“I don’t know about that. But she’s a knitter. So I have yarn.”
“That’ll do,” I said. “Go get some of that.”
She turned to walk back into the house, and I set down the bucket and followed her. It was a relief to be behind her, out of that intense, frowning gaze. I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable I’d been, squirming under her stare, until it was over.
I waited on the porch.
The dogs wove themselves around me, softly wagging their tails. It seemed to have improved their moods to see their owner’s daughter. It struck me that I didn’t even know this woman’s name. She hadn’t bothered to tell me.
I reached down and patted their heads as they brushed by.
I looked up to see her bring out a skein of yarn, which I took from her. I tied a knot in the free end and reached up and held the knot at the very top corner of the doorframe.
“Here, hold this,” I said, tossing my head upward. In the direction of the knot.
She made no move to do as I had asked. Just snorted a bitter laugh. I realized that she couldn’t reach nearly so high. She was a small woman. I placed the knot in the lower corner instead.
She set the broken strip of wood on the floor and then knelt down and held the knotted end of the yarn, and I ran yarn up to the top of the frame and marked my place with the tip of my thumb.
She brought me a scissors and I cut it there.
I picked up the broken trim.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take this to the lumberyard, and you take the lock to the hardware store, and I’ll meet you back here and we’ll get this done.”
She only nodded. She didn’t thank me. I wasn’t sure if that felt okay or not. But it was clearly all I was going to get.
I stood inside the little cabin with her, holding the strip of molding in place while she hammered in the nails. I knew it would probably look like hell when we were done, and I was too cowardly to take responsibility for messing up her place with our bad workmanship.
We stepped back and viewed our work. I frowned. She frowned. But then, she was always frowning, so it was hard to tell.
“I guess it won’t look right till it’s painted,” I said.
The other sides of the doorframe were painted an off-white color.
“I don’t know that it’ll ever look quite right,” she said.
“But it’ll keep the door closed.”
“We don’t know that. We haven’t tried it.”
I walked up to the door cautiously. As if it might be a spider or a snake.
I saw the dogs on the porch through the partly open doorway. They tapped their tails at me.
I pulled the door closed and tried the new lock. It was a dead bolt that locked with a simple turn from the inside, a key from the outside. I gave it a turn, but it hung up quickly. We hadn’t positioned the new lock quite right. The dead bolt pin wouldn’t go all the way in. But it wedged in enough to keep the door closed.
I turned to find her right beside me, looking over my shoulder. Well, around my shoulder. She wasn’t tall enough to look over it.
“It’ll do,” she said. “When she’s feeling better, she’ll tinker with it. That’s a given. She’ll get it perfect. Story of her life—everything has to be perfect. No matter what we do with it today, she’ll tinker. Meanwhile it holds the door closed, so it’s good enough for now.”
She gathered up the tools she’d used and carried them out to the shed.
I walked out onto the porch and sat on the low edge with the dogs. The male dog put his head on my thigh.
I was thinking I should go home. But there was so much more I wanted to know. Still, even if I stayed, I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to ask her all my questions.
She brushed by me again on her way into the cabin.
I looked down into the boy dog’s face. “I should go now,” I said.
He seemed to know what that meant. He laid his ears back along his neck and his eyes took on a sorrowful expression. Or . . . even more sorrowful, I guess I should say.
A second or two later the woman—the daughter, whose name I still hadn’t asked—came out and sat next to me on the edge of the porch, her jeaned legs stretching out next to mine.
“Fortunately I know where my mom keeps the tequila,” she said, and plunked down a bottle and two short glasses.
I said nothing. I stumbled over what I even had up my sleeve to say. Not much, so I was hoping she’d figure it out on her own.
A second later, she got there. “Oh. What am I saying? You’re just a kid. What’re you, like, fifteen, sixteen years old?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
She poured herself what looked to me like a very large serving of tequila. Then she poured just a splash into the other glass. My glass, I supposed. A couple of tablespoons.
“Go ahead,” she said. “That little bit won’t kill you.”
I just stared at it. I was still petting the boy dog’s head.
“Ever had a drink?” she asked me.
“I had half a beer once at a party.”
“This is nothing like that. This stuff’ll blow the back of your head off.”
I watched her down the whole drink as if it were a shot, then slam the empty glass onto the boards of the porch.
I was thinking I liked the fact that my head had a back to it. You know. Intact and all. But she looked over at me expectantly, so I sipped at it. It felt like drinking liquid fire.
“That’s not how you do it,” she said. “You toss it down all at once.”
I did as she said—I think because I generally did what grown-ups said. I hadn’t yet learned
