Chapter 23: The Cradle

Cora's POV

Six months after Founders' Day, I was thirty-four weeks along and could no longer see my own feet.

The tech in Duluth turned the screen so I could watch her yawn.

Anders sat beside me, because I had asked him to, and he watched the screen with his mouth a little open.

"That's her hand," the tech said. "Look, she's got your thumb."

"She does not have my thumb," Anders said.

"She's got your thumb."

He wiped his face quickly with his sleeve, and the tech pretended to look at the machine.

In the truck on the way home he held the printout in both hands the whole forty minutes.

He had stopped asking whether he could do things.

He just did them now, and told me beforehand, and waited if I said wait.

That was six months of it.

He had come to every appointment, every Sunday dinner at his mother's table, every hard morning.

He had listed the house in town for sale, because I never wanted to walk back into it.

He had read me the rest of his notes, all eighty-seven, standing in my kitchen with a mug in his hand.

When he finished he asked what I wanted him to do with them.

I told him to burn them.

We did it in the woodstove on a Sunday, and he watched the black cover curl.

Signe had pleaded guilty to forgery and fraud that fall.

She got four years in the state women's prison at Shakopee.

Margit drove down once, alone, and came back and did not speak of it.

I thought about Signe sometimes, in the small hours, and found I felt a little pity and a great deal of peace.

That evening there was a cradle in the cabin.

Anders had built it himself in the shed, out of the same white oak as the hull, planed so smooth that I kept running my hand along the rail.

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