Hands

by Speranza

Her hands hurt. She holds her right hand carefully in her left and massages her palm with the thumb of her other hand. The skin is red and cracked and really quite painful. Sighing, she takes up the knitting in her lap and stares down at her prominent, bony knuckles, the wide, blue-green veins snaking across the backs of her hands.

"Mom?" Ben's at her knee when she looks up, watching her intently with his huge, concerned child's eyes. No, that's wrong, she thinks suddenly. It's wrong for a child's eyes to be as concerned as all that.

Ben's only five, after all.

Caroline drops her sewing on the floor beside her chair and extends her hands to her son. He takes hold of them, and his hands are reassuringly childlike—white and pudgy and just a little bit sticky. She thinks that's sweet.

"Give Mamma a hug," she says impulsively.

For a moment, Ben doesn't move at all, and Caroline feels a pang of fear—surely he's not already too old for cuddles? But then Ben darts a quick, nervous look over his shoulder, and she realizes with a start that, no, he's not yet too old for cuddles.

But he's old enough to be worried about what his father thinks.

She tugs on his hands, and Ben abruptly abandons his fear of being caught and scrambles up into her lap. Caroline giggles as she feels her son's arms snake around her neck, and to her delight, she hears Ben giggle too, like a soft, sweet echo of her own voice, his breath hot against her cheek.

They're conspirators again, as they so often are—like when she wastes valuable supplies of flour and sugar on baking cookies for him, or when she let Ben name and keep one of the rabbits in a hutch as a pet, or when she lets Ben creep into her bed at night when Robert's away and Ben has been scared by the darkness or the howling wolves outside.

She cuddles her giggling son, who presses his face to her breast and squeezes her tight—tight as a five year old can manage. And suddenly everything is worth it, all the hard work and the sacrifices, the difficulty of enduring Robert's long absences and sometimes-even-more-startling presences, the isolation and the loneliness and the cold.

Because she is knitting a bright blue sweater for her son, and she's going to put bright red stripes around the collar and down the sleeves because he'll like that, and Ben will look just cute as a button in it. And she'll teach him to play jacks and spit and jackstraws and marbles (she's been saving her own marbles just for him, in a little red velvet pouch like precious stones) and maybe even "Old Maid" and "Our Birds" and backgammon, because Ben is smart indeed and could probably remember the rules to—

Ben suddenly pulls out of her arms and scrambles off the chair and disappears—hiding, sliding!—under its skirted bottom. Caroline is surprised until she hears the howling of a dog team outside, and then she laughs. Ben's senses are nearly supernatural, at least as far as his father is concerned.

Robert says jump, Ben doesn't even ask how high. He just jumps as high as he can.

Still, she thinks, going to the window, there'll be plenty of time for her to exert her own influence. Ben spends more time with her than with Robert, after all. And she's younger than he is—only twenty-six, which isn't terribly old, even though it may feel like it some days.

Caroline nudges the curtain open a little so that she can peek at her husband—but the man tying his dogs to the post isn't Robert Fraser, but Holloway Muldoon.

"It's not Daddy," she says, knowing that wherever Ben is hiding, he will hear her and be reassured. "It's Mr. Muldoon. I'd better go see what he wants."

Caroline opens the door, instinctively checking to make sure that her sweater's buttoned all the way to the top. "Mr. Muldoon," she says, warmly greeting him as he walks up the path toward her. "Good morning to you!" and what the hell's he holding in his hands?  

The End

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