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Kit stomps on the floor a few times to shake the snow from her boots before rubbing her numb hands together for warmth and turning the key to her apartment. The whistling of the teakettle greets her, and she closes the door quickly once she’s inside to keep in what little heat they have. “Hey, I’m home,” she calls out.
Ruthie walks out from behind the curtain they’d hung up on a clothesline to divide the kitchen from their bed in the corner. “You’re later than usual,” she says.
Kit winces. “I know. My boss sent me to talk to the accounting people about some bills—”
“Again?” Ruthie takes the teakettle off the stove and motions for Kit to come to the corner they call the dining room. “Doesn’t he have a secretary or something? It seems like you have better things to do.”
“Assistant duties are part of my job. And I don’t have anything better do to, considering I don’t have an assignment.” Kit considers taking off her coat, but thinks better of it, since the apartment will be chilly again soon enough when the heat from the stove dies down. “I like my job.”
“I wish they’d let you write another story,” Ruthie says. She sits down at the table.
Kit does the same. “So do I,” she says. They are having potatoes again, and homemade bread from Aunt Millie’s recipe, and the last of the butter ration for the month. Kit thinks of the article on page seven of the Minneapolis Star last month about a fire in the orphanage with the byline that said “Margaret Kittredge,” which Ruthie had tacked up on the kitchen wall. At her parents’ urging, Kit had also sent it to them by mail, embarrassed and secretly proud. “I’ve been asking, but I think he’s getting tired of me.”
“Hmm,” Ruthie murmurs.
Kit watches Ruthie pull her cardigan sleeves over her hands and curl her fingers around her steaming mug of coffee. Then Ruthie glances at the pile of envelopes on the table and frowns, almost imperceptibly, but Kit has known Ruthie for long enough to know it’s not about bills. “What’s in the mail?” she asks.
Ruthie drinks, and the corners of her mouth turn downward around her mug.
“My mother wrote me again,” Ruthie finally says.
“Oh.” Wanting to avoid the inevitable silence, Kit says with as much levity as she can summon into her voice, “Did she ask if you’d met a boyfriend again?”
Ruthie nods. She smiles, but it falls as flat as Kit’s tone. It was supposed to be a joke—and it had been for the first few months, the first few letters—but it’s gotten more and more difficult to laugh off. “You can read it yourself, if you want.” She takes the last pat of butter for her bread and tosses the wrapper aside.
Kit hears, Please read this letter because I don’t know how to deal with this by myself. “I will,” she says, retrieving the wrapper and smearing the last dregs onto her own slice of bread. As she reaches for the envelopes, she hears Ruthie actually say, “Kit, you know I can’t stay here forever.”
“Well, I know that,” Kit replies instantly, putting down the letter.
She will not say it, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that Ruthie is here at all. Years of being accustomed to wanting and unaccustomed to having are hard to shake off. She knows the feeling of holding her breath, when her father became employed again and when she left for college and when the newspaper gave her a job, half-disbelieving and waiting for loss.
Most of all, she remembers it when Ruthie kissed her in her attic room when they were seventeen. Since Ruthie arrived a few months ago, Kit never stopped marveling that she is allowed to sit across the table from Ruthie and talk and laugh and drink coffee in her own apartment. She tells herself that life will go on when Ruthie leaves, and takes a deep breath.
“My mother mentioned that she’d let me stay for a year,” Ruthie goes on. They know this. “She expects me to get married.” They know this too, and Ruthie opens her mouth and closes it, and finally decides to say, “I don’t have a college degree like you do, and she’s paying for me to stay here, and I don’t know—”
“I know,” Kit says. “I could write to her and tell her you’re doing well.”
“Kit,” Ruthie says. This time, Kit hears, Your writing can’t solve everything.
“I know,” Kit says again. “Or we could rent a room in a boarding house instead, to save money, I know you don’t like the idea—”
“Kit.”
“I know.”
Kit leaves in the morning as Ruthie is just getting out of bed, since Ruthie’s shift as a telephone operator only starts in the afternoon. She puts on the coat her parents had given to her as a high school graduation present, which thankfully she is too old to outgrow, and walks to work. In the summer she might have looked out over the bridge at the Mississippi and at the skyscrapers downtown, but the winter wind is biting hard, so she keeps her head down and hurries.
