He could see in the strange stillness of her that she was somewhere else, somewhere years away. He did not say anything. He bent down, picked up the pieces of the plate and dropped them quietly into the trash. He went to the cupboard and took down another plate of the same color and set it on the counter where the broken one had been. "Don't worry about it."
He said low and even. "Plates break." She came back into the room a moment later the way a person surfaces from cold water and she nodded without looking at him. He turned and walked back outside to the feed sacks. There are kindnesses that are louder than any question.
Sometimes the most respectful thing a man can do is not ask. Three nights later Noah came downstairs for water. The kitchen was dark and he almost did not see her. Elena was sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinets, both arms wrapped around her belly. One hand pressed hard against her mouth.
She was crying without sound. Noah was 8 years old but he had lived 3 years in a house with a man who did not know how to talk about the woman who had left and he had learned what to do when somebody cried that way. He did not turn on the light. He did not say her name. He went back upstairs, took the brown stuffed bear off his bed, came down again, sat next to her on the kitchen floor and put the bear in her lap.
Then he leaned his head against her shoulder and stayed there until her breathing slowed. In the morning Elena returned the bear to him at breakfast. Her eyes were red but she was smiling. Noah took the bear back without a word and tucked it under his arm and went to the bus stop. Darius watched the whole exchange from the stove and did not understand all of it but he understood enough to know that something had moved in his house that he had not been part of and that it was good.
Us. The first time he laughed, he did not know he was going to. It was a Saturday afternoon. Elena was trying to catch one of the brown laying hens that had gotten out of the pen. The bird was faster than her and her belly was making her slower and she chased it twice around the wood pile before her foot slipped in the loose straw and she sat down hard.
She was not hurt. She started to laugh from the ground, one hand on her stomach, and Noah, who had been watching from the porch, doubled over giggling. Darius had been splitting wood at the side of the shed. The sound came out of him before he could stop it. A real laugh, deep, the kind he had not heard from his own throat since before Noah was born.
He turned around to see if anyone had noticed and both of them were looking at him grinning and he had to look away quickly because his eyes had gone hot. That evening at supper, Elena passed him the dish of sweet potatoes. Their fingers met for a second on the rim of the bowl. Both of them pulled back. Neither of them spoke.
Noah was telling a long story about a boy at school who had eaten a worm on a dare and he did not see the small thing that had happened over his head. Darius cut his cornbread very carefully into squares and did not look up for a long time. The third moment came on a night in early October. Noah had gone to bed early because of a cold. Darius was sitting on the porch with a cup of tea, the kind Elena had started making at night with honey and lemon.