Summer Sun's Arc

Chapter 13 of 15

The morning after the tea, Summer Sun did not go straight to the bramble cottage. She waited. Matilda had told her to stop trying. That meant she could not arrive with a question or a gift or a plan. She sat on her step until midmorning, then walked the long way through the field. She told herself she was only checking on the moonbloom patch Matilda had mentioned. That was a small enough reason to knock. She was still in the trees when she heard it. A laugh, loud and rough, coming through the open window of the cottage. Summer Sun stopped on the path. She had never heard Matilda laugh alone. She crept closer and looked in. Matilda stood at the mirror above her washbasin. Her long gray hair was loose down her back. She had just put a hat on her head, and it was not her hat. It was a bent, teal thing covered in pink and yellow polka dots, the brim drooping over one eye. Matilda stared at herself. Then she laughed again, harder, and had to catch the basin to stay upright. Summer Sun stepped back from the window. She could go in. She could knock and say something clever about the hat and try to keep the laugh going. Her hand was already halfway up. She stopped it. That was the old method. That was the thing in the way. Matilda had found a laugh by herself, over a silly hat, with no audience. If Summer Sun walked in now, she would turn it into a show. The laugh would close up. She lowered her hand and stood in the brambles and listened to the witch laugh at her own reflection until the sound died down on its own. She walked home the long way. She had come to learn how to make Matilda laugh, and instead she had learned to leave when a laugh was already there. It felt like losing. She had never in her life walked away from a laugh she could have joined. She thought of the person who had held out for three weeks when she was young, and how she had chased that one down until it broke. She had chased every one since. Now she was going home with her hands empty on purpose. At the edge of the field she stopped and said out loud, "Alright." Then she kept walking. She would go back tomorrow with nothing, and she would knock, and she would see what Matilda chose to show her. That was the work now.