She is not looking at me. She is tying her boots with the single-minded attention of somebody who does not waste motion. She has a jacket on now, dark canvas, the collar up. Her short dark hair is dark with drizzle. Her hands are broad and scarred and quick. I watch her tie the laces and I notice that I am watching. I file this quietly, the way you file a receipt you will want later but not yet. A small curiosity about a woman, noted and put in a drawer.
She comes in and brings the smell of rain and pine with her. She takes her jacket off at the door and hangs it on a peg. She looks at the bowl drying on the rack and at the spoon I laid on the towel next to it, and she nods once.
"I have to go in at four," she says.
"Work?"
"A drill. I'll be back after ten."
"All right."
"There's a key on the hook by the door. If something happens and you need to leave, leave. Take my truck if you have to. Keys are in the same drawer as the spoons."
I don't know what to say to that. I say, "Thank you."
"Don't answer the door," she says. "There's nobody coming. If somebody does come, it's wrong. Go out the back. The forest runs down to a fire road. The road runs out to the county road in about three miles."
"All right."
"The landline works. The number for the station is on the fridge. You call that number, you ask for Hale. They'll come get me.”
"All right."
"Evangeline."
It is the first time she has said my name. She says it the way you would say the name of a person who is in a room with you. Not like a sentence with my name in it. Just the name, held up, set down. I have been called Mrs. Clark for so long that my first name in another woman's mouth hits a place I wasn't bracing.
"Yes," I say.
"I'm going to keep you safe."
"I believe you."
I do. I don't know why. I don't know this woman. I have known her for nine hours and she has fed me and bandaged my hand and handed me a set of sweats and left me her truck and told me not to answer the door. I have been in rooms my whole life with people who told me they wanted what was best for me and I have never once believed any of them the way I believe thisstranger in a wet henley in a kitchen I didn't know existed this morning.
She goes.
I stand at the window and I watch her truck move down the drive between the pines until the rain and the distance close over it.
I sit at the kitchen table in her flannel shirt.
I look at my left hand, at the pale band on my ring finger where the ring used to be, and I listen to the rain on the roof, and I understand that there is a shape forming under all of this that I cannot see yet. I am a woman whose house burned down. I am a woman whose husband just died. I am a woman in a stranger's kitchen in a forest I have never been in, drinking coffee out of a mug that saysStation 9in faded white letters, and I am not afraid.
I should be afraid.
I am not.
That is not the right feeling for this morning. I know it is not the right feeling. Daniel is dead and my house is a hole in the ground and I have no passport and no money and I do not know if anyone is looking for me yet. I should be afraid. I should be in a hospital. I should be on a phone with my attorney.
I am in a flannel shirt that smells like cedar and I am not afraid.
I sit with that, the way I sat with the not-grief this morning, and I do not try to correct it. I let it stand. I have let other women's feelings stand in my own chest my whole life. The least I can do on my first morning as a widow is let my own feeling stand without arguing it down.
Somebody has done this. The fire was not an accident. The phones, the cell booster, the window keys, the man at the treeline, the very specific fact that Daniel was sleeping in the east wing alone and the very specific fact that I was not supposed tobe there. I know that someone has done this. What I have not let myself do until now is put the two shapes in the same room: the man at the treeline who chose to leave me, and the woman who pulled me out of the fire and fed me oatmeal this morning. They could be the same chain. They could be opposite ends of it. I do not have to choose today.
Today I have a kitchen and a flannel shirt and a pot of stew on a woodstove.
I look at the ring in the white dish on the dresser, down the short hallway, through the open bedroom door. It catches the gray light and throws it back weakly. The band I wore into the fire. The band I did not die wearing.
