Crossing Tinker's Knob

by Cooper, Inglath

She pushed her cup away and stood. “Thank you for the coffee, but I really have to go.”

  “Becca,” he said. “Stay. Please.”

  “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.” She crossed the wood floor of the coffee shop, feeling the stares of the teenagers by the window. She stepped quickly outside into the late afternoon sun and made her way to her car, and then home, all the while feeling Matt’s searching gaze on her skin, as if he had in fact, touched her.

  ∞

  Then

  EVERYTHING CHANGED AFTER Matt Griffith came to work on the farm. Overnight, Becca became too aware of the way she walked, not trusting her own feet, worried she would trip in front of him or that her voice would squeak when she talked. When she was near him, her hands refused to function the way they normally did, clumsy and inept.

  During the two weeks he’d been on the farm, she’d tried hard to avoid him. But it seemed as if everywhere she turned, he was somewhere within her line of vision.

  Becca couldn’t quite remember what it was like before he came. She only knew she hadn’t walked around with a bubble in her stomach, half hoping they’d run into each other every time she stepped out of the house, half dreading that they would.

  For the past couple of hours, she’d been sitting at the picnic table in the back yard, stringing green beans. Matt and Jacob were down at the barn, changing the oil in the tractor. The temperature had hit around ninety today, and Matt’s shirt stuck to his back and shoulders, making it hard not to notice the lines of muscle beneath.

  Emmy walked up from the garden with another wash pan full of beans. She sat down at the table next to Becca and started breaking off ends, dropping them in the white plastic bucket between them.

  “You’re awfully quiet. Something wrong?” Becca asked.

  Emmy glanced down at the barn, then back at Becca. “You look at him all the time.”

  Becca stopped snapping for a moment, then went on again, faster. “At who?” she said, keeping her voice indifferent.

  “The new boy,” she said. “Matt.”

  “I do not.”

  “Becca. I’m fifteen, but I’m not blind.” Emmy hesitated, as if choosing her words. “He’s cute. But he’s not like us.”

  “Does everyone have to be like us, Emmy?” Becca asked the question quickly, hearing the irritation in her own voice.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  At the barn, Jacob banged a wrench against the tractor. It made a loud, clattering sound. Matt looked over his shoulder, directly at Becca, and for a moment, she could not bring herself to look away. Since the day they’d gone to pick up sawdust, they’d caught each other’s gazes time and again, the connection between them making her insides drop like the grain released from the hopper bottom bin at the barn.

  “See,” Emmy said.

  Becca looked away from Matt and went back to stringing beans, focusing on the pan in front of her.

  “You’re not going to be like Jacob, are you?” Emmy asked after a few moments, her voice low and concerned.

  Becca looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Jacob wants out,” she said. “To live another way.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “I know about Linda,” she said.

  Becca snapped a few more beans. “Jacob has to make his own choices, Emmy.”

  “But it’ll be sad if he goes.”

  “Being with Linda doesn’t mean he can’t ever see us again,” Becca said.

  “You know Mama and Daddy could never accept the two of them together. What kind of life would they have?”

  “If it’s one started on love, shouldn’t that be enough?” Becca paused and then added, “And why shouldn’t they accept her?”

  Emmy shook her head, looking much older than her age. “Isn’t it just as easy to love someone who’s the same as you as it is to love someone who’s different?”

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. “But what about you and John? When you were thirteen, you said you wanted to marry him one day. Wouldn’t you still love him if he weren’t like us?”

  Emmy remained silent for a few moments, and then said, “I don’t think I would have let myself.”

  The answer surprised Becca. Even when they’d been little girls, Becca knew Emmy had no desire to look outside their life. Maybe it was easier that way. But she could not bring herself to view the world with blinders.

  A dark blue Chevrolet truck turned in off the main road, scattering gravel and dust as it pulled up to the barn. Aaron Brubaker, a friend of Jacob’s, got out and walked over to the tractor where Jacob and Matt were still working.

  “I bet he came to see you,” Emmy said, the words light and teasing.

  “He did not,” Becca said, her face flushing.

  But a couple of minutes later, Aaron left the barn and headed up through the yard to where they sat.

  “Hey, Becca. Emmy,” he said, stopping just short of the table.

  “Hey, Aaron,” Becca said, noticing that he wasn’t wearing the work clothes he normally had on during the day when he stopped to see Jacob. His light blue shirt was fresh-pressed, his dark pants spotless. He had blonde hair, blue eyes and skin that always had color in it, as if he’d gotten a little too much sun. Some of the girls she hung around with from church thought he was cute and would giggle when he walked by. Standing here in front of her with his appealing smile, she could see why they thought this.

  “Hi, Aaron,” Emmy said, getting to her feet. She picked up the bowl of beans they’d finished snapping and added, “I’ll take these inside. Be right back.”

  Aaron folded his arms, then unfolded them, anchoring a palm at each hip. “Looks like you’ve been busy today.”

  “The beans have done well this year,” she said, wiping her palms on the apron tied at her waist.

  “Our garden’s overflowing. Not like last year when it was so dry,” he said.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Becca said.

