“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All

Chapter 1

The trouble started before the supply wagon had finished unloading.

Ada Voss stood on the post office steps with a sealed letter in her hand, folded once, the way a person folds something that has cost them three days of courage, and she was still counting the money she had left — four dollars and sixty cents, plus a little more in pennies — when the post office door came open and the trouble walked straight out of it.

She had come a long way to reach this town. Two counties, a river crossing, and a stage ride that had left her hips sore and her boots whitened with road dust. The letter she held said, in her own careful hand, that she was arriving, that she was grateful for the position Mr. Edmund Holbrook had promised her, and that she looked forward to keeping his house with diligence. She had written it at a boarding table three days ago, borrowing ink, and she had carried it since because mailing it had felt too final, as if the posting of it would close a door she was still standing in.

Three days. She had stood in three different towns holding it. And now here was the answer, delivered directly into her path, wearing a gray dress and a hat with a feather in it and the expression of a woman who had been rehearsing for a week.

“I don’t know what kind of woman shows up in a town,” said Mrs. Holbrook, in a voice built to cover distance, “with a letter and an expectation and no references that anyone can verify.”

The street had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet. The three men near the wagon stopped their business. The woman with the basket of dry goods turned her head. The boy who swept the post office steps stopped sweeping, which out of everything was the politest thing that happened to Ada that whole morning, because he at least had the decency to look embarrassed about it.

Ada looked at Mrs. Holbrook. She took in the fine wool of the dress, the careful way the woman had pinned her hair, the small gathering of spit at the corner of the mouth that anticipation makes. And she understood, in the way a person understands a fence they have just walked into, what had happened: Mr. Edmund Holbrook had written her a letter offering work, and Mr. Edmund Holbrook had apparently also offered the same work to his wife, and had told neither of them about the other. She had not known she was walking into a house with two doors until one of the doors had bowed at her.

“Ma’am,” Ada said, and her voice came out steady, which surprised her, “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

That was all. She did not produce her own letter in her own defense. She did not explain. She folded the paper back into its crease, tucked it into the small bag at her hip, and stepped off the steps. She walked the length of the street to the bench at the far end, the one under the maple that had lost half its leaves, and she sat down.

Behind her, she could feel the town deciding what to do with what it had just seen. She could feel Mrs. Holbrook’s triumph detonate and then deflate in the silence, because a speech rehearsed for a week needs an opponent, and Ada had declined the role. She could feel the boy on the steps pretend to sweep.

She looked down at her own hands. They were work hands, chapped at the knuckles, and they were not shaking. This was the part that would have to stand as a small miracle later, because everything about the last hour should have shaken them.

What she had: four dollars and sixty cents and spare pennies. One change of clothes. A small Bible with handwriting in the margins — Sister Honora’s hand, the careful letterforms she had pressed into Ada’s memory from the age of seven to the age of sixteen, in the county home in Holman County, which she had never once called by its other name, though everyone else had. And the reading. She could read nearly everything, which sounded grand when you said it and paid nothing when you didn’t.

The far end of the road curved past the town and became a dirt track heading into the hills, and she watched it, because looking at a road was easier than looking at the town.

She had not cried. She had promised herself on the stage, somewhere between the river crossing and the county line, that she would not cry in public — not here, not in front of them, not ever again if she could help it; that thirty-one years and a county home and a week of hope were worth something better than that.

And then she heard boots.

A man had been leaning against the post office wall through the whole of it. She had noticed him without letting herself notice him — the way you notice a shadow without looking at it. He was tall, the way men are tall who have worked outside since they were boys. Broad where the shoulders put in their claim. His hat was pulled low and his coat was canvas and his hands hung at his sides like tools waiting for a purpose.

He pushed off the wall and he crossed the street, and he didn’t stop when he reached her. He stopped one pace short of the bench, at a slight angle, so that he was looking at the road too, and not at her.

“Can you cook?” he said.

She looked at him. He wasn’t looking back at her. He was watching the road the way she had been watching it, as if the two of them were in agreement about something that hadn’t been said.

“I can,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of hard work.”

He told her, then, in the flat way of a man reading items off a list, that he ran the sawmill two miles east of town. That he had two children. That his housekeeper had left in March and had not been replaced, and the house had fallen to a condition that embarrassed even the horses. The work would not be easy. The house was not near town. He could pay four dollars a week, meals, and a room of her own.

She said, “When would you need me to start?”

“I’ve got the wagon,” he said. “I’m heading back now.”

She stood up. She picked up her bag. “All right,” she said.

Behind them, the boy on the post office steps had stopped pretending to sweep and was watching with his whole face. Behind the post office window, a woman with a feather in her hat stood watching too, with her mouth slightly open, which was as close as that woman would ever come to an apology.

Ada did not look at either of them. She walked toward the wagon, and the tall man walked beside her, and neither of them said another word about what had happened, which turned out to be the first of many things they would agree not to say aloud.

The bench was empty behind them. The wind moved through the maple, and a last leaf came down, and the town of Morrow Creek drew a breath and got on with its Wednesday.