Which was the worst way of blaming the girl, really. It made Emma like everyone else in the world. And because it wasn’t something she had said—because it didn’t need to be said—it was something she couldn’t take back. She could only nod as Lucy started up the ladder. The girl’s trials had leaped even further beyond Emma’s own—there seemed to be no way to catch her now, no way to know or comfort her.
“It’s going to work,” Emma said. “You’ll see. In the spring. We’ll pour it out and boom! Perry of the highest order.”
Lucy turned. “How do you know?”
Emma looked around at all the barrels they hadn’t filled (barrels paid for by Josiah Story, who had rejected Emma with such abrupt certainty she felt she’d been slapped). She didn’t know. She didn’t know how the perry would fare—or Lucy, either. She didn’t know how to help her. She found herself wishing the girl would say it for her, accuse her outright: You don’t know. But Lucy wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t her job to do that. Emma was a coward. If she weren’t such a coward, she would tell Lucy the truth. If she weren’t such a coward, she would leave Roland. She did think of it. Of course she did. Before they left the orchard Mrs. Cohn had offered her uncle’s house as a sort of way station for Emma and the children. I know you wouldn’t want to live here, but for a while . . . she’d said, as Emma braced herself. Saying yes, she was almost certain, would be an admission of failure on an intolerable scale. She considered asking Sven’s wife if she would temporarily take them in; or going to Sacred Heart, asking there, though the parish knowing the situation was almost unimaginable. Emma even wondered if Mrs. Greely would take them for a time, until Roland . . . But what? What would Emma wait for Roland to do or not do? Emma had not confronted him. She couldn’t imagine what she would say. Each time she thought of it, she heard him laughing, heard her own confusion—Emma would leave because of the nonsense with Lucy, was that all?—saw herself slithering away.
Lucy waited on the ladder. Emma didn’t have to talk to him, of course. She could just leave. Women did this. They left. But Emma was scared. She was scared of what she knew people would think. Leaving was sin enough—A woman might as well run naked through a butcher shop, Emma’s mother used to say—but to leave the poor, maimed fisherman? She was scared, too, about the chimney catching fire. How would Roland put it out? How would he fetch wood in the first place? She worried about his loneliness. She worried about his dying from it, worried he was the sort of man who might, who fought people off but needed them to survive. She loved him, though the love was deformed now, much of it piled up behind her, though she felt hate for him, too. She envied Josiah, going back to stay with Susannah with such apparent confidence. That was how he’d phrased it, coldly: going back to stay. As if otherwise Emma might stand around waiting for him to defect again. No. She had gone and confessed. At last. Then she had knelt on the bare wood floor of her bedroom and done what Roland wanted her to. That was not how the priest phrased her penance—Go tell your husband you love him, he’d said—but it was Emma’s interpretation.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know if the perry will work.”