The Net Beneath Us by Carol Dunbar

Author:Carol Dunbar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

22

The day after the storm Elsa made herself wait. She did not go over to the farmhouse because she’d been too shaken—didn’t trust herself to know what to say. But the day after that, sunlight flitted through the windows and they had their first blue sky since Easter. She drove up the short driveway and parked next to the barn with the milk house attached and the house there to her right.

She opened the back car door and Finn got out by himself, toddling across the ground. Patches of snow still spread out across the fields like a cobbler topping over dark, jammy dirt, but the driveway and yard were clear, tufts of green already sprouting. Another truck sat parked next to Ethan’s relic, the new hired hand, presumably, someone Ethan had found to replace all the work that her husband had once done.

A group of pullets wandered in from around the milk house. Hester and Finn squealed and chased the young birds into a sunny patch next to the goat pens. They were away from the house, and that gave Elsa the freedom to say what she needed to say. This was good, she thought, marching up to the front door because the garage was closed. She knocked and waited, looked around again at the curtained windows of the house. But no one answered the door.

Back out into the sun where Hester and Finn chased the birds—the older hens jerking their necks with feathers fluffed, and Elsa called out to them a few words of warning and then ducked inside the milk house.

“Hello? Ethan? Luvera? Is anyone here?” She couldn’t remember the name of the new hired hand. Ethan had told her about him when she invited him over, and she felt embarrassed now by her little display, the scones she’d baked, the flowers she’d bought, the fire glowing cheerily in the woodstove. She’d wanted to show him that they were doing okay—she’d done it!—she’d gotten them through winter. But apparently, she hadn’t done enough. Apparently, her house needed cleaning and her woodpile needed straightening.

Elsa’d been splitting wood in the rain behind the house when Luvera had come over, unbeknownst to her. She’d been in a mood—needed to be alone. After splitting logs for three hours in the rain, she’d come back to the house to find that someone had stacked the wood splits she’d left heaped on the porch. They were arranged in the same way that Silas had always done it, neat and tidy squares of four. Her chest had bunched into an icy fist as she stood there shivering with the kids stomping behind her on the porch, all of them tired and hungry and dripping wet. She’d been afraid to go in.

The plastic tubing above her head flowed with milk and she walked down the main aisle of the barn painted gray and washed clean with nary a scrap of straw or chaff of dust. She spied Ethan, slipping off the black rubber teatcups that drew out the milk.

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