My Mother Married Into Four Brothers, and Each One Says I Saved Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Hallways
At her mother's wedding supper, four stepbrothers each tell Signe in a different hallway, "I know it was you," and when a drunk neighbor tells the family legend of the girl in the red coat, she cuts the cake and tells the old man she does not want his marsh.
The first of my new stepbrothers caught me in the pantry doorway, before I had even hung up my coat.
"I know it was you," Kasper said.
He was thirty-three and broad enough to fill the door.
I had met him an hour earlier, over a tray of ham sandwiches.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, nodded once, and stepped aside to let me pass.
I thought he had mistaken me for someone.
Then I went down the hall to the mudroom for my phone, and the second one was waiting there.
Eero stood between the boot rack and the dryer, tall and thin in wire glasses.
He was holding a glass jar of marsh water up to the bulb.
He lowered it when I came in.
"I know it was you," he said, in a soft, careful voice.
"Was what me?"
"Let me check something first," Eero said, and he walked out past me with his jar.
I stood among the rubber boots and counted the strange things I had heard that day.
There were two.
The third came at me in the front hall, with a smile.
Soren was twenty-nine and the best-looking man in the house, and he knew it.
He wore a gray vest with his sleeves pushed up.
He took my hand in both of his and held it a moment too long.
"Signe Aasland," he said. "I know it was you."
He kissed my knuckles.
He had a plate of cranberry relish in his other hand.
When he let go of me, it tipped.
A red smear ran down the front of my good green dress.
"Oh, sweetheart," Soren said, and he was not sorry at all. "That's going to stain."
I took the relish out of his hand and put it on the hall table.
"Say it again," I said. "What exactly do you know?"
He winked and went back into the kitchen.
I went out the front door because I needed air.
The porch steps were white with frost, and the dark was coming down over the marsh.
Past the barn, the cranberry beds lay flat and rust-red to the horizon.
The reservoir shone at the far end.
My foot slid on the second step.
A hand closed around my elbow and held me up.
It belonged to the youngest one, Ansel, twenty-seven, who had not said a single word to me in the church.
He was tall, with dark hair that touched his collar.
He wore long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, and every other man in the house had rolled his up.
He did not let go right away.
Through my sleeve his palm was very warm, and I felt it all the way up my arm.
"I know it was you," Ansel said, low, close to my ear.
Then he let go fast and went down the steps into the yard.
I blamed the frost.
I stood on the porch with my elbow burning and four men's sentences in my head.
When I went back inside, the kitchen was full.
My mother sat at the long table in her lavender dress.
She had a flush on her face that I had not seen in twenty years.
Beside her sat my new stepfather, who had married her at two o'clock.
He had said fewer than ten words since.
The cake stood at the end of the table, white and tall.
It had two little silver bells on top that my mother had picked herself.
The old man's oldest friend got to his feet.
He was a drunk neighbor in a corduroy jacket.
He tapped a spoon on his glass until the room went quiet.
"At every Tollefson supper the old man tells the story," he said, "and today he's too happy. So I'll tell it."
The four brothers sat at four different places along the table.
"Seventeen years ago this month, in the harvest flood, a boy went in the bog."
He swung his glass to show how.
"Went under the vines. A little girl in a red coat got him by the collar and hauled him out."
My hand closed on the back of a chair.
"She ran home before anybody could thank her. Nobody ever found out whose girl she was."
"We all went out on that dike that day," Soren said, easy and warm, from the head of the table.
"When we went in, I thought that was it for us."
The room laughed softly.
"And by the old rule," the neighbor said, "whoever the bog gave back owes the girl who gave him back."
"And the girl is owed the marsh."
He lifted his glass.
"So if she's out there, she has a marsh waiting."
Everyone drank.
I was nine in that October.
I had a red coat with toggle buttons.
My grandmother lived on the dike road, next to a cranberry farm.
I had never in my life told anybody what I did in that bog.
I looked up.
Kasper was looking at me.
So was Eero, over his glasses, and Soren from the head of the table.
Ansel watched from the doorway, with his arms folded across his sleeves.
They were not laughing.
Not one of them looked at his brothers.
My mother squeezed my hand and whispered, "Isn't that a lovely story?"
I picked up her cake knife.
I cut the first slice, and I set it on my stepfather's plate in front of the whole kitchen.
"Congratulations," I said. "I don't want your marsh. I came for my mother."
Nobody laughed this time.
I put the knife down and took my coat off the hook.
I walked out to my car in the dark with a cranberry stain on my dress.
When I looked back at the house from the driveway, there was a man at four different windows.
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