"Wind changes back," said Agnes, climbing out into the cold. "But not tonight."
Chapter 15: The Crew Returns
The letter from the church vestry came on a Tuesday, on stationery so old the letterhead still showed a telephone exchange, and Agnes read it standing at the mailbox with the wind worrying her coat: the contract for the Church of the Valley roof had been awarded to New Roots Builders of Rutland β fairly bid, the letter said, and underlined, lowest and best, which Agnes suspected was Pastor Luke's own hand adding its testimony to the record. The work would take about two weeks. The crew would sleep at the grange hall, and the ladies of the church would see to their lunches, a sentence Agnes read twice, picturing certain ladies arranging themselves around that duty like cats around a stove.
She walked up her drive slowly, composing refusals.
By the time she reached the porch she had refused six ways. She was too old for company. The house was not fit. The men would feel obliged, which was a debt, and she had sworn off manufacturing debts. There was the cat β there was no cat, there had never been a cat, and Agnes, arriving at this final and feeblest barricade, stopped on her own steps and laughed out loud at herself, alone in the yard, like a woman surprising a thief in her own pantry.
"Agnes Holloway," she said, "you are a coward with a large dining room."
The dining room had seated fourteen in Thanksgiving years, and the table was still there under its cloth, patient as an altar. She stood in the doorway and did the arithmetic of another kind: six chairs she could account for, the leaf for the table in the hall closet, her mother's china in the hutch β the good set, with the blue band β and a leg of lamb, she decided, because Eli would have opinions about a leg of lamb, and she wanted to hear them.
She telephoned Hank Tiller that evening, before the talking-herself-out-of-it could rally.
"Sunday dinner," she said. "One o'clock. All four of them, and yourself. I will not be argued with, Mr. Tiller, so save the men's pride and your own and simply say yes and tell me if anyone cannot eat lamb."
There was a silence on the line of a very particular kind β the silence of a man rearranging his face so his voice will not betray it. "Yes, ma'am," Hank said. "Nothing on this earth any of them can't eat. Eli will want to help."
"Eli," said Agnes, "may render an opinion on the gravy. That is the extent of the army I am enlisting." She hung up and wrote it on the calendar in pencil, then went over it in ink.
She told Pastor Luke on Wednesday, after choir practice, in the spirit of informing the authorities. Luke Meredith, who had the shepherd's habit of receiving all news as though he had been expecting it, said, "That's a fine thing, Agnes," and then, carefully, "You know it will be talked about."
"Pastor," said Agnes, "I have begun to think being talked about is just the tax on being alive in a village. I intend to pay it in full and ask for the receipt."
Carol Bixby heard about it within the hour, of course. She heard about it, the postmistress later told the selectboard chairman's wife, from three sources, two of whom had it from Agnes's own mouth and one of whom had divined it from the size of the lamb order at the general store β for Agnes had telephoned in her order Thursday morning, and a leg of lamb for six, in Marlow Falls in February, is a proclamation in any language. By Friday the dinner had acquired, in the village's telling, a guest list of eleven, a string quartet, and a motive. By Saturday it had lost the quartet and gained a rumor that the men were moving in permanently, and Agnes, receiving these bulletins at the store with her groceries, corrected none of them.
She bought potatoes, and mint, and the good coffee. She bought a bag of flour for Eli's gravy-adjacent ambitions and a second because the first seemed insufficient for what she had set in motion. At home she took the blue-banded china down and washed it piece by piece at the sink, and set the table for six on Saturday night so the room would be used to it: her mother's plates, Thomas's chair at the head that she did not, after a moment's thought, leave empty in protest at the world, but set like any other.
Sunday would come whether she was ready or not. That, she had lately learned, was the entire secret of storms, of dinners, and of most of the rest of it. She polished the silver until it held the window's light, and went early to bed, and slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a woman who has raised her flag and means to stand under it.