Page 6 of Keepsake
I’d ached to see that.
Mrs. Shipley wasn’t finished apologizing to Lark for the bunkhouse accommodations. “Your room has a door on it, so you’ll have privacy. But you’ll be sharing a bathroom with three men, sometimes four. They do the early milking from six to seven thirty, so that’s the best time of day for a lengthy shower, I’d think.”
“The bunkhouse will be absolutely fine,” Lark assured her. “I always loved that funny little building. But I’m not booting anyone out of his room, am I?”
Mrs. Shipley shook her head. “Griffin used to stay there in the front bedroom, but now he’s in the bungalow with Audrey. So we’ve kept that room for guests.”
“I’ll show Lark the room,” May said, getting up. “Lark, you carry our drinks, and I’ll get your bag.”
“Deal.” Lark stood, too.
I kept my eyes to myself as she left the room.
Griffin and I helped to clear the last glasses off the table. And then it was time to say goodbye to Isaac and Leah.
“Goodnight, sweet boy,” Leah Abraham said, folding me into a hug.
“Goodnight.”
Leah was only twenty-nine to my twenty-three. But nobody had ever been more of a parent to me than Leah and her husband. It was the Abrahams who took me in when I’d been turned out of my so-called home four years ago. And, more than that, they were the only two people who understood what I’d been through.
They knew how strange and difficult it was to make a new life after leaving the odd place where we’d been raised. Because they’d lived through the same thing, too.
I patted Leah’s back awkwardly until my Thursday-night hug was finished. I knew that Leah hugged me on purpose—she was trying to prove to me that hugging was ordinary. That it wasn’t a sin. When I first came to Vermont, Leah’s hugs always froze me in my tracks, because holding another man’s wife was just weird. Even now, whenever I received the occasional hug, I just sort of tolerated it.
Where we grew up, touching resulted in lashes from the whip. Hugging was a punishable offense, just like talking out of turn or sneaking food from the pantry. As a result, I kept to myself. I was disinclined to touch anyone or talk too much except with people I knew very well.
There were half a dozen of those.
“I’ll see you at the market on Saturday,” I told Isaac. “And tomorrow morning I’ll do that oil change on your truck. You can pick it up any time after noon.”
“Thanks, man,” he said. “See you soon.” He passed through the doorway in front of me with his three-year-old daughter, Maeve, passed out on his shoulder. Her sleeping face came into view. She was a lucky little girl.
Maeve would grow up to be a world-class hugger. She was the center of her parents’ universe, and she had no idea that life could be otherwise. Maeve would never be lost in the shuffle of too many children competing for not quite enough food. She would never be slapped for asking a question. And that was just the beginning.
Maeve’s name wasn’t straight out of the old testament.
She wasn’t required to call her father “sir.”
She had a valid birth certificate, and she’d get better than an eighth-grade education.
She wouldn’t be married off to an old man the day she turned seventeen.
Isaac opened the back door of his wife’s car and gently placed his child’s sleeping body into her car seat.
I’d lived with Isaac and Leah on their farm my first two years in Vermont. But eighteen months ago I made the big two-mile move down the road, because the Shipleys had a larger operation and they could afford to pay me wages.
Isaac would have kept me on if I’d needed it. He was the closest thing I had to a family. But living and working on my own felt right and good, and Isaac understood that. “You can always come back if it doesn’t work out,” Leah had assured me.
Standing on the front porch, I watched the Abrahams drive away, hoping I’d never have to impose upon them again.
Even after their headlights disappeared, I stood a while longer in the sweet Vermont air. The Shipley farm smelled of growing things and of ripening fruit. This time of year, the scent had a slightly vinegar undertone of apples in decay. We’d worked the cider press for six hours today, which meant that I was also thoroughly apple-scented. If I hurried, I could catch a shower before lights-out in the bunkroom.
But Griff had other plans. “Hey, Chewie. Here’s your library books.”
“Thanks.”
His cousins came clomping onto the porch, too. “Got a second, guys?” Griff called. “I need to talk to everybody.”
