Dawn
We stopped for lunch on a blanket in the shade of that skinny maple, peanut butter sandwiches and apples and a bag of chips I’d brought in the car.
Archie went inside and came back out with a jug of tea and paper cups. He didn’t ask me in. I was glad he didn’t.
A little after three the gate latch clicked. I looked up, and there she was, coming across the grass in her scrubs and her work shoes, with her hospital badge still clipped to her pocket.
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She had gotten off early. I found out later she had traded the last four hours of her shift to come home.
She stopped about ten feet from us. She was younger than me by a few years, with a plain face and tired eyes, and she looked about as scared as a person can look standing in her own backyard.
“I’m Dawn,” she said. As if any of us didn’t know. Then she said, “Hi, girls,” and Pearl waved a blue hand at her, and Maisie didn’t, and Dawn nodded at Maisie like she understood that completely.
“I wasn’t going to come out,” she said to me. “I was going to stay inside till you left. Archie said that would be best. But I’ve been thinking about it all day at work, and I couldn’t do that to you. I owe you better than hiding.”
“I told him not to take it,” she said. “Tuesday night when he came home with it. I told him he had to take it back. We fought about it till two in the morning. He wouldn’t. He said I didn’t understand.” She looked at Archie. “I didn’t, I guess. I do now.”
There was a third brush sitting across the lid of the tray. She looked at it. She looked at me.
And I thought about what kind of mother I wanted those two little girls to see standing in that yard, and I picked the brush up and held it out to her.
“There’s a lot of trim left,” I said. “And Maisie’s particular about the window, so you’d better ask her first.”
Dawn took the brush. She went over to Maisie, crouched down to her level, and asked if she could help with the window.
Maisie looked at her for a long time. Then she pointed her own brush at the bottom corner and said, “That part. Slow.”