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Ellis comes back on the fifth day of the fifth month, just as she’d promised she would. She's got Monty in tow, attached to the back of her bike with a series of straps and buckles, all of which she undoes as Sheri bounces on the balls of her feet, waiting to hear what it is she's brought this time.
"Anything good?"
"Have you been good?"
"Yes!"
"No," says Lauren, coming up behind her and putting a hand on her shoulder. "She pulled down the washing yesterday. Was a nice sunny day for it, too, and she yanked all of it down – what was that you said, squirt?”
Sheri makes a face, mumbles something inaudible.
“What was that?” Ellis asks.
“I wanted my pinafore.” She pouts at Lauren, who stifles a laugh. “It’s not funny, Mum – you said I could have it back as soon as it was dry!”
“And was it?”
“No,” she admits, her voice very small. “But I thought –”
“You see,” Lauren says, smiling at Ellis. “We thought –”
“Mum made me wash it all again and then hang it up again,” Sheri says, clearly filled with the sort of despair that only a seven-year-old set to chores can muster. “I said I was sorry!”
“And we show we’re sorry by fixing what we ruined,” Lauren reminds her. “But all right, you have been forgiven, it’s not very fair of me to keep you from whatever Auntie Ellis brought for you this go-around.”
“So she has been good?” Ellis tries not to smile. “Can I give out presents now, or do we wait until after chores?”
“Now,” says Sheri. “Please?”
“All right.”
Ellis crosses the yard to where the bike is parked, leaning precariously on its kickstand, and rummages through the bag in the back of it. Saddlebags, she’d called them once, something that made Sheri ask solemnly if her bike was actually a horse.
“No,” she’d said, then: “Well, sort of” – for it had replaced one, after all. “Better than, for all its faults” – which she had tried to explain, though Sheri had not listened. Today there are no explanations, for there are no questions, only a small and impatient girl bouncing as she waits for what will come out, what has she been brought. The last visit, three months before, had seen her gifted ribbons for her pigtails, before Mum had told her she was old enough to have them clipped, if she so wished, and thus shorn them short. Lauren had said as much in one of her letters, and so Ellis packed something else this time.
She rummages, pulling out a new pinafore, this one patterned with strawberries. Sheri takes it, hugging it to her chest, and looks to her mum: “Can I?”
“Tell Ellis thank you, first.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Now can I?”
“As you like.” Lauren laughs, helping her tug off the old one (still beloved, but not as beloved as one with strawberry patterns, pulling it over her head and fastening the ties ‘round the back. “Better?”
“Yes!”
She bounds off to go play, leaving the two of them considering each other. Monty is still waiting, whirring now in the sunlight, solar panels extended.
“You’d best come in, then,” Lauren says. “I”ll put tea on – there should be hot water in the reservoir. Good that you came today and not yesterday…”
Yesterday, for she’d done laundry twice after all, and so what water had been heated by the solar system was spent on that – not enough for cooking and bathing, and since they resist using wood here, where it’s so scarce…
“Good timing, then,” she says. “Let me unpack Monty” – for the whirring is changing to the sort of chirruping that means he is done charging and that he too would like to be let down, to stretch his servos (for the temptation is always there, to humanize him, though he is not human and would likely be offended, if he could understand her impulse to do so).
“As you like,” Lauren says, then: “You’re as bad as Sheri sometimes.”
This is probably fair, though Ellis doesn’t quite entertain it. She hums, rather, considering: “I’ll take being compared to the seven-year-old as a compliment – she’s good at finding the joy in things, isn’t she?”
“Never a still moment.” Lauren helps her with the straps and ties that hold Monty in place, freeing the robot until he is able to rise to his full height (just taller than Ellis, long and gangly, looking for all the world as though he is going to fall over). “Need to make hay while the sun shines, or so she’d say, if she was familiar with it – can’t be still while the sun’s out, after all, too many things to do, and God forbid I stop her. Did you have a reason for bringing Monty along this time?”
“No,” Ellis admits, then: “Company, maybe, and Sheri likes him.” The robot knows how to play hide-and-seek, after all, and she delights in this – a silent, ever-loyal playmate who listens to her every command and will never tell her no or that he is bored and ask to play a different game.
“You spoil her.”
“Well, yes,” she says. “Hard not to.”
Lauren tsks, but doesn’t comment on this. “Did you bring anything else?”
“More flour,” she says. “You said you were low, last time – oh, and salt, and black pepper, dried sage, seeds…”
At seeds, Lauren’s hands – refastening the buckles for Monty’s trailer – still. “Seeds?” she says carefully. “What sort?”
