“That isn’t the point.”
“No.”
He softened.
“What is?”
She looked toward her stomach.
“I feel like everyone is watching again.”
He sat.
“Do you want me to tell them to stop?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to fight Mrs. Carter?”
She almost laughed.
“No.”
“She’s seventy.”
“That hasn’t stopped me before.”
“You are not helping.”
He smiled slightly.
Then became serious.
“What do you need?”
The answer came slowly.
“To be allowed to be scared without somebody correcting me.”
He nodded.
So she talked.
About childbirth.
About dying.
About becoming like her aunt.
About hating her body again.
About not knowing whether she could love a child without turning love into control.
The mountain man did not say:
You’ll be fine.
He did not say:
Don’t worry.
He listened.
When she finished, he asked:
“Can I tell you what scares me?”
She nodded.
“That you’ll die.”
Her throat tightened.
“And the baby?”
“Yes.”
“That I’ll be useless when you’re hurting.”
“You probably will.”
He smiled.
“That’s comforting.”
They sat.
Two frightened people.
Neither pretending courage meant absence of fear.
Their daughter arrived during a spring thunderstorm.
She screamed almost immediately.
So did the mountain man when the midwife handed her to him unexpectedly.
The young mother laughed despite exhaustion.
The baby had thick dark hair.
A furious expression.
Large lungs.
The mountain man held her like someone had given him a basket filled with glass.
“She’s small.”
The young mother stared.
“You expected what?”
“I don’t know.”
“A calf?”
Mrs. Vale laughed from the doorway.
The mountain man looked offended.
Their daughter grew broad-shouldered like her father.
Soft-cheeked like her mother.
Hungry.
Constantly.
When the child was six, an older woman visiting from town watched her take a third biscuit.
“My,” she said.
“She has quite an appetite.”
The young mother froze.
The child’s hand stopped halfway.
The old pattern presented itself.
One comment.
One embarrassed child.
One opportunity to begin measuring.
The mother smiled.
She placed another biscuit on the girl’s plate.
“She’s growing.”
The visitor frowned.
“You don’t want her becoming too—”
The mother looked up.
The sentence died.
Not because she shouted.
She did not have to.
“Too what?”
The visitor looked away.
“Nothing.”
The child finished the biscuit.
That night, the young mother cried privately.
Her husband found her beside the barn.
“What happened?”
“I almost heard my aunt come out of my own mouth.”
“But she didn’t.”
“I thought it.”
“Thoughts happen.”
“What if I become her?”