The End of Always: A Novel by Randi Davenport

moved beneath the skin and I nearly cried out, and then I did cry out. He smiled a little and said that I must like that and then I grew angry and leaned into him harder and into the bottomless pain that felt so familiar and so much a part of me that I knew he truly loved me.
      
    If I smiled to myself at the laundry and Inge and Johanna and Ella watched me with open curiosity as I turned to my work, I did not care. I climbed the ladder and stirred the vat. I dipped the pole and swung steaming sheets into my basket. I scrubbed the sheets until my hands bled. I saw William Oliver. But I was in the laundry room with Inge and Johanna and Ella and all he could do was come and stand next to me and examine my work. When he gave up and walked away, I smiled and shook my head and sometimes laughed. One day when I did this, he turned in the doorway and fixed me with his stare, one eyebrow raised. I ignored him. But he stayed in that doorway for a long time.
    If I stood on the back steps and watched the deliveryman load the brown paper parcels into the wagon while the western horizon turned rosy with the light at the end of the day, it was only to see that night was coming. August was coming. I felt an ache in my chest like a string wound taut and taut until it is so tight and wired that it cannot slacken except if it is plucked by the right hand or else snapped in two in the waiting.
      
    A slice of blue moonlight lay across the bottom of the garden and the wires for my mother’s bean plants carved a thin shadow across the back fence. Everywhere the night, still, cold. I worked my broom under the kitchen table. Reached down and fished a button out of the dust. Martha hummed while she washed the supper dishes. Wait till the sun shines, Nellie. My mother’s clock ticked in the front room. Hattie went up the stairs and after a minute, I heard her braces fall to the floor.
    Something tapped on the glass over the kitchen sink and Martha bent over the dishpan to peer out the window. She was wearing an old skirt that had belonged to my mother. I do not know when we started to go into her room, when we started to take her things and wrap them around ourselves, but we had. We did not talk about it. We just did it. Hattie wore my mother’s old blue coat. Martha had her skirt. I wore her shoes. The day I took them, I told myself I was just borrowing them, that it was foolish to let a perfectly good pair of shoes go to waste, but I found a reason to wear them every day.
    I could see August through the window, his shoulder and a wedge of his arm. Then he stepped away and the window went blank and glassy. I made one last pass with the broom and carried it along with the dustpan to the mudroom, where I set the dustpan on the floor. I lifted my coat from the nail by the door. Martha stepped into the doorway.
    “Who is that?” she asked.
    “It is nobody,” I said. “Do not think about it.”
    She looked at the coat in my hands. “Where are you going?”
    August tapped on the glass again.
    Martha reached out and touched my sleeve. I could see that she meant to calm herself, as if self-control was something she had practiced so long and so hard that she fell into it the way another woman might fall into a bath. But she was not entirely successful. “I hope you know what you are doing,” she said. Her voice went up a little in pitch when she spoke and that was the giveaway.
    “You do not need to worry,” I said.
    She rolled her lips together as if considering what she might say, but she could say nothing that would matter. I was not to be stopped.
    “You make that hard,” she said at last.
    “Pretend you do not even know.”
    “But I do know,” she said. “I do not know everything but I do know something.”
    “Pretend you do not,” I said again. And all the while I was thinking: Pretend you never saw him. Pretend I go out to fly through the night. Pretend I haunt the woods by myself. Pretend I am just wild. Pretend you do not