The Bride in the House

The girl did not come every night. She came when the house was quiet, and she never stayed long, and she never, after the first dream, asked for anything. But she was there, in the way that a quiet presence is there in a house that has learned to expect one.

The mother set the second bowl every morning now. She did not discuss it with her husband, and he did not discuss it with her. They were old enough to know that some things are not discussed. They are done, and the doing of them is the whole of the conversation.

Once, the mother left a length of cloth out, on the table, with the scissors. She had meant to make a summer robe. In the morning, the cloth was folded, and the scissors laid beside it, and the fold was the fold a woman's hands make, not the fold the mother's own hands would have made. She said nothing. She folded it again, differently, and let it be.

The father, for his part, would sit in the evenings by the inner hall, where the two tablets stood, and read his book aloud. He had never read aloud before. He began to do it now, because the house was quiet, and because the boy had always liked to hear a man read, and because it was, after all, a house with two children in it again.

The neighbors, who noticed everything, said that the old couple were failing. They left out an extra bowl, they said. The father talked to himself. They did not say it unkindly; old people are allowed their little follies, and this was a gentle folly, and it hurt no one.

But the house itself was different. It was warmer in winter than it had a right to be. Things that had been lost for years turned up, put back in their proper places. The mother, who had once grieved so that she could not leave her chair, began to move about the house again, singing under her breath, the way she had sung before the boy died.

It was not happiness. The parents of a dead child do not, by and large, become happy again. But it was something like peace, and peace, in such a house, is the next best thing. They had not, in any case, expected either.

Then one evening, in the fourth month after the wedding, the girl came to the mother as she was mending a coat by the lamp. This time she was not in a dream. She stood in the corner of the room, where the light did not reach, and she spoke without opening her mouth, the way the dead speak.

You have been very kind to me, she said. I have not earned it, and I want you to know that I understand that I have not. I was a girl from a small house. I died without having been anyone. You have given me a place, and a name that is not my own only, and a family that asks after me. This is more than I had any right to.

The mother did not look up from her mending. She was a practical woman, and she had learned, in these months, not to be afraid of the girl. She said, quietly: You are our daughter now. That is not kindness. That is the way of it. Eat, and sit, and do not thank us for doing what we should have done.

The girl was quiet for a moment. Then she did a thing the mother would tell for the rest of her life: she sat down, invisibly, on the stool across the table, as though it had been offered her. She did not, after that, thank them again. She had understood, at last, that thanks were not what was wanted.