Page 7 of Mail Order Mercy

“Then feed me breakfast,” Albert said.

She blinked. “What?”

“I’m tired of mill breakfasts. You cook the eggs, I eat some, and we call it square.”

“That is not square,” Dorothy said. “That is you inventing numbers until they suit you.”

“I was never much good with numbers,” Albert said. “But I know when a man is hungry, and a woman has eggs in her hand.”

He kept his tone light because lightness seemed to help Dorothy keep her pride. If he sounded too earnest, she would hear charity in every word and shut the door against him. Albert was learning that helping Dorothy required more care than lifting lumber. A man could bruise a person’s dignity without ever meaning to.

Dorothy tried to look stern, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her. “You are very troublesome before sunrise.”

Dorothy looked down at the basket. It was not charity if she fed him in return. It was still more help than she could ever repay, but it gave her hands something useful to do besides taking. “Come in before the eggs freeze,” she said.

She told herself she was only accepting a bargain. That was safer than admitting how much she had wanted to open the door each morning and find the pail waiting there. Wanting help felt dangerous. Wanting Albert’s help felt worse, because Henry’s name stood between them like a grave marker she could not step around.

The cabin was crowded with Albert inside, but the children made room for him as if he had always belonged there. Clara sat close to the table and watched Dorothy crack eggs into the pan with the careful attention of someone witnessing a miracle. Tommy climbed onto a stool and asked Albert whether chickens minded giving eggs away.

“I never asked one,” Albert said. “But if I do, I’ll bring you the answer.”

Tommy considered that with great seriousness. “Ask nice.”

“Chickens don’t talk,” Clara said from her place near the table.

Tommy frowned. “How do you know? Maybe they talk when people aren’t listening.”

“Then I shall be extra polite,” Albert said. “I would hate to offend a chicken with influence.”

For the first time in weeks, breakfast smelled like more than watered meal. Dorothy cooked the eggs with a little salt and warmed milk for the children. She gave Albert a plate because that was the bargain, but she noticed he took less than a hungry workingman should have and pushed the rest toward Tommy when he thought she was not looking.

“Henry used to say you could make a feast out of two eggs and a heel of bread,” Albert said.

Dorothy’s hand stilled over the stove. “He said that?”

“More than once. He bragged about your biscuits, too. Claimed no man at the mill had tasted anything worth eating until he married you.”

Dorothy looked down before Albert could see too much in her face. She had been afraid to speak Henry’s name except in whispers to the children, afraid the sound would tear open what little healing had begun. Instead, the memory warmed her in a place grief had left cold. “I burned the first biscuits I ever made for him,” she said. “He told me the black bottoms added flavor.”

Albert smiled. “That sounds like Henry. Loyal even when a biscuit threatened his life.”

Albert had meant only to give her a memory Henry would have wanted shared. He had not expected the small smile it brought to Dorothy’s face to affect him so strongly. For a moment, she looked less like a woman bent beneath winter and more like the Dorothy Henry used to describe with laughter in his voice. Albert felt the warmth of that look and then the guilt of noticing it.

Dorothy surprised herself by smiling back.

The smile frightened her almost as much as hunger had. It had come without permission, called up by Henry and carried in Albert’s voice, and it settled over her shoulders like a quilt warmed near the stove. She did not know what to do with comfort that came from Albert.

After breakfast, Albert stepped outside to check the stacked wood and looked up at the roof. From the ground, he could see a sag near the back corner and two places where the shingles had lifted. When the spring thaw came, water would find every weakness.

“Does it leak?” he asked when Dorothy came to the doorway with Grace on her hip.

Dorothy followed his gaze. “Only when the sun is warm enough to melt what has frozen above us. It drips near the children’s pallet sometimes. I move them when I can.”

Albert’s stomach tightened. “That roof needs fixing before thaw.”

“I know.” Dorothy’s tone said she had known for a long while, and knowing had not made lumber appear. “I cannot pay for materials.”

Albert looked down at his sleeve. “I have two shirts that need mending.”