My Mother Married Into Four Brothers, and Each One Says I Saved Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Thermos

Back from her night shift, Signe finds each brother already guarding her in his own way, learns how they all found out about the red coat, and hears Soren say the papers should be drawn before the flood.

I came off my shift at eight in the morning and drove straight to the farm, because I had promised my mother six weeks.

She met me at the kitchen door with a spatula in her hand and her wedding ring on.

"Signe, I'm so sorry about last night," Martha said. "Your stepfather's friend always gets sentimental after the second bottle."

"It wasn't him, Mom."

"Then what was it?"

"I was tired," I said, and she let me have that.

The long table was full again.

Kasper sat at one end with a ledger open beside his plate.

Eero sat across from him, dissecting a piece of toast, and Soren leaned back in the old man's chair with his boots crossed.

The youngest brother stood at the counter with a mug, and he did not look at me when I came in.

"Sit," Kasper said. "I'm driving you to work tonight."

I put my bag on a chair. "No, you're not."

"The dike road floods at the low spot after dark, and you'll be coming back at dawn with the deer out."

"I've driven it a hundred times."

Kasper did not look up from the ledger.

"You have not driven it since the pumps went in."

"Kasper," I said. "I drive myself to work. I'm saying it once."

He looked at me.

Then he closed the ledger and said, "All right."

That was the whole argument.

I sat down, and Eero slid a folded square of paper across the table to me.

It was a sticky note covered in numbers.

"Your thermos was on the counter," he said. "I ran it. The Marshfield tap is fine, pH seven point four."

"You tested my coffee water."

"Only the water. I didn't touch the coffee."

"Eero." I kept my voice even. "You can test the marsh all day. Don't test what I drink."

His ears went red, and he took off his glasses to polish them.

"I'll ask first," he said.

"Good."

"Does she take eggs?" Kasper asked my mother.

"She'll have two over easy," Soren said, before I could open my mouth. "And she doesn't like the yolk broken. Right, sweetheart?"

I had not told him that.

My mother must have, and she beamed at me over the pan.

"I'll order for myself, Soren."

"Of course you will." He smiled, showed me both palms, and tipped his chair back. "I was only helping."

He had been helping since the front hall.

Ansel came to the table with the toast rack.

He set it down beside my plate and reached across me for the butter, and his cuff slid back.

A ridged scar ran around his left forearm from the wrist almost to the elbow.

It was pale and ropy, and it wound around the arm.

He pulled the cuff down fast.

"Pump house," Soren said, cheerfully, to nobody. "He was ten. Stuck his arm in the wrong pipe. Burned it right through."

Ansel said nothing at all.

I am a nurse. I have looked at a lot of burns, and burns do not heal in a band.

I forgot it the moment my mother put the eggs in front of me.

After the plates were cleared I went to the pantry for a clean mug, and I found my grandmother's handwriting behind a row of canning jars.

It was on the back of a framed photograph, propped against the wall.

I turned it over.

A girl of nine stood on a gravel dike in a red coat, squinting, with her hair hanging in wet strings.

I knew that girl.

I turned it back and read the writing again.

Signe. Oct 14, 2009. Came home soaked in the red coat. Won't say why. Don't ask.

"It was in your mother's box," Kasper said behind me.

I did not jump.

I had known he was there, because the pantry floor creaks and he is a big man.

"I turned it over on Monday," he said. "I figured I was the only one who had."

I looked at him.

He had no idea that three other men had said the same words to me in three other rooms.

I was nearly sure each of them had turned that photograph over alone.

I decided not to tell him he was only the first.

"Four men told me they knew it was me last night," I said. "Not one of them said thank you."

"Signe."

"Nobody asked me what I wanted, either."

Kasper stood there in the dim of the pantry with his big hands hanging down.

"Thank you," he said. "What do you want?"

"To sleep for six hours."

"I'll keep it quiet," he said, and he meant it.

When I came back to the kitchen, I went out to my car for the rest of my things.

The driver's door was already unlocked, and the engine was off.

On the passenger seat sat a small ceramic heater, plugged into the dash, set to low, with a wool blanket folded under it.

The whole cabin was warm.

"It's for after the shift," Ansel said.

He stood two steps behind me in the frost with his hands in his jacket.

"Who gave you my keys?"

"Your mother."

He held out the ring.

I took it, and his thumb ran across the inside of my wrist for a second, on the bare skin above my glove.

Neither of us moved.

"Thank you," I said, because I had just been asking for that.

He nodded and went back to the barn.

I stood by my open car door with my wrist burning and my face warm, and I told myself it was only the heater.

When I went back into the kitchen, Soren was telling the table about a call he had made to a lawyer in Wisconsin Rapids.

"We should have the papers drawn up before the flood," he said. "For the rule. In case she turns up."

My mother put a hand to her mouth, delighted.

Kasper looked at his plate.

"I told you last night what I wanted," I said.

"You told a kitchen what you didn't want," Soren said. "Nobody's asked what you're owed."

Behind me, Ansel set his mug down on the counter, hard, and walked out of the room.

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