Chapter Thirteen

She walked off the track and down through the village, and when the turn to her mother’s house came up on the left, she took it.

She had been walking past that turn for five weeks.

Her mother was at the table shelling beans into a bowl. She looked up at the doorway, and she didn’t look surprised, and after seven years what she said was:

“There’s tea.”

Dara came in and sat. The kitchen was smaller than she remembered, or she had been in too many big rooms. The radio was still on its shelf.

Her mother shelled beans. The pods went one way, the beans went the other.

“The village says you’re training the little one,” her mother said. “The dawn boy.”

“I stopped.”

“Why?”

Dara opened her mouth. The thing that had happened on the track didn’t have a shape she could hand to anyone.

Her mother went back to the beans and let it alone.

For a while the only sound in the kitchen was the pods.

“When will you stop running?” her mother said.

And this time Dara answered it.

“If I stop, there’s nothing there.”

The shelling paused. Her mother looked at her — a long look, the kind that took its time because it had earned the right to.

“Did you know?” Dara said. “That whole year. Did you—”

“No.” Her mother’s hands started again, slower. “I shared a bed with a dying man and woke up beside a healthy one every morning. He was that strong. Or that afraid. I never learned which.”

The pods. The beans. The bowl filling.

Then her mother said, not looking up:

“There was a whole man there, Dara. You only kept the coach.”

Dara sat very still.

Her mother slid the bowl two inches across the table toward her.

“Sit. You can be angry and eat at the same time. Your father never learned that. Learn it.”

She pulled the bowl closer and ate, and her mother went on shelling, and for a while the kitchen was just the sound of that.