Free A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick

exactly what he intended to do. If he never needed the girls to run the studio, well then, after a few years he could perhaps help them find employment with other photographers, where men did need trained assistants.
    His easy mood cautioned as he placed his hat on the round table beside the door and felt the silence slice like the calm before a storm. Silence sparred with concern. Too quiet. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. Surely Russell was still up, and he’d asked Mrs. Bauer not to put Winnie to bed before eight so he could play with the child for a time.
    Not again , he thought as he turned back to look at the moon. It was up above the trees, so bright it created a shadow of the house framed against the lawn. So peaceful everything looked. Nothing to match the turmoil in his gut.
    FJ paced his way through the house, his mind racing to the first evening when he’d returned home to an empty house. Eighteen ninety-four. They’d been married for three turbulent years. Oh, not shouting and such, not on his part; he was never one for that. Mrs. Bauer made her voice heard though. She was young and he’d given her ample time, or so he’d thought back then. Time to adjust to marriage. Time to visit her mother, every day if she wanted. He’d moved her mother to Winona from Ellsworth in fact. He’d encouraged her to come to the studio, to learn the business with him. He’d pushed for more intimacy. She’d resisted. She was still young, he knew, but he wanted a family, wanted children laughing and scampering around the house. What was the point of working so hard if not to have children to share the fruits of the labor and, more, to leave it to?
    Then one fine summer evening he’d come home to emptiness. She’d left him, moved her dresses and chemises and jewelry and cold creams into her mother’s house. When he finally worked through the ups and downs of worrying over something having happened to her, it was the next morning. He walked to her mother’s house, where she met him at the door and told him her mother needed her now, what with her father’s death and her sister Eva’s being newly married and not able to help her mother. “She can’t be alone.”
    But her mother had often been alone while her husband travelled for his photographic business. Ernestine Otis was a capable if not eccentric woman who distinguished herself in Winona commerce by never carrying a purse. Instead she wore layers of petticoats into which she’d sewn pockets, and whenever she purchased items—pieces of material for quilts she started but never finished—she’d have to paw through yards of fabric in order to find the pockets that had coins in them. She didn’t need her daughter with her, but FJ needed his wife with him. It was where a wife belonged, beside her husband.
    Eventually he’d gotten his mother-in-law to agree, but not his own wife.
    He’d bought flowers and started her on bottled mineral water, to no avail; he spent long hours at his lodge because the house felt as empty as an overdrawn well.
    What finally brought her back after nearly six months was beyond him. He’d begun to think she would never return, and then one night he came home and there she was, sitting at the table, his dinner warming in the Monarch oven. That he didn’t know why she’d returned meant he couldn’t prevent what might make her leave again.
    She did not wish to speak of why she left or why she’d come back, but she’d been more ready to be intimate with him. The matter of children had taken nearly four more years of gentle persuasion, but in 1899 Russell was born.
    She’d gone home again the next year but returned in less than six months, and he told himself that perhaps she needed that respite to be with her mother, learning how to tend a newborn. Two years later, Donald arrived. She announced that there’d be no more children and moved into her own bedroom. Only one time had she let him in and then only because he cajoled her,