Ora is still out with the animals when Dale comes back into the station. He walks through the store to the kitchen, where he guesses he’ll find supper on the table, Ora waiting. But the kitchen is empty, the table bare. He surveys the kitchen with bemusement. When he looks toward the window above the sink for signs of Ora in the yard, he finds it’s grown dark enough outside that in the glass he can see nothing but his own blurred reflection: a man standing alone in a room.
He crosses the kitchen to the screen door, calls through it. “Ora?”
He listens: bugs, katydids. He looks up, finds the face in the risen moon.
“Ore?”
His voice doesn’t echo; the fields swallow the sound.
He frowns, pushing open the door, and he’s about to step outside to look for his wife when he notices her shadow, cast by moonlight on the other side of the shed. She’s leaning up against the building, he can tell by her slanting shadow, and he can tell by her silence that she wants not to be found.
Quietly, he lets the door close and turns into the kitchen. His back is tired and the chair beckons, but he doesn’t want to sit down, doesn’t want to think. Instead, he crosses to the stove, where the burner is on beneath the stew. He stirs the bubbling liquid, as he imagines Ora would do, and then he starts to set the table: straw placemats, white china plates yellowing with age, plastic cups cloudy with scratch marks. He folds the paper napkins carefully, can’t remember where the fork goes, on the left or on the right, can’t remember which goes inside, spoon or knife. He stirs the stew. He puts bowls atop the plates, in case that’s what she intended, and fills their cups with cold water from the jug. He moves the forks to the other side, but it looks wrong, and he moves them back again. He stirs the stew. He sees corn bread on the counter, so decides to take the bowls away, and then he hears Ora in the doorway.
“You can leave those,” she says.
He turns, a bowl in either hand. Ora is leaning against the door frame, watching him, and from her posture it seems that she has been watching for some time.
“Turned out soupier than I intended,” she says. “Bowls’ll be better.” She straightens up and takes the bowls from his hand, puts a hunk of corn bread in each, and then ladles atop the corn bread steaming spoonfuls of stew. She sets the bowls on the table, then gets a salad of cucumber and radish from the fridge. Dale stands just where he was when she came in, watching her, so near, yet so distant, her heart half a world away. Dale wants her back the way she wants Tobe, and he fears that to show her the letter would be to lose them both.
“Well, go on now, sit,” she says, meeting his gaze as she squeezes a lime over the vegetables. “What are you standing there for?”
Dale obeys. “Smells good,” he says, spooning up a bite, which he lets cool for a moment before putting it in his mouth.
“Should be all right.” Ora sits down, shifting her place setting so that it is not directly across from him, and a third spot glares.
For a few moments, they eat in silence. Dale tries to think of conversation, but his mind keeps coming back to the letter in his pocket. He looks at Ora across the table, and his heart starts to race.
He clears his throat. “Everything OK out there, with the animals?”
“Just fine. Got more eggs than I can do with.”
“Can send some home with Benny. He brought some figs. I set ’em on the counter,” Dale says, gesturing.
Ora nods. “I’ll pack some up,” she says. And then they are quiet again. Their spoons click and scrape in the silence.
“Benny said ol’ Art’s gone to see the execution,” Dale says, after a minute.
Ora looks up questioningly, her spoon full.
“Execution over in St. Martinville,” Dale says. “Been in the paper. Thought you’d a heard.”
Ora shakes her head.
“They brung the chair down from Angola.”
“Execution for what?” Ora asks, spoon still in midair.
Dale shrugs, scrapes up his last bit of stew. “Some damn nigger raped a girl, some such,” he says. He puts the bite into his mouth.
Ora’s eyes harden, and she sets her spoon down. “Wish you wouldn’t use that word.”
“I’ll say nigger if he acts like one, raping a girl like that.” He swallows his mouthful.
“And what if it was a white man did the raping?” Ora asks. “What would you call him, then?” she demands, and in the singular inquisitive expression on her face Dale so clearly sees their son that the hard truth of the letter he’s been hiding hits him like a kick in the gut.
His eyes flicker and dart around the room. He pushes back from the table and brings his bowl to the stove, and he stands there and he fills it, and he fills it because though he isn’t hungry, he cannot let Ora see him fighting not to cry.