a kid,” he whispered, and it sounded like he was saying it to himself more than to me. “She’s so little, Mother.”
“She was sixteen when she came to me,” I said, my voice dropping down until it was almost gentle. “Same age Deb was when you helped carry her cardboard boxes out to the drive. You missed thirty years of your sister’s life, Mark, and she missed thirty years of yours, and all because you were too proud to let her make a mistake and come back home to learn from it. You want to do that twice? You want to spend the rest of your Sundays wondering what happened to Rilla every time a car goes past the parsonage?”
Upstairs, the floorboards finally creaked. We both looked up toward the ceiling as a light, uneven step crossed over the landing. The door at the top of the stairs clicked open, and then Rilla’s bare feet started coming down the steps, one slow, careful thud at a time, until she appeared in the doorway with her coat still pulled tight around her shoulders and her hair falling down across her eyes like she’d been caught in a gale. She didn’t look at her father. She looked straight at me, her chin trembling just a little bit, ready to run out the back door if Mark made a move toward her.
Mark didn’t move. He turned around slowly, his boots scraping across the linoleum, and he looked at his daughter the way a man looks at something he thought he lost in a fire before he realizes it’s still sitting in the ashes, half-burned but still breathing.
“Go wash your face, Rilla,” he said, and his voice didn’t have that church-pew rattle in it anymore. It just sounded tired, like a man who had been walking through the brush all night and finally found the trail back to the truck. “We’re going home. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but when you’re ready. Your grandmother’s got three thousand dollars in the drawer for the doctor, and I reckon I can find enough work around the parsonage to pay her back before the winter’s out.”
Rilla didn’t answer him right away. She looked at me, her eyes big and round in that pale face, and I gave her a little nod, just a short dip of the chin to let her know the house wasn’t going to fall down on us quite yet.
“Go on,” I told her, and I reached out and poured a fresh cup of coffee from the pot that had been sitting on the warm iron since five o’clock. “The kettle’s still hot.”
Mark stayed until the sun finally cleared the ridge and hit the top of the pump house out back, turning the frost on the water trough into a sheet of silver that looked like tin foil. He didn’t eat anything, but he sat down in Raymond’s Windsor chair for twenty minutes while Rilla went upstairs to pack her schoolbag back up, and we didn’t talk about the church or the deacons or the roof fund. We just sat there watching the steam rise off our cups while the old house settled down into its morning routine, the floorboards giving their little warning creak every time the wind shifted off the river.
After he left with her, driving slow down the gravel road with his hazard lights blinking against the gray light, I stayed at the table until the kitchen went cold again. The little pile of shredded napkin was gone, swept down into the dark of the stove where it belonged, but the grain of the wood still looked worn down right where Rilla’s fingers had been digging into it. I pulled the telephone off the wall and set it down on the table right in front of me, next to the small leather address book with the water-damaged cover that Raymond had kept in his shirt pocket until the day he died.
I turned the pages past the hardware store and the feed mill until I found the name I hadn’t looked at in twenty years. It was written in pencil, the letters faded until they looked like spiderwebs, with an area code down in Oregon that didn’t look anything like the ones we used around here. My thumb hovered over the buttons for a long time, just like it had at six o’clock that morning when the world was still waiting to see which way the wind was going to blow.
