turns,” she said. “Drop a pączek into the bag, fold it closed, and shake hard.” Stanley grabbed for the doughnuts. “Where are your manners?” the widow asked. “Ladies first.” She pushed the plate toward Violet and went back to the stove.
Their bellies full, Violet and Stanley had as much sugar on their faces as they’d had on their pastries. “Don’t forget to wash up,” the widow said.
They both nodded and took turns at the sink.
“Thank you kindly,” Violet said as she dried her hands. “I never tasted anything so wonderful.”
Stanley added, “Me too,” then smacked his lips and laughed as the pair headed out the door.
* * *
The widow sat at the kitchen table long past suppertime thinking about her situation. She had her books, her garden, her lace. All gave her pleasure, though the books caused some of the neighbors to regard her with suspicion.
“Always has her nose in a novel, that one,” one remarked in a disapproving tone. “Wish I had time for such folly.”
When Violet and Stanley came into her life, the widow realized what she had been missing all these years. “If only we’d had children,” she directed toward a sepia photograph staring down at her from a wall. In the picture, Henryk stood behind a seated Johanna, his hands on her shoulders, eyes glaring straight into the camera. He wore the new suit of clothes they’d purchased their first week in America. Like so many immigrants, they’d gone out and bought new American clothes and had their picture taken to show their families in the old country how well they were doing in the land of opportunity. In the end, that had been Henryk’s only suit, so of course the widow had him buried in it.
Finally, the widow stood and cleared the pączki dishes from the table. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to imagine how children might have changed her life. Just as sadness started to settle in, she glanced over at her husband’s picture once more. Henryk’s eyes, cold marbles, stared back at her. “I suppose God knew best,” she said aloud, “considering.” She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from inside her sleeve and spit the word “świnia,” bastard, into its center.
CHAPTER TEN
DUTY AND INDIAN SUMMER, two unlikely conspirators, coaxed Grace into the backyard for the first time since the tragedy. Violet wouldn’t be home from school for another two hours, so Grace decided to hang the wash herself. She dropped her basket next to the clothesline, shut her eyes, and tipped her face toward the sky, inviting the sun to warm her bones, to thaw her heart. The rays obliged, and for a moment, Grace convinced herself that a tonic of sun and sky might be enough.
“A little color in your cheeks. It makes all the difference.” Grief stood on the other side of the clothesline, examining Grace’s features. “At that angle,” he formed a frame with his thumbs and forefingers, cocked his head, and closed one eye, “you look like a young girl.”
Grace ignored his remarks and held onto the sun, absorbing its heat like the trees, the grass, and the flowers around her. Without opening her eyes, she pictured the spot where she was standing—the back half of her own yard and the beginning of Myrtle Evans’s patch of dirt. That’s what Owen always called it when he compared their properties. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, both families rented from George Sherman, owner of the Sherman Mine. The company houses looked forlorn, like rows of ragamuffins, some taller than others, but all uniform in their modesty. Soot from the mine and nearby culm bank fire dressed them in sober shades of gray and brown. Frost from the Pennsylvania winters kicked up the footers and bowed the boards, forcing porches to rest on their wooden haunches like old arthritic dogs. With no more than ten feet between them, huddled houses passed along the secrets contained inside. Mr. Harris, who lived to the right, used the Lord’s name in vain whenever he got his hands on whiskey. Louise Davies on the left watched for her husband each night in spite of his death four years earlier. Backyards ran into one another, and neighbors met in the middle to discuss weather or church or those out of earshot.
Yet, from late spring to early fall, Grace managed to color her house in pinks, reds, blues, peaches, and yellows. Sweet peas stretched up the back porch’s latticework, hiding the unpainted boards. Trellised roses craned their necks to view the scene below. Delphinium stood watch over the begonias as they fanned out across the soil. Snapdragons waited open-mouthed for lilies of the valley to breech their borders. Come summer, throaty toads from nearby Leggett’s Creek crooned from the shade of rocks.
At the slap of a screen door, Grace’s eyes popped open. Over on the Evanses’ back porch, Myrtle offered an armless rocker to a rather rotund woman. A missionary, if Grace’s recollection could be trusted.
“Good afternoon, Grace,” Myrtle called over from a second rocker. “So good to see you up and about.” She covered her mouth, and whispered something to her guest.
Grace waved a handful of clothespins that she’d retrieved from her apron pocket, peeled a sheet off the top of the basket, and hung it on the line.
“No one likes a busybody,” Grief said, pushing aside the sheet that separated him from Grace.
“She’s a fine Christian,” Grace murmured, smoothing the sheet back into place. “Not many like her who would open their homes to as many missionaries as she does.”
Grief walked the length of the clothesline and stepped around to Grace’s side. “She only puts them up long enough for the elders to take notice,” he said. “They’re someone else’s problem, soon enough.”
“I’ll not have—”
Grief put a finger to Grace’s lips, cupped his ear, and tilted his head toward the women on the porch.
“God as my witness,” Myrtle’s voice penetrated the sheetwall, “she threw that sparkler at her sister.”
“I told you!” Grief’s voice crackled with excitement as he slapped his knee.
“Don’t take my word for it. Ask my sister Mildred.” Myrtle started her rocker going. “She’ll back me up. We both saw the whole thing from this very porch.”
“Myrtle and Mildred. Two peas in a pod.” Grief shook his head good-naturedly. “Always have a bone to scratch between them.”
Eager to please her captive audience, Myrtle continued: “And then we heard poor Daisy accuse her sister. Violet! she yelled just before her dress went up in flames.”
When Grief turned around, he seemed to notice Grace’s wracked expression for the first time. “You really didn’t know?” He studied her for a minute before changing his tack. “I’m not saying it’s all her fault. That husband of yours played a part in this little drama.” His brow furrowed as he tried to get the words right. “No telling what might happen when you put trouble in a child’s hands. Isn’t that what you told him when he brought those sparklers home?”
“What harm can come?” Grace parroted Owen’s response, the last words he delivered on the subject. Somehow this detail, of all the details, this snippet of conversation between a husband and wife—for that’s what it was and nothing more, or was it?—destroyed her. She leaned forward, her hands trembling, her eyes glazed with tears, picked up a damp shirt from the basket, and
