Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [12]
It was first light before she recovered the calm or belated contrition to wonder what she might have lost here—other than, momentarily, her mind. She knew that most men her age and most other animals had done this. The collision of strangers. Or not strangers, exactly, for they’d had their peculiar courtship: the display, the withdrawal, the dance of a three-day obsession. But the sight of him now asleep in her bed made her feel both euphoric and deeply unsettled. Her own nakedness startled her, even; she normally slept in several layers. Awake in the early light with the wood thrushes, feeling the texture of the cool sheet against her skin, she felt as jarred and disjunct as a butterfly molted extravagantly from a dun-colored larva and with no clue now where to fly.
From the look of his pack she guessed he was a homeless sort, out for the long tramp, and she wondered miserably if she’d coupled herself with someone notorious. By late morning, though, she’d gathered otherwise. He rose calm and unhurried and began carefully removing items from his pack and stacking them in organized piles on the floor as he searched out clean clothes and a razor.
A criminal wouldn’t take the time to shave, she decided. His pack appeared to be a respectable little home: medicine cabinet, pantry, kitchen. He had a lot of food in there, even a small coffeepot. He found a place to prop his small shaving mirror at an angle on of one of the logs in the wall while he scraped the planes of his face one square inch at a time. She tried not to watch. Afterward he moved around her cabin with the confidence of an invited guest, whistling, going quiet only when he studied the titles of her books. Theory of Population Genetics and Evolutionary Ecology: that kind of thing seemed to set him back a notch, if only briefly.
His presence filled her tiny cabin so, she felt distracted trying to cook breakfast. Slamming cupboards, looking for things in the wrong places, she wasn’t used to company here. She had only a single ladderback chair, plus the old bedraggled armchair out on the porch with holes in its arms from which phoebes pulled white shreds of stuffing to line their nests. That was all. She pulled the ladderback chair away from the table, set its tall back against the logs of the opposite wall, and asked him to sit, just to get a little space around her as she stood at the propane stove scrambling powdered eggs and boiling water for the grits. Off to his right stood her iron-framed cot with its wildly disheveled mattress, the night table piled with her books and field journals, and the kerosene lantern they’d nearly knocked over last night in some mad haste to burn themselves down.
At some point they’d also let the fire in the wood stove go out, and the morning was cold. It would be July before mornings broke warm, up here at this elevation. When she brought over two plates of eggs, he stood to give her the chair, and she huddled there with her knees tucked into her flannel gown, shivering, watching him through the steam above her coffee cup. He moved to the window and stood looking out while he ate. He was five foot six, maybe. Not only younger but half a head shorter than she.
“No offense,” she observed, “but guys of your heighth usually get away from me as fast as humanly possible.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. They kindly like to glare at me from the far side of the room. It’s like being tall is this insult I arranged for them personally.”
He paused his fork to look at her. “No offense, Miss Deanna, but you’ve been consorting with too many worms and voles.” She laughed, and he angled a grin at her, a trout fisherman casting his fly. “You’re what we western boys call a long drink of water.”
He seemed to mean it. Her long thighs and feet and forearms—all her dimensions, in fact—seemed to be things he couldn’t get enough of. That was amazing. That, she appreciated. It was his youth that made her edgy. She suppressed the urge to ask if his mother