Part 7
By May, the county road had broken free of winter except for two gray shelves of snow in the deepest shade. Water ran loud beneath the Dry Creek bridge, and Anna’s scarf no longer rode in the passenger seat.
Sophie wore it when mornings were cold. They spoke on Sundays unless one of them asked for another day. She still went quiet when Graham described the minutes after the crash, and he still sometimes answered a question with a repair estimate or an offer of food. Now she stopped him, and most of the time he started again.
They sorted Anna’s things one box at a time. Sophie took the sheet music, the blue bowl, and a set of gardening gloves stiff with old soil. Graham kept the cast-iron skillet because Sophie said it weighed more than her kitchen table. Two boxes remained in the hall closet with their flaps open. Neither of them treated that as failure.
The cabin remained off the market. Graham had repaired the bathroom floor a third time and admitted, after Ruth set a marble on it, that the northeast corner still won.
Bean was enough for the present.
She grew long-legged and dark, with one ear beginning to stand and the other leaning sideways like Nell’s. Before entering any unfamiliar room, she sat and studied the threshold. Graham learned to wait instead of lifting her across.
He had not become easy company. On nights when freezing rain touched the windows, he sometimes woke on the couch with every light downstairs burning. He still checked the weather three times before Sophie drove the pass and once sent her a map with three alternate routes she had not requested. She replied with a photograph of the delete button. The next time, he sent only the forecast and waited for her answer.
On the first warm Saturday of spring, Dana and Caleb brought Nell and Patch up for a visit. Nell jumped out before Caleb had fully opened the truck door, raced one circle around the yard, and found Bean beneath the porch steps. The puppies recognized each other through scent before certainty. Then they tore across the wet grass, scattering Ruth’s seed packets and knocking over the bucket Graham had set beneath the eaves.
Dana handed him the final folded receipt for Nell’s clinic bill. “Paid.”
“I see that.”
“You could say congratulations.”
“Congratulations.”
“Work on the warmth.”
Caleb had repaired the fence himself and added a spring latch low enough that it could not swing free. He showed Graham photographs on his phone without being asked. In one, Nell lay in a patch of kitchen sunlight while Patch slept with his head inside her water bowl.
Sophie arrived near noon carrying Anna’s blue bowl covered with a dish towel. She had filled it with potato salad and washed it by hand. The harmonica was in her coat pocket even though the day had warmed past coats.
Graham started down the steps when her tires sank into the soft edge of the drive. Sophie backed up, corrected the angle, and parked on firm gravel without his signals. When she got out, she looked at his hands hanging uselessly at his sides.
“That must have hurt.”
“A little.”
She handed him the bowl. “You’ll recover.”
They ate on the porch. Ruth told Caleb three contradictory ways to keep a dog out of tomato beds. Dana fell asleep in a chair for twenty minutes and woke without apologizing. Graham watched Sophie slip Nell a piece of egg beneath the table and decided not to report it.
After lunch, Sophie took out the harmonica. She had been practicing the tune Anna used to play while washing dishes, a simple old waltz that always slowed at the same difficult measure. The first notes came thin. Patch stopped chewing a stick. Nell raised her head from Graham’s boot.
Sophie reached the high note and missed it cleanly.
Ruth looked into her coffee. Dana bit the inside of her cheek. Caleb failed first and laughed; the rest of them followed, including Sophie.
“Your mother used to blame the acoustics,” Graham said.
“She blamed you for running the garbage disposal.”
“Once.”
“Every time she told the story.”
Sophie lifted the harmonica again. Bean came to sit between her shoes, one ear upright and the other uncertain. Across the yard, the truck door stood open to the warm air while Nell and Patch slept in its shade.
When Sophie missed the same note, Graham did not pretend not to hear her begin again.