porch. “Christ, Olivia, what was that?” he shouted.
“Oh Jeremy, I’m so sorry.” She followed him outside and knelt at his side. “I
didn’t mean to hit you. I’m so sorry. Let me see.” She moved toward him, but he
leaned angrily away.
He rose and brushed past her, strode down to the river, and stuck his head into
the cold water. Olivia watched from the porch, mortified. She was not, however,
too mortified to notice that those delicious fish were starting to burn and
removed the pan from the hot stovetop. Jeremy got to his feet, leaned over to shake the water from his hair, and returned to where she was waiting, her eyes
on the ground in humble apology.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said. “It’s just … I was so startled … I
didn’t hear you come in. It’s … it’s …” She paused, working out a plausible lie
to tell him. “Last year I was in my father’s store one day, sweeping the
storeroom, when a man, a stranger, came up behind me. He grabbed me and
began touching me …”
“Where was your father?”
“He’d gone out on the sidewalk, trying to get someone to move his wagon
away from the front of the store.”
“What’d they do to the man?”
“Nothing. I never told anyone. The whole thing only lasted a few seconds.
He’d rushed out and ridden off by the time my father came back in. He wasn’t
from our town. I’d never seen him before. I was too embarrassed to tell my father or anyone else. I felt like I’d done something wrong. Ever since … since
that man … I’ve been real jumpy about anyone coming up behind me.”
“Yeah, I would say so.” He managed to smile at her. “I’m lucky you didn’t
have that knife in your hand. I guess those fish are ready.” He glanced at the pan.
Jeremy moved the fish to two plates while Olivia put the bread and tin cups of
water on the table. Jeremy added a bowl of cold boiled potatoes and they sat down to eat in silence. When their plates held only heaps of bones, Jeremy got
up to pour coffee.
“I left some sacks of feed and seed in my barn,” she said. “Lots of other things too. You’re more than welcome to anything you find there that you have a
use for. Or anything you can sell.”
“You don’t want to be giving everything away. What if you decide to come
back?”
“I don’t think that’s likely. At least not soon. In any case, it will all go to ruination before I ever get back here. Trappers will clean it out in a lick. I’d rather you have it. So please, take whatever you want.”
“What will happen to your place?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It will still belong to me. Of course, to folks
around here I suppose it will still be the old Scruggs place. Soon enough no one
will remember that Mourning and I were ever here.”
He shook his head. “More like a lot of stories about you and your mysterious
disappearance will get told around campfires.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about a person giving up and going back home.”
“But people like stories, don’t they? They’ll have you off robbing banks or