Page 18 of Mail Order Moose

Ella looked at the cards, then at David. The room was small. The night was cold. Outside, snow lay over every path they would have to break again tomorrow. Nothing about Alaska had become easy.

But David was waiting, not for a confession, not for a different woman, only for her answer.

She nodded.

He dealt the cards slowly, giving her time to gather herself between each one. Ella watched them fall into place. One, two, three, four, five. A hand imperfect, but playable.

It seemed to her, as she lifted the cards and arranged them by suit, that perhaps being cherished might feel something like this. Not sudden. Not loud. Not simple.

But possible.

Chapter Seven

Ella found the error on a Thursday because Thursday had become the day for checking what had been promised against what was actually stored.

That was not its official purpose. No one had said Thursday must be the day. The women had not voted on it or written it in the ledger. But Thursdays came after the middle of the week, when enough had changed to matter, and before Sunday, when too many people expected plans to already be certain. So, Ella had made it Thursday, and because she wrote the marks clearly and arrived with her pencil sharpened, the others accepted it.

The cold house stood behind Belle’s cabin, half-dug into the rise and half built of stone, with sod packed along the back wall to keep the temperature steady. Ella disliked the smell of it at first. Not because it was bad, but because it was many smells together—smoked meat, apples drying in sacks, earth, burlap, damp wood, and the faint sharpness of onions kept too close to potatoes.

Now she knew the smells well enough to notice when one was missing.

She stood near the second shelf with the ledger balanced against her arm and read the line again.

Flour, three small sacks, south wall.

There were two.

Ella did not move for several seconds. She looked at the shelf, then at the ledger, then at the shelf again, as if the third sack might magically appear. Two sacks rested against the wall, both tied with twine, both marked with a short charcoal line near the knot. The space beside them was empty except for a scatter of flour dust where something had once been dragged.

She had miscounted.

The thought came hard and fast. Not a question. A sentence. She had written three when there were two. She had built portions and promises around a sack that did not exist. She had told the women there would be enough if everyone followed the plan. She had made them trust figures that were wrong.

Her hand tightened around the pencil until the wood pressed a line into her palm.

“No,” she whispered.

The cold house gave no answer. It only held the two sacks and the empty space between what she had written and what was true.

*****

By the time David came to fetch her, Ella had counted the south wall six times and the rest of the room twice. The numbers did not change. That was rude of them, she thought faintly, and then felt foolish for thinking anything at all.

She had not meant to stay so long. David had only said he would stop by Belle’s after leaving the mill, since the snow on the path had crusted and he did not like her walking home alone once the darkness set in. She had meant to finish before he arrived. She had meant to have an answer.

Instead, she stood with the ledger open and her own mistake staring up at her in her own handwriting.

David ducked beneath the low doorway and paused just inside. “Ella?”

She shut the ledger too quickly. The sound cracked through the little room.

His gaze moved from her face to the shelf and back again. He did not ask what she had done wrong. That almost made it worse.

“I counted wrong,” she said.

The words were small, but they filled the cold house until there seemed to be no room for breath.

David stepped fully inside and let the door fall nearly closed behind him. “What did you count?”