  “Thanks, but no. I can’t stay. Actually, I was wondering. . . .” He cleared his throat, and then went on. “Some of us are getting together over at Eli’s tomorrow. Would you like to come with me?”

  Despite what she’d said to Emmy, Becca wasn’t really surprised by the invitation. Aaron had been seeking her out at the end of church lately, talking past casual interest. And it seemed like he’d been dropping by to see Jacob more often. Behind Aaron, she could see Matt Griffith looking up at them. She leaned to the left a bit, Aaron now blocking him completely from view. Maybe the timing of this was right. Maybe going out with Aaron would give her some place else to put her thoughts. “That sounds like fun,” she said. “What time?”

  “Pick you up at five-thirty?”

  “Five-thirty,” she agreed.

  “Okay, then,” he said with a quick nod, smiling. “See you Saturday.”

  He headed across the yard, and she watched him go. He stopped to speak to Jacob who looked back at her and clapped Aaron once on the shoulder.

  Matt, however, went inside the barn without looking her way at all.

  19

  Questions

  There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

  - Aeschylus

  Now

  Stepping out the back door of the two-story white farmhouse in which she’d lived her whole life, Martha Miller carried the heavy wicker laundry basket to the clothesline, wondering if she’d finally let her worries get the better of her. She should have gone with her daughter to the funeral today. Maybe if she’d been by Becca’s side, she would avoid talking to that boy. Though he was hardly a boy now. Matthew Griffith.

  Just his name set up a quiet roar of anxiousness deep inside her.

  She yanked a bleached white sheet from the pile in the basket and pinned an edge to the wire clothesline. She slid the other side down the line until the sheet hung straight, securing it with another wooden pin. A breeze lifted the bottom and snapped it forward, then back again, be
fore it settled into place.

  Martha had always retreated to work as a way to redirect her thoughts when she was upset about something. Putting the mind to a task diluted the power of worry, which she’d long ago learned was one of the devil’s handiest tools.

  Not for the first time, she searched her memory for the moment where she’d gone wrong with her oldest daughter. She concluded just as quickly that there had never been a single instant. Instead, a growing awareness from the time Becca was a little girl that she would not, as Martha had, walk the path of their family with complete acceptance.

  From the beginning, her questions overwhelmed Martha, marked as they were by a clear resistance to take anything at face value. Mama, why do we dress different from the people we see in town? Why does Daddy have a long beard? Why doesn’t our car have a radio? Why can’t I finish high school?

  Martha’s answers had never seemed to satisfy her, no matter how many times she tried to explain that their choices were based on their desire to live a plain and humble life without getting caught up in the ways of the world.

  As a child, Martha had never once questioned anything about her life. She had accepted her parents’ choices as her own. This had made it more than difficult to relate to a daughter who accepted nothing without question. In truth, a daughter who questioned her mother and what she had chosen to be.

  Martha had been raised to believe that a mother had an obligation to teach her child right from wrong. And there had never been any doubt in her mind that their way of life was the right way for them.

  It all went by so fast anyhow, the years that strung together a person’s time here on earth. Lately, she’d felt a need to settle things. She couldn’t explain it, but the need hung tight in her chest.

  She glanced up at the window to Emmy’s room. Her youngest child. The curtains were drawn, and Martha pictured her in the chair by the bed, staring at a wall, her mind settled in a place none of them could reach, no matter how hard they tried.

  A wave of tiredness gripped her, so intense that she could barely stop herself from sinking to her knees. Standing there in the back yard of this house where she had grown up, where she had raised three children of her own, a son and two daughters, she’d never felt more lost. Jacob, gone for so long now that she sometimes had to pull out photos of him as a boy to keep his face from fading in her memory. Emmy, here in this very house, but so unreachable. And Becca.

  She thought of happier times, when the children were small, when her husband Daniel had been alive, of early morning breakfasts around the table after the first milking at the barn was done. Of fall afternoons when they’d fill up bushel baskets with apples from their orchard to make apple butter the next day in the big copper pot handed down through Daniel’s family. And of the much loved Fix Sundays.

  How long ago it all seemed, those days when she had somehow thought they would always be happy.

  There was so little of any of it left. Somehow, she had to hold on to what remained.

  20

  This Kiss

  Do not tell secrets to those whose

  faith and silence you have not already tested.

  – Elizabeth I

  Now

  Becca didn’t tell Aaron about her meeting with Tom Williams or the incredible gift Mrs. Griffith had left her. Nor did she tell him that she’d had coffee with Matt. Guilt for each of these things ate a little hole inside her, but she made a pact with herself that she would just get back to her regular life. There was no point in letting something that in the big picture was insignificant upset an existence that worked as it was.

  Today, she headed for her garden, and a goal of setting out a row of tomato plants despite the advice of the Farmer’s Almanac, which still predicted a few more cool nights. In the past two days, she’d plucked every visible weed from the rich, dark earth and prepared another row for some extra squash plants.

  Mostly, the work had succeeded in distracting her. But it was the nighttime that did her in. She dreaded the nights.

