She looked down at her hands where they rested on the tabletop. They were cracked and dry, and the nails were dirty. She folded them together self-consciously. “I just got out again a couple of weeks ago. I don’t plan on going back.”
“If you needed to,” Nest said quietly, “you could leave Harper with me.”
Bennett’s eyes lifted. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. “Thanks, Nest. That’s nice of you to offer.”
“She would be safe here.”
“I know that.”
Nest looked out the window into the crisp black night. It was almost five in the afternoon. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asked.
Bennett Scott looked down again at her hands. “We wouldn’t want to be any trouble.”
In those few words, Nest heard a plea so desperate that she knew things were much worse than she believed. Then she remembered the dilapidated satchel Bennett was carrying. It was sitting inside the back door where Bennett had left it. Nest had thought it was just a baby bag, but now she wondered if it might not contain everything they had.
“Maybe you’d like to stay over for the night, too,” she said carefully, feeling her way across this treacherous ground. “Is someone else expecting you? Are you visiting anyone here?”
Bennett shook her head. “No. No one.” She was quiet for a long moment, as if she were making up her mind about something, and then she looked up. “The truth is, Harper and me came here because we don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes, and she looked down again quickly. Nest reached across the table and put her hand over Bennett’s. “I’m glad you came. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to.”
She rose and walked around the table. “Come on,” she urged, gently drawing the other to her feet. “I want you to go in and take a long, hot bath, soak everything out, just let it all go. I’ll look after Harper. When you’re done, we’ll talk some more.”
She walked Bennett into the guest bathroom, helped her out of her clothes, and deposited her in the big claw-foot tub that used to be Gran’s. Leaving Bennett to soak, she looked in on Harper, then went back out into the kitchen to clean up. Feeling as she did about herself, it must have taken a strong mix of courage and desperation for Bennett to come back to her after all this time. It made Nest wonder how much of what had happened to her she couldn’t bring herself to talk about and was keeping hidden somewhere deep inside.
When she finished the dishes, she began preparing dinner. She put together a tuna and noodle casserole and stuck it in the refrigerator so Bennett could heat it up later on. Nest had agreed to accompany the church youth group as a chaperone while they went caroling to the elderly sick and shut-in, and she would have to leave soon. She would get herself something to eat when she returned.
Finished with her preparations, she stood at the sink and stared out the window at the darkness. The park lay directly in front of her, just across the backyard, but the moon and stars were masked by clouds, so there was little to see. The temperature had dropped to well below freezing, and she doubted that it would snow tonight. When she lifted her hand and placed her fingers against the window glass, the cold pierced her skin like needles.
How did Pick stay warm on a night like this? Did he burrow down in a tree somewhere or was his bark skin impervious to cold? She had never asked him. She must remember to do so.
She thought about the ways in which magic ruled both their lives, its influence pervasive and inexorable. Sometimes she wished she could talk about it with someone, but for the whole of her life there had been only Pick and Gran. Gran had been willing, but Pick regarded talk of magic the same way he regarded talk about the weather—a pointless exercise. He would instruct, but he didn’t know how to empathize. Having magic didn’t mean the same thing to him that it did to her. To him, it was a natural condition of who and what he was. To her, in spite of her heritage, it was an aberration.