“Squash, mostly – and yes, I know it’s late in the season – they’re for your glasshouse.” If it can be called a glasshouse, when it’s made of plastic paneling, scavenged from elsewhere. “Wildflowers – they didn’t have anything very edible this time, but it’s all things that should self-seed, or that you can save the seeds of.”
“Squash should winter over, in the greenhouse, if I get the right lights on it,” Lauren says, then: “Thank you.”
“‘Course.” A moment of hesitation, then she pats the front pocket of her shirt, still buttoned against the long ride she’d had, undoing it carefully before pulling out the most precious cargo of all. “And these.”
She draws the reading glasses out carefully – gold-rimmed frames, possibly too large for Lauren’s face, but they are the right prescription, or so the fellow that sold them to her off-system said. He’d ground the lenses for her while she waited, making conversation about where it was she was headed – “nice place, heard, though hard to make a living.”
Ellis heard him out, listening and making the right sounds in the right spots, telling him about Lauren and her daughter (“my brother’s wife, may his memory never be forgotten”), the two of them carrying out his dream. “The girl’s seven now, getting taller by the day. Lonely life, but they do all right. Would be easier, y’know, if she had a way of reading…”
So, the glasses. She’d bartered for them – traded some of her time, her skill with small repair, fixing the grinder he used in exchange for the glasses and lenses, Lauren’s prescription still in her pocket, what the traveling optometrist told them when he’d come through eight months before.
“Ellis,” Lauren says, pulling her back to the present. “You didn’t.”
“Did,” she says. “Bartered for ‘em, you can’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.” She takes them, puts them on, blinking at Ellis once they’re in place. “God, they’ll take adjusting to again…”
“Thought of that, too,” she says, reaching into a pocket and pulling out one of the datacubes she’d loaded up before she left port. “Here – can rip it to your home network, and I’ll refill it next time I come through.”
“Ellis.”
“Lauren.”
“You’re – we get by just fine without you,” Lauren admonishes her. “We don’t –”
“I know,” she says. “I also know, if David had lived –”
Lauren takes the datacube from her, her fingers curling about it. “If David had lived we’d see you even more than we do, and Sheri would be even more spoiled than she already is,” she says. “But thank you, fine. I’m not too proud to accept it.”
“Good,” she says, sighing. “Glad.”
“Yes,” she says. “Come in – we’ll have tea, and you can tell us all about where you’ve been this time.”
They walk into the house, Ellis taking a seat at the kitchen table as Lauren pulls hot water from the reservoir, steaming and bubbling in the container, letting the tea steep as she prepares everything else: boba pearls, mostly, for these she can barter for. They’re not true tapioca, but the texture is close, and Ellis, who can almost never afford the real thing, doesn’t protest. These she sets out, with milk and the rough lumps of brown sugar she makes herself from tree sap.
“Good run this year,” she says – for the sugar bowl is full to nearly overflowing, then: “I know hot isn’t how most people take it, but…”
Refrigeration is dear, the little units costing more than almost anything else in their house. Certain things can be kept cool enough in running water, and there is a stream just out the back door, but others, like ice, only last so long. “They serve it hot at some of the ports,” Ellis says, scooping the pearls into her mug, adding sugar atop these and pouring the tea over them when Lauren brings the pot to the table. “It’s enough of a treat as it is – I almost never get real sugar these days.”
“If you can call tree sugar real sugar.” Lauren sighs. “How have you been, really? You told Sheri you’d be back for the festival, but I wondered…”
She waves a hand. “Made sure to wrap up all my trades before I came back this way,” she says. “I’m free for the next two decads, then it’s back off-planet for a while.”
“How long?”
“Getting soft on me?” Ellis grins, stirring tea into her milk. “Month or two, maybe longer. I should be back no later than the eighth month – I’ll be back for, well.”
The anniversary, she means, of David’s passing. Three years this year, and still not any easier, neither of them talking about it directly.
“Thank you,” says Lauren, then: “Oh, hell, did Sheri put her old pinafore on Monty?”
Ellis glances out the window, looking out to where her niece is standing, the robot kneeling on the ground before her, ever obedient as she ties the ribbons about the back of him. “Looks like it,” she says. “Should I…?”
“No.” Lauren shuts her eyes, leaning back in her chair. “It’s – hell. She wants to share with everyone, you know, not surprised that she’d dress up the robot.”
