Most of them washed out in the first two weeks. And the ones who didn't wash out, the ones who didn't wash out, learned eventually that real strength doesn't need anybody watching to know it's true. Ren looked down at their joined hands. I'm just tired of being underestimated, Grandma. Some days it's almost funny.
Other days it isn't. Let it be funny more than it isn't, Elellanar said with the ghost of a smile. Bitterness is heavy, sweetheart. I carried some once a long time ago after your grandfather passed and it near about broke my back before I finally set it down. Don't pick it up on my account or Danny's or anybody's.
I'll try. Trying's all any of us can promise. Eleanor patted her hand and reached back for her book. Now go home. You look like you haven't slept right in a week.
And don't argue with a woman who spent four decades reading exhaustion off a person's face for a living, long before you ever needed her to. Ren stood, leaned down, and kissed her grandmother's forehead. "I love you, Grandma." "I love you, too, and Ren." Elellanar caught her wrist gently before she could pull away.
"Whatever's coming with that boy, I trust you to know the difference between defending yourself and destroying him. You've always known that difference, even when the world made it hard to remember. I raised you to remember it anyway." Ren nodded, throat too tight to answer, and stepped out into the hallway. She walked the last two blocks home instead of waiting for the bus, kneading the cold evening air on her face.
Cedar hollow at dusk had a particular kind of quiet, porch lights coming on one by one, the smell of somebody's dinner drifting out an open window, a dog barking twice at nothing, and then going silent. Her apartment was small, above a hardware store on Third Street, one bedroom, a kitchen the size of a closet, and a window that looked out over the rooftops toward the river. She stopped in the little kitchen first, filled a glass of water she didn't drink, and stood a moment at the window, looking down at the street. A man was closing up the hardware store below, pulling the metal grate down over the front window, the way he did every night at exactly this hour. A car passed.
Somewhere a screen door slapped shut. Ordinary sounds, ordinary town. She used to find that unbearable in the first few months after she came home. The ordinariness of it. The way life just kept going, ringing up flour and yeast and paper bags while somewhere else men she'd trained beside were still doing the work she used to do, still carrying the weight she had set down.