Chapter 19

Summer settled over the farm in a rhythm Anna found herself adjusting to by careful degrees — the early mornings thick with the sound of livestock and birdsong rather than the distant clatter of a rebuilding city, the long, unhurried afternoons spent helping Dorothy in a kitchen garden that made Frau Brandt’s own modest plot look, by comparison, like a child’s first careful attempt at cultivation. Dorothy proved as generous a teacher as she was a hostess, patient with Anna’s unfamiliarity with American canning methods and the everyday rhythms of a farm kitchen, and by the end of June, Anna found she had settled into the household’s routines with a comfort that surprised her, given how foreign the whole of it had felt on her first morning there.

“You’ve a good hand for this,” Dorothy observed one afternoon, watching Anna work through a batch of strawberry preserves with the same careful, exacting attention she’d once brought to translating a difficult document. “Precision, I suppose you’d call it. Suits canning better than most folks realize, until they’ve ruined a batch or two from rushing it.”

“I have found,” Anna said, “that precision serves most things well, whether the task is translation or preserves. It was, I think, the one skill the war did not manage to take from me, whatever else it claimed along the way.”

Not every welcome that summer proved as warm as Dorothy’s, however. The county’s reception of Anna ran, on the whole, kinder than she had steeled herself to expect, but there were exceptions — a Sunday at church in early July when an older woman, a Mrs. Pruitt whose own son had died at Anzio, looked at Anna across the churchyard with an expression cold enough that Anna understood its meaning without needing a single word exchanged, and turned deliberately away rather than offer the greeting extended to every other new face in the congregation that morning.

Anna had noticed the woman before that Sunday — a fixture of the front pew, always dressed in careful, unadorned black, her face carrying the fixed, permanently guarded expression of someone who had learned, through hard experience, to armor herself against any further loss the world might still have in store for her. Word had reached Anna, secondhand, through the easy gossip of a small congregation, that Mrs. Pruitt had lost not only her son at Anzio but a husband to influenza years before that, and had raised the boy alone through the hardest years of the Depression only to watch him shipped off to Italy and buried there, in a country she would likely never have occasion to visit and mourn him properly within.

“Don’t let her trouble you,” Dorothy said afterward, walking Anna back toward the car with a protective hand at her elbow. “Mildred Pruitt’s grief runs deeper than most folks’ capacity for kindness can survive, and I don’t fault her the coldness, given what she’s lost. But it isn’t yours to carry, whatever she might wish otherwise. You didn’t kill her boy. The war did that, same as it took so much from you as well.”

“I understand her coldness better than she might expect,” Anna said. “I have stood on the other side of exactly that grief, in Germany, wondering whether I was permitted to want happiness for myself when so many around me had lost so much more. I do not think less of her for feeling it. I only wish there were something I could offer that might ease it, beyond simply existing as a reminder of what her own loss has cost her.”

“There isn’t,” Dorothy said, gently but firmly. “Not from you, and not from anyone else, save time, which has a way of softening even grief as stubborn as Mildred’s, given enough of it. You needn’t solve her sorrow, Anna. You need only live your own life honestly, and let the rest of the county draw its own conclusions from watching you do it.”