There’s a blast of warm air as Kit pushes through the revolving doors to the gleaming lobby. She takes the elevator up to her desk—no office of her own, yet—and arrives before the other two people who share her corner of the room. The morning passes in a blur of dull paperwork.
Just as Kit starts to question once again the wisdom of accepting a job that consisted of “mostly assistant work,” and “maybe a few stories” after Kit brought in a stack of her columns from the student newspaper and pestered her boss for days, she sees her boss walking toward her desk. “I have a story for you,” he says.
Kit gapes. He goes on, looking a little smug at finally having given Kit what she’d apparently been desperate for. “There’s a photo exhibit about photography from the FSA, the—”
“The Farm Security Administration,” Kit cuts in, and immediately feels embarrassed. She’d memorized much of the alphabet soup from looking at government jobs, anxious for Charlie to not become unemployed again.
“Right. Here’s the press release,” he says, sounding irked. “Why don’t you interview the photographer who’s mentioned in it. Do it by Friday, I want it in the art section on Sunday.”
“Yes, sir,” Kit says. She reads the press release excitedly—it’s not a war story, but she’d been told months ago that girls like her didn’t write war stories, and her boss doesn’t seem to have changed his mind. Still, this was infinitely better than going over expenses.
There would be an exhibit of New Deal-commissioned photography at the Institute of Art, and Kit didn’t see why this was particularly important, but at least photographs of the poor were more important than those ridiculous paintings of shapes. She scans the name of the artists and doesn’t recognize any, except for the lady who’d taken the photograph of the poor migrant woman, until—oh.
Stirling Howard, one of the photographers featured, will be giving a talk at the opening, it says.
Kit nearly jumps out of her seat from the shock. Would it really be him? Stirling and the rest of the boarders had moved out when Kit was sixteen. The Howards were really headed to Chicago this time, and Kit had Stirling had earnestly promised to write, but the rush of high school had disrupted even the best of intentions. A year later, after that day with Ruthie in the attic, Kit had sadly realized that she and Stirling had been close enough for her to tell him, had he stayed. She stopped writing to him until one impulsive day in college, and was sent the same envelope back with a note that Stirling Howard didn’t live there anymore.
That had been that. If Stirling had been traveling around, that would have explained it. Without thinking too much, Kit picks up the telephone and calls the museum, and wrangles this Stirling’s contact information from them.
She calls him, halfway expecting a different person until she hears the familiar deep voice. “Hello?”
Kit can’t speak for a second, and on the second “Hello?” Kit bursts out, “Stirling? This is Kit.”
Now it’s Stirling’s turn to be silent, and Kit begins to wonder again if she’s mistaken, until Stirling says, “Kit Kittredge?”
“Yes,” Kit says, and sighs with relief. “Stirling, I’m a reporter for the Minneapolis Star”—not technically true, but it sounded good and she would be eventually—”and I’m writing about your exhibit.” She must sound ridiculous. “Stirling, oh my goodness, I haven’t talked to you in so long and my letter got returned to me, and—” People have turned to look at her. “Will you have coffee with me tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Stirling says, and the familiarity of his voice overwhelms Kit so much that she can’t think. Then, “How have you been?” he asks.
“Oh! I’ve been—I’ve been fine.” As if she weren’t overwhelmed enough, just thinking about all that’s happened in her life in the years after Stirling left makes her dizzy. “I went to college,” she says, for some reason, and feels herself blush. “I’ll see you tomorrow? What time?”
Stirling laughs. “How about ten at the coffee shop near where I’m staying?” He gives her the address, and Kit shakily copies it down. Then she hangs up, and looks around at the people who are pretending to not look at her and at the half-finished expense accounts, embarrassed and thrilled.
Kit knows even before she opens the door that Ruthie will not want to talk today, because the sound of the radio filters through the thin walls of the hallway. With some trepidation, she unlocks the door.
They listen to news about the British invasion of Italy as they eat.
After dinner, Kit turns down the radio. “You won’t believe who I talked to today,” she says.
“Who?”
“Stirling.”
Ruthie puts down the plate she’s washing and turns off the faucet. “Stirling Howard?”
