Page 75 of The River We Remember

“Did he say anything about Noah? Or maybe Kyoko?”

“Kyoko?” Colleen turned her face to Charlie, her look confused. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“It’s not important.”

At the same moment, they all caught the scent of something burning.

“The cinnamon bread,” Bridget cried and jumped from the swing.

“We need to get back to our work,” Colleen said.

“I understand. Thank you for your time.”

The two girls hurried inside.

Human beings are wired to remember. Struggle as we may to stuff the past out of sight and out of mind, nature has devised triggers that bring back even the most unwelcome memory. The smell of that baking cinnamon bread had done it for Charlie. Sitting in the porch swing, the scent of the sweet burn drifting through the window, Charlie was taken back nearly five decades. She felt her stomach tighten and the bile rise, as it had so often in those years after her mother died and Charlie replaced her in the house where she and her father continued to live together so unhappily, so at war.

Charlie left the swing and went to the porch steps, intending to leave. But she heard crying through the window screen, and if the sound of a child’s weeping doesn’t break your heart, nothing will. She turned back and, although she knew it was a trespass, went inside. She found the girls in the kitchen, where the smell of the burn was strong. The older girl sat in a chair at the table, her head laid across her arms. Bridget stood behind her, her hand on her sister’s shoulder. The cinnamon bread sat on the stove still in the pan, charred.

“It’s only bread, Colleen,” Bridget said gently. “Only bread.” She looked up and saw Charlie and said as if speaking of some great mystery, “Only bread.”

Charlie pulled up a chair beside Colleen and put her arm around her shoulders and drew her close. The girl didn’t resist but laid her head against Charlie’s breast and wept, soaking her blouse with warm tears.

“My fault,” she cried. “It’s all my fault.”

“Hush, child. The blame is mine. I distracted you.”

“I never can do anything right.”

“Not true,” Charlie said. “Is it, Bridget?”

“Colleen can do everything.”

“I can’t,” her sister cried. “I mess up all the time.”

“Oh, sweetheart, we all do,” Charlie said. “All the time. More than anything else, we’re made of mistakes. But you know what? We always have a second chance.”

“That’s what the rainbow is about,” Bridget offered.

“Exactly,” Charlie said. Although she didn’t necessarily agree this was the point of that particular biblical fable, she appreciated Bridget’s effort.

Brody, when he told Charlie about his visit to the Quinns to bring them the news of Jimmy’s death, had reported that the children showed no sign of grief. He didn’t remark on it as a strange thing, necessarily, and there was good reason for this. Grief—both Charlie and Brody knew this well—doesn’t come in the immediacy of the moment. Nor does it send a calling card for later. It arrives unannounced, springing from some unexpected incident, grabbing the heart in moments of total surprise.

That’s what Charlie thought she was seeing in that hot, humid kitchen with Colleen’s tears wetting her blouse. The ambush of grief.

“You don’t get second chances with everything,” Colleen said.

“Okay, maybe not everything,” Charlie agreed. “But with bread, you get as many as you want. What do you say we take another shot at it, all of us together?”

And they did. They made the bread again, put it in the stove to bake, and Charlie sat with the girls in the kitchen and didn’t ask them any more about their father or Noah Bluestone, but instead told them stories of mining towns and shantytowns, of battles with hired thugs, of the courage of common people in the face of great adversity. They listened as they might have to someone telling them Grimms’ fairy tales, telling them stories of places far away and maybe even only make-believe. They listened as if they were the children Charlie never had.

WHEN CHARLIE LEFT them at the front door and started for her car, which was parked in the shade of a great beech tree beside the drive, their mother and J.P. still had not returned. As she crossed the yard, she heard the sound of a tractor approaching along a lane that cut between fields to the southeast. She watched it come, shading her eyes against the glare of the June sun.

The man who occupied the seat of the John Deere was no stranger to Charlie. Tyler Creasy had been her client on a single occasion, a little under a year earlier. She’d been appointed to defend him on an assault charge arising from a bar fight. She didn’t like the man and had told him that the next time he got into trouble, he’d need to find other counsel. The problems with Creasy ran deep. He was one of the Black Earth Creasys, a notorious and unfortunate family that resided as a group in a low-lying area near the river a mile south of town, a place folks called Creasy Hollow. They ran a gas station and garage service along the road, which was backed by several dilapidated houses and a trailer home mounted on cinder blocks, set among trees that edged the Alabaster. The Creasy men tended to be gifted mechanics. They also tended to be drunks. Their wives were silent, sullen women, and their children kept to themselves and ran in packs, almost feral.

Like so many sons in Black Earth County, Tyler Creasy had been drafted in the Second World War. Charlie hadn’t known him then, but Brody had, and Brody had told her that Creasy had been a quiet, unremarkable kid. When he returned from his service, which had been mostly in North Africa and Italy, he was changed. He fought with everyone, including his own family, and he didn’t stay long in Jewel. Brody had heard nothing about him until he’d shown up eighteen months ago, bringing with him his wife and her son, who was not Creasy’s child.

Creasy drove the tractor to the gas pump near the big barn, and Charlie headed in that direction. He was just dismounting when she called his name. He wore a dirty cap with the insignia of the St. Louis Cardinals across the crown. He removed the cap, smoothed his wet, thinning hair, and put the cap back on.