The Giver of Stars(29)

He came down the steps from the office holding a piece of paper. ‘He’s over at Monarch Creek, at his late mother’s place. Been pretty poorly by all accounts. Turns out they’d only treat him the first couple of months in the hospital here, then he was out.’

‘Good of them.’

Sven knew well how little she regarded Hoffman. ‘What do you want him for, anyway?’

‘I wanted to find his sister. But if he’s sick, I don’t know if I should be bothering him. Last I heard she was working in Louisville.’

‘Oh, no. Mrs Pfeiffer just told me his sister’s the one looking out for him. Chances are you head over there, you’ll find her, too.’

She took the piece of paper from him and looked up. His eyes were on her, and his face softened under the black. ‘So when will I see you?’

‘Depends when you stop yammering on about getting married.’

He glanced behind him, then pulled her around the corner, placing her back against the wall as he stood close, as close as he could get. ‘Okay, how’s this? Margery O’Hare, I solemnly promise never to marry you.’

‘And?’

‘And I won’t talk about marrying you. Or sing songs about it. Or even think about marrying you.’

‘Better.’

He glanced around him, then lowered his voice, placing his mouth beside her ear so that she squirmed a little. ‘But I will stop by and do sinful things to that fine body of yours. If you’ll allow me.’

‘How sinful?’ she whispered.

‘Oh. Bad. Ungodly.’

She slid her hand inside his overalls, feeling the faint sheen of sweat on his warm skin. For a moment it was just the two of them. The sounds and scents of the mine receded, and all she could feel was the thumping of her heart, the pulse of his skin against hers, the ever-present drumbeat of her need for him. ‘God loves a sinner, Sven.’ She reached up and kissed him, then delivered a swift bite to his lower lip. ‘But not as much as I do.’

He burst out laughing and, to her surprise, as she walked back to the mule, the safety crew’s catcalls still ringing out, her cheeks had gone quite, quite pink.

It had been a long day, and by the time she reached the little cabin at Monarch Creek, both she and the mule were weary. She dismounted and threw her reins over the post.

‘Hello?’

Nobody emerged. A carefully tended vegetable patch lay to the left of the cabin, and a small lean-to skimmed it, with two baskets hanging from the porch. Unlike most of the houses around this holler, it was freshly painted, the grass trimmed and weeds beaten into submission. A red rocker sat by the door looking out across the water meadow.

‘Hello?’

A woman’s face appeared at the screen door. She glanced out, as if checking something, then turned away, speaking to someone inside. ‘That you, Miss Margery?’

‘Hey, Miss Sophia. How you doing?’

The screen door opened and the woman stood back to let Margery in, her hands on her hips, thick dark coils of hair pinned to her scalp. She lifted her head as if surveying her carefully. ‘Well, now. I haven’t seen you in – what – eight years?’

‘Something like that. You haven’t changed none, though.’

‘Get in here.’

Her face, so thin and stern in repose, broke into a lovely smile, and Margery repaid it in full. For several years Margery had accompanied her father on his moonshine runs to Hoffman, one of his more lucrative routes. Frank O’Hare figured that nobody would look twice at a girl with her daddy making deliveries into the settlement and he figured right. But while he made his way around the residential section, trading jars and paying off security guards, she would make her way quietly to the coloured block, where Miss Sophia would lend her books from her family’s small collection.

Margery had not been allowed to go to school – Frank had seen to that. He didn’t believe in book learning, no matter how hard her mother had pleaded. But Miss Sophia and her mother, Miss Ada, had fostered in her a love of reading that, many evenings, had taken her a million miles from the darkness and violence of her home. And it wasn’t just the books: Miss Sophia and Miss Ada always looked immaculate, their nails perfectly filed, their hair rolled and braided with surgical precision. Miss Sophia was only a year older than Margery, but her family represented to her a kind of order, a suggestion that life could be conducted quite differently from the noise, chaos and fear of her own.

‘You know, I used to think you were going to eat those books, you were so hungry for them. Never knew a girl read so many so fast.’

They smiled at each other. And then Margery spied William. He was seated in a chair by the window and the left leg of his pants was pinned neatly under the stump where it ended. She tried not to let the shock of it show as even a flicker on her face.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Margery.’

‘I’m real sorry to hear about your accident, William. Are you in much pain?’

‘It’s tolerable,’ he said. ‘Just don’t like not being able to work, that’s all.’

‘He’s about as ornery as all get out,’ said Sophia, and rolled her eyes. ‘He hates being in the house more than he hates losing that leg. You sit down and I’ll fetch you a drink.’

‘She tells me I make the place look untidy.’ William shrugged.