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

Chapter 4

Eleanor woke before the sun, the way she had woken for two years, before she was ready for the day to arrive and while it was still safe to lie still and not be looked at. She lay in the narrow bed in the room that had been prepared for her — clean, simple, a washstand, a window, a small dresser with a jar of wildflowers on it.

The flowers. She had almost missed them the night before, in the lamplight. They were early spring things, mostly sage flowers and a few stubborn daisies, crammed into a pickle jar with the slightly chaotic abundance of someone who had picked every flower they could reach rather than a careful few. There was no way a grown person had arranged them.

Abby had been hovering in the doorway when Eleanor first saw them.

“Did you do this?” Eleanor had asked.

Abby had nodded, fierce and proud and a little afraid, the way you are afraid when you have offered something and don’t yet know if it was wanted.

“Thank you,” Eleanor had said. “They’re lovely.”

And Abby had beamed and run off, presumably to report on the success of the flowers to anyone who would listen.

Now, in the gray before dawn, Eleanor got up and washed and braided her hair, and put on the blue dress. The mended seam held. She ran her fingers over it once, checking the stitches, and then she went down the hall to the kitchen and set about finding where everything lived.

She had not been in the kitchen in daylight. She opened every cupboard, every drawer, the pantry, the bin for flour, and she did it the way she did everything in a new classroom: cataloging, learning the order of things, understanding what was where and why. She found the coffee, and she set the pot on the stove, and by the time William came in from the early chores, stamping the cold off his boots, there was a cup of coffee poured and set at his place at the table, with no comment attached to it.

He stopped in the doorway.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I wanted to see the kitchen properly in daylight, and I think better with my hands busy. The coffee was incidental.”

He sat down and drank it. It was good coffee — better than he was used to making for himself, and he said so, and she said that was a low bar to clear, and he laughed before he had quite decided to.

Over the following days, Eleanor took stock of the household the way a person does when they intend to stay, rather than simply pass through.

She found the root cellar a tangle of jars and bins that had not been properly sorted since the previous autumn, and she spent an afternoon reorganizing it, setting what would spoil soonest nearest the steps. William, coming across her at this task, said only that his late wife had kept it the same way, organized by what would spoil soonest, and Eleanor said that was the sensible way to do it, and neither of them made anything further of the comparison. Though both of them noticed it had been made, and made without flinching.

She reorganized the kitchen within the first week in a way that made sense once you saw it, and that had clearly not made sense before. She took over the children’s schooling on the days the weather kept them from the schoolhouse in town. She mended. She baked. She learned the names of the five cats — including the three-legged one, who was called Hoy, after a territorial governor, which had been Elias’s idea, and which told Eleanor more about the boy than a month of conversation would have.

Elias took longer than Abby to warm to the arrangement. Not because he was unkind — he was never unkind — but because he was careful, in the way older children sometimes are after a loss, about investing in things that might not last. He watched her. He answered her questions with the shortest possible words. He did not meet her eyes, but he was always, always watching.

Eleanor noticed, and she did not push. She made herself reliably present. Breakfast on time. His shirts mended before he had noticed they were torn. His questions about the territorial governors — whose names the cats carried — answered with more detail than he had expected anyone to have. She let him decide when to come closer, the way you let a shy animal decide.

It was in the second week that he first called her by name, without the careful formality he had been using.

At supper, out of nowhere, he asked, “Eleanor, did you know Governor Warren in person, or just from the papers?”

She recognized the small shift for what it was, and she answered the question as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which it was rapidly becoming.