The picnic had been my idea. Quakers didn’t celebrate holidays—all days were treated equally, meant to be lived with the same simplicity—but Israel was known to hedge a bit on the children’s birthdays. He was home working that day, shut in his study with invoices and ledgers and bills of exchange. Having enough sense not to go to Catherine with my whim, I’d interrupted him mid-morning.
“. . . Spring has come,” I’d said. “Let’s not squander it . . . A picnic will do us all good, and you should see Becky, she’s so excited to be seven . . . A little celebration wouldn’t hurt, would it?”
He set down the account book in his hand and gazed at me with a slow, defenseless smile. It’d been months since he’d touched me. Back in the fall he’d often held my hand or slid his arm about my waist as we walked back up the hill from the pond, but then winter came, and the walks ceased as he retreated, going off inside himself somewhere to hibernate. I didn’t know what had happened until one morning in January when Catherine announced it was the second anniversary of Rebecca’s death. She seemed to take morose joy in explaining how deeply her brother was mourning, even more so this winter than the one before.
“All right, have the picnic, but no birthday cake,” Israel said.
“. . . I wouldn’t dream of anything so decadent as cake,” I replied, beaming, mocking him a little, and he laughed outright.
“You should come, too,” I added.
His eyes veered to the locket, lying on his desk, the one with the daffodils and his wife’s name engraved on it.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I have a great deal of work to do here.”
“. . . Well, try and join us. The children would like that.” I left, wishing I weren’t so dismayed by him at times, at how mercurial he could be, embracing one day, stand-offish the next.
Now, as I gazed down at the white cloth spread on the lawn, it wasn’t even disappointment I felt, it was anger. He hadn’t come.
Catherine and I laid out the contents of the basket, a dozen boiled eggs, carrots, two loaves of bread, apple butter, and a kind of soft cheese Catherine had made by boiling cream and drying it in a cloth. The children had found a thatch of mint at the woods’ edge and were crushing the leaves between their fingers. The air pulsed with the smell of it.
“Oh,” I heard Catherine say. She was gazing toward the house, at Israel striding toward us through the brown grass.
We ate sitting on the ground with our faces turned to the bright crater of sky. When we finished, Catherine pulled gingerbread from the basket and stacked the slices in a pyramid. “The top slice is for you, Becky,” she said.
It was evident how much Catherine loved the child and all the rest of them, and I felt a sudden remorse for all my ill thoughts of her. The children grabbed the gingerbread and scattered, the boys toward the trees and the two girls off to pluck the wild flowers beginning to poke through the sod, and it was at this moment, as Catherine busied herself clearing things away, that I made a terrible mistake.
I languished, leaning back on my elbows within an arm’s length of Israel, feeling that he’d returned from his long hibernation and wanting to bask in the thought of it. Catherine’s back was to us, and when I looked at Israel, he had that yearning expression again, the sad, burning smile, and he dared to slide his little finger across the cloth and hook it about mine. It was a small thing, our fingers wrapped like vines, but the intimacy of it flooded me, and I caught my breath.
The sound made Catherine turn her head and peer at us over her shoulder. Israel snatched his finger from mine. Or did I snatch mine from his?
She leveled her eyes on him. “So, it is as I suspected.”
“This is not your business,” he told her. Getting to his feet, he smiled regretfully at me and walked back up the hill.