The Drought Married My Sister

How it begins

Margaret Finch set a third cup on the breakfast table and told her brother not to fill it.

"He prefers it empty."

Robert looked at the chair.

The paint had cracked since yesterday. A small drift of dust lay beneath its legs, though he had swept before opening the bakery.

"Who does?"

"My husband."

Robert put down the bread knife.

His sister had been a widow for nine years and a librarian for twenty-one. She disliked unreturned books, inaccurate clocks, and people who treated a woman's silence as proof she had no further plans.

He knew all this. It did not prepare him for breakfast.

"You married somebody?"

"The drought. On Sunday."

Outside, the town had reached its eighty-third rainless day. The baker's delivery bicycle stood beside a water tank nobody wanted to discuss before eating. Robert had cut smaller loaves that morning because the dough was drying too quickly at the edges.

He looked at the empty cup again.

A hairline crack moved through the glaze.

"Is this a way of telling me something?"

Margaret buttered her toast.

"It is several things. Most statements are, if you leave them alone long enough."

The chair creaked.

Robert stepped backward before deciding whether he believed it had moved.

From the street came a knock, then another. Neighbors had begun collecting at the window, staring past the bread display toward the third place setting.

Margaret closed the curtain.

"We don't owe them a performance."

For once, Robert agreed immediately.

He had imagined helping his sister begin again in some sensible, familiar shape. A journey. A new room. Perhaps a man who remembered to bring his own chair.

Now sunlight pressed against the closed curtain as though waiting to be admitted.

Robert sat opposite the empty cup.

"What did you promise?" he asked.

Margaret stopped buttering the toast.

The pause frightened him more than the cracked chair.

"I thought," she said, "you might ask what he promised me."