worst of it was, though, that she was right, even if I had never thought of that before. If Kenny stayed and patched things up with his mother, he would end up running the farm in place of me—and I would be just another hired hand, or maybe out of a job altogether.
“Is that why you were so cold toward him?” Ingrid asked cuttingly.
“Ingrid, may the good Lord forgive you for talking this way,” Olsen said. She put a hand to her breast. It had always been hard for her to see that people had their selfish sides too, and it was a part of life she had never been able to cope with.
“No,” I said, holding my own temper in check, but with some effort. “No, that’s not why.”
It wasn’t until I had gone out, banging the back door behind me that I realized she had goaded me after all into admitting that I had been cold toward him. I even wondered if maybe she didn’t know why. For all her giddiness and apparent helplessness, I knew full well Ingrid was as sharp as she was pretty. Even if she had been stone stupid, she’d have known about the other, about what had happened before Kenny left. I doubt if there was anyone in Hanover who didn’t know about Dexter Holloman. If Ingrid still had a crush on Kenny, it wasn’t because she didn’t know about that—and there was no telling how much more she might know.
I thought about Dexter Holloman while I finished up my chores, and the thought of him made me shiver even though it was a warm night.
They, the others in the house, were waiting with anxious breath for the meeting that was going to take place tomorrow in the pink house. Right now, that was as far as any of us had thought about things.
But Dexter was there, hanging back in the dark part of all our thoughts. Sooner or later, planned or accidental, there was sure to be another meeting too—and in the long run, that one might be more important than the one between Kenny and his mother.
The house was quiet when I came back in. Ingrid must have gone to her room. Olsen was in the front room, mending. I looked in on her after I had locked up.
“Good night,” I said from the doorway. “Don’t strain your eyes with that.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s like saying don’t squeeze the apples after they’re already sauce.” She looked up over her glasses. “She didn’t mean what she said, Mar.”
“I know she didn’t,” I lied.
She sighed and folded her hands thoughtfully over her sewing. “Lord willing, someday I’ll see her married to some nice young man. That’s what she needs. I always thought how nice it would be if she and Kenny…but there, now I’m talking like a wishful old woman.”
“Don’t stay up all night wishing.” I grinned at her and left, climbing the stairs toward my room. It was always easy to forget that mothers were human, and there was Olsen being just a little small too, but in a nice way. And she was right: it would be nice for Ingrid if she and Kenny were to hit it off that way. Probably it would even be a good thing for Kenny, in the long run.
Well, when it came to that, I was being the smallest of all, wasn’t I? It was Ingrid who was most responsible for Kenny’s coming back, and who had done the most to try to patch things up between him and his mother. And Olsen wasn’t the first mother to wish her daughter could marry the boss’s son. But what excuse did I have for being jealous. Love wasn’t prerogative.
I cleaned up and went to my own room, where I undressed in the dark and threw myself across the top of the bedclothes. I yawned a few times and tried to convince myself that I was dog-tired and would fall right asleep.
I didn’t, of course. I lay in the dark and stared up at the ceiling where the shadows of the big pear tree’s branches chased one another back and forth with each breeze.
He was here, in the house, in the next room. If I called out, he’d probably hear me. Maybe he would even come slipping along the hall as he sometimes used to, and we’d smoke a cigarette in the dark and talk seriously about things that only seem important at times like that. Maybe….
The hall floor creaked, but it was only Olsen, coming to bed. It wasn’t until she had gone by and the door to her room had opened and closed that I realized how tight my breath was in my chest. I sat up, shaking a little, and lit a cigarette.
He won’t be coming down that hall, I told myself firmly, almost enjoying the flash of pain it caused me. That was too many years and too many pains ago, and probably he had forgotten all about that, just as he had forgotten that I was Mar, and not Ingemar. He had outgrown what I had never quite learned to live with, and it was time now for me to stop kidding myself about it and pretending it had been different.
Kenny had changed. Well, what of it? That wasn’t so unusual. I’d changed too, in a lot of ways. Olsen had grown absentminded and I was willing to bet her hair was a lot grayer than it looked to me. Ingrid had grown up and become what everyone said was a beautiful woman, even though I still saw her as a skinny little girl.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was the past. All of those times that I kept remembering, they were just the way they had always been, even to our very first day in the pink house. I was seventeen then, and Kenny thirteen, but there was more than four years difference between us. He was everything that a boy should be: devilish and full of life and fun; and if losing his father the year before had saddened him, it had done it in ways that didn’t show, except maybe in the way he attached himself to me right off. And although I wasn’t much more than a kid myself, I probably seemed old enough to be a father to him, or at least an older brother. I had been the man of our family for some time already, and was as somber and grim a Swede as ever took over running a farm.
We were hired in a package. If the truth were known, Kenny’s mother was probably being as much charitable as she was practical. But even then Mrs. Baker wasn’t a strong woman and she was a widow by that time, with this big farm and another smaller one to run, and no one to run it for her but a thirteen year old boy who worked hard enough when he wasn’t hiking through the woods hunting critters or taking off for the swimming hole.
That was how we’d come here. Olsen was to run the house and I, with some understandable doubts on Mrs. Baker’s part, would run the farm. Ingrid, well, she helped Olsen and tormented Kenny.
Even then the world revolved around Kenny. If things were hard, when bad weather threatened the crops, he’d work around the clock and weary the strongest hand. But let him hear that the catfish were good someplace, or let someone even hint at some bit of trouble he could be stirring up, and he was off and running. He would stand all of our hair on end, mine the straightest; and then, when we were the maddest and I was all for crating him up and dropping him in the creek after his catfish, in he’d saunter, as calm as the first day of May. I gave him credit: he never lied about things or ducked a question. He’d confess all in a way that said, “What are you upset about anyway? It was only an outhouse that I pushed over, and I didn’t even know Mr. Craig was in it.”
And of course, by the time he was done smiling at us and doing little favors for us, and fawning over us, we’d all be asking ourselves just what we had been so upset about. Except, while we were asking, he’d be off on some new mischief.
Or, if all else failed and he couldn’t soothe our anger any other way, he’d put on a face a mile long and then we would hear, “Nobody cares about me,” and the like, until we all felt sorry for having been mad and outdid one another showing him we did care. Olsen always said later that the only people who could afford to say such a thing were those who knew better. Kenny knew better, of course,
