A Home for Both

The last light of a long spring day came in low across the garden, and the work of writing was done. The girl set her pen aside and closed the lean book she kept, the one that held the counts before the weather. Nyra closed the older book, the full one, and for a moment the two volumes lay apart on the table, each in the shadow of the hand that tended it. Then Nyra rose and carried both toward the shelf.

For as long as the girl could remember, the two books had lived in separate places. The old one rested on a high shelf near the window, where Nyra had always set it. The new one traveled with the girl, tucked under her arm, laid down wherever the day ended. They had grown up apart, as two lives that shared a garden but kept their own hours.

Now Nyra made a space on the low shelf within easy reach of the table, a spot where the evening lamp fell plain and even. She wiped the wood clean with the flat of her hand. Then she stood the old book upright, and next to it she stood the new one, so that the two spines faced the room as a single line. She stepped back and looked at them a moment, and the girl looked too.

There was no ceremony in it and no words. It was only a small thing, the moving of two books to one place. But the girl understood what the act meant without being told. The books that could be truly read by no one but the two of them would from now on wait in the same corner, the one set next to the other, keeping each other company through the dark hours when the house slept.

Outside, the first warm night of the year settled over the beds, and the young plants held still in the dark. Inside, the two books stood together on the shelf, their pages closed, their long day of work behind them. They had each been written in a different hand, in a different order, for a different reason. But they belonged, now, to one place, and to one another, and that was where they would stay.