Kit tells her about the news story she’s been assigned to write and about their phone conversation. She’s glad that Ruthie is talking to her, if only because she is incredulous. “We should have him over for dinner soon. I don’t know how long he’ll stay in Minneapolis,” Kit says absentmindedly, and wishes she hadn’t.
Ruthie frowns, and says nothing, and Kit hears I don’t know how long I’ll be in Minneapolis either, and What will he think of us living together? Maybe even What do I think of us living together? The faucet turns on again. Kit is relieved when the telephone rings, and rushes over to it, for once grateful that Ruthie had insisted on one.
“Hey, Squirt,” she hears on the other end.
“Charlie!” Kit realizes that she’d forgotten Charlie would be home today, on leave. Had it really been a year since she last talked to him?
“You sound happy to hear me,” Charlie says, and Kit can hear him smiling.
She begs for details about his time in France. Charlie obliges, and only afterward does Kit realize that he doesn’t really want to talk about it. He sounds happier when he says, “Did you hear that some Congressmen are talking about free college education for returning soldiers? Mom and Dad told me about it tonight.”
“Really? That’s great! Are you going to take it?” Kit remembers her guilt over going to college when her brother hadn’t, even fully knowing that she’d worked hard to earn the money and was still paying off the loans now. “If there is a bill, I mean.”
Charlie pauses. “I think so,” he says. “I’ll be a full decade older than some of those kids. It feels crazy.”
He’d clearly been thinking about it a great deal beforehand. “You won’t be the only one,” Kit says. “You always wanted to go to college. Why not?”
“It’ll take another few years,” Charlie says. “I don’t know if it’ll even help—” But he seems to change his mind halfway through, or maybe he doesn’t want to let Kit down. “Like you said, why not?” he says. “We’ll see.”
Kit grins. “That’s great, Charlie,” she says, genuinely happy for him.
He puts her on the phone with her mother, and then her father, and her throat closes up a little when they politely ask after Ruthie. After she’s said her goodbyes and promised to write more often, she hangs up, and sees Ruthie standing on the same side of the curtain a few feet away.
“Is Charlie going to college, then?” she says stiffly.
“I—I think so.”
Ruthie’s mouth wobbles like she’s going to say something, but instead she takes a step toward Kit and throws her arms around Kit’s neck, resting her head on Kit’s shoulder. Ruthie smells like dish soap, and Kit can feel Ruthie’s body heaving and warm against her as she takes deep breaths, in and out.
“I just really want this to turn out okay,” Ruthie says, muffled.
“Me too,” Kit says, feeling just a little less cold.
The next morning, Kit heads outside for her interview with plenty of time to walk, only to find that the soft, drifting snowfall from earlier had grown into a full-on snowstorm. Mentally cursing the Minnesota weather, she resigns herself to calling a cab, even though it would be ridiculously expensive. But it’s the middle of the morning before the lunch rush, so she gets to the coffee shop early despite the bad weather.
She sits and sips her coffee for half an hour once she’s inside, watching the people come and go, mostly college students. Around ten o’clock, Kit fumbles in her purse for the address, worried that she’s in the wrong coffee shop.
“Kit?” says someone next to her.
Stirling’s voice. “Oh!” Kit says, and looks up.
It’s definitely him, standing across the table from her and grinning, still short and skinny and pale but not diminutive anymore. His hair is darker, and his face more hollowed out, but Kit would have recognized him anywhere. “Stirling!” she says, motioning for him to sit down, not knowing what to say.
“It’s good to see you again, Kit,” he says. It feels surreal, as though they were sixteen again and sitting in the ice cream shop in downtown Cincinnati. Kit watches the breathtakingly familiar way he pulls out his chair and sits down, crossing his legs.
She realizes that Stirling is looking at her in the same way, full of wonder. “How have you been?” he says, and it feels like an echo of every time she’s heard his voice.
Kit doesn’t even know how to answer. “I’ve been alright,” she says quietly. “I finally went to college like I said I would.”
“You told me that over the phone,” Stirling says in his soft teasing way, and Kit can’t help but laugh.
“I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“I know. This is unbelievable, right?” A waitress brings Stirling some coffee, and smiles at Kit. Kit realizes, a little mortified, that the waitress and everyone else in the coffee shop think that she must be on a date. “You went to the University here, right?” Stirling continues.
