“Who sewed this?” she asked as she looked down at the quilt for a distraction. It was how she imagined the earth might look from above if she could see all the irregular rock walls and multicolored fields knitted together.
“My grandmother,” he said, pointing to some of the scalloped edges. “And then my mother added these bits. It’s kind of a family tradition. Something they hand down upon marriage. In fact, I think this bit might have been my great-grandmother’s.”
“It’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said. “What are you doing with it?”
“It’s the best quilt we have in our house. And it’s cold up here.”
“You could just go home,” she suggested. “That’s what most people do after work.”
“Suppose it depends on the home.” It was an idea she could understand. Since her mother got sick, she had wanted less and less to return home at the end of the day.
“It’s very nice,” she said, not wanting to think of her reluctance to go home, or face the truth her family was trying to hide.
“Grandpa was a herder, you see,” Tom said, his attention focused on the quilt. “One of the landsmen. Kept sheep out near Kelynack.” It was a small settlement only a few miles from there. “That’s why Nanna chose browns and yellows. For the land. Mum added the blues for the sea, because Dad is a fisherman.” It was his turn for a moment of unease, as he tried to clarify what he had said. “At least, he was a fisherman, before he started drinking.”
Elizabeth knew that Pat Hale’s drinking corresponded to the loss of Tom’s brother, but she didn’t want to ask about it. So instead she watched as Tom set about lighting the small gas stove, after which he produced a pan from his fishing creel. He filled it with water and set it to boil before sitting down next to her. The warmth felt good, so Elizabeth held her hands close to it. When he opened the edge of the quilt, resting his legs underneath, it didn’t feel wrong, but still her gaze flicked to the door to ensure they were alone. It surprised her to realize that she wanted that, to be just the two of them.
“Do you like being a fisherman?” she asked him.
Checking the water as bubbles began to rise, he shook his head. “Not much, but it pays okay. I don’t really like the sea.”
“I love the sea,” she told him.
“I doubt you would like it very much if you did my job. There’s not much fun to be had waking in the dark and waiting for fish to catch every morning.” He dropped a tea bag in the water and dabbed at it with a spoon. “I’d have rather stayed at school like you did. But after Daniel died I had to leave. We needed the money.”
Was it all right to probe if he was the one who brought it up? The need to ask him about his brother swelled so fast that she began talking before she even realized. It was a personal matter, and yet after what he had done for her mother last night, she felt somehow as if it wasn’t an intrusion.
“What happened to your brother?”
The light from outside was weak, but what was there cast his features in a golden-yellow haze as he stared straight ahead. The sight of him thinking made Elizabeth want to reach out and touch him, hold him close to her body. His soft gaze spoke of a depth for the way he felt about the world, she could sense it. Even though she wanted to know his answer, know all about Daniel, she wanted even more to stop time right there and then so that the moment they were sharing might never end.
“He was sailing when he shouldn’t have been. Winter weather, the sea too rough.”
“Oh, my goodness,” she said, bringing one hand up to her open mouth. It made what he had done for her mother last night even more commendable. “And still you jumped in.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, anybody would have done the same.”
Elizabeth didn’t believe that for a moment. A lot of people would have been too scared, would have called for help and decried what an awful tragedy it was without once getting a foot wet. “My mother was so lucky you were there.”
“Well, you can thank my father for it. If he’d been at home, my mother wouldn’t have sent me out to look for him and