would do, though she was not his wife.
She sat naked on the edge of the bed for a moment and pattered her feet, mulled what she should do. Her big toes left a row of wet thumbprints on the floor. When she looked up, Emma was still smiling from her photograph with a curious power, her eyebrows arched, but whether in question or happiness Aloma could not say. She stood abruptly and pushed the curtains wide. Dust piled on the sills, dust that clung to the bubbled pane that flowed thick to the sash. Grassed land waved beyond it. Light refracted across her breasts and lit the rhinestone droplets of water on her legs and again she felt the small alien power of the photograph and thought to cover herself. She dressed quickly.
Aloma made her way to the hall where she found, in the closet, a few buckets and a broom, a mop, sponges curled and grayed with dirt. She kicked the braided rugs from the bedroom into the hall and with the broom she cut great swaths and arcs across the dusty floor. To the picture, she said, I am here now, like it or not. But she polished that too with the hem of her cotton blouse. She peeked inside the bedroom closet, but all that remained were old shoes. She considered throwing them out, but she remembered the emptied look on Orren's face the night before when he had gazed out past her into the dark as though she had been only accidentally there. It pricked at her mind and she left the shoes where they lay in crackled useless pairs and shut the door. She stripped the linens from the bed, noting the whitish marks that they had made last night, and she had a low, queer feeling that she had spent her wedding night without a wedding. It gave her pause, she stared down at the bed, but then she balled up the sheets and threw them aside and abandoned her campaign in the bedroom for another room in the house.
The next door in the hallway was a linen closet, empty. Then a bedroom with two twin beds, the boys' room. She hesitated for a moment at the threshold and then stepped inside and the floorboards groaned. The room had been closed for a long time, she inhaled the talcy scent of old wallpaper glue. The walls were ringed in pennants from the central college where both the boys had gone, Cash five years before Orren, so that he was back on the farm and in fact the one driving that day when the truck in front of theirs broadsided a station wagon and flung its load of sheet metal with all the force of a train into the cab of the truck so that he was crushed and Emma decapitated all in an instant. He had been an Aggie too and their miniature John Deere tractors stood parked, their tops floured with dust, sides aged blackish green on the two dressers that stood between the narrow beds. The beds were made and tightly cornered, the wool blankets sunbleached near the window. Aloma coughed and the dust motes circled in a wake. She crossed the room to the window, and after she unlatched the hasp, she still had to pound the frame with the butt of her hand before the old window loosed in its casings and gave grudgingly up. The outside air was warm and sudden and it startled the room with the smell of living things.
Out the window, far down in the lowest field, she saw Orren. His smallness surprised her, he was just a speck in the cup of the bottomland. It was not really a large farm, but it was a great deal of space for one man to possess.
As she leaned down to peer through the screen, her hand came to rest on a photograph in a frame balanced on the little bed stand. Orren, seven or eight at the time of its taking. She held it up to the light. Water had found its way inside the photo and rumpled its glossy front. It was taken in this room, the boy Orren sitting on the bed and grinning like a savage, one front tooth missing, the other chipped.
She looked around at the foreign artifacts of the room— tobacco leaf posters, puzzle dinosaurs, horses and trucks forlorn on a shelf—and all of it struck her as strange, the tokens of an unknown boyhood. She herself had no proof of having been a child, nothing imbued with the patina of age. She had packed up her life into two boxes the size of egg crates and they held mostly her scores. She looked again at the picture of him as she replaced it on the bed stand, the small flush unlined face smooth as an ironed sheet, keenless eyes. In that face gathered the nascent force of his life, his other life, constituted mostly of the time before her. She backed out of the room that belonged to a boy she didn't know and in her mind it became tangled—what she did and did not know about the man or the boy called Orren—so that when she shut the door, she did so with a brute clap.
She hurried down the stairs into the open space of the main room. But here the piano waited for her. She touched the top with one finger, careful, as if it could crumble under the force of her small hand. She opened the cover and pressed a white bone key. There was no sound, just a sponging broken depression. She pushed down the neighboring keys and the pitches yawed out, one string buzzed hideously. She stepped away suddenly and looked around herself as if seeing the room, the house, for the first time.
Shit, she said and put a hand up to her mouth to cover it and keep it from uttering another word. She was alone in a strange house that did not belong to her. For a long time, she could not bring herself to uncover her mouth. She blinked a few times. She put her hands on her hips and resolved silently that she would say nothing about the piano, that she would not be foolish, not be lost. Then she began to clean in earnest, and once she started, she could not bring herself to stop for three days.
On the third day, when she'd grown sick of the smell of linseed oil on her hands and even sicker of the meals she'd made in a single skillet using the foodstuffs from her one trip to the grocery, she caught Orren late in the afternoon. He had just come around the front of the house with an auger flighting up in one hand and chicken wire in the other, rolled and tied. He did not look up until he almost ran into her. She said, I need things from that other house, Orren.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down the slope at the small house, the chicken wire graded so it rested on the ground between them. How come's that, he said. He did not look pleased.
There's not hardly anything to cook with, she said. How do you expect me to feed you if there's nothing to work with? Why don't you drive me down there.
He shrugged once, but he nodded. Yeah, he said and continued on around the back of the house where he laid his tool in the bed of his truck and the chicken wire at once sprung loose from his hand and uncurled itself. Orren pressed up the tailgate until it caught and he pulled his keys from his rear pocket.
But he did not come into the house with her. When she slid out her side of the cab, he remained where he was behind the wheel. He took his cigarettes from his pocket, thumbed the lid free. Take what you want, he said. It's unlocked. His finger tapped the white butt end of a cigarette.
The door gave way to the smell of must. The house had not been opened at all, at least she had never seen Orren down here. He was in the fields whenever she looked out the back door for him, or by the barn in the morning scattering scratch for the chickens, letting loose the cows from the rood pen. But this dank little house, into which she walked with its low fluorescent lighting and cracked louvered blinds, this he had not touched. The windows were all closed, they had died on a cool day. One by one, Aloma unhasped the windowpanes and pressed them up as high as they would slide in their painted frames. It was better for a house to smell like cow shit than like something forgotten. Then she drew open the kitchen cupboards and in their recesses found all the utensils Emma had used for her cooking. Aloma discovered a box under the sink and she piled in everything she could use until it brimmed over with skillets and cutting boards, spatulas with the tiniest fragments of unwashed egg adhering, glasses with blue roosters on them. She looked behind her at the darkened hallway that led to the bedrooms. She raised the hem of her shirt to wipe her upper lip and took unfeeling stock.
As she stood there, Orren came up behind her. What do you want me to carry? he said.
She pointed to the box, but looked at him. He stood beside her, straight and plain as a cooling board.
I do like this house, Aloma said.
Orren shrugged. Small, he said.
But it's so much nicer down here. It's