“Good thing to be, kind-hearted,” Ellis remarks. “If a bit hasty…”
“Always doing things in the wrong order, and then pouting when they’re not done right.” Lauren sighs. “I caught her washing the dinner dishes before we ate, the other day – not because they were dirty, mind, but because she thought it would save time if she washed them before – wouldn’t need to do them after.”
Ellis stifles a laugh. “David did the same thing when he was her age. He grew out of it – she will, too.”
“I don’t know that he ever did.” Lauren shifts in her seat, stirring a touch more milk into it, sipping it before nodding. “He bought this place before he’d even asked me if I wanted to get off the station, you know – sight unseen. We had a fight over it.”
“I remember.” He’d slept on her couch for a while, lamenting that his wife couldn’t see his vision – it’ll be wonderful, Ellis, she just doesn’t get it yet, but if I give her time…
She’d reminded him about what he’d always struggled with: carts before horses, why didn’t you ask her before you pulled the trigger. He’d apologized, offered to unwind the deal, they’d gone through with it, and then – well.
The farmstead had been more or less set when they lost him. Ellis had been off-planet at the time, trading on one of the stations in the outer belt, bartering work for the broken box of parts that would eventually become Monty. Lauren had called her – actually called, one of the voice recordings that cost more than most people made in a month, and left a message for her, telling her what had happened. It was a kindness Ellis hasn’t forgotten, that it could come through voice, almost instantaneous, and not have to be shared with her through some impersonal block of text, the way all other news had been.
She’d come back for a year, just to set them to rights, make sure the place ran more or less smoothly. She’d worked on Monty in her free time, got the little robot that could up and running and repaired the solar panels on Lauren’s place, to boot. By the time she’d left, things were as good as they could be, and her labor wasn’t strictly needed – not that she’s stayed away since.
“I did forgive him,” Lauren says.
“Had to,” Ellis says. “He was a difficult man to stay mad at – well.”
Sheri comes bounding into the house, Monty rolling behind her, her pinafore draped about his neck, the ties tied in a loose bow ‘round the back. “Can I have tea too, Mum?”
“Yes, if you –”
There is a tinkling sound of breaking glass.
“Oh, lord,” Lauren says, her eyes closing. “Sheri…”
“Oops?”
Ellis, who knows where the broom lives, goes to fetch it, while Sheri, her face almost as red as the strawberries on her new pinafore, takes a seat at the table, legs swinging as she waits quietly for her aunt to sweep up what’s broken (one of the teacups, not one of the wedding-pattern china – irreplaceable, and what she’d been half-afraid had broken), but one of the every-day cups, the sort that can be found in any port or else purchased in the town.
“No harm done,” she says, tipping the pieces into the cullet bin. Lauren will use them later – trade them with someone else who will clean them and melt them down to recast into different glassware, for such is life here, where the fine clean sand needed for glass is hard to come by. “I’ll get you a mug down, my girl, and you can show me how you like your tea – how’s that?”
“Thank you, Auntie.”
“Of course.” She puts the broom back, pulling down a mug, and sets it across from Sheri, who waits patiently for Lauren to pour for her – being afraid to after having already broken one mug today. “Have to be patient, squirt – or you’ll end up breaking more mugs.”
Sheri wiggles in her seat. “It’s bubble tea,” she says. “Mum never makes it except when you’re here!”
“Well.” It’s hard to argue with the logic of a seven-year-old there. “I see. But you must get nice things other times too, yes?”
“I get tea with milk from Rosie and I’m allowed to have two spoonfuls of sugar, but I don’t get bubbles except when you come to visit.”
“And on your birthday,” Lauren says. “Don’t forget about that.”
“And on my birthday, but you were here for the last one, so that doesn’t count.”
“Logic,” Ellis says gravely, looking to Lauren. “We’ve been outmaneuvered."
Lauren waves a hand. “Drink your tea,” she says. “Then outside again – to play – while your auntie and I get everything ready for supper, yes?”
There is more wiggling from the small, strawberry-pinafored creature in the chair. “Can I borrow Monty again? Please?”
“Yes,” says Ellis. “Because you asked nicely.”
The happy squirming does not stop, and neither does the flow of chatter. Sheri tells her about the flowers she has found (she calls them violets, though Ellis recognizes that the only thing they likely have in common is the color), the birds’ nest she has found elsewhere, full of baby birds (“if I’m very quiet I can see them - I watch them eat!”), what books she has been learning to read in the village school…
It is all warm and cozy, the sort of chatter that Ellis looks forward to. She’d never married – never seen the point in it, not drawn to anyone quite like that– but what Lauren has with Sheri is something that she envies, sometimes, when she considers her own life, how it’s her against the world, alone save for Monty – who is loyal and steadfast as only a robot can be, but who is not exactly good company.
