Chapter 3: Lamb Stew with Dried Plums
You didn't tell him for nine days.
You told yourself it was because of the holiday, the first one in the district in years, the first time anybody had strung lanterns in the square or roasted anything that wasn't government ration. You told yourself it was because Peeta had baked a cake the size of a cartwheel and Katniss had shot two turkeys and three geese (wild ones; Haymitch had checked) and the whole Village had eaten together at Peeta's long table, and it would have been cruel to bring it up then. You told yourself it was because you might write to the Ministry and ask them to reconsider, and there was no point upsetting anyone until you'd heard back.
The truth was that you sat across from him at his kitchen table every evening, eating your own soup and listening to him complain about your own soup, and every evening you opened your mouth to tell him, and every evening you thought about him on the platform with the red lamp swinging, slow, slow, stop, and you shut it again.
You'd written the letter to the Ministry. They'd written back. The answer was no.
Katniss found out first. Of course she did. She found everything out first; it was like living next door to a hawk.
"You're leaving," she said. Not a question. She was standing in your doorway in her father's hunting jacket with snow on her braid, holding a brace of rabbits she'd evidently meant to give you. Behind her, the Village was white and silent.
"How did you — "
"Greasy Sae's cousin works at the depot. The new stationmaster's her nephew." Katniss looked at you with flat grey eyes, very like his, though neither of them would ever admit it. "Does he know?"
"Not yet."
"You're a coward," Katniss said, and handed you the rabbits. "He poured it out, you know."
You stared at her.
"Every bottle in the house. The night of the memorial. I went over to check on him, because I always check on him, and he was standing at the sink pouring it down the drain. All of it. The good stuff from the Capitol and the white liquor from Ripper's old still. He made me help." She turned to go, then stopped. "He's done it before. He always goes back. But he's never done it with a signal lamp sitting on his kitchen table."
You went over that night with nothing in your hands. No soup. No pot. It felt like walking out onto the platform without your coat.
His kitchen was warm and bright and smelled extraordinary. It smelled like lamb and onions and something sweet and dark you couldn't place, and he was standing at the stove with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a wooden spoon in his hand, frowning into a pot with the furious concentration of a man defusing a bomb.
"Don't come in," he said, without turning around. "It's not ready. And it's going to be terrible."
"What are you doing?"
"Cooking. What does it look like." He stirred. "You've been feeding me for two months. Thought I'd try it the other way round. Peeta told me how. Then Katniss told me Peeta was wrong. Then Greasy Sae came over and told me they were both wrong and took the spoon off me for an hour." He tasted it off the spoon. He winced. "It's lamb stew. With dried plums. It was her favorite, back on the train, the first year, the girl on fire. Only thing she ever said she liked about the Capitol. I've had the plums in the cupboard since the war. I never knew why I kept them."
You sat down in his kitchen. Not at the table. On the floor, with your back against the wall, the way you'd sat once on the floor of a train.
He turned around and saw you there, and the spoon went still.
"I'm being transferred," you said. "Home to Six. On the second."
The kitchen was quiet except for the stew bubbling. The geese muttered outside in the snow. He looked at you for a long time, and you watched him take it, the way you'd watched him take the telegram about the memorial: one small flinch at the corner of the eyes, and then nothing, the shutters coming down.
"Well," he said. "Six is nice. Hills. You like hills."
"I wrote to them. I asked to stay. They said no."
"Of course they did." He turned back to the stove. "Paperwork. Paylor loves paperwork. Probably for the best, sweetheart. You don't want to get stuck here. Nothing here but coal dust and geese and a washed-up drunk who can't make a stew." His back was very straight. "I'll wave you out. With the lamp. Proceed. All clear. It'll be very moving."
"Haymitch."
"I'll be fine. I've been fine for twenty-five years."
"You haven't been fine for a day of it." You got up off the floor. "And I'm not asking you to wave me out."
He didn't turn around. You crossed his kitchen and stood next to him at the stove, close enough that your shoulder brushed his arm, and you took the spoon out of his hand and tasted the stew.
