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

Chapter 7

It was a Thursday evening in late May, six weeks after Eleanor’s arrival, and the pattern had repeated itself almost exactly. The children asleep. Eleanor at the kitchen table with the sewing — one of Elias’s shirts, which she had mended twice before, and which had torn again at the shoulder, and which she suspected Elias kept wearing past its useful life because he did not know how to ask for a new one. William coming in for water and staying.

He sat down across from her, as he had taken to doing most evenings. For a while neither of them spoke. The lamp was low. Outside, the spring night was doing the things spring nights do in this part of the territory, which involved a wind that never fully stopped, and the occasional sound of cattle settling somewhere in the dark, and once, far off, the cry of an owl.

William said, eventually, in the careful tone he used when he had been thinking about something for a while and had decided to say it: “Abby asked me something today.”

Eleanor kept sewing. “What did she ask?”

“She asked if I was going to marry you properly.”

Eleanor’s needle stopped. “You told her we already had.”

“I told her we already had,” William said. “She said that wasn’t what she meant.”

Eleanor set the shirt down. She looked at him. The lamp made his face all hollows and shadows, and he was looking at her the way he had looked at her at the platform, six weeks ago, before he had said the words that loosened something in her chest. Like a person who intends to see her.

“What did you tell her?” Eleanor asked.

“I told her I’d have to ask you about that,” William said. “Because it wasn’t only my answer to give.”

Eleanor was quiet for a long moment. The wind pushed at the window. Somewhere beyond the circle of lamplight, in the dark, one of the horses stamped in the barn, and the sound carried, small and certain, and then there was no sound at all except the two of them breathing.

“When I got off that stage,” Eleanor said, “I apologized before you’d even said hello. I spent eleven days rehearsing that apology. I was certain that whatever I looked like would be the first thing you saw, and I wanted to get ahead of it. I wanted to say the worst thing myself, so you couldn’t use it against me.”

William said nothing. He was watching her.

“You didn’t say anything about it,” she said. “You said the road had been hard on me, and you wanted to get me somewhere warm. And then Abby said what she said. And I think, if I’m honest, that was the moment I stopped thinking of this as an arrangement.”

William was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I had a picture in my head from the letters, about what this would be. You didn’t match the picture when you got off the stage.”

“I know,” Eleanor said.

“You don’t understand,” William said. “I didn’t match it either. I had a picture of the kind of man who could do this — who could take a stranger into his home and his children’s lives and make it into something. And then the stage pulled up, and you were there, and I thought, this woman has been through something, and she is standing anyway. And somewhere in these six weeks, I stopped thinking about the picture at all. Because the actual version turned out to be better than anything I’d imagined. And I didn’t notice that until just now.”

Eleanor said, “That is possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to me in three years.”

“I’m not very good at saying things,” William said. “I wanted you to know that I noticed.”

“Abby noticed before either of us did,” Eleanor said. “She usually does.”

William almost smiled. “She does.”

They were quiet again. The lamp burned. The wind worked at the window. And then Eleanor reached across the table, and William took her hand, and neither of them said anything else for a while, and the silence was not the careful silence of the past six weeks. It was a different kind. It was the silence of two people who have stopped measuring the distance between them.

“William,” Eleanor said, after a long time.

“Mm.”

“There’s something you should know about me,” she said. “Before we tell the children anything. Before you decide you still want to ask me anything.”

His grip on her hand tightened, not in fear, but in readiness.

“Tell me,” he said.

And Eleanor, who had carried this thing for seven years without ever saying it out loud to another living soul, looked down at their joined hands, and began.