Not too envious, though, she reminds herself. You know how she paid for it.
The price of joy, her father once said, was always eventual sorrow. Make hay while the sun shines, and find joy where you can, for an opportunity to be happy, once lost, may never return again. Well – her opportunity had never come, or not exactly, for she’d never found anyone the way David had found Lauren – but she was still happy enough, all the same, and in the aftermath of what had happened, they’d become their own little family unit.
Sheri goes back outside, leaving the two of them alone in the house once again.
“Well,” says Lauren, once she’s out. “You’ll be in with me tonight – Sheri wiggles too much, and I know you don’t like to be touched unexpectedly – shall we get supper on?”
“Let’s,” Ellis says.
Supper is as quiet as anything with Sheri can be, which is to say not very. They stay up until the light starts to go, the solar lanterns flickering on, until Lauren sighs and stretches and says that since they need to be up very early to leave for the festival in the morning, they had best go to bed. There’s more wiggling there, and protesting that Sheri is not sleepy at all, though the way she yawns, her eyes drooping closed when she thinks no one is looking, says otherwise.
“Bed,” Lauren says. “Brush your teeth – come along.”
Brushed teeth and washed faces and hands, then tucked into the trundle, Monty standing guard over her at her request, the friendly lights that make up his face dimming as he goes to reserve power.
“‘Night, auntie,” Sheri says.
“Good night, sweetheart.”
They don’t stay up much later themselves. Lauren tries to keep up with her, for Ellis has always been a night owl, but this doesn’t last.
“C’mon,” Ellis says, prodding her. “To bed, yeah?”
“Bed.” She yawns a jaw-cracking yawn. “I’m as bad as Sheri, aren’t I? No wonder where she gets it from – we have company that’s not the Rosenthals or the Martinez family, and suddenly I don’t want to go to bed…”
“More tomorrow.” Ellis guides her to the sink, on manual now, and pumps for her in the quiet dim of the house. “To bed with you, then.”
“Mmhm.”
Lauren slips into the other room to undress, pulling on a nightshirt, while Ellis changes in the kitchen, switching out her flight jumpsuit for the soft shorts and t-shirt she’d brought herself, waiting at the kitchen table until Lauren is curled up in bed, asleep, before she brushes her teeth and comes back to bed herself, sliding beneath the covers beside her, leaving a good deal of distance between them.
“It’s not that I don’t like being touched,” she says softly, as Lauren starts to snore. “Only that it’s a great deal sometimes. I can stand to be touched by you and Sheri, but anyone else is too much.”
There’s a soft murmured sound she can’t quite place, no doubt Lauren telling her to go to sleep. She sighs softly, turning about in the bed, and says the word that brings the last of the lights down.
The last thing Ellis thinks, before sleep takes her, is that she ought to have taken the extra pinafore off Monty while Sheri slept, for once she sees it on him in the morning, she won’t want to take it off again.
They wake at sunrise, the pink-grey light of dawn illuminating the room, hitting the solar panels and turning both the lights and Monty back on. The robot whirs to life, the lights come up, and Lauren stirs in the bed beside her.
Sheri is already awake, waiting patiently on her bed, sitting cross-legged in her nightgown, for her mother and aunt to wake. “Is it today?” she says, looking to the two of them. “Can we…?”
“Yes,” says Ellis, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress and padding across the floor, back into the kitchen where her clean clothes await. “Festival day. Are you ready?”
“Yes!” She hears the sound of drawers opening, various things pulled from hangers, and the tired, grumbly noise of protest from Lauren – “not your best gown!” – accompanied by a whine from Sheri as outfits are negotiated over.
When the two of them emerge, fifteen minutes later, they are both dressed well, Sheri in a white dress with the strawberry pinafore over it, handmade brown boots on her feet, while Lauren is in one of her nicer outfits: a patchwork skirt and ruffled blouse Ellis hasn’t seen her wear since –
Since before David died. She freezes at the thought.
“Pancakes?” Lauren offers. “They’re quick…”
“Pancakes!”
“Well, that’s one of us weighing in.” She laughs. “Ellis, do you mind?”
“No, not at all.”
