The three of them at the table after supper, the way they were every evening, the shape of three people who had been in the same space long enough that the space had arranged itself around all three of them. Amma said, "Word this morning. " Gideon looked up from Burell. Through his wife's cousin, some of our people, a group, they made it south. Arizona territory.
She looked at the table, then at Desa. They're settled temporarily, but alive. The fire, the lamp. Desa looked at her sister for a long time. "How many?
" she said. "Enough, " Amma said quietly. "Not everyone, but enough. A silence with several layers. the relief layer, the grief underneath, the complicated texture of surviving something others did not, and having to hold both truths at once.
Gideon sat with that. He understood something about holding both things at once. Seven years of practice, you can reach them, he said. When the roads clear, yes, Desa said, "You could go south. " Yes, the word sat there.
He didn't add to it because she hadn't because he was learning her grammar. The unspoken rest of a sentence was not absence. It was a room he was not being told to stay out of, but was not being told to enter either. There are people who need you there, he said. Yes, and there are things here that are unresolved.
Yes, those two things don't cancel each other out. Desa looked at him. Long, no, she said they don't. Amma had the small private expression she sometimes had, the one she usually put away before it could be read. She didn't put it away quickly enough.
This time, Gideon chose, as he had many times, not to investigate it. Amma spoke after Desa had gone to the sleeping area, just the two of them. Amma with her maps, Gideon with his coffee. The quiet of late Wyoming evening when the wind was the only thing moving. She won't make it easy for you, Amma said without looking up.
I know. Not because the feeling isn't there. He held his coffee because she doesn't know yet how to trust something good without waiting for it to become something bad. Amma said she has been right to wait most of her life. She protected me by learning not to need things, not to rely on things.
A pause. You understand? Yes. Gideon said, "I think I do. You spent seven years not needing things either.
He looked at his hands. Yes. So you understand, Amma said. The difficulty of being around someone who makes you want to need things again. Not knowing whether that wanting is hope or just hunger.