At first, Kit is startled that Stirling doesn’t know something so integral to her life. “Yes, I did,” she says, and remembers that Stirling couldn’t know because they’d stopped writing to each other. She will ask about her returned letter, but not now. “What happened to you?” she says.
Stirling draws a breath, as though similarly not sure where to begin. Kit suddenly remembers that she is on an interview, and pulls out her notepad and pen. Stirling raises his eyebrows and says, “Do you want the quick version for your newspaper?”
“Oh, goodness, that’s not what I mean,” Kit says, embarrassed. “I really would like to know. I don’t have to—here—” she starts to put away her notepad.
“Don’t, it’s fine,” Stirling says. “I’m sorry, was just wondering if you were in a hurry to do this interview, I know you have to get back to work—”
“I’m not,” Kit says quickly. “What happened to you? I sent you a letter about three years ago and it got returned to me.” She hadn’t planned to bring it up so early. Three years sounds like a long time, now that she’s said it aloud.
“I was in California,” Stirling replies matter-of-factly. “Actually, maybe New Mexico. I became a photographer for the New Deal programs, but I suppose you already knew that, since you called me.” Kit considers writing this down, but doesn’t. “I couldn’t go to art school since we had no money, so I bought a cheap camera and learned how to take photographs. My mother thought it would be more useful, and I did end up getting a few jobs from the newspaper until I signed up with the government.”
Kit scribbles this down in the shorthand that she’s grown proud of. “If you’re really not in a hurry, I’d really like to hear about what you’ve been doing,” Stirling says.
Kit thinks of Ruthie, and says, “I’d love to talk to you more, but we can just keep talking about you and finish up the interview first, if you’d like.”
Stirling fills Kit in on his travels around the country, to migrant camps in California and dust-ravaged farms in Nebraska and cardboard cities in New York. He shows her photos of poor farmers and laborers and women and children captured in all their dignity. Kit runs her fingers over the glossy photos and says, “What are you going to do now?”
Stirling seems confused by the question. “You mean here?”
“I mean later. Where are you going to go from here? I mean, the government doesn’t need photographers anymore, like you said.”
“I don’t know,” Stirling says without hesitating.
Kit is taken aback. “You’re not worried?” she blurts, and immediately feels embarrassed at feeling familiar enough to say this to him. But Kit’s entire view of the future has always been bound up in worry, and the same has been true for Stirling for as long as she’d known him. “I mean, are you going to find another job, or—”
“Well, eventually. I don’t know where, but I do have some money left over.”
Kit knows she shouldn’t have asked. “I’m—I’m sure that the Star would have a position for you. You’re a really talented photographer, and I could talk to my boss about it, and we are running a story about you.”
“Thanks, Kit,” Stirling says. “I’ve met a lot of people around the country, and I’m sure I can work something out with one of them.”
“But—”
“Hey, you still haven’t told me what you’ve been doing after college.”
Kit pauses. “Alright,” she says, resigning herself to the change in subject. She would help Stirling get a job here if he asked. “I got a job at the Star. I’m not really a reporter. I replied to an ad for an assistant, and then I convinced my boss to let me write stories once in a while. I told him about my reporting for the college paper.”
Stirling laughs. “You convinced him? Really? That sounds like you.”
“Hey—” Kit tries to be indignant, but she surprisingly feels a bloom of warmth inside her, that Stirling would still tease her after all this time. It did sound like her. “I guess you’re right.” And before she can stop myself, she says, “I got an apartment with Ruthie.”
Stirling’s eyes widen a little. “Wow. That sounds great. I should have known you’d have kept in touch. Did she go to college here too?”
Kit regrets saying anything. “Well, actually,” she says slowly, and takes a sip of her coffee. It’s cold already—had they really been here for this long?—but she did pay for it, so she downs the rest of it before it gets any colder. “No, she didn’t. She stayed in Ohio, and after I graduated, she came over here to live with me for a while.”
Stirling nods, and Kit is both terrified and relieved to see what might be comprehension on his face. Stirling doesn’t say anything for a while, but his lack of words has never signified any lack of thought.
Finally he says quietly, “Forgive me for asking, but is Ruthie going to have to leave?”
Kit hears what Stirling has figured out and does not need to ask. “I think so,” she says. With her heart pounding in her throat, she says, not knowing what’s come over her, “I really wish she could stay for longer.”
