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

Chapter 8

Spring came to the mountains slowly, the way it comes to all high places — reluctantly at first, a thaw at a time. The snow retreated up the slopes, the creek ran loud and full, and the world turned green in a matter of weeks.

Maren found Elias at the woodpile one warm afternoon, and stood beside him for a moment before speaking.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

He straightened, wiping his forehead. “That’s usually trouble.”

“Usually,” she agreed, and smiled. “The store. Mr. Fry isn’t young anymore. He’s been asking if I’d ever want it back.” She watched his face. “I told him I’d have to ask my husband.”

Elias was quiet for a long moment. Then he looked at her, and the smile that crossed his face was one she had never seen before — open, and easy, and whole.

“Ask away,” he said.

“There’d be a house in town,” she said. “But I thought — we could keep the cabin. For summers. For when Lily’s grown and the mountains call her home. I thought we could live in both, and let this place be the one we come back to.”

He set down the axe. “Maren Bell,” he said, and it was the first time he had said her name like it was something precious. “You can have whatever you want. I just want to be in it.”

And that evening, at the table, with the windows open to the first green smell of spring, they told Lily.

“What do you think, little one?” Elias asked. “A house in town, a school with other children, a store with peppermints — and this place, always, to come home to?”

Lily considered it with all the seriousness of a small judge. “Can I have a say in what’s in the store?”

“You can have a say in everything,” Maren said.

“Then I want,” Lily said, “a jar of peppermints on the counter. And a chair by the window where I can read. And —” She paused, and her voice went small. “And I want Mama Mini to be my real mama. Not just the kind that stays.”

The word broke over Maren like weather. She knelt beside the chair, took the small hands in hers, and looked into the gray eyes that were Lily’s father’s and, now, unmistakably, hers.

“Lily,” she said, “I have been your real mama since the moment you asked me if I would leave, and I said I wouldn’t. Papers don’t make it true. Loving you every day makes it true. And I will love you every day for the rest of my life.”

And Lily, who had learned to believe in things again, climbed into her arms and held her, and Elias came around the table and wrapped his arms around both of them, and the three of them stood there in the spring kitchen — a family made of broken pieces that had somehow, impossibly, been joined into something whole.

—

Spring brought the term, and with it, the thing Maren had been dreading without admitting it.

The schoolhouse in Cedar Vale had a teacher now — a young woman named Miss Hartley who had come west with more hope than training. When she saw Maren in the store one afternoon, she all but seized her by the arm.

“They told me you were a schoolteacher back east. Please. My older readers need someone who knows what she’s doing, and I’m drowning.”

Maren said no. She said no twice. And then she remembered the sound of Ruth’s voice calling across the snow, and she said yes — not for Miss Hartley, not for the children, but for the girl she had failed, who had taught her that silence has a price.

The first morning in the schoolhouse, she stood at the front of the room with her hands shaking, and she looked out at the row of small faces and nearly fled. One boy was looking at her with the exact same frightened, trusting eyes she had seen in Ruth — a farm boy named Peter who could not read a word and was certain everyone knew.

Maren did not send him to the corner. She did not make him perform his shame in front of the class. She knelt beside his desk and said, “Let’s start where it’s easy,” and she taught him one letter, then two, then the whole alphabet over the following weeks, the way she should have taught Ruth — the way she had been too afraid to.

“You could see something in Peter,” Miss Hartley said one afternoon, as the children filed out. “The way you watched him. It was like you knew him.”

“Someone I loved,” Maren said, “had his eyes. I looked away once. I don’t do that anymore.”

And she said it without the old weight in her chest. She said it the way you say a thing you have finally understood.

A month later, the Widow Hayes appeared at the store.

Maren braced herself — the old iron in her chest, the practiced calm. But the widow did not come to speak. She set a jar of preserves on the counter, looked at Maren for a long moment, and said, “My daughter lost her mother when she was five. I know what that little girl is carrying.” Her voice roughened. “I was wrong about you. I said things I should not have said.”

Maren looked at her, and she felt the old walls doing their work — and then, deliberately, she let them down.

“Thank you,” she said. “That must have been hard to say.”

“Harder than almost anything,” the widow said. “I’m not good at being wrong. But I’m good at pie. You’ll come to supper Sunday?”

And Maren said yes — not because she needed the widow’s approval, but because she had learned, in the mountains, that being wanted was a thing you had to accept when it was offered, and that love, once opened, had to keep opening.

“We’ll come,” she said. “All three of us.”

The widow nodded, once, and left the preserves on the counter, and Maren stood looking at the jar and thought about how far she had come from the woman who had stepped onto that thin ice.