“Go ahead.”
She opened the notebook and started writing. Columns: numbers, words, arrows. Mike watched. Then finally asked:
“What are you doing?”
“Figuring things out,” she said without looking up.
He stood, walked over, and looked over her shoulder. On the page she had written: what the farm still had, what it needed, rough prices, timelines.
Chickens first—fastest return, eggs by spring. Garden, seed stock: maybe something left in the cellar from last year, worth checking. Two dairy cows by summer, if they could work out payments or make a deal with a farmer in the next county.
Mike looked at it. Something dull and heavy rose in his chest, not quite anger but close to it.
“It’s my farm,” he said. “I know all that.”
Sarah closed the notebook calmly, without offense.
“Of course,” she said. She didn’t argue, didn’t explain. She just put it away. But she didn’t throw it out. She slid it neatly back into the drawer.
Mike went back to the couch, picked up the bottle, set it down, picked it up again, set it down again. Outside the snow kept blowing, maybe the same storm as yesterday, maybe a new one; in January they came one after another. Sophie slept in the back room. The kitchen clock ticked.
Mike lay there staring at the ceiling. Thinking about the notebook. About the numbers in it. About how he knew every one of them, every timeline, every item, knew them and had done nothing. A year and a half of nothing. And she had come in from the road in soaked slippers with a child in her arms and in one morning had worked out everything he’d been putting off for two years.
The bottle sat on the edge of the couch. He stared at the ceiling, then picked it up and slid it under the couch. First time in a very long while. Not because he’d made some grand decision, not because he’d sworn anything. He just put it away.
Then he kept lying there, staring at the ceiling and thinking about chickens, the field, the tractor under the shed that he hadn’t started in two summers, whether it would turn over. Probably would. It was a good tractor, nearly new when they bought it.
He and Laura had bought it together. She’d laughed at how he talked to the tractor like it was alive, coaxing it to start in the cold. He’d said, “Well sure. Machines do better when you treat ’em right.”
He stared at the ceiling a long time, thinking about that, then fell asleep without drinking. Just fell asleep. Outside, the January wind howled. Firewood cracked in the stove. In the back room, a little girl named Sophie breathed softly in her sleep.
The house was full of people. For the first time in a year and a half. The first few days were strange—not bad, just strange. The way it feels when a house that’s been quiet too long suddenly has sounds in it again.
A floorboard creaking at six in the morning—that was Sarah getting up before everyone else to start the fire. A low voice—that was her saying something to Sophie so she wouldn’t wake anybody. The smell of boiled potatoes or onions in a skillet. Water running.
All of it was ordinary life, ordinary household sounds, but Mike hadn’t heard them in so long that now they woke him up, and he’d lie there with his eyes open not quite understanding what was happening. Then he’d remember and not know what to do with it. He got irritated…