Stirling leans closer to her and props his elbows on the table. “Well, she isn’t leaving all that soon, is she?”
Kit remembers why she sometimes used to think that Stirling should have been a reporter along with her. She’d never met anyone more economical than he was with words. “I suppose not,” she says.
“Do you want to take a walk?” Stirling says. “I haven’t seen much of the city yet. You can talk to me more about this if you’d like.”
“Oh, I think—” Kit thinks. “Well, that’s fine. We can take a walk.”
The waitress gives the check to Stirling. Kit insists on paying for both of them, and is relieved when Stirling agrees.
The snowstorm had subsided as quickly as it had started, and Kit and Stirling are met with a few inches of fresh snow on the ground when they go outside. People are just starting to leave their buildings for lunch, and the snow muffles their noise. It’ll be a while before the newly white streets become gray and brown again, Kit thinks.
“I’m still up for the walk if you are,” Stirling says, and Kit laughs.
They set out toward the river with Kit leading them. The air is crystalline and quiet, and everything moves slowly through the snow. Kit cannot find anything else to say about Ruthie, and Stirling does not insist. She’s surprised at how little time it took for them to be able to settle into this comfortable silence, just like they used to.
They reach the Stone Arch Bridge, and Stirling says, “This is gorgeous.”
“What?” Kit says.
“The river.”
Stirling points, and Kit looks up. She’s never given much thought to the Mississippi before, that flat dark ribbon stretching through her adopted city that she now crosses every day on the way to work. But now the river is frozen over, and both the water and riverbanks are blanketed with snow, bright in the dull winter sun and lined with bare, dark trees. It extends into the gray-white horizon, up to the northern woods on one side, and down through the city and beyond on the other.
Kit squints into the distance, and imagines the river thawing and broadening and twisting, all the way until it spills into the sea.
“When is the snow going to melt?” Stirling says. He’s taking out a camera.
“Not for a few months,” Kit says, remembering the years of trudging through the snowy campus even in March or April.
“It’s beautiful,” Stirling says, and begins to take photos. Kit listens to the shutter snapping again and again, and looks at the city, at the rising skyscraper scaffolds and the ruins of the old mill and the frozen hydroelectric dam. Just a bit farther is the campus where she’d earned her diploma. When he is finished, Kit is afraid to ask for his address, for fear of what happened last time they’d promised to write.
Stirling says, “Don’t bother writing me.” Kit feels sadly vindicated, and he continues, “I travel too much. I’ll write you, since you’re settled down here.”
“Well—” Kit is about to object, but what comes out is, “Yeah, you’re right. I’d really like to see you again sometime.”
“You’ll see me at the exhibit opening,” Stirling says, smiling.
“Right, but— You know.”
“Take care,” Stirling says, grinning. “Say hello to Ruthie for me.”
“See you later,” Kit says.
She walks across the bridge back to the newspaper building downtown. A cab passes, but she doesn’t hail it, and instead walks the rest of the way through the snow. Her shoes might get soaked, but it’s not too cold out, and the air feels good in her lungs after too much time spent inside heated buildings. She takes her nose out of her scarf and looks around.
She realizes that she forgot to invite Stirling to dinner. It’s fine, she thinks, because surely they’d run into each other again sometime in the future. And with Ruthie—well, Ruthie would be there too, hopefully.
A shopfront with flowers catches her eye, shining against the dreary gray everywhere else, and Kit goes in, feeling lighter than she has in a long time. She has a little money in her pocket which was supposed to have been cab fare for the return trip, so she lets herself budget half of it toward flowers. In the end, she decides on a smaller version of the bouquet in the window, bursting with leaves and purple flowers.
“For a friend, miss?” the shopkeeper asks as she takes Kit’s money.
“Oh, yes,” Kit says. “Have a good day.”
Her coworkers will probably think that she’d been on a date and had been given flowers by her boyfriend, Kit thinks with some glee. This afternoon, she will finish her article. The flowers might wilt a little before she gets home.
“I think we should talk about this,” Kit says out loud to herself when she is out in the street again. For practice. She sees Ruthie in front of her, in their drafty apartment with sheets for walls, putting the flowers in the chipped vase on the kitchen counter.