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

Chapter 5

They went down to Cedar Vale in early November, for supplies and for the simple, terrifying act of being seen. Maren had braced for the whispers. What she had not expected was the welcome.

Old Mrs. Pemberton, the reverend’s wife, met them at the door of the church with a patchwork quilt folded in her arms. “For the little girl’s bed,” she said, and pressed it into Maren’s hands before Maren could thank her. “We heard. We prayed. We’re glad you’re home.”

The general store had new peppermints in the jar, and Mr. Fry winked at Lily and let her pick two. And in the street, a girl about Lily’s age — the Oakes girl, whose brother Lily’s father had taught to read — came running up with a fistful of river stones and asked, in a voice too bright to be rehearsed, “Do you want to see my rocks?”

Lily looked at Maren. Maren nodded. And for half an hour, in the autumn dust of the main street, Lily Hope ran and laughed with another child for the first time since her mother died, and the sound of it carried all the way to the top of the mountain.

But not everyone was kind. At the mercantile, a woman Maren knew only as the Widow Hayes made a point of standing close, of letting her voice carry.

“Can you imagine,” the widow said, not quite to anyone, “the nerve of it? A man buys himself a wife and a mother in one afternoon, like ordering seed from a catalog. They’ll be back here in a month begging for charity, mark my words.”

Maren felt the old, familiar heat behind her eyes — the rush of shame she had spent years learning to swallow. She looked at Lily, who had gone very still at her side, watching the woman with those too-old eyes.

And then she heard herself speak, calmly, the way she had spoken to children for years.

“Mrs. Hayes.” The widow turned, surprised. “You’re right about one thing. That man walked into my shop and asked me to marry him before sunrise, and I said yes without knowing a single thing about him except that he loved a child he had never met. And you know what I’ve learned since?” She stepped closer, not threatening, just present. “That the people doing the talking are rarely the people doing the loving. Now, I’d like to buy my flour in peace.”

The widow’s mouth opened and closed. In the end, she said nothing, and Maren paid for the flour, and Lily took her hand, and they walked out into the cold sunshine together, and Lily squeezed her fingers so hard it almost hurt.

“You were brave,” Lily whispered.

“No,” Maren said. “I was scared. Scared and brave is the only way anyone ever does it.”

—

A second letter came from the lawyer in St. Louis in late November, addressed to Elias, and Maren watched him carry it unopened to the porch and sit in the rocking chair for a long time, staring at it the way a man stares at a grave.

It was only when the wind came up and the light began to fail that he came inside, the letter open in his hands, his face unreadable.

“She wrote it at the end,” he said. “Hannah did. She knew she was going. She gave it to the lawyer and told him to hold it until I had my daughter safely home.” He held the paper out, then took it back. “She said — she said she never blamed me. Not once. She said she had always known the shape of the man I was, and that she had told Lily the truth — not the sad version, the real one. That I was good, and that I deserved to know my daughter. And she said that if I ever read this letter, she wanted me to stop carrying the weight of her death like it was mine to bear.”

His voice broke. “She said she had a happy life. She said raising our girl was the best thing that ever happened to her, and that she was proud of me for being strong enough to let her go, and that she hoped —” He stopped.

Maren did not speak. She simply crossed the room and stood in front of him, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were red, and he was the most beautiful, broken thing she had ever seen.

“She hoped I’d find someone to be happy with,” he finished, very quietly. “She hoped I wouldn’t spend my whole life alone in the mountains.”

And Maren, who had spent eight years never letting anyone see her cry, felt the first tear slide down her own cheek.

“Then we should both try,” she said, “to be worthy of what she hoped for us.”

That night, in her own room, Maren sat by the lamp with the letter, and she read it — the whole of it, the careful handwriting of a dying woman who had loved a man with her whole heart and let him go. And she found herself thinking of another letter, the one that had never come, the one she had written in her head a thousand times to a girl named Ruth, and never had the courage to send.

She did not know if forgiveness existed for what she had done. But she knew, with a certainty that felt like weather, that she wanted to try.