Chapter 23: Two Rooms

"You're keeping the room," Gerda said.

It was Wednesday, and I stood in the doorway of the room over the store.

I had a cardboard box in my arms and the typewriter on the table behind me.

"I'm moving to the house."

"I heard. Half the county has the date. You're keeping the room."

"Gerda, I can't pay rent on two..."

"Who said anything about rent?"

She folded her small arms.

"A woman needs a place with a door that only she opens. Ask me how I know."

"How do you know?"

"Fifty years of a husband," Gerda said, with great dignity. "God rest him. I had the store."

I looked at the narrow bed, the lamp, the table by the window.

I looked at the place where I had waited for a man to climb my stairs, and where he had.

"Two rooms," Lennart said, behind me.

He had come up the back stairs without a sound, with the iron key swinging at his chest.

"One in town. One on the ridge."

"I'll keep this one for her," Gerda said, "and you'll leave my typewriter where it is, Alpha. She can have the new one."

"I bought the new one," he said.

I turned.

"You bought a typewriter?"

"On Monday. From a man in Duluth. It has a perfect 'e'."

"I hate it already."

"I thought you might."

He took the cardboard box out of my arms and set it on the table, and slid his hand into mine.

"Come and see the other room," he said.

The house on Larch Ridge had a room across the hall from the bedroom that had been a store room for twenty years.

He had cleared it.

He opened the door, and I stood there with my breath stopped.

It was small and bright, with a window onto the lake.

There was a desk under the window, and a lamp, and a chair with a cushion.

The new typewriter sat on the desk, black and gleaming, with a sheet of paper already rolled in.

On the paper, in his tall slanting hand, he had written:

Maja.

"The door locks on the inside," he said. "I had the lock put in on Tuesday. It's yours. I won't open it unless you ask."

"You don't have to..."

"I want to. I want you to have a room that nobody can come into. And I want you to leave the door open."

I turned and looked at him.

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