Mending Fences

The porch smelled of geraniums and earth. Potted ferns abounded on the floor. Begonias and snapdragons tumbled from boxes strewn along the railing, and ivy twisted upward round the posts and clung to the eaves, blocking the late May sun. Across the floorboards drifts of plant dust had formed, green chaff from the sidewalk maples mixed with litter from the porch blooms. Will Mehring stepped over them and peeked through the screen door. There was no one in the parlor to catch him doing it. But, from deep within the house, radio music greeted him, a song blurred with the creaking and scraping of Helen’s old washing machine. Will cocked his ear and heard a bluesy tenor grieving over the sound of an electric guitar. He listened for a moment, his heart in his throat. All day long he’d let the concerns of his trip busy his mind—the blistering roads, the men who’d picked him up, their tales of woe. Now he’d arrived. Home. Raising his hand to the latch, he whispered, “Lord, let this go right.”

Darkened behind drawn shades, the living room exuded a familiar scent—the stale breath of his wife’s mourning. It stalled Will by the door. The radio was cut off in the kitchen and Helen called out, “Dan?” She waited. “Son?” Then, plaintively, yet as undisturbed as if Will had been out for a little stroll, her voice came again: “Will?”

That drew him through the long room to the kitchen doorway. Helen stood beyond the table in a blue housedress he remembered from their good years, her eyes locked on his. Piled in a basket on the table were the linens and clothes she had wrung out. The washing machine shimmied before her. Helen’s face, sunken a little in her cheeks, permitted his stare through a film of sweat. Will had forgotten her beauty—her slender features, the jonquil-like sheen of her skin, her olive eyes—or had renounced it like a failed belief or a lost pleasure too painful to remember. He couldn’t speak.

Helen turned off the washing machine. “I wasn’t sure I’d be here to meet you when you walked in. I thought of slipping out the back door and running to—well, God knows where.”

His mouth creaked open. “How did you know I was nearby?”

“Ranny Kindig saw you waltzing through Ulrich’s fields. Waltzing is his word; he beat you here to tell me. Within the hour half the town will know you’re home.” She’d tried to speak in a light tone, but her hands, clenching the rim of the tub, betrayed her distress. “Are you home?”

“I want to be. You have some say in it.”

Helen glanced at the rings of suds in the water below her fingertips. “I’d nearly stopped wondering about you.”

Will took a step into the room, not toward her, but she stiffened. He halted and, lifting his arms in a pleading gesture, tried to start the explanation it had taken him the past ten days to work out. “I’m sorry, I’m . . .” What he knew of love, what still shone brightly from his time with Helen together with all he’d discovered since, rose unchecked within him to choke his words.

Helen drew a deep breath. “Do you still like to cook?”

“Cook?” He laughed. “I’m out of practice.”

“Maybe you could peel four or five potatoes—they’re stored where they’ve always been—and heat some water in a saucepan. I was planning a grand meal for myself this evening—boiled chicken with mashed potatoes and carrots.”

He moved past Helen, gauging a distance that would not offend her. In the yellow pantry he leaned against the counter and sobbed. Then, opening a cupboard door beneath the sink, he found the potatoes.

Helen had rolled the washing machine to the back porch, its good-weather home. Now she stood near him with the basket of wet clothes in her arms. Her hair—all their lives together the color of summer straw under a...