Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown

Author:Elizabeth Inness-Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425119
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Five

Lunch was strange without Tante. It was strange to be in the kitchen without her, knowing her room was empty, knowing she was nowhere in the house—nowhere at all, really. Strange to be alone with Faith because it was only Tante’s absence that made them alone. Yet they weren’t alone; Tante was everywhere, and not just in what she’d left behind. Every time he came into the kitchen, he saw her stooped shape bent over the sink or rounding the corner into the bathroom. In the crackling of the fire he heard her calling him, the bedsprings creaking as she rose, her shuffling gait as she walked. Once, looking out the window, he thought he saw someone passing by, shadowy in the snow, going up toward the barn, but when he went to look, there were no tracks and nothing else to see except the dark empty rectangle of the open barn door.

James had to get away from the house. They had a few more hours of daylight. He wanted to go fishing.

“Fishing?” Faith said. “Ice fishing?” she said. He nodded. “What about the sheriff?” James shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about it.” She gave him a funny little smile but said, “All right.”

They made cocoa together, Faith watching the milk heat on the stove while James fetched the chocolate syrup from the refrigerator and the thermos from the cupboard. He handed her a wooden spoon, and she stirred the syrup in. “More,” he said, taking the can from her and inverting it over the pot till the milk was dark with chocolate. Faith looked at him with that funny smile again. “You like chocolate,” she said.

“Hmm,” he said.

“Me too,” she said.

He made her dress in layers this time, piling on some of his things and some of Tante’s, till he was sure she would be warm.

The sky was clearing. He found that heartening. The day’s dry snowfall billowed behind the truck as they drove to the bait shop. It felt good to have Faith in the truck beside him, good to know they would be making love again later. He wondered a little at himself, at what right he had to feel good so soon after Tante’s death. Then he tried to imagine how he would feel if she were still alive and realized he couldn’t know. So he stopped thinking about it.

He expected Faith wouldn’t last long. Ice fishing wasn’t the kind of thing a lot of women enjoyed, at least not the women he knew. Tante was the only exception, and she had enjoyed it because she liked the notion of something for nothing: fish on the table that you caught yourself, no middleman, no one to exchange money with. For him, the thing was being alone. Out there on the ice, you could spill your mind into the fish hole the way you would a mop bucket into a sink, sink your thoughts with the bait, and contemplate life. How risky it was. How a man could just as easily have been born a fish.

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