We will probably get no eggs today on account of them being stressed, but we have three from the day before, in the red bowl on the counter.
Inside, Finch has the cast-iron skillet on the cookstove, heating up. She sits on the couch reading a book.
“You all right?”
She looks up and there—flash, memory, a seething wound. Cindy, Finch’s mother. Like seeing a ghost and I love it and hate it at the same time. Her blond hair and her green eyes, those are Cindy’s, no doubt. That in and of itself has always seemed to be some sort of revolt against the probabilities of genetics: my dark hair and brown eyes should’ve won out. But it’s also the way she looks at me, the way she walks, toes pointed out, the way she winds her hair around her pointer finger. All of it, Cindy’s. Her expressions, most of all. How Finch could have and be those things when the two of them only knew each other for four months.
“I’m a little mad at you,” Finch says. “For what you did in the yard.” She looks away.
I pour a teaspoon of canola oil into the skillet. Measure it because we are always rationing, always keeping track. Tomorrow, December 14th, Jake—my buddy from the Army, he owns the place—should be here with supplies. His annual trip and frankly, the highlight of our whole year. But every year at this time, I’m sweating a bit. Thinking about what it would mean for us if he doesn’t show up. We’d need to expand our hunting, maybe dig out the traps in the loft of the cabin. Most troubling of all, we’d need to go out and get supplies.
It could happen, him not coming, and I know that; it’s always lurking at the edge of my mind, me and Finch at the start of winter without ample food. The snow piling up, the roads unpassable. I pluck an egg from the red bowl. “I’m sorry about Susanna.”
“It’s just that maybe we could’ve nursed her back to health. Maybe she would’ve been all right, if she’d had some time. If you’d given her a chance.”
“No, Finch. That raccoon had her by the neck, and it was broke, I saw how it was bent.” I turn from the woodstove and look her in the eye. “Maybe it would’ve taken a while, but she wasn’t gonna make it, sugar.”
“Well,” she says quietly, “I don’t see how that makes it right, what you did.”
I crack two eggs and drop them into the skillet, edges turning white, hissing, lifting. I sprinkle the white clover and add a dash of salt. “Sometimes what’s right isn’t all that cut-and-dried, Finch. Hate to say it, but it’s true.”
She stretches her legs out onto the little green trunk we use as a coffee table and then snaps her book closed. She walks the book over to the bookshelf in the corner and slides it into place—tidy little creature, Finch is, with the books organized by genre—and then spins to look at me. She saunters over, mouth twisting to the side. “But you always say there’s a right and wrong, and you have to do what’s right,” she says, peering into the skillet. She looks up at me. Those penetrating green eyes, wanting an answer.
But. This house with two rooms and four blankets, an old table, a bookcase. We have a kettle, a Dutch oven, a cast-iron skillet. A sink with a little window that looks out over the long dirt road that leads here. Two shelves above the woodstove. A small and insulated world for both of us, and there is a simplicity to it that makes it difficult to explain the complexities of life. The unreliable and often shifting line between right and wrong. The truth is, sometimes Finch probes for answers that I simply cannot give her, not because I don’t want to, but because there is too much to explain. She has never known anything but this cabin, the woods that hold it. It’s the life I chose for us. Well—it wasn’t so much a choice, I guess. It was the only way.
Let it suffice for me to say this: sometimes bad things happen and you’re unprepared and you make choices that seem good to you at the time, and then you look back and wish there were things you could undo, but you can’t, and that’s that.
I flip the egg and the yolk sizzles.
“Jake will be here soon,” I say, hoping to divert her attention.
She grins. “I know. Tomorrow.”
I look at my watch: a Seiko, doesn’t need a battery. Nicest thing I’ve ever owned, a graduation gift from Aunt Lincoln. Thirty-three hours. Maybe thirty-two if he times it right and misses the traffic. We’ll hear the engine, first: a low purr against the whisper of pines. We’ll see the truck emerge, the silver hood gleaming in the sun, the branches that hang over the road, lifting like a drawn curtain. He’ll pull into the yard, quiet the engine. He’ll climb from the truck, use his arm to lift the bad leg, wince as he stands. He’ll lean against his cane and grin, that wide smile, his mouth the only part of his face that made it through the blast unscathed.