  Standing before her bathroom mirror, she smoothed moisturizing cream on her face and tried not to acknowledge the discontent in her own eyes. A knock sounded at the door. She opened it to find Aaron standing there, his expression set, serious. “Is something wrong?” she said, feeling the sudden rap of her heart.

  He handed her a piece of paper, Tom Williams’ number scribbled across the top. “He called this afternoon,” he said, his voice perfectly even. “Asked me to tell you that he’d really like to tie up the loose ends of Mrs. Griffith’s estate. Apparently, she left you something?”

  Even as she heard the confusion in his last words, a response eluded her. She ran the brush through her hair one last time, and then secured it in a ponytail, before looking at Aaron. “Yes,” she said, attempting indifference. “Her house at the lake.”

  Aaron’s eyes widened. He didn’t speak for a few moments, as if he couldn’t quite absorb what she’d said. “Why would she leave you such a thing?” he asked finally.

  “You know I delivered her eggs for years,” she said, glancing away. “We used to talk sometimes.”

  “And she put you in her will based on that?” Skepticism underscored the words, the set of his jaw suddenly hard.

  “I kept in touch with her,” she added. “I visited her at her house and then at the nursing home after she moved there.”

  Aaron stared at her, his eyes glazed with sudden hurt, as if she had just revealed an affair about which he knew nothing. “Why would you do that, Becca?” he asked in a careful voice.

  “She was always kind to me,” she said. And this much was true.

  “Your family was not enough for you?”

  “Aaron. She was a friend. Am I not allowed to have friends?”

  “A friend you never managed to mention that you were visiting over the course of how many years?

  She flicked off the bathroom light and walked into the bedroom, her back to him. “I thought you might not understand.”

  “You were right about that part,” he said, his voice thick with an anger she had rarely, if ever, heard in him. “I do not understand why you would maintain a friendship with her and never tell me about it. Surely, that must mean something.”

  Becca didn’t want to do this with him. No good could come of analyzing her motives. She turned to him then, her voice pleading. “Aaron, it means nothing. We had some things in common. She loved to read. We talked about books. That’s all.”

  He leaned against the frame of the bathroom door, arms folded across his chest. Several moments passed before he said, “You will not accept such a ridiculous thing, of course.”

  The words burned her skin like the spatter of grease from a hot stove. She removed the pillows from their bed, pulling back the bedspread, fussing with the sheets, willing herself to answer in agreement. But there was something in his absolute certainty that she would agree which clogged her resolution, forcing words from her mouth that came as a complete surprise. “I’d like to think about it,” she said, propping her pillow against the bed’s headboard.

  “Becca,” he said, her name a harsh rasp. “What is this about?”

  She let herself look at him then, saw that her defiance had shocked him. Maybe it shocked her a little as well. “Simply that I would like to think about it.”

  He remained quiet for several long moments. “I forbid you.”

  Aaron had never before used such words with her. It wasn’t as if they’d never disagreed on anything before. There had been a few major things, the most memorable of which had been Aaron’s desire to move to Ohio after his family sold their farm and moved there several years ago. Aaron had thought it would be good for them, give them a fresh start of sorts. He’d brought it up one night after they’d gone to bed, and she’d thought him already asleep, his voice in the dark startling her.

  “There’s a farm for sale adjoining my folks’ place in Ohio. I think we should buy it, Becca.”

  For long moments, she cou
ldn’t summon a response. “Do you mean just you and me?” she finally asked.

  “And Abby, of course,” he said.

  “What about Emmy?” She spoke carefully, as if suddenly alert to uncertain ground.

  Aaron’s silence took on weight. “Becca. You have your own life to live. Emmy’s not your-”

  “Burden?” she finished for him, the question rising up before she could stop it.

  He reached for her hand, entwining it with his. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Do you think she would expect you to give up your whole life to care for her, Becca?”

  “My life is here, Aaron. And she’s my sister.”

  “You’ve been here for her for so long. And your mother is here.”

  “Mama couldn’t do everything herself.”

  “She could get help. We could pay for that.”

  “Aaron.” Becca pulled her hand from his and sat up in bed. “What’s brought all this on?”

  “This place has never felt like mine, Becca.”

  “It wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for you. After Daddy died—”

  “I know,” he said, “but it’s not the same.”

  She heard his quiet appeal and understood suddenly how much he wanted this. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “But I can’t leave. I can’t.”

  Aaron didn’t say anything more. He got up after a bit, went into the bathroom and dressed, then let himself out the door, the lock making a dull click as he pulled it closed.

  They never spoke of the conversation again, but Becca often thought that what held Aaron and her together, what served as the foundation of their marriage, was a mutual sense of sacrifice.

  And now with this latest conflict between them, a house left to her, she could see in his face awareness of his own sacrifices, his willingness to accept something less than he’d wanted in their marriage. In his voice, she heard a note of ownership that made her skin feel as if it were being rubbed with sandpaper. Her heart began to race, and she pressed her lips together to keep herself from saying something she would later regret. “I’m tired, Aaron,” she said, without looking at him. “I’m going to bed.”