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

Chapter 8

“When Joseph died,” Eleanor said, “the doctor said it was the fever. And it was. But I think there’s a part of a person that dies before the fever, when they’ve already lost the thing that was keeping them alive.”

She was looking at their joined hands. William did not let go.

“When I married Joseph,” she said, “I was twenty-three. I had taught for three years. We wanted a family. That was the whole plan — that was the shape of our whole future, a family. And in the winter of my twenty-sixth year, I had a daughter. She came too early. She lived an hour.”

William’s hand tightened again.

“An hour,” Eleanor said. “I named her. I held her. And then she was gone, and there was nothing left of her but the name, and the grave, and the silence where a child’s voice should have been. And after that, there was no child. Joseph and I tried, but there was no child. And then Joseph died, and there was nothing — no husband, no child, no future I could see. And the town was very kind to me. Everyone in Findley was very kind. But it’s a particular kind of kindness, the kind a town gives to a woman who has lost everything, and it keeps you at a distance. They didn’t know how to talk to me. And I didn’t know how to talk to them.”

She took a breath.

“So when I saw the advertisement in the paper,” she said, “I didn’t see a marriage. I saw a place where nobody knew what I had lost, and where I could start again as somebody who was still whole. And I thought — I thought if I could be useful to someone, if I could be needed, then maybe the silence would have something else to do.”

William said, after a moment, “The children.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said. “That’s what I’m telling you, William. I have never been anyone’s mother. I have never gotten to see a child of mine take a first step, or say a first word, or call me by a name. But I have spent seven years loving a child who never got to stay, and I have spent these six weeks loving two children who are here. And I need you to know that before you decide whether you still want to ask me anything. Because if you’re asking what I think you’re asking — if you’re asking whether I want to be their mother for real, and yours, not because it’s an arrangement but because it’s what I want — then I need you to know what you would be asking me. I need you to know that I would not be doing it carefully. I would be doing it with my whole heart, the way I did the last time, and I am afraid of what it would do to me if it didn’t last.”

William was quiet for a long moment. The wind had dropped. The lamp had burned down until the flame was a small blue point, and neither of them moved to trim it.

“I placed the advertisement,” William said.

Eleanor looked up.

“I placed it,” he said. “Not the agency. I wrote to them. And I nearly didn’t send it. For months after Ruth and the baby —” he stopped, and went on. “I thought loving anyone again would be a betrayal. I thought the children were enough, that I could be enough for them, that I didn’t need anything for myself. And then Abby started asking when they’d have a mother again. And Elias stopped talking at the table. And I realized I was so afraid of losing someone again that I was already losing the people I had.”

He looked at her.

“I have been afraid,” he said, “right up until the stage pulled in. I was afraid of the woman getting off it, and afraid of her not getting off it. And then you got off, and you apologized for your dress, and I thought, this is a woman who has been hurt, and she is trying to make it easier for everyone else. And I wanted to get you somewhere warm. That was all I wanted. And then Abby said what she said, and I saw your face, and I thought — I thought, maybe I am not too old to hope.”

Eleanor reached across the table with her other hand, and laid it over his.

“Then let’s hope,” she said.

They told the children the next morning, over breakfast, in plain terms appropriate to a six-year-old and a nine-year-old. They had decided, they said, beyond the practical arrangement, that they wanted to be married properly. In the way that meant something beyond paper. And they had wanted Abby and Elias to know first.

Elias, who had been quietly observing the household dynamics with more attention than anyone realized, set down his spoon and said, “I already knew that.”

William laughed — properly, from his chest, a laugh Eleanor had not heard before. Elias did not quite smile, but something in his face softened a degree.

Abby looked between the two of them for a long moment. Then she said, in a very small voice, “Does this mean you’re really my mama now? Not just staying?”

Eleanor came around the table and knelt down, so she was at Abby’s eye level.

“Yes, Abby,” she said. “I’m really your mama now. I think honestly I have been for a little while. But yes — now it’s official too.”

Abby threw her arms around Eleanor’s neck, and Eleanor held her, and over Abby’s shoulder she looked at William, who was watching with an expression she had not seen on him before — something unguarded, something he usually kept carefully put away.

“I want to be married in the blue dress,” Eleanor said, later, when the children were out of the room. “The one I mended that first night.”

William frowned. “That one? It’s — it’s been mended, Eleanor. It’s not new. If you want a new dress for the wedding, we can —”

“I want that one,” she said. “That one matters.”

“Why?”

She smiled, and it was the smile of a woman who has decided to keep one secret for herself, just a little longer.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “on the day.”