Herschel, with a small smile, watched Jean move around the kitchen, preparing dinner. It looked like she was floating from the stove, to the sink, and to the pantry. Her porcelain-skinned hands moving this pot, pouring that cup, and sliding that dish. He had not the slightest idea what she was making, but there was the warm smell of bacon, cheese, and fresh bread.
The floorboards creaked with every one of her busy steps. Need a few more nails, he thought. The sun’s rays streamed in from the big single-pane window he and his neighbor Bob had installed just one summer earlier. Jean liked the window with the curtains drawn wide open. She hated a dark room. She would not stop bothering him about the electricity that was supposed to be coming to town in the next year or so. Herschel did not know about all that.
Something knocked into his legs under the kitchen table. He leaned over and glanced down beneath the tabletop. His little boy was playing with a metal cavalry horse, and he had fallen over onto Herschel’s feet. The boy looked up, his sharp blue eyes bright in the shadows. “Sorry, Pa,” he said.
“That’s okay. You like that horse?”
“Yes, sir, I wish I had about five more,” he said excitedly.
Herschel’s smile, which had never left his face, grew, stretching from ear to ear. The dimple in his cheek expanded from a suggestion of a shadow into a crevice running from his cheekbone down to his jawline.
“What are you smilin’ at over there?” Jean asked, with no small amount of sarcasm.
“Oh, just life,” he answered. He rubbed his son’s hair before leaning back up to look at Jean. She was a small woman. Not so small as to be abnormal, but small enough that from a distance she might be confused for a girl. Her face was soft and round with a smattering of freckles on her nose. Her brown hair fell in curls around her face. She was pleasant to look at in the same way a hill was nice to see beside a mountain. One might prefer one view over the other, but both have their own value.
He had loved her from the first moment he had seen her walking by the station house in Blue Ridge, Georgia. He had jumped off the still-slowing train to catch her before he lost track of her in the crowd pouring off the train from Nashville.
“I’d smile too if someone was cooking me something this good,” she said, smiling.
He stood up and took two big steps toward her. “What else would make you smile?”
She giggled like a child. “Stop that.”
He kissed her, and she kissed him back.
“Let me go, I’m gonna burn the food.”
“Fine.” He loved the way she spoke — that sweet, drawn-out Southern accent. It drew him into every one of her words. “I am going to wash up. Give me a yell when you are ready.”
“Okay, honey,” she said, engrossed in cooking again. He walked out the door.
Zachary Peters 