Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The School

"Name them," the eldest elder called back.

I held up one finger out of the quilt.

"Nothing in the Keeping ever burns again. No eight-year law. The truth doesn't get a shelf life."

Murmurs on the far bank.

He nodded. "Go on."

"No reading gets sworn on one nose. Two readers, every time. Nobody gets a nineteen-year-old alone at a table again."

He nodded again, slower.

"Patsy Stallard is Keeper. Her key, her seal, her room."

Up the bank behind me, very faintly, I heard Patsy say something unrepeatable through the cabin window.

"And I teach," I said. "In the Keeping. Anybody with a nose. Pack pups. Crew. Wolves from the burn. Anybody who walks in the door."

"That's four," the eldest elder said.

"Five. I'm not coming over today. I just had a baby."

Both banks laughed.

The eldest elder took off his red wool hat and held it against his chest.

"Done," he said.

The school opened on the first Saturday in April.

The Keeping didn't look like the Keeping anymore.

The crew had spent two weekends down there with crowbars and paint.

The steel shelves were still there along one wall, every box labeled, every box open, in Patsy's square handwriting.

The rest of the long stone room was tables and stools and rows of glass jars.

They'd pried the iron hatch off the coal chute and put in a window instead.

The lilac outside it was just coming into bud.

The room smelled of fresh paint and old stone and spring coming in through the glass.

Patsy sat at a desk by the oak door with her reading glasses on their beaded chain.

Her brass key hung around her neck on its red string.

"Anybody touches a box without signing my book," she announced, "I'll serve them."

"With a side of cornbread," said the kid in the yellow shirt.

He'd written TEACHER'S HELPER on a strip of flagging tape and stuck it to his chest.

Nobody had asked him to.

Nobody had the heart to tell him to take it off.

The opening party was that night, upstairs in the hall.

It was the first time the crew and the pack had sat down to one supper together.

It was loud.

Patsy's pies went in ten minutes.

The volunteer chief gave a speech about the new engine the bluff house money had bought, and cried halfway through, and sat down.

Charmaine wasn't there.

She'd come to Patsy's kitchen every Sunday since November.

On the last one she'd brought a pie of her own.

Patsy had eaten a slice and said, "Huh," which from Patsy is a medal.

Fraser sat beside me at the long table.

His first fire season as Alpha started on Monday.

He'd be crew boss in the summer and Alpha in between.

The elders had stopped arguing about it after the first week, because he just kept doing both.

The boy sat across from us, telling three pack pups about holdover fires.

He had all the words right.

He'd been coming to my Saturday class in the barn all winter.

Our daughter was asleep on Fraser's chest in a sling, in a yellow onesie that said FUTURE HOTSHOT.

She'd been asleep through the speeches, the pie, and the kid's toast.

She was five months old now, with chestnut hair that stuck straight up and a scream that could clear a hall.

Fraser looked down at her.

Then at me.

"Patsy says she's taking both of them tonight," he said. "The baby and the boy. She says if she sees either of us before nine tomorrow, she'll have us exiled."

"She can't exile anybody."

"Do you want to test it?"

I looked at him across the noise.

At the gray coming in at his temples, and the scar on the back of his hand, and the gold starting in his eyes.

"No," I said.

The crew had raised the house in March, on the pack bank above the ford.

Logs from the burn, cut from the dead snags the kid swore he'd felled himself.

It had a porch that looked across the river at the old camp.

It had a big room with a woodstove, and a bedroom at the back where the morning came in.

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