It was Rose. Rose was seven and where Emily was all forward motion and questions. Rose was different, quieter, watchful, with a seriousness that sat on her face like it had always been there. She held Nathan's hand coming across the market, and she looked at everything with large, dark eyes. And when they reached Margaret's table, she stood slightly behind her father and looked at Margaret with an assessment that was absolutely thorough and entirely without cruelty.
Nathan said, "This is Rose." "Hello, Rose," Margaret said. Rose looked at the pies. She looked at Margaret. She said in a small deliberate voice.
My papa says you put kindness in them. The market noise kept going around them. The wind was there. Everything was normal. Margaret said carefully.
Your papa said that. Rose nodded. He said that's why they taste different from other pies. Because you make them like you mean it. She considered.
I think that's true. I can tell when something is made like somebody means it. Nathan was looking somewhere to the left of Margaret's shoulder with the expression of a man who had not anticipated this particular development in this particular moment and was managing it by pretending to study the middle distance. Margaret looked at Rose, 7 years old, a girl who had grown up watching her father carry grief through the front door every week and learned to read sincerity in the texture of things. she said. "Would you like to try one?
Just a small piece I have a little wrapped here from this morning's extra." Rose looked at her father. Nathan nodded. Margaret unwrapped a small wedge of cinnamon apple, the last piece, the one she'd been keeping without really knowing why, and handed it across the table. Rose took it with both hands, which was how a child took something they understood was being given carefully.
She tasted it. She looked up at Margaret. It tastes like sundaes, she said. Margaret pressed her hands flat against the table. She said, "That's the nicest thing anyone said about my baking."
Rose handed back the cloth napkin with a gravity that made her look 40 years older and took her father's hand again, and Nathan finally looked at Margaret directly. And what was in his face was not pity and not gratitude and not attraction and not any single thing. She had words for it was something older and quieter, something that had been sitting in him for a long time and had only just found a direction to face. He said, "Same time next Sunday." "Same time," Margaret said.