Wednesday, Hannah wrapped up the cake and took it over to Seth. This time, she decided to walk under the bridge and along the overgrown path that led to his house and deliver it in person. She realized she hadn’t spoken to a soul except Joan—did talking to a parrot count?—since she’d gone to church on Sunday with Mrs. Putty. Seth Wilbee was working in his garden, an interesting hodgepodge of unrecognizable vegetables and weeds.
“Hello there, miss,” he said, leaning on his spade.
“Mighty fine cookies those were last week. Mi-ighty fine. I’m very partial to raisins.”
“I brought you a cake today,” Hannah said, handing him the foil-wrapped loaf. Lucky about the raisins, she thought. “What are you digging up? I thought your garden would be done by now.”
“Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” the tramp said. “Two or three parsnips for my supper and a bit of celery. Parsnips don’t mind the weather, you know.”
“Celery!”
“Yep. See these leaves?” He bent and lovingly ran his hand along a line of green fronds sticking out of the ground. They looked amazingly healthy for early November.
“Don’t they freeze, Seth?”
“Oh, yes. I generally kick a little straw over ’em this time of year. But a spot of frost improves a parsnip. Sweetens ’em right up. I don’t suppose you knew that.” His pale blue eyes twinkled as she shook her head. She wasn’t fond of parsnips, frost or no frost. He seemed delighted to be telling her something she didn’t know.
“Come in for tea, miss. I’ve got something to show ya.” Seth planted his spade deeply and left it standing there. “Come in! Come in!” He waved her toward his shack.
Hannah hesitated, remembering the last time she’d had tea, then thought, Oh, what the heck—we’re both lonely. And she followed him in.
The shack was no more than six or seven feet wide—a corridor, really—and maybe twelve feet long. A cot at the far end, with a frayed curtain in front of it, which he hastily pulled shut as she entered, was obviously Seth’s bedroom. The front of the shack, near the door, had a wooden table and one chair, no doubt Seth’s own handiwork, and a potbellied stove, which threw out considerable heat. There was no electricity. No lights, beyond candles and an oil lamp. No books, no magazines. No personal items, no photographs. The few pictures on the wall—literally pasted to the boards—had been cut from calendars and magazines.
“Here, sit, miss!” Seth pushed the chair toward her and rolled an empty wooden barrel on its edge to the other side of the table for himself. When Hannah had been there before, the barrel had contained an injured skunk, which Seth had been nursing back to health. There was no sign of the skunk now.
Hannah sat down and watched her host as he busied himself making tea. He wasn’t an old man, probably no more than fifty. But he was worn-looking, thin and threadbare. She knew he reused tea bags that he collected in the town restaurants and cafés, but she also knew that he kept a small canister of unused tea bags for guests. Seth poured boiling water into the two mugs he’d set out on the table. She was relieved to see he was taking the cracked one for himself.
Slowly he dipped a new tea bag into first one cup—hers—then the other. When the water in both mugs looked fairly brown, he removed the bag, let it drip for a few seconds, then carefully pegged it to a small line strung across a corner of the shack. He was saving it for another day.
“Milk or sugar, miss?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, this is just fine. And please don’t cut the cake,” she protested. “I can’t stay long. I just had lunch anyway. I’m not a bit hungry.”
“Well, if you say so,” Seth said. “If you say so.” He sat down and stared at her while she drank her tea. Pretty insipid stuff. One could only guess at how old the tea bags were. Or where he’d found them.
“You said you had something to show me,” she reminded him.
Seth bolted up and went to his cot, where he rummaged under the mattress and produced an envelope. “A letter!” he said, brandishing it.
“I see.” Hannah took the envelope. It was a little tatty-looking and had obviously been much handled, but Seth hadn’t opened it. The letter was from the Town of Glory, addressed to Mr. Seth Wilbee.
“Aren’t you going to open it? Maybe it’s important,” Hannah said, laughing. The intense look on Seth’s face stopped her.
“You go ahead, miss. You open it,” he said with a shrug that didn’t quite manage nonchalance. He leaned forward and took a great slurp of his tea. His eyes never left her face.
Hannah opened the envelope carefully. There was one sheet inside. “Here—” She started to hand it over to him, but he gripped her wrist and pushed her hand with the letter in it back to her side of the table.
“No! No, you go ahead. You tell me what it says.” His eyes still focused intently on hers. It was as though he was trying to tell her something without putting it into words. She suddenly realized: Seth Wilbee couldn’t read.
“Okay,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her surprise. The poor man! She quickly scanned the letter, her heart sinking, then read its contents aloud to him. The town was informing him that his shack would have to be removed from municipal property immediately, that the town was planning to landscape the riverbank to integrate it into a walking and bicycle path connecting the town square to the municipal park farther upstream. He had until the middle of December to relocate.
Hannah watched his pale eyes fill with tears and his big gnarled hands begin to tremble as he attempted to hold his tea mug steady. “Oh, my,” he said finally. Sadly. “Oh, my.”
There were worse things, Hannah decided, than having a stubborn red tint that would not wash out of your hair and a parrot with a bad mouth.
That was Wednesday.