As she drove into town, rolling down the window didn’t help her sort out the tangles in her brain. She touched the knitting on the seat next to her in the same way she used to touch her suitcase’s clasp.
Bertha. She had to find Bertha.
She wasn’t at Tillie’s. She wasn’t at the market, or the post office, or the small town library. Bertha was so rarely at home – no time for it, she’d say, got too many other places to be – that her house was the last place Eliza tried.
The curtains were drawn, even though it was now past nine. No one answered Eliza’s knock, and when she pushed the door open, the silence that met her was strangely thick.
“Bertha?” she called. “It’s me, Eliza. Are you home? May I come in?”
“Who is it?”
“Eliza,” she repeated. “Are you all right?” She went down the dark hallway to the first open door.
“I’m fine,” said Bertha in a small voice, which worried Eliza – usually Bertha was as quiet as a freight train. She was sitting under a green knitted afghan and looked small propped up against her pillows.
Eliza hurried to her. “Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?”
“No doctor for what I’ve got.”
“What? What is it?” She sat on the edge of the bed.
Bertha smiled. “Really, child. It’s no worry. I’m just busy being sad today. As long as you’re here, though, can you get me my knitting basket from the parlor?”
“Of course. And a cup of tea,” said Eliza firmly. “I’ll be right back.”
Tea at hand, served with a homemade banana muffin from the kitchen, Eliza settled at the foot of Bertha’s bed. A ray of sunlight came through the open curtains and warmed Eliza’s back.
Bertha smiled thinly. “You look like a cat, all tucked up there.”
“I love a good puddle of sunshine,” said Eliza, holding her knitting gently. “Now, eat a bite of your muffin. That’s good. Tell me about the sadness.”
“You’re not usually this bossy.”
“I’ve never had to be with you.”
Bertha carefully wrapped the yarn around her needle. “Every year, on this day, I stay in bed and cry.”
“Why this particular day?”
“My husband Nathaniel died on it. Twelve years ago.”
On a previous visit to Bertha’s, Eliza had seen Nathaniel’s picture, hung on the parlor wall in a place of honor. “You talk about everything, and everyone else. But never about him.”
Bertha inclined her head.
“Why?”
“Because it still hurts too much.”
Eliza spoke slowly, measuring her words. This felt important – she needed to get it right. “You were happy together. Will you tell me about that?”
“What do you mean? What more can I say? We were happy. What more do you want me to say?” Bertha stabbed at the shawl she was making.
“I don’t know if I believe in true love. True happiness.”
“It exists,” Bertha said crossly. “That I know.”
Eliza leaned forward and kept her eyes on Bertha’s. “Then tell me about it.”
With a sigh, Bertha set the shawl down. She closed her eyes. “I don’t talk about him because if I do, I might get something wrong. And if I get something wrong, I might start to believe it myself, and then what I know about him won’t be true anymore.” She stopped speaking.
Eliza waited a beat and then said, “Tell me anyway. Trust yourself.”
Bertha’s eyes slowly opened, and she picked up the shawl again. She knitted almost a whole row. Eliza let the silence settle between them.
Finally Bertha said, “People talk about their perfect love being their other half. The piece that makes them whole. Nathaniel and I were never like that. We were oil and water. He liked things quiet and orderly and tidy. I liked things loud and messy. I wanted to live. He wanted peace. When he ate an apple, he had a procedure, a formula that he had to follow every time.”
“What was the formula?”
Bertha smiled, her face suddenly as bright as the sunlight that bathed her cheeks. “He’d wash it twice and would only dry it on a tea-towel I hadn’t yet used. He didn’t mind germs, he just didn’t like the taste of dust, he always said. Then he’d twist the stem off, going through the alphabet. A, B, C, no matter when the stem came off, he’d go back to B. “B is for Bertha,” he’d say. Then he’d get out his pocketknife – only that would do, none of my knives could possibly be sharp enough – and he’d divide it into eight equal pieces and cut out the pips. He ate each piece one after another, chasing each slice with three huge gulps of milk. Every afternoon, he did this, every afternoon at three o’clock sharp. Didn’t matter if I’d got lunch on the table late that day, if we’d just finished eating an hour earlier. He wanted his apple at three, and nothing else would do.”
“What about when apples weren’t in season?”
Bertha laughed. “You don’t even want to know what he would do to an orange.”
“Was he particular about everything?”
