Borrowed Bride

The house had been waiting longer than any of its doors. I knew that within an hour of unloading my tools, before Maren even came home, while the grandmother sat in the kitchen with her back to me and her hands folded on the oilcloth.

The doors were the reason I'd been hired. Six of them, interior, original to the house, each one swollen in its frame from decades of river damp. The front door stuck so badly that the old woman had taken to using the side entrance, which meant the main threshold had gone unopened for at least two seasons. I ran a chisel along the jamb and the wood shrieked.

"Leave that one be."

I turned. The grandmother had not moved, but her voice carried through the house with the flatness of a hand laid on a table.

"Mrs. Voss." I set the chisel down on my drop cloth. "I was told all six."

"You were told wrong." She shifted in her chair, and I heard the scrape of her shoes on the linoleum. "The front door stays shut. You do the others."

I could have argued. I needed the work, and the woman paying me was not this one but Maren, who had found me through a county listing and offered three weeks of room and board plus cash for the restoration. The grandmother was not the client. But I had been in enough old houses to know that some doors are not stuck because of weather.

"All right," I said. "The others."

I packed my chisel back into its leather roll. The house settled around me, and the front door held its breath.

Maren came home at dusk with a bag of groceries and a bootlace untied. She was thirty-two, three years younger than I was, and she moved through the kitchen door with the particular weariness of someone who had spent the day teaching seventh graders to diagram sentences. Her hair had come loose from its clip, and she tucked a strand behind her ear with a finger that left a smudge of chalk dust on her jaw.

"You started," she said.

"The doors in the hall. Your grandmother won't let me touch the front one."

Maren set the groceries on the counter. She did not look at her grandmother, and the old woman did not look at her. The space between them had the temperature of a stone pulled from a river.

"Oma," Maren said, "Ilse is here to do the doors. All of them."

The grandmother stood. She was smaller than I had expected, her spine curved, her hands gnarled and dark at the knuckles. She came toward me with the slow gait of someone crossing a wet floor, and when she reached me she took my wrist in her grip.

Her fingers were cold. Not the cold of poor circulation but the cold of something stored in a cellar.

"You smell like the wrong kind of salt," she said.

I did not pull away. That would have been a kind of admission, and I had learned long ago not to flinch from old women who said strange things. My own mother had said strange things before she left.

"What salt is the right kind?" I asked.

The grandmother's grip tightened. Then she let go and walked out of the kitchen, and I heard her bedroom door close at the end of the hall.

Maren stood at the counter with her hands flat on the grocery bag. "She's been worse since the anniversary."

"Of what?"

"Of everything." Maren turned and began unpacking the bag. Cans of tomatoes. A loaf of dark bread. A paper-wrapped wedge of cheese. "I'm sorry. I should have warned you. She says things."

"I've heard worse from clients." I crossed to the table and began sorting my tools, mostly to give my hands something to do. The wrist where the old woman had gripped me still held the shape of her fingers, a bracelet of cold that did not fade.

Maren watched me for a long moment. Then she laughed, a short sound with no amusement in it, and said, "You're very good at pretending not to be rattled."

"I'm very good at a lot of things that don't matter."

She did not answer. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard popped, and I listened for the sound of a horse in the far field, though I did not know yet that there would be one.

That first night I slept in the room Maren had prepared for me, a narrow space under the eaves with a window that looked out over the fen. The bed was old, the mattress thin, and the sheets smelled of lavender and dust. I lay awake for a long time,