The Grinding Mill

The Grinding Mill

Leni already had her hand under the faucet when she decided she wasn’t going to cry. That mattered to her. She told her father about it over the phone while he searched for the key outside the schoolhouse.

“It didn’t hurt at first,” she said. “Then it did.”

Thomas wedged the phone between his shoulder and ear. He held three keys in his right hand, two of them for padlocks. The big one had to fit. It didn’t.

“You pour the water into the cup first. Then the powder. I showed you.”

He heard a faint rubbing sound on the other end. Probably her finger on the tabletop. When Leni had to wait, she liked running her nail along the joints in the kitchen table.

“Mom says you have to stir it first.”

“The kettle’s heavy when it’s full. You can just fill it half—”

“Dad.”

The big key turned halfway. Thomas pulled the handle. Car doors slammed behind him. A dog barked, and a woman scolded it, although the barking sounded perfectly reasonable. It was a cold, bright Thursday in October. The beeches had lost enough leaves to let him see through the woods, and kept enough to make the woods look friendly.

“I’m listening,” Thomas said.

“But you’re saying a lot.”

He let go of the door handle.

It was exactly the kind of thing Kathrin had been saying to him for months, only without the weight of everything that had come before. Thomas stepped back from the door and set down the case of measuring equipment.

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“I wanted to tell you I didn’t cry.”

“That was brave.”

“I only bawled when the skin came up. But that was later.”

Thomas smiled. He pictured her hand, brown from the summer, with the tiny mole between her thumb and index finger. He asked where she’d burned herself. On her left palm, Leni said. Down near the thick part. Mom had put a bandage on it, but she’d have to take it off when she went swimming.

“Sunday. Ten o’clock,” Thomas said.

She didn’t answer right away.

“I remember,” he added.

“You can come later, too. We’ll be in the little pool first. Just not really late.”

“I’ll be there before they open.”

Leni went quiet. Then she asked if he wanted to tell her something that wasn’t finished yet.

That used to be her question. Can I tell you something that isn’t finished yet? Then she’d tell him about school, an idea for a book, or how she wanted to stop liking a friend but still did. Thomas would listen, sometimes for fifteen minutes, while Kathrin unloaded the dishwasher in the other room. Since the separation, he’d been trying to fit those conversations between appointments. Only now had he noticed that Leni no longer asked the question.

“I’m standing outside a school, and I can’t get in,” he said.

“Are you late?”

“By a few years.”

She laughed. That short, slightly too loud laugh she’d gotten from Kathrin. Thomas looked at the window beside the door. A narrow strip of sky lay in the glass, with his head beneath it and the dark opening of his own mouth.

“Is it old?”

“Very. There used to be a whole village here.”

“What about now?”

“The forest came back.”

“Had all the people left?”

“Little by little.”

“Good,” Leni said. “Otherwise that would’ve been bad.”

Someone cleared their throat behind Thomas. A small woman stood on the path with two cloth shopping bags. She wore a dark green jacket and had one eye narrowed as if sunlight were hitting her face from the side. The sun was behind the house.

“You have to pull before you turn,” she said.

Thomas pointed to the phone and nodded. He told Leni he had to go. She put Kathrin on, and Kathrin repeated the same time, a little less kindly.

“I wrote it down,” he said.

“I know.”

There was no malice in it. Kathrin could say things that sounded like accusations when she was simply stating the facts. It had made him angry during their marriage. Now he was often angry and had no one left to blame for it.