Tilting her head to the side, Bertha said, “You would think. You’d think he’d want me to keep the house in a certain way, wouldn’t you? But no. No matter what I wore, whether it was my Sunday best or my cleaning housedress, he said I was the prettiest thing he ever saw. If I burned the roast, he said the char was tasty. Once I put a cup of salt into a batch of his favorite blueberry muffins instead of sugar. I don’t like blueberries, so I didn’t try one. Wasn’t till I fed one of that batch to a neighbour that I learned what I’d done – he’d been choking them down for days. He would have died before criticizing me.” Her words dropped as slowly, in time with the stitches that slipped from one needle to the other. “He could have criticized me, you know. Everyone does. It’s what marriage is about – getting irritated, and then forgiving what made you that way. Loving anyway. That’s what I was always doing to him. Forgiving him for his errors. He just never seemed to hold anything against me.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Sometimes I’d get so mad at that man. I wanted to rile him! To make him lose control! To make him use a different goldurn knife to cut his dadgummed apple. Once I pretended I forgot his birthday. All day, I felt terrible, but I wanted to see what he’d do. I wanted to see him get at least a little bit annoyed. The man wasn’t human the way he forgave.”
“What happened?”
“I confessed the next morning, and gave him his present, a new razor and strop. I cried. The worst part was that he’d forgotten his own birthday, too. Said there was nothing to forgive me for. Oh!” Bertha put her hand to her mouth and seemed to be holding back a sob.
Eliza sat as still as possible and waited. She didn’t knit. She barely breathed.
“That man loved me so hard I knew I’d never do half of what I should to deserve it. And that was the point. He said I never had to do a thing to make him love me. He just did. He just loved me.” Bertha’s voice broke. “Do you know what that’s like?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Eliza, ignoring the image of Joshua’s blue eyes that appeared in her mind.
“I wish that for you,” said Bertha. “I wish that for every woman, but I know it doesn’t happen for most, and for that I’m truly sorry. That man. The one you ran away from?”
“My husband.”
“Did you . . .”
“I don’t think I ever loved him at all.” Eliza released a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“Why did you marry him?”
“He dared me to.” She snorted. “What a ridiculous reason. The truth is I was trying to stay in one place – near my sister. I thought maybe if I married, I’d figure out how to stay. I ended up running again, though. I always do.”
“But you told me, that first day in Tillie’s, that you had a good reason to run.”
Eliza imagined George’s fist, rushing toward her. “A very good reason.”
“That’s being sensible, Eliza. That’s a virtue, not a flaw. What else makes you want to run?”
Eliza thought hard before she answered. The knitting helped, giving her fingers something to grasp while she struggled to hold on to her flying thoughts. “Fear.”
“Of what?”
“That I’ll end up in the same place.”
“As what?”
“As where I started.”
Bertha asked gently, “And that was . . .”
“The orphanage. With my sister.”
“Oh, you poor wee things. How long were you there?”
“We were there fifteen years. I was tall and gangly at every age, and Honey has a lazy eye. No one wanted us, and Sister Margaret Luke wouldn’t let us be adopted separately. When I was seventeen, I got my first job. I rented a tiny apartment, and took Honey out of there. I worked three jobs to pay for us both to go to college.”
“That doesn’t sound like running to me.”
The steady clicking of Bertha’s needles soothed Eliza. “When I graduated, when I knew Honey was going to be okay, I left. I went to Europe and taught English in three different countries. I barely stayed in one place more than three months at a time.”
“Sounds adventurous.”
“It was cowardly. Every time I made an attachment, I’d leave. First chance I got. Out like a shot. Dang it.” Another stitch dropped from her left needle as if it had a will of its own.
“Don’t hold the needles so tightly. They need room to breathe, so they can dance. No, like this.” Bertha scooted forward and adjusted Eliza’s fingers. “Don’t wrap the yarn around your finger like that – you’ll cut off the circulation to it like farmers do with a lamb’s tail. Don’t want your finger dropping off, do we? Why doesn’t Joshua run sheep?”
“What?”
“He should. He’s got those cattle, but with that hilly land sheep would do better. Then you could have the wool.”
“I’m not staying.”
“Why not?”
“Because we . . . we’re . . . I just work for him.”
“Then why are your cheeks so flushed, my darling?”
Eliza scrubbed her face with her hands. “No reason.”
“He’s a good man. Doesn’t talk much, but neither did Nathaniel.”
Despite herself, Eliza blurted, “He talks all the time.”
Bertha sat back with a look of satisfaction. “Oh, he does, does he?”
“Bertha! I’m not staying.”
Bertha dropped the shawl into her lap and raised her hands. “Of course! You leave whenever you like, darlin’. Just say goodbye to me before you go, promise?”
“I promise.”
“And remember, staying is sometimes the most exciting thing there is.”
The words stayed, strung like soft yarn between them. Eliza felt their import, their weight, but couldn’t respond.
“Now leave me, sweet girl. I’ve been looking forward to crying all day for weeks, and I’ve barely got started.”