Ida knew she should call Henry, but she was beginning to seriously resent that word, should. And why should she? Where Ezra was now had nothing to do with him; it wasn’t Mose who’d gotten on that ocean liner. But—oh, she was starting to resent that word too—but Henry did have a right to know that the estate settlement might be delayed again. And Henry deserved to know that Mose had gone to Australia, that he’d wanted to send back some of the money. Yes, all right, she would have to call Henry.
Even as Ida thought it, the phone rang.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Henry said, “but I have news.” He paused. “News I’d rather not discuss over the phone.” So he knew the risk Hattie posed by now. “Is it convenient for me to stop by?”
“In fact, I was about to call you.”
Ida noted a lift in Henry’s tone. “Oh?”
Ida looked out the window. The light had yet to mellow and lengthen; Lem was moving slowly from barn to wagon, not diverting to the house as he often did after his work was done. He’s growing old, she thought. She returned her attention to the phone. “As it happens, I have my own news. But I’ll come there. To the office.”
“Very well,” Henry said, each word as level as the ground.
The short walk seemed long, made longer by the tug of Ida’s hem on her ankles. She was missing the bicycle more and more with each step, not just because of the convenience or the thrill of speed but because of the power, of that feeling that she was in charge, that she could manage her own schedule, her own direction, her own life. Silly, but still.
As if to rub Ida’s nose in it, as she crossed Main Street she saw that Henry was standing outside the office with his bicycle, talking to a woman near Ida’s age, a woman she didn’t know. As Ida watched, Henry bent down and rotated the bicycle pedal backward in a gesture Ida knew well.
“And the brake,” Henry was saying as she drew near. “Would you like to try it?”
Only then did Ida see it wasn’t Henry’s bicycle; it was a woman’s bicycle, Perry’s bicycle. Her bicycle. Ida stepped into the shadow of the wall and watched Henry as he explained everything he’d once explained to Ida, watched his hands moving so competently from handlebar to seat to brake. He looked up and spied Ida. He spoke to the woman; she nodded; he handed her what looked like a card and she walked off.
Ida stepped through the office door ahead of Henry. The first things she noticed were two more bicycles, brand-new, one a man’s and one a woman’s. Ida went for the woman’s and examined it with care—no chain, plush leather seat, perky tilt to the handlebars, a shine that could blind the sun.
“I’m sorry, that one’s sold,” Henry said behind her.
“You’re selling bicycles now?”
“Mary Ellen Bishop asked me to find her one. I was rolling it into the shop when that woman out there asked to look at it. I showed her yours instead.”
“So that’s sold too?”
Henry didn’t answer. “So you have news? I haven’t eaten since breakfast. May I invite you to share our tales over dinner?”
“What I have to say can’t be said in a public dining room.”
Henry crossed his arms and looked at her; after a minute he pointed to the stairs. “I’m sorry, but I’m famished. If I don’t eat soon—” He began to climb the stairs, lunging at them as if in a hurry to get away from her, and yet he called over his shoulder, “Come. Please.”
Ida followed. Henry went straight to the kitchen and began to set out food: half a cold meat pie with dark, rich beef and onions tumbling out of the cut, a partial loaf of bread, a bowl of apples, and a pitcher of cider, the tang of it snaking straight up Ida’s nose. He set out two plates and cut Ida a wedge of the pie; she started to protest, but she too had eaten nothing since breakfast, and the top crust was flaky and golden while the bottom was drenched with juice. She bit; it was all she’d hoped it would be and more.
“You made this?”
“Mary Ellen Bishop brought it yesterday morning. I ran into her at Luce’s.”
Of course, thought Ida. Mary Ellen Bishop was rumored to have broken off an engagement with a banker in Falmouth who had failed to disclose a mistress in Bourne, to whom he’d also failed to disclose his pending marriage. “She mustn’t have approved of your shopping list.”
“Bread and beer? I can’t think why.” Henry smiled at her and Ida responded, although they were likely smiling at separate jokes: Henry at bread and beer, Ida at the suddenly disengaged Mary Ellen Bishop digging into Henry Barstow like a tick.
“Best tell her you’re married before she starts arriving with breakfast,” Ida said.
Henry set down his fork, no longer smiling. “You said you had news.”
Ida told him about the visit from Ripley. “It seems unlikely Ezra will be held accountable.” She paused. “Or Mose.” She told Henry about Mose planning to return some of the money and was startled to see a violent flash of anger cross his features; only then did Ida realize how deeply Mose had hurt his brother, how hard Henry must have worked to keep that hurt tamped down in front of Ida. Henry got up, retreated to his room, and returned with a stiff envelope.
“Your news would explain this, then. They’ve attached the property.”
Ida picked up the envelope. Put it down. “What—”
“What does it mean? That if they can’t recoup the fraudulently obtained money any other way, the property will be sold, and the proceeds divvied up among the investors. This is what I was calling to tell you.”
Henry picked up his fork and resumed eating. Ida sat silent. She was sorry about the food; if she didn’t have a plate in front of her, if Henry didn’t, it would have been easier for her to go. She cast about for a topic. She pointed to the copper kettle leaning against the wall.
“You brought that thing up here?”
“I was trying to figure it out.”
“Did you?”
“Not . . . No.”
Ida tried again.
“How is the divorce proceeding?”
“It isn’t.” Henry set down his fork and leaned forward, a new intensity washing over him like a storm surge. “She knows about you. And now she won’t divorce. She won’t admit you’re the reason; she says only that she’s changed her mind, that she was being selfish, she could never do that to our girls.”
“How did she find out about me?”
“That time when you came to tell me about the lambs. She appeared to have seen something in my face, or heard something in my voice, I don’t know. She asked and I told her; what good did lying ever do?” He laughed, but so bitterly it didn’t sound like the usual Henry laugh Ida knew. “So now I’m the ogre for proceeding.”
“You’re proceeding?”
Henry nodded.
“But not because of—”
“Because of you? No. Silly as it may sound, I believe two people need to be on speaking terms in order to—” He cut himself off with another alien laugh.
“Then why?”
“Perhaps in some way it is because of you. I saw who she was because of you. But in fact now I’m proceeding because of my children; I didn’t want to divorce because I didn’t want to be apart from them, but now it seems I’ll be apart from them if I don’t divorce. She’s keeping them from me. When I moved in behind the carriage shop, she took them away to her parents, said she wasn’t comfortable alone in the house, said I’d abandoned them and had no right to see them anymore. Of course I do have that right and I also have a good lawyer who will see it’s secured.”
Henry continued on, more about the fancy Boston lawyer he was quite sure he couldn’t afford, but Ida didn’t hear the rest. She was running behind, stuck on that one line: When I moved in behind the carriage shop.
They had finished eating. Henry got up and carried their dishes to the sink; Ida needed no other opening to get up and go, just as she’d hoped to do for many minutes now, and yet she lingered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your children.”
He watched her.
“I have to go. Good luck with—” She hesitated.
“Starting life over? I guess you know something about that.”
“It’s not easy.”
“I’m trying to think of it as building a carriage. I work at it piece by piece, the early pieces utilitarian, the later ones decorative, the final ones the touches that say this is a Henry Barstow, this is a thing of—” He stopped.
Value. Integrity. Beauty. The words might have flowed out of Ida’s mouth a month ago, but not now.