Page 8 of Mail Order Mercy

Dorothy narrowed her eyes. “Two shirts will not buy a roof.”

“They will buy my time,” Albert said. “Everett has scrap boards. I can make do.”

“If I mend your shirts,” Dorothy said, “you will not decide afterward that the roof took three more shirts and a pie.”

“No pie,” Albert said solemnly. “I would not put such a burden on a roof.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he said, gentler now. “Two shirts for the roof. No more owed between us.”

He wanted badly for her to believe him. Not because the shirts mattered, but because the bargain did. Dorothy needed to stand on her own feet, even while accepting a hand. Albert understood that too late, perhaps, but he understood it now. If he pushed too hard, she would turn away from the very help that might keep the roof over her children dry.

He thought of the way Henry had trusted him without ever asking whether the trust was safe. Henry had handed him tools, shared wages when another man was short, spoken freely of Dorothy and the children as if Albert belonged to the circle of people who cared for them. Albert had accepted that place when it was easy. Now he had to earn it when every nail he drove reminded him how late he was.

Dorothy studied him for a long moment. She knew he was arranging the bargain to ease her pride, and he knew she knew. Still, there was a difference between taking and trading, even when the trade favored her. “Bring the shirts,” she said.

Dorothy accepted the bargain because refusing would have been foolish and because accepting made her feel less helpless. Still, as she watched Albert walk away, she wondered when she had begun measuring safety by whether his boots appeared on the path. She did not want to need that sound. She did not want to listen for it.

Albert brought them that evening. One truly needed mending. The other had needed only a few stitches until he stood outside his cabin and made the tear worse with his pocketknife. He told himself Henry would have laughed at him. He also told himself Dorothy never needed to know.

The next afternoon, Albert climbed onto the roof with a hammer, a small stack of boards, and more determination than skill at staying balanced on frosted shingles. Tommy stood below announcing every nail as if he were foreman of the job. Clara watched more quietly from beside the woodpile.

“Mr. Albert?” Clara called.

Albert paused with the hammer in his hand. “Yes, Clara?”

She twisted the end of her sleeve between her fingers. “Are you going to disappear again?”

The words struck him harder than the hammer ever could have. Albert looked down from the roof at Henry’s little girl, standing with her boots in the snow and her face tipped up toward him. She had not accused him. Children rarely knew how to make accusations sound proper. She had only asked the question that mattered.

“No,” Albert said. “I’m not going to disappear again.”

Clara studied him as if deciding whether he was the sort of man promises could stick to. “Mama says folks get busy.”

“Folks do,” Albert said. “But I can be busy and still come by.”

“Will you come even if it snows?” Clara asked.

“Even if it snows.”

“If Tommy is loud?”

“Especially then. A man should know what he is walking into.”

Albert heard the joke leave his mouth and was grateful for it, because the truth beneath Clara’s questions made him feel unsteady. She was asking whether grown people could be trusted to stay, and Albert wished promises were something he could build with boards and nails.

He turned back to the roof before she could see too much on his face. He had made another promise to Henry’s child. He wondered whether he had the right to make it, after doing so poorly with the last one. Then he drove the nail in straight and told himself rights mattered less than keeping it.

Inside the cabin, Dorothy had heard Clara’s question through the open doorway and felt it pierce a place she had tried to keep guarded. She wanted to tell her daughter not to ask such things, not to lay their loneliness at Albert’s feet. But another part of Dorothy had waited for his answer as hungrily as Clara had. She hated herself a little for that.

Two days later, Dorothy sat at Ella Sanders’s table with Grace asleep in her lap and a cup of tea cooling beside her. Ella had invited her under the pretense of needing help sorting mending, but the basket of torn stockings sat untouched between them.

“Albert has been coming by,” Ella said, far too casually.

Dorothy looked into her cup. “Only because of Henry.”

“Of course,” Ella said.