The River Widow(12)
But any vulnerability was quickly replaced with anger. Adah could sense Jesse’s pain and rage gathering from the very center of his soul. The air between them went icy despite the warmth from the engine.
“Something that don’t make sense to me,” Jesse eventually breathed out. “Lester’s no idiot. Why’d he go down to the river when it was all a-rising and rushing like that?”
She managed to say, “It was the milk cow.”
A stony silence and then, “I don’t know much yet, but I do know this: Lester didn’t go down there for no cow.”
Fear leached from the roots of her hair. Adah sat completely still.
“No,” he said as Adah now broke out in a quick sweat. “Lester was too smart to let himself get caught like that. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
The sky shifted duskier and started swirling heavier snow. Adah told herself to stay calm. Not to get carried away defending herself, which would only make her seem guilty. “I-I’m telling you what happened.”
He jerked his head. “Just don’t make sense.”
She rubbed at her eyes and whispered, “I can’t believe it happened, either.”
A long hush followed, during which Adah stole a glimpse sideways. Jesse’s facial features were coming together hotly. His neck looked monstrously thick and red. He spoke through his teeth: “There’s something more to this story.”
“Th-there’s nothing else I can tell you. We were caught unaware.”
Jesse was driving under control on roads that were icing over. He seemed far away for a moment. What was he thinking? Was he thinking about Les, or was he thinking about his parents? Was he thinking of himself, or was he thinking about Adah?
She couldn’t read him.
“I don’t get it,” he uttered with a cold fury. His lips twitched, and he gripped the steering wheel so hard Adah expected blood to come oozing out of his hands. “There’s something else, something you’re not saying, and you better believe I’m going to find out what it is.”
Now the land was a wide swath of stark white glister. She kept silent, her heart gripped with a hundred new fears. What would they do to her? And what of Daisy, the innocent in all this?
If family history held, there was no telling. The Branches had always let it be known that Adah wasn’t one of them. Les’s mother, Mabel, had always refused Adah’s help in the kitchen, and his father, Buck, had once corrected Daisy when she’d called Adah “Mama,” insisting, “She ain’t your real mother.” Yet her in-laws had always remained civil. Could she count on civility now?
Adah’s breath snagged in her throat. The idea of escape was still there, like a whisper—soft, yet insistent.
“When we get to the house, you ain’t putting one step into the room where my folks is waiting. First thing, you go on and get yourself a bath.” He glanced in her direction. “You smell like shit.”
Chapter Five
The Branch house, a well-kept white two-story with dormer windows and an inviting wraparound porch, sat on a low rise overlooking empty fields ringed halfway around the back by an unlogged hardwood forest. Off to the side of the house stood a livestock barn, a new wood-plank curing barn, an old log-sided curing barn, and a shed that housed farm equipment. Adah had never been prone to romanticizing the rural life, but the Branch place was the picture of pastoral loveliness, complete with painted wooden rocking chairs with rope seats spread across the sprawling front porch.
Jesse parked the truck at the top of the long gravel driveway in front of the house. Adah looked up to see her mother-in-law standing in the doorway with Daisy hiding behind her grandmother’s housedress skirt and thick-stockinged legs. The Branches’ two large hunting-type dogs bounded forward but didn’t bark.
As Adah opened the truck door, Daisy sprang down the front-porch steps, crying, “Mama!”
Adah stepped down onto the wet ground and immediately had the sensation of being stuck there. But Daisy, wearing the same woolen jumper she’d worn the last time Adah had seen her, threw her warm and pliable body at Adah, and her heart took a turn. The little one clung to her, burying her face in Adah’s filthy clothing, and Adah stroked Daisy’s hair, silky as fine threads. But tangled. When was the last time someone had combed her hair or put it in pigtails? She pulled in a deep breath.
This was why she had come back.
Daisy lifted her tear-streaked face and gazed at Adah. Her eyes were wide set and open, and a circle of dried milk ringed her mouth. “Where’d you go, Mama?”
Adah leaned down, smoothed Daisy’s hair, and tucked the sides behind the girl’s ears. “The flood took me away for a while,” she answered, “but now I’m back.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
Adah glanced at Jesse, who shooed her away like some annoying insect, and Adah determined to do exactly as he wished.
The Branch home was one of the first outlying farmhouses to have indoor hot and cold running water due to the New Deal. And still there were parts of town without sewers, which the Works Progress Administration was working on, and most rural homes had no running water. The Branches could afford to install the plumbing and buy toilet paper and towels for the bathroom.
In the second-story bath, Adah stripped out of her clothes and sank down into the claw-footed cast-iron tub full of warm water. Finally the remaining numbness in her toes and fingers seeped away into the fluid around her.