Duet for Three by Joan Barfoot Read Free Book Online

be pale. He sat in the kitchen hugging himself, and they thought he was still chilly.
    How different he was! So thin. Aggie and Edith hovered at the edges of the kitchen as their mother made tea and served him cookies. How, Aggie wondered, would someone like this shovel snow or split wood or toss hay into a wagon? His hair was also thin, and blond, and when he dipped his head to the tea it was apparent he was balding, wisps of pale hair over pale scalp. He seemed an unlikely figure to be sitting at their kitchen table.
    (Could he really have been as unattractive as she remembers? She is sometimes startled, when Frances comes to visit, that she is not as beautiful in the flesh as Aggie has envisioned in her absence.)
    How thin his wrists were. How narrow his features. Such pale blue eyes, with lashes so blond they were almost invisible. He leaned toward people when they spoke as if he couldn’t hear properly.
    There were other things, though. His voice; well, not his voice precisely, but his accent. There was a kind of foreign lilt, some parts of words more drawled and others more clipped. Also there seemed to be more grace in his slenderness than in the bulk of her father and brothers.
    Too, he had to have some kind of toughness, if not the obvious sort of strength, because he had been brave enough to come here alone and begin a new life, so far from what was familiar.
    â€œImagine how lonely he must be,” Aggie thought.
    People were of two minds about a teacher. On the one hand, it seemed a failure of masculinity for a man to be concerned with book-learning, which was nothing like real work and certainly not essential. On the other hand, he would know things. He would contain a vast store of secrets, or at least things other people didn’t know. It made him a little mysterious, gave him an edge. People had some respect for what they didn’t know, even if they knew all they actually needed to.
    Aggie, watching the blond head bobbing around their house, wondered what it contained that hers did not. She wondered if his brain looked different from hers, more stuffed and crammed. If it were split open, would little facts and thoughts fall out, rolled up neatly like bits of paper? When he looked at her family, at her, what did he see? Did he see things they didn’t, because of what he knew? Could he tell secrets about them because of the way he saw?
    Her mother said, “Now, Aggie, I want you to look after him especially, talk to him and make sure he’s not lacking for anything and make him feel at home, because I don’t have time.” The hint could not have been much plainer. “But don’t be forward.”
    She found that conversation, in the beginning, was mainly up to her. His place at the supper table was set between her and her little brother, who was too ill at ease in his teacher’s presence to speak. The teacher himself seemed to have a streak of shyness, or just silence.
    â€œYou’re from England, Mr. Hendricks?”
    â€œYes, near London.”
    â€œAnd do you have family there?”
    â€œMy parents. I was their only child,” and he looked around the noisy table with some astonishment.
    â€œYou must miss them.”
    â€œI do, but this is where the opportunities are, or so they say back home.” He dipped his head and smiled. His lips, she thought, were narrow, but not entirely unappealing.
    â€œIs it very different here, then?”
    â€œWell, the customs are, I suppose. The way people live. It’s not quite what I expected.”
    â€œHow did you think it would be?”
    â€œOh,” and he waved a hand vaguely, a slim hand with long fingers, smooth instead of rough, pale instead of reddened, with clean fingernails and little blond hairs on his knuckles — everything about him different, down to his fingertips — “I didn’t realize how cold it could get or how far apart people lived. I didn’t think of education