Lauren cooks while Ellis watches the sunrise from the window, sipping at a cup of tea (made as soon as the concentrating solar unit on the roof heated the water sufficiently) and watching Sheri as she very solemnly explains the rules of pick-up-sticks to Monty.
“Breakfast,” Lauren says, just as Monty loses (robot servos not being designed for the fine detail-oriented work of pick-up-sticks, or perhaps because Sheri cheats – it’s difficult to say, not that the robot cares). “Come on – the sooner we eat…”
“The sooner we leave!” Sheri climbs into her chair, smiling widely. “They’re doing it at the beach this year!”
The lake, she means, the rime of sand that surrounds it. “They sure are,” says Ellis. “We’re going to bike there. Your mom says you’ve got a bike now.”
“I can go for very long distances!” she says. “We biked all the way to the mountain!”
“We did, and then I had to bring you home in the trailer.” Lauren puts the plate of pancakes down, brings them syrup and butter.
“Better than last year,” Ellis says. “So.”
“Mmmhm.”
They eat quickly, quietly – Sheri oddly silent, fixated as she is on getting breakfast into her mouth, into her, for the sooner they finish, the sooner they leave.
“I’m done, Mum!”
Lauren looks as though she wants to say something, but Ellis looks over at her, shaking her head. “Festival day,” she says, smiling. “C’mon, let’s get the dishes washed quick like a bunny, and then we’ll put Monty away and get the trailer hitched to my bike, in case we find anything good.”
The ride up the mountain is smoother this time. Sheri is better at riding, which helps, and Lauren is in a better mood than she was last year, too.
It’s easier, Ellis thinks. Every year gets a bit easier – we find our way forward…
Without David, eking out a living on the planet he chose, with the people he’d chosen – trade or barter, all solar panels and a distillation system that purifies the rainwater, the only access to the ‘net being two towns over – completely off the grid, almost, but completely free, for all of that, too.
The festival is crowded as always. Ellis has never understood what the point of it is – what they do, or why they do it, only that it’s important, that Sheri loves it, and that she must attend too, though the people, the noise and the heat, are enough to make her wish that she didn’t. Still, the way that she looks when they park the bikes (no need to lock them; no one has any way to get them down except by riding, and no one disrespects their neighbors enough to do such a thing here) makes it worth it.
“There are games,” Sheri says, tugging at Ellis’s sleeve. “Can we…”
“Yes,” she says. She lets Sheri take her hand, wrapping her fingers around the small girl’s and giving a gentle squeeze, the sort of affection she finds grounding when in public like this, surrounded by strangers, the old anxiety flaring up again. “Lead the way.”
Sheri takes her to the different carnival games - the duck game, ring toss, all the various old favorites. Ellis pays with credits – nothing is too dear, not out here – and helps her. There are consolation prizes at each booth, mostly in the form of hard candy, which Sheri wants almost as much if not more than the books and games that are given as real prizes. Ellis wins her a bear at ring toss, and she pouts until the man offers to give her the runner-up prize: a jar of peach-flavored hard candy.
“I can share this,” she says. “And Mum will want the jar.”
So good, Ellis thinks. She tucks the jar into her satchel, for it’s a bit much for small girls to carry, and follows her to the next tent, and the next, and the next…
Sheri finally loses interest in the tents, leading her down to the lake, where there is a man telling tales about the mysterious “creatures of the deep” – as though the lake is a vast ocean, instead of the perhaps thirty-foot deep pool it actually is.
“Oh, and it was on a day like this one, the sunlight beating down upon us, that I spotted the wicked sea-serpent…”
He’s a good storyteller, even if the story he’s telling is one he’s borrowed from the old maritime legends – the ones from planets that have far more free water than this one. Nevertheless, Sheri wants to listen, so they sit on the sand beside him, listening to his stories. The water ripples as he continues talking about the dread sea-serpent, until a long, undulating creature emerges, making waves on the beach and causing the small children who are wading to squeak and flee.
Sheri doesn’t squeak. She looks at it, then looks up at the storyteller. “That’s not a sea serpent,” she says, clearly disappointed. “That’s a fish.”
“A robot,” says Ellis, who can see it clearly. “Modeled on an oarfish? I’ve only ever seen them in books.”
“It’s a robot,” the man admits, revealing a tiny remote control in his hand. “Neat trick, isn’t it? They’re – the old stories, the ones from Earth – they were the original sea serpents. Had to run with it, y’know, did a stint on one of the outer planets that’s all water…”
She listens politely to his story of actual danger on the high seas – mostly waves, and inclement weather – only pausing when she realizes that Sheri, no longer paying attention, is clearly flagging.
