Kay dried her hands. As she turned she had the sensation of Maria turning with her; she was two people, the way she turned and took the dish cloth and hung it over the rung along the stove door, smoothing the wrinkles. Any woman could do this, every woman did, the ritual choreography of the dish cloth. And then Maria would pause and regard the sunny, clean kitchen, how it was ready for the day: a sense of pride at the order of things. She understood that routine was an anchor, routine was putting one foot steadily in front of the other and not running or fleeing or dispersing.
At some point, in the winter, Maria became afraid, fear at first appearing like a mouse, shyly. The long, deep days, the strange light of the snow, and she began cooking extravagantly—complex dishes with marinades, requiring detailed preparation. Ingredients were difficult to source. She was able to get achiote from the Mexican restaurant; the produce manager at White’s Supermarket obtained pablano chiles for her. She peeled and stirred and chopped, she baked and sautéed as Frank began to remove items from the house. At first, just old books, drawers of junk, she hardly noticed. One day she came home and all the pictures had been taken from the walls. One morning, she woke up and he was piling her summer clothes into the back of the pick-up. She watched him drive away, the bright bouquet of fabric lifting and subsiding as he hit hardened drifts of snow.
“Kay?”
She turned again, a slow pirouette.
“Sorry. I knocked. The door was open.”
Even when Frank took the boys’ skates and coats, their toys and games, Maria stayed because she believed it was an affliction of the winter, a passing season. She chased the fear back through its little hole, back into the walls. But then, he bought the white paint, not painting. Erasing.
At last Kay’s eyes focused in on Ben. He was speaking to her. “Is everything all right?”
“I was—” she made a small sound that was supposed to be a laugh. It took her a moment. “I was not expecting anyone.”
Ben stood in the doorway, his cap in his hands. She hadn’t realized how tall he was. “I wanted to check that Ammon got those traps.”
“He did. Thank you.”
“Okay, then, well, good, problem solved.” Ben put on his cap. “I’ll see you around.” He took a step back toward the door, she took one forward.
“Wait. Ben. Let me get you a coffee.”
“Thanks but I have to be going.”
“You know this house.” The words sprang out of her.
He paused. “Yeah, I know this house.” And bent down to pick up one of Freya’s hair clips from the floor. He passed it to Kay, pressing it into her hand as if it had value.
“Maria liked to cook.”
“Did she?”
“What’s going on here, Ben?”
Ben crooked his head, as if he might see her better from a different angle. “What is it, exactly, that you’re after?”
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
He took a moment. “But who are you that I should tell you?” His words were Michael’s, were Sam’s, a hard, masculine backwall against which she might hurl her hysterical self. Ben went on, “I don’t know you. You’re not from here. You start asking questions about people, and those questions have implications, you have some kind of agenda, and I have to wonder, what could it be.”
“Concern.”
“About people you’ve never met?”
“Aren’t you concerned about them?”
He turned away for a moment, looking around the kitchen with the same attention he’d given her car. “You alone up here?”
She looked at him. The question was loaded with menace or it was entirely innocuous. Ben was unreadable. “Yeah,” she said. “My husband’s away.”
“You’re a city person, then.”
“It’s not that. I’m not scared because I don’t know how to milk a cow or whatever it is I need to prove my toughness here. I’m not scared.” Her arms were folded tight across her chest, so she unfolded them to make the point. “I’ve been a journalist for years, in all kinds of hairy places, and I know something is wrong.”
There was no recrimination in his voice, just a calm negation: “Frank and Maria—their lives are none of your business. You’re renting their house, that’s all.”
Briefly, he tipped his fingers to his cap, “Enjoy your vacation.” He smiled. Beguiling as a woman, Kay thought. For she felt the smile, where he’d aimed it, way down low.
She listened to the sound of his truck fade. She could hear it for a long time, clanking along the drive, then down the hill, around the bend. Odd how sound didn’t work the other way: you couldn’t, so easily, hear people approaching the house.