AFTER MILES HAS GONE, SARAH looks for Brush, who is nowhere to be seen. She checks the usual spots: the sawdust pile near the sawmill shack, the edge of the brush near Emily’s pen, the hill overlooking the cabin. No dog. She shivers. The air is damp and cold in the late afternoon. Snow is falling again. She feeds Emily and, after a last look around the silent yard, heads into the cabin.
“Miles back yet?” her father asks, coming in with another armful of firewood.
“Not yet.”
He glances through the window, then kneels by the stove and tends the fire. Her mother tends to the woodstove—she’s making corn bread for dinner. Sarah herself curls up close to the woodstove with a book, one of her old favorite fantasy novels; but she can’t concentrate.
She steps into the kitchen area, which is warm and smells good. “Need any help?” she asks her mom.
“Not really, dear,” Nat says cheerfully.
Sarah goes to the small window and looks out. The light is grayer still, and the yard is silent and ever smaller because of the thickening snow. No Brush. And no Miles.
She goes back by her mom and perches on a stool. “How did you meet Dad?”
Her mother pauses. She turns to Sarah with a smile—and a glance at Artie, who is lost in his music. “At the university in Minneapolis—I thought you knew that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sarah says impatiently. “But how did it happen?”
“I stalked him,” her mother says, stirring the yellow batter with a wooden spoon.
“What?!”
Her mother laughs. “He was in this intro to music class I had to take—what do I know about music?—and I thought he was cute. Brown, curly hair. Totally absorbed in the lessons. It was like there was no one else in the room except him and the professor. And your dad knew his stuff. He asked questions that no one else had even thought of—including the professor.”
“And?”
“And there’s nothing like being ignored that makes a woman competitive,” her mother says.
“So you made the first move?” Sarah presses.
“You could say that, yes,” her mother answers. There is color in her face now; maybe it’s the warmth of the kitchen or maybe it’s the memory. “The semester was almost over before I mustered up courage. I managed to walk out of class next to him, pretending to be totally confused about that day’s lesson.”
“You played dumb! No way!” Sarah exclaims.
Her mother picks up on the teasing. “I guess I did, yes. Hey, sometimes we girls gotta do what we gotta do.”
“What happened next?”
“That particular day?”
Sarah nods.
“We went to the student union, had coffee, and went over the lesson—it was musical notation, I remember—and he showed me how to tap it out with my fingers.”
“That’s sort of romantic,” Sarah says. She glances at her father.
“I thought so,” her mother says. “Especially when he got impatient and said, ‘You’re not quite getting it. Here, give me your hand.’”
“Whoa,” Sarah says.
“Exactly,” her mother answers with a sideways glance at her husband. “So he took my hand in his, turned mine palm up, and did this slow, drumming thing on it with his fingers while I read the chart.”
“How come you never told me this?” Sarah asks.
Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know,” she says with a serious look on her face. “I should have. Long ago. Back at home, there was never time.”
They are both silent for long moments.
“Anyway,” her mother says, “gradually he stopped drumming on my palm, and I stopped looking at the chart. We just looked into each other’s eyes.”
“And you were still holding hands!” Sarah adds.
“Very good!” her mother says, and laughs.
Sarah looks across the kitchen to her father, then out the little window, to the gray-blue sky. “That kind of thing will never happen to me,” she says, and sticks out her lower lip.
“Why of course it will!” her mother says; she drops her spoon into the bowl with a clatter and comes over to wrap Sarah in a big hug.
Sarah begins to sniffle and lets her mother continue to squeeze her. The moment might go on forever but for an odd thudding on the porch, then a scratching on the door.
She and her mother look quizzically at each other.
“Brush?” Sarah asks, and hurries to the door.
But it is Miles. Miles lying there, covered in dirt and snow, with his left foot turned the wrong way.
“Accident.” He groans, and slumps in the doorway.