“One must lose with grace, Isabelle,” George said between bites.
“Not in this instance.”
On this, his eyebrows rose. “I don’t see hearts differently from any other competition.”
“Perhaps I’m not speaking of hearts.”
He shrugged the comment away as if he hadn’t understood a word she’d uttered. Sensing that he was lost in his own mind, she turned to the window, took in the lane leading to the main road toward town. She had no green thumb, but that hadn’t stopped her from planting the squat and unpretty shrubs that paved the trail. To the side of it stood the old barn, still housing the farming tools that George’s father had stored away which George himself had little interest in. And by its rear, masked from the public eye, stretched the clothesline, naked in this instant, a simple white etching outlined in the morning dew. It was this very place her secret had been born, and just the thought of it brought color to her cheeks.
She dropped her fork onto her plate.
“I don’t like this, George,” she said. “I don’t. How do I say this…I don’t believe we’ve been honest with one another. For you to disappear at odd hours as you have. To let me burn the hotcakes and say nothing.”
He looked up from his food, placing his own fork onto his plate.
“Well. It goes without saying you turned them too late.”
She shook her head in defiance.
“It’s a matter of taste, which is entirely beside the point. Whether you wish to tell me why you’ve been off late at night, I can’t go on any longer without sharing the thoughts that fill my mind.”
He was about to speak, but she cleared her throat and went on with a declaration that came out so quietly it was nearly a whisper.
“I put our clothes on the line the morning after the rainfall, and that very same night, a man tried to steal your socks.”
“Did you say my socks?”
“I did. The gray ones I knit for you.”
Finally, she had her husband’s full attention: “Who would do such a thing?”
She explained some of it then. Going out to fetch the clothes before sundown; the feeling of being in the company of someone else; thinking it was George, smelling him when she was really smelling only the scent of his clothes.
“I nearly screamed, but when I saw him, his fear so far outweighed my own, I felt something else. Sympathy, I suppose.”
“And this was yesterday?”
“There were two occasions,” she said, and now it was Isabelle staring at her plate, unable to meet George’s gaze. “I should have told you right away. The man had been hiding behind the barn. When he stepped forward, to flee, our eyes met. He was tall. A Negro—”
She looked up then, and George was returning her glance with nothing but a look of mild curiosity. Behind his unruffled exterior was a man who had always appreciated the odd bit of gossip, the scandalous and bizarre, and she felt almost dismayed that he wasn’t more caught up in her story.
“—And he seemed utterly lost. Not only in the physical sense. It’s not something one can describe, exactly. I could tell he wished to be there, in my presence, far less than I might wish to have him, and as quickly as he was there, he was gone.”
There were emotions she was withholding. Chiefly, the pure rush of the man’s presence upon that first encounter. She could nearly count the number of times that the chance of excitement had entered her life in adulthood, and this was surely the most urgent of them. In that moment she had felt nothing but fear, yet it came upon her like an unexpected gift rather than a threat. The night it first occurred, she thought about it in bed beside George, and it was still on her mind come morning. The image of the man: his lower jaw unhinged like the bottom drawer of a dresser left open, the awkward hunch of his broad-framed shoulders.
She told herself he might be dangerous, that her preoccupation with his possible return was only reasonable considering the prospect of what he might do in the future. So when George was napping on the back porch, or off in the woods, there was nothing odd about the attention she paid to the clothesline. Yet the absence of the trespasser’s shadow at night was disappointing instead of comforting. Which only led her to keep watch about the property more closely, awaiting his reappearance as if the mystery surrounding him might reveal some hidden part of her, too. If only he would come back to divulge it.
His return two days later, as if her desire had summoned him, was a shock, something she thought would only ever take place in the workings of her imagination. She saw him before he saw her, as he was lost in his own shadow, his movements so deliberate they seemed like those of a toddler. She observed him from the safety of the house, knowing she could call George any moment from upstairs in his study, and he could come down to deal with the matter. But soon she was nearing the back door, and with the turn of the knob she was on the back porch, watching as the man once again inspected the clothes on the line.