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

Chapter 6

The six weeks that followed the marriage were where the actual story was. Not the wedding itself, which was brief and unremarkable, and not the arrangement, which ran with the same competence the placement agency in Cheyenne had promised and that William had, on some level, hoped for without quite believing in. The story was in the carefulness.

They were, by any practical measure, partners. They ate together. They discussed the household together. They made decisions about the children together. The house ran. The children were cared for. There was mutual respect and no friction worth mentioning.

And there was, between them, a formal courtesy that had not worn off the way William had perhaps expected it to.

They did not speak of Ruth — William’s first wife — beyond what the children mentioned naturally. Abby mentioned her freely, the way children do, as a fact among facts, and Eleanor listened and let the door close. Elias did not mention her at all. They did not speak of Eleanor’s husband, Joseph, beyond the bare fact of his death, which she had stated once, briefly, and which William had not pressed.

It was Abby, at six years old, with none of the carefulness the adults were practicing, who said what nobody else would say.

They were hanging washing on a line in the yard, a week into the sixth week, on a blue afternoon with the wind behaving for once, and Abby, who had been quiet for an unusual length of time, said, “Eleanor?”

“Mm,” Eleanor said, reaching for the next shirt.

“Do you love my father?”

Eleanor’s hands went still on the clothespins. She was, for once, genuinely caught without preparation.

“I think your father and I are still getting to know each other,” she said. “That takes time.”

Abby considered this. “You held his hand at the wedding,” she said.

“That’s part of the ceremony.”

“You held it longer than the ceremony needed,” Abby said.

Eleanor did not have a response to that. She finished hanging the washing in silence, and she was quiet through supper, and that evening, sitting in the lamplight with her sewing — one of Elias’s shirts, a tear at the elbow — she found herself watching William in a way she had been trying not to.

The way he listened, when Elias explained something at length about the horses, with complete attention and no impatience. The way he had noticed, the week before, before anyone had said anything, that Abby’s shoes had worn through at the toe, and had simply gone to town the next day and come back with new ones, without making it into anything. The way he read the paper aloud at breakfast because he knew Abby liked the sound of it, even though she couldn’t read it yet.

She thought about what Abby had said. She had held his hand longer than the ceremony needed.

She had not noticed herself doing it at the time.

The lamp burned. The wind had come up again, the way it did every night, and the house creaked around them in its familiar ways, and William, coming in for a glass of water, sat down across from her the way he had taken to doing most evenings by now. He did not say anything. He sat with his hands on the table, and she sewed, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable, but it was not quite easy, either.

She looked at him over her needle. He was looking at the lamp, his face in profile, and she thought: I do not know what you are thinking. I do not know what you are hoping for. And I am afraid to ask, because I am afraid of what I might say.

“William,” she said.

He turned.

“The dress I mended that first night,” she said. “The blue one. I wore it the morning after I arrived, and I’ve worn it most days since. I didn’t want to say anything, because it felt like something I shouldn’t put into words. But I want you to know I wear it on purpose.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you mended it the first night you were here,” he said, “and you could have mended the other one. You chose the blue one. I saw you choose it. I’ve been watching you choose things ever since.”

Eleanor’s hands had gone still on the shirt. The lamp made the kitchen small and warm, a circle of light with the dark territory pressing in just outside the window, and inside that circle, for the first time since the platform six weeks ago, neither of them was being careful.