"What’s your problem?” she asks, not cruelly. I glance to the stairs.
"The stray you took in last night."
She cocks an eyebrow and smirks slightly.
"Come on, Cade, you know as well as I do she wouldn’t have lasted a day out there in the prairie," she protests. "We couldn’t just leave her out there, it wouldn’t have been right. Besides, I saw the way you looked at her..."
"What the hell does that mean?”
"Oh, come on, you know what it means," she teases. I don’t want to admit she’s right, but I’ll be damned if my sister doesn’t know me well enough to see right through me. For as much as I want to believe that I could contain it at a single glance, there’sa part of me that can’t help but respond to the way that girl looked, her long legs, her sweet, hopeful smile when she came to us asking for help.
"Don’t know a damn thing about it."
She rolls her eyes skyward.
"Sure, sure," she replies, waving a hand. "Either way, I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t see her."
"Could have. Could have let her be someone else’s problem."
She lets out a short puff of air through her nose, clearly not impressed with my attitude. But that’s not my problem. She knows that we don’t have a whole lot to our names, not since Momma passed, and the last thing we need is to add more to that pile and cause ourselves even more trouble in the process.
"Yes, and what kind of person do you think would have seen a woman alone at the side of the road and decided that they were going to take care of her?” she points out. "It wouldn’t have been right. You know it’s not what Momma would have done."
I stare down into the coffee, which is glistening in the early morning light. The girl – Kim, her name is – is still upstairs, likely sleeping. She retreated up there alone as soon as she got the chance, despite Lucy’s best efforts to get her to take some food before she vanished. I guess she’s not exactly enjoying all of this, and damn, she’s not the only one.
Bringing up our mother is a dirty trick and she knows it. Mostly because she’s dead right that our momma would have invited a girl like her in without a second thought. She always did the right thing, always looked out for people, even when it came at the cost of her own safety and security.
Part of the reason she spent her whole life in this place, taking care of us, of our father, before he passed. She never put herself first, even though she could have done bigger things than just raising our family.
Doesn’t matter how much I tried to encourage her to get out there and do something more, she always brushed me off, laughing away my words like they were nothing more than flattery.
"Cade, I’m happy enough here," she had told me, not long before she had been taken ill with the disease that had eventually taken her from us. "I got you, I got Lucy. I got more than a lot of people do..."
"But you could have had more," I had implored her, an ache in my chest bigger than I could even give name to. Her face softened.
"Doesn’t matter what could have happened," she reminded me, as she stroked the hair away from my face like she did when I was a little boy. "Matters what did. And I made the most of what I had. Can’t ask for much more than that..."
She was right, of course, same way she always was. One of the most irritating things about her, Lucy would always tease her, when she was still here. No matter what she might have been able to do, she had been born and raised in this community, this place that wanted little more than for her to be a wife and mother.
Her smarts and her wit would only get her in trouble here, as difficult as they were to control, and she knew it. The best she could do was pour all of that into my siblings and I, and hope that we found something to do with it that she never could.
No doubt if she had seen Kim at the side of the road, wandering around lost, she’d have been the first to bring her home and get her fed and watered. Probably would have been up all night stitching her a dress that fit – that was just the kind of person she was.
But that doesn’t mean that we have the resources to do the same thing, especially not for a whole- ass grown woman. Theway she’s dressed, something tells me she might be from the same place that Riley is, wherever that might be.
My brother has never exactly gone into great detail about where his wife came from, apart from to tell me that she’s a long way from home – as well as she seems to have settled in, that doesn’t exactly explain much.
The strange clothes, her reaction when she discovered the year, all of it. She doesn’t belong here. And I don’t know what, if anything, we can do about that. Seems like Lucy is intent on making her our problem, and I don’t know if I am on board with seeing it through.
"She needs us, Cade," Lucy urges me, leaning towards me slightly and lowering her voice. "I know it’s not ideal, but we need to help her. You saw the state she was in when she got here-"
"I heard the way she talked to you, that’s for sure," I shoot back.
"Wouldn’t you be the same way, if you thought you’d just been dropped into another time with no warning?” she points out. "Give her a little grace. It’s the least we can do."
"It’s not the least-"
But before I can finish what I’m saying, I hear a creak on the stairs, and both of us turn to see Kim making her way down to the kitchen. She’s wearing one of my sister’s dresses, though it hits too short on her, landing at the ankle awkwardly. Her blonde hair falls around her shoulders, her green eyes lowered to the ground to make sure she doesn’t trip, and she has the skirts bunched in one hand as though worried she’s going to go ass over teakettle straight into the ground.
