was somewhere between yellow and dirty white.
Olivia sank into the rocker and stared at the wing back chairs, trying to
imagine Mrs. Place and her father passing an evening together. Mrs. Place was
easy. She’d be knitting or embroidering, passing on the gossip she’d overheard
in her shop that week, getting up to serve him coffee and a slice of her peach pie.
That had always been his favorite. And the taciturn Seborn Killion? Did he talk
about his children? About his wife’s sickness and death? Complain about the
customers in the store? Olivia tried to imagine him playing with a kitten, but couldn’t. Neither could she imagine him sustaining a conversation.
A tiny pair of scissors and some spools of thread lay on the table next to the
chair Mrs. Place had occupied last night. Olivia guessed she must spend most every evening in that chair, doing some kind of needlework. There was no
evidence of it in the house, however. Olivia hadn’t seen any samplers or
embroidered cushions. It made her sad to think of Mrs. Place sitting in that chair
all alone, night after night, decade after decade, nothing to look forward to but
Old Seborn’s visits. That being the highlight of anyone’s week was a truly
dismal thought.
Olivia’s mind returned to the present. What was she going to do? There was
still no sign of her monthly visitor. What had Mrs. Place meant when she said,
“If you decide to stay here?” Had that really been an invitation for Olivia to hide-out in Mrs. Place’s house until she knew for sure, one way or the other? It
was a comforting idea. If she wasn’t with child, she could simply go home the
day after her bleeding started. And if she was? Well, perhaps Mrs. Place would
let her stay for a few weeks, put off going to one of those homes for a while.
Then, when it was all over, she could come back to Five Rocks and pretend to
have been out in Michigan the whole time. No one would ever know the
difference.
Delicious aromas began to emanate from the kitchen and drew Olivia through
the arched doorway. Embers glowed in the stove and Olivia lifted the lid of the
cast iron pot on top of it. A meal of chicken and potatoes coated with honey was
slowly cooking. On the table were a pot of coffee waiting to be heated, a still-warm loaf of bread, and a jar of thick strawberry jam. Olivia helped herself to breakfast and then washed her plate and cup and wiped up the crumbs.
With Mrs. Place safely out in the shop, Olivia felt free to nose round, starting
with the kitchen. There was something depressing about how clean and orderly
everything was. The walls were painted a bright yellow and decorated with pictures cut out of a ladies’ journal: the head of a bored-looking woman with an
elaborate hairstyle, a couple in evening dress holding glasses of wine at what seemed to be the rail of a steamer, and three orange kittens playing with a ball of
blue yarn. Yellow and white checked curtains covered the window over the
washing up basin. Olivia went to the basin and worked the arm of the rusty iron
pump for a glass of water.
The strong smell and taste of minerals in the well water – so different from the cold, clear Michigan stream – brought her back home. Her father hadn’t
gotten a kitchen pump until she was ten or eleven. Before that, they’d had to go
out to the yard to pump water. Olivia remembered the joy of having a lark with
Tobey in the hot summer sun, the strong smell of iron in the air as they splashed
one another.
