A widowed mother showed up at a reclusive old woman’s gate with two children and nowhere to sleep—then told her, “You need someone to care for you as much as we need a home.”

Chapter 5

The first thing Nora did was the yard.

Elsie told her not to bother — it had been down for two years, it wasn’t worth the effort, there wasn’t even anything to put in it. Nora listened politely and said, “Yes, ma’am,” because she still slipped into it when she was distracted. And the next morning, Elsie woke to the sound of post hitting post.

She went out onto the veranda and found Nora raising the yard posts alone — a crowbar, a coil of rope, and her bare hands. Ruby handed her the nails one at a time. Archie sat on a wooden crate in the shade, chewing a piece of harness leather, so delighted by this development that he drooled.

“That strength — where do you get it?” Elsie called from the veranda.

Nora wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “From spite,” she said, and kept working.

It took her four days. On the fourth afternoon the yard stood up — crooked by a degree or two, but firm. And in it, Nora had put the cow: a thin, skittish bush cow that had been wandering the back paddock for two years, which she had chased down, roped, walked in, and milked.

That evening she set a jug of warm milk on the kitchen table.

Elsie looked at it as if it were a miracle. “I haven’t had milk in two years,” she said.

“Well, drink it.”

Elsie drank it slowly, with both hands around the jug, and when she set it down her eyes were wet, and it was not the milk doing it.

The shed came next. Elsie offered it on the second day, with the gruffness that was now her only way of being kind. “The shed’s out the back. Clean it. It’s got a roof.” Nora cleaned it in an afternoon: swept out twenty years of dust, threw out three rat nests, patched two leaks with scraps of iron, and put the rolled mattress in the least cold corner. And there they slept, all three, huddled together, warm for the first time in three months, under a roof no one could take away from them.

Every night, Elsie watched from her window. She saw the stub of candle in the shed, saw Nora’s shadow moving, saw the light go out at nine. And then she stayed a little longer, looking at the darkness where they were, before she went to her own bed.

That was the first thing she noticed. She slept differently. She no longer checked the bolt twice. She no longer woke at three in the morning with her heart slamming against her ribs for no reason at all. There were people on her land.

The weeks settled into a routine. Nora rose at five, lit the stove, made the tea, drew the water, milked the cow, swept the yard. By half past six, when Elsie dragged her walker out of her bedroom, the tea was already poured and the smell of damper hung in the air. Elsie sat down, ate little, and grumbled a great deal.

“The tea’s too weak. Make it stronger tomorrow.”

“At dawn I’ll remember that.”

“The damper’s burnt on one side.”

“Turn it sooner.” Nora would raise one eyebrow. “Are you worried about the damper, or about me?”

“I’m worried about my floor. It’s flagstone, and it costs money.”

And Nora would laugh — a soft, helpless laugh that she shook her head over, and go on sweeping. Elsie pretended not to see the laughter. But afterwards she would sit in her rocking chair and look out the window with an expression that was difficult to name. The expression of someone learning a thing late in life, and finding it stranger than they expected.

Ruby was another matter.

Ruby did not approach. For the first week and a half, the child behaved like a bush cat. She ate what was given to her, slept where she was told to sleep, obeyed her mother without question, and avoided Elsie with astonishing skill. When Elsie entered the kitchen, Ruby left it. When Elsie sat on the veranda, Ruby found urgent business in the yard. It was not rudeness. It was something else, and Elsie could not name it, and it nettled her more than she cared to admit.

On the eighth day, she caught her.

The girl was crossing the veranda at a run, an egg cupped in both hands, and Elsie had planted herself square in the rocking chair, and Ruby miscalculated. She tried to swerve at the last step, and the old woman’s voice pinned her to the boards.

“Ruby.”

The child stopped.

“Come here.”

Ruby came three steps and stood there, clutching the egg.

“Why are you scared of me?”

“I’m not scared of you.”

“Then why do you keep running off from me?”

Ruby pressed her lips together. Elsie waited. She was seventy-eight years old. She knew how to wait better than anyone alive.

“Because you’re going to die,” the child said.

The veranda went very still.

Elsie felt the air leave her chest. “What did you say?”

Ruby looked up, her eyes dry, her chin set, and she spoke in that flat, plain voice of children who state the truth without any ornament. “My dad fell off a roof. I loved him very much, and he died.” She swallowed. “And I loved my nan, and she died too. And you’re older than my nan. And you walk with that.” She pointed at the walker. “So I know what’s going to happen.”

Elsie opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

“And I don’t want to,” Ruby said, and for the first time her voice trembled. “I don’t want to love you and then have you die. I’ve already had two. I don’t deserve another one.” And she turned and ran.

The egg fell and burst on the flagstones. She did not look back.

Elsie was left alone on the veranda, both hands on the walker’s frame, the morning sun falling warm on her knees, and for the first time in eighteen years, Elsie Hartley cried.

She did not cry beautifully. She cried ugly — mouth open, silent, the way old people cry who no longer have the strength for sobs. She cried for Tom, bloated on the riverbank with his eyes open. She cried for Edie, burning with fever, asking for water. She cried for Bert in the pine box with his hands crossed. She cried for eighteen years in the rocking chair. And she cried, most of all, because a six-year-old girl had just told her, to her face, the only truth she had spent her whole life refusing to look at. People hurt when you die. And if she died alone in that house, no one would hurt. And that, in the end, was the thing she had chosen, eighteen years ago, on the afternoon she had turned the lock on the children’s room and dropped the key into the drawer under the tablecloths.