Chapter 8: Sunday Supper

Seven days.

I wrote it on the kitchen wall in charcoal, big, so nobody could miss it.

Then I wrote the list under it.

Roof, chimney, two more ceilings, a shed, stair railings.

A latrine that didn't make the girl cry went at the bottom.

"That's a lot of list," Gwenna said.

"That's a Line list. We've done worse in a snowstorm."

"We had forty wolves in a snowstorm."

"We have a carpenter," I said. "And a widow who's scarier than both of us."

The widow took over the kitchen on the first morning.

She scrubbed it down to the stone and stood at the stove with a wooden spoon. By noon there was bread.

Real bread. Dark and chewy, from her own starter she'd carried across the river in a jar inside her coat.

Gwenna ate half a loaf standing up.

"Marry me," she told the widow.

"No," said the widow.

On the second day the carpenter came back from Highwater with a truck full of tools.

He looked like a kid at Christmas.

By day three the new shed had walls.

The kids were everywhere.

The girl appointed herself foreman and followed the carpenter with a clipboard Gwenna gave her, writing down every measurement wrong.

The boy wore his new boots in the river until his mother hauled him out by the collar.

Emrys came every day.

He fixed the chimney.

He hung doors.

He carried a cast-iron bathtub up the stairs on his back while Gwenna rated his form out of ten.

"Six," she said. "Points off for grunting."

"I don't grunt."

"You grunt like a wood stove."

On Sunday afternoon he climbed down the ladder and stood in front of me, wiping his hands on a rag.

"Come to supper," he said.

"What?"

"Supper. Tonight. At Highwater. All of you. The cook's been cooking since yesterday."

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