I Need a Wife by Tomorrow Said the Mountain Man — She Whispered One Question

Chapter 4

The days that followed were not easy, and Maren had known they would not be. Lily’s grief came in waves — unpredictable, overwhelming, sometimes triggered by nothing more than the smell of fresh bread or a shaft of evening light across the floor. Some nights Maren woke to find the small figure standing in her doorway, a ghost in a nightgown, and she would lift the covers and let the child climb in beside her, and they would lie in the dark while Lily asked the questions she had no one else to ask.

“Was she pretty? My mama. Was she pretty?”

“Very pretty,” Maren would say, because it was true, because Hannah’s photograph sat on the shelf in Lily’s room, a woman with a gentle mouth and steady eyes. “She had kind eyes. You have her mouth, and her way of tilting her head when you’re thinking.”

“Did she love me?”

“She loved you more than anything in the world. You were the whole of her heart.”

It was the hardest promise to keep, this business of not lying. Because some questions — the deep ones, the ones about why, and where, and why her — had no honest answers, and Maren had to hold the child instead, and let the silence speak what words could not. One night Lily asked, in a small flat voice, why her mother had had to go and stay gone, and Maren could not give her a reason that would make it right. So she held her, and let the dark do the talking. And once, in the gray hour before dawn, Lily asked a question that belonged to Elias and no one else: what her mama’s laugh sounded like.

He sat on the edge of the bed, a man who had never once heard Hannah laugh, and the silence that answered was the truest, most terrible thing Maren had ever witnessed — the shape of every year he had given away. Lily watched him, and something passed between them that was not words, and she took his hand and said, “It’s all right. I’ll tell you. She had the laugh that makes you laugh too.”

And Elias, who had not cried since his mother’s funeral, cried then, and held his daughter, and Maren stood in the doorway and let them have it.

But there were small victories, and Maren learned to count them the way a farmer counts rain. The morning Lily laughed — actually laughed — at Elias’s lopsided attempt to flip a pancake and sent it sailing across the kitchen. The way the sound of it stopped him cold in the middle of the room, like a man hearing music after years of silence. The afternoon she asked him to teach her to carve, and they sat side by side on the porch, him with a knife and a block of pine, her with a stick and a blunt whittling tool, both of them frowning in concentration, and the valley spreading out below them like a promise.

Elias was learning, slowly, painfully, how to be a father. He did not always know what to say. There were days he retreated into his work, into the silence that had been his armor for seven years, and Maren would find him in the barn working wood until his hands were raw, punishing himself with labor for every word he failed to find. But he never gave up. He carved Lily a whistle that actually worked, and the sound of her running through the trees with it made him stand on the porch and watch her for a long time, like a man who could not quite believe what he was seeing.

And Lily, slowly, began to believe it too.

One evening — the first evening it happened — Lily was curled in Maren’s lap after supper, half-asleep, and she said, without opening her eyes, “Good night, Mama Mini.”

Then her eyes flew open. Horror flooded her face. She scrambled off Maren’s lap and stood in the middle of the room, trembling, as though she had done something terrible.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean — I’m sorry.”

“Lily.” Maren knelt in front of her and took her hands. “Why are you sorry?”

“Mama isn’t — you’re not —” The child couldn’t finish.

Maren smiled, and it was the truest smile she had given in years. “I like that name very much. You call me whatever feels right, little one. It honors your mama that you have so much love to give.”

Lily stared at her. Then she threw her arms around Maren’s neck, and Maren held her, and over the child’s shoulder she met Elias’s eyes across the room. He was standing by the fire with his carving in his hands, and his eyes were shining, and he nodded once, slowly, as if giving thanks for something he had never dared to ask for.