It was terrible. It was much too sweet and the lamb was tough and he'd burned the bottom so the whole thing tasted faintly of smoke, and you stood at his stove with your eyes stinging and thought it was the best thing anyone had ever cooked for you.
"Too many plums," you said.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. It came out broken.
"I'll tell you what I asked them," you said. "In the letter. I didn't ask them to keep me on as stationmaster. They've got a stationmaster. He's a nice young man. He'll be good at it. I asked them to give me the junction instead. The signal box up on the ridge, where the electric signals keep failing. It's an old post, it's been empty since the war. Somebody needs to live up there and keep the line clear through the winter."
He was looking at you now.
"They said no," you said, "because the junction belongs to the district, not the Ministry, and the district has to appoint someone. The mayor, or the district council. Or," you said, "a victor. Victors have always had a vote on the council here, did you know that? Some old Capitol rule nobody ever bothered to take off the books. Peeta looked it up for me. Katniss says she's not voting on anything. That leaves one."
The stew bubbled. Outside, Plutarch the goose honked at the snow.
"You want me," Haymitch said slowly, "to go to a council meeting."
"Yes."
"In public. Sober. In a clean shirt."
"Yes."
"And vote to give you a signal box on a mountain."
"It's only half a mile up the ridge," you said. "You'd be able to see it from your porch. You'd be able to see the lamp in the window at night. I'd come down for supper. Somebody has to tell you there's too much salt."
He didn't say anything. He reached out and turned the stove off, carefully, like a man doing something he wants to remember doing. Then he turned to face you, and he took the spoon out of your hand and set it down, and he stood there looking at you with his grey eyes and his bad shave and the burn on the bottom of the pot filling the kitchen with smoke.
"I was going to let you go," he said, very low. "I had it all worked out. Wave you out with the lamp, go home, open the cupboard. It's what I'm good at. I'm good at standing on a platform watching people leave."
"I know."
"I don't want to be good at it anymore."
"I know," you said again. "So don't."
He lifted one hand. It was shaking, just slightly. He put it against the side of your face, rough palm, warm, and he looked at you like he was waiting for you to disappear, the way he'd waited the morning after the train, when the conductor told him he must have been seeing things.
"Are you real?" Haymitch Abernathy asked you, only half joking.
You turned your face into his palm. Then you put your hands on the front of his clean creased shirt and pulled him down and kissed him.
He went still for exactly one heartbeat. Then he made a low rough sound and kissed you back, both hands in your hair now, holding you like the platform was tilting under him. He kissed like he argued, stubborn and wholehearted and with no intention of losing. He tasted like burnt plums and coffee, not liquor. You noticed that. You noticed that and you held onto him harder, your fingers twisting in his shirt, and he backed you up against the edge of his kitchen table until the signal lamp on it rattled and nearly fell off, and neither of you bothered to catch it.
When he finally lifted his head, he was breathing hard, his forehead against yours.
"Council meets on the thirtieth," he said hoarsely.
"I know."
"I'll need a shirt ironed."
"Peeta will do it."
"I'll need someone to keep me busy. During. So I don't climb out a window."
You picked up the signal lamp off the table and pressed it into his hands, and he looked down at it and laughed, really laughed, the first time you'd heard it all the way through, deep and surprised and helpless.
On the thirtieth of December, the district council met in the half-built Justice Building with snow coming in under the door. Haymitch Abernathy attended in a pressed shirt with a brass signal lamp in his lap, and when the item about the junction came up, he raised his hand before anyone had finished reading it out.
On the second of January, the morning train to Six left on time without you.
And on the first clear night after that, Haymitch sat out on his porch in two coats with a goose asleep on his boots and watched a red lamp come on in the window of the signal box on the ridge, half a mile up the hill. He watched it swing, slowly, side to side.
All clear.
He went inside and put a pot on the stove. Potato and leek. He oversalted it on purpose, and left the door unlocked, and waited.