#museumlad

“He’ll be back in two weeks,” Mama says finally, dark eyes catching towards the end of the spiky handwriting. “He’s travelling with a few friends, stopping at Lieutenant Peterson’s for a day or two, then they’ll make their way here. They’re aiming to arrive by the twenty-second, give or take a day or two.”

“They?” Lark echoes. None of the Frasiers have met the Lieutenant, but even Donnie’s darkest letters paint him in the most flattering lights. She certainly isn’t opposed to meeting the man who seems to have kept Donnie grounded and steady. “Is the Lieutenant coming too, then?”

There’s a crease between Mama’s brows that only appeared after Donnie announced he’d signed up for the military, and that Lark worries is now too deep to truly fade away. “It seems so. He keeps saying ‘we’ and ‘us’, talking in plurals all the time…” She bites her lip, and Lark knows she’s thinking about the three subsequent chickens that have disappeared from the henhouse in the past month, knows she’s mentally counting the hens they have left, the chicks yet to grow up, knows she’s wondering if they’ll have enough food to support an extra mouth -- or four, knowing Donnie.

Papa shudders to his feet, ruffling Lark’s hair as he rises and squeezing Mama’s shoulders as he passes her. “Then we’ll have to start preparing extra beds. We’ve got two weeks to figure it out, love, don’t look so worried.”

“You don’t worry enough,” Mama mutters, but presses a soft kiss to Papa’s knuckles anyway. She folds the letter back up, slipping it into its envelope, and leans it against Donnie’s uniformed portrait. “I’ll head upstairs and start cleaning things up. Lark--”

“I was going to go check the coop again,” she blurts out, feeling heat crawling up her cheeks. “I don’t think I fixed the hole quite properly last time.”

Mama levels her with a look, but doesn’t get a chance to respond before Lark’s scampering past her, skipping the second step and racing down to the coop. Her fast pace isn’t the only thing setting her heart stuttering in her chest, and she swallows down her nerves the closer she gets to the little wooden coop -- and the dark woods just beyond.

It might be too early, all things considered -- the sun has barely begun to set, and no doubt the shadows of her parents are still moving around in the windows, but if she slips behind the chicken coop at just the right angle, only someone standing on the roof would be able to see her, and the grass is worn down enough from her own footsteps that she knows exactly where to go. She wets her lips, empty fingers grasping at her sides, and wonders if he’ll come.

“Fox,” she calls, keeping her voice low, hushed, a gravelly whisper that her father, who’s also somewhere in the yard, shouldn’t be able to hear. “Fox!”

For one eternal, breathless moment, nothing happens. A slight breeze teases at the kerchief keeping her curls off her neck, there’s a faint smell of cinnamon floating over from next door, but -- exhale -- nothing.