Mail-Order Bride Arrived in Rags — The Rancher’s Daughter Whispered, “Please Be Our Mama”

Chapter 10

Eleanor turned from the wardrobe, and the look on her face was not what Abby expected. She had expected her mother to smile, or to make a joke, or to fold the dress away the way she had always folded it away. Instead Eleanor looked at the dress in her hands the way you look at a face you have been missing.

“I was remembering,” Eleanor said.

Abby came into the room. She was twenty-three now, a grown woman with her mother’s steady gaze and her father’s stillness around the mouth, home for the summer from the town where she taught school. She had asked the question she had been carrying since she was six years old, and now she asked the real one.

“Why do you keep it, Mama? It’s not even wearable anymore. It’s been mended so many times there’s almost nothing left of the original. Papa says you wore it for your wedding. But you had other dresses. Nicer ones.”

Eleanor sat down on the edge of the bed, the dress across her knees, and she looked at it for a long moment before she spoke.

“I was thirty-one years old,” she said, “when I got off that stage in Morrow Creek. I had been eleven days on the road. My husband was dead. My —” she stopped, and went on. “My baby was dead. My baby was dead, and had been dead for seven years, and I had never told anyone. And I climbed down off that stage in a dress that was falling apart, and I apologized for how I looked before anyone had said a single word to me, because I was so sure that was what they would see. And your father — who I had never met — looked at me, and he didn’t look at the dress, and he said the road had been hard on me, and he was going to get me somewhere warm.”

Abby sat down beside her on the bed.

“And then,” Eleanor said, “a six-year-old girl came out from behind his knee, and she looked up at me, and she said, ‘Please, won’t you be our mama?'”

Abby’s eyes went wide.

“That was you, Abby. You were six. You had been waiting at the gate for an hour, because you had decided — off the strength of one sentence in one letter — that I was worth waiting for. And you said it out loud, in front of everyone, before I had said anything to your father beyond a greeting. And I —” Eleanor’s voice broke. “I had held a baby once, for one hour, seven years before. She never got to say a word. She never got to call me anything. You were the first child who ever called me mama out loud. And I was wearing this dress.”

Abby was crying. She did not seem to know it. “The blue dress.”

“The blue dress,” Eleanor said. “I mended it that first night, because I wanted to look like myself the next day. And I wore it for the wedding, because I wanted to look like myself for that, too. And I wore it for years after, because every time I wore it, I could remember the girl at the gate. And I kept it, all these years, because —” she looked at the dress, at the seams that had been mended so many times they had mends of their own — “because some things you keep, not because you need them, but because of what they remind you.”

Abby put her arms around her mother, and Eleanor held her, the way she had held her that night in the dark, and the way she had held her at the breakfast table when she had knelt down and said the words that changed everything.

“I’m glad I waited at the gate,” Abby said, into her mother’s shoulder.

“I’m glad you did, too,” Eleanor said.

That evening, at the gate, the wind came up the way it always came up, off the hills, and Eleanor stood where she had first stood thirty years ago — where she had climbed down off the stage, eleven days late, in a ruined dress, with her apology ready and her heart in a knot.

William came out of the house and stood beside her. He did not ask what she was doing. He knew. He put his hand on her shoulder, the way he had been putting his hand on her shoulder for thirty years, and they stood together, watching the road.

Behind them, in the yard, a small girl came running — Abby’s daughter, six years old, with a fistful of wildflowers — and she called out, “Grandma! Grandma, I picked these for you!”

And Eleanor turned from the road, and she smiled, and she held out her arms, and she thought: Every road I have ever traveled led me here.

The End