“Thank you,” she tells the storyteller. “I need to find this one’s mum – and get her some water, maybe.”
Sheri has the dazed look of a child who has had too much sugar and been in the sun too long. This high up – we put on sunscreen hours ago, but the heat’s intense, and she’s not used to it – it’s not like this down in the valley. Hell.
She gets her niece up, and, realizing that she’s too wobbly to walk, picks her up, carrying her bodily to the first aid tent.
Lauren comes to meet them, her arms laden with what she’s bartered for. “Everything all right? They radioed and said that I was to come here – oh, God, squirt…”
Sheri is sitting on the edge of one of the cots, in the air of the evaporative cooler they have set up, drinking some sort of electrolyte solution that the nurse says is supposed to be watermelon-flavored – “but, well, it mostly just tastes sort of vaguely fruity?” She nods, holding up the drink for her mum to see.
“It’s got a fancy straw.” Which is to say, it’s one of the clear glass ones that has loops and whirls in it of the sort that are meant to make it fun to drink from.
“I see.” Lauren glances over at Ellis. “Did she…?”
“Haven’t been running around – we were sitting in the heat, though, listening to stories, and I suppose someone got a little too much sun.” Ellis shakes her head. “My fault, really – but she was caught up in it, and…”
“It happened when we came out for our picnic, too,” Lauren says, smoothing Sheri’s hair. “We’re not very good at telling a grown-up when we start to feel too hot, are we?”
Sheri makes a pained face. “It was a very good story, Mum.”
Lauren looks up at Ellis. “I don’t blame you,” she says quietly. “These things happen – it’s summer, no harm done.”
No harm done. It’s the same wording she’d used in the call she’d made about David. Undiagnosed heart defect, they said. Overexertion must have – well. I found him. Nothing we could do, Ellis. If we hadn’t come here, maybe, but – well. I don’t blame you. No harm done. He was set on it – not like you talked him into it, and not as though any of us knew.
She meant it then, and she means it now.
Ellis shudders, aware of the parallel drawn, however unintentionally. “Thank you.”
“Mm. I suppose I have you to thank for why she has a jar of peach candy?”
“Guilty as charged,” she says, then: “I won her a teddy bear. She didn’t want it; she wanted the candy – so she could share it with us, and let you have the jar.”
“My girl,” Lauren says, smoothing her hair again. “Sheri…”
“Auntie Ellis,” she says, sounding very pathetic. “Can you win me the bear, too?”
An hour in the tent and a lot more of the watermelon drink sees Sheri restored to full, wiggly glory. They spend a bit more time at the festival, listening to more of the fish-man’s stories (for Sheri insists that her mum hear them too, though they sit in the shade this time, a floppy hat tied beneath Sheri’s chin as she grumbles about it), the bear that Ellis won for her (for she could not say no, not really, even as Lauren sighed about Sheri becoming spoiled) in her arms. The oarfish does its undulating dance out of the lake again, the children scream and run, and Sheri walks up to pet it.
“I like it,” she says. “But not as well as Monty. Can we go home now?”
Back down the mountain. Sheri’s bike goes in the trailer behind Ellis’s, while she herself curls up in the pull-car behind Lauren’s, where she has a blanket and a book.
“Back to the house, then,” Lauren says, sighing. “And then back to work tomorrow – plenty to do. I bartered for more seeds, Ellis, if you’re willing to lend a hand with the glasshouse? There’s something wrong with the irrigation system, so if you wouldn’t mind taking a look…”
“I won’t,” she promises. “I’ll give it a once-over. Got plenty of time to fix it, if need be. I’ll be here two decads.”
“I know,” Lauren says, then: “And then you’ll be back in, what, three months?”
“That’s the plan, unless you’d rather I didn’t.”
“No,” she says. “It’s a good one. I was thinking –”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re going to be coming back,” Lauren says. “Might be able to barter for some things – get you a proper bed. Sheri’s been asking, if you’ve not got anything pressing in winter…”
“I don’t.” She doesn’t, anyway, or nothing that can’t be shuffled around. “If you’d like…”
“Stay with us,” Lauren says. “Through the winter, anyway, if you’d like.”
“Of course I would. Tenth month through twelfth?”
“That’ll do.” Lauren lapses into silence, leaving Ellis alone with her thoughts, too.
Nothing that can’t be put off, she thinks. Keep the squash going through the winter, keep an eye on the little one –
It’s a very cozy thought.