She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”

Chapter 18

Willa Brenner and Gideon Hale were married in the little church at Stone Creek that autumn, when the aspens along the creek turned gold and the first bite of winter was in the air.

It was a small wedding, the way weddings were then — a handful of neighbors, the doctor and his wife, the minister with his worn Bible and his kind eyes. But it was not a quiet wedding, because there were three children standing up front, and children are not quiet, and nobody asked them to be.

The minister said afterward that it was the first wedding he had performed where the bride arrived with her own row of family already in the pews. He said it with a smile, and Willa, standing at Gideon’s side in the dress she had remade from her mother’s — the dress she had carried west in the trunk, the dress she had almost sold a dozen times — understood that he meant it as a blessing, and she received it as one.

Ada stood up front in her best dress, her hair brushed until it shone, her chin up. She did not cry. She watched the whole thing with the same grave attention she gave everything, and when the minister asked if anyone present knew any reason these two should not be joined, Ada looked at the congregation with an expression that suggested she would personally escort anyone with an objection out into the cold.

Ellis stood up front in his good shirt, and he was so full of excitement he could barely stand still, and he kept craning his neck to look at the horses tied outside the church — Gideon had let him ride Sadie in that morning, sitting in front of the saddle, and Ellis had not stopped talking about it since.

And Lily — Lily stood up front in a dress that had been Ada’s and had been let out twice, clutching Winky in one hand and Willa’s skirt in the other, and she was too young to understand what was happening, and too happy to care, and when the minister said the words that made Gideon and Willa man and wife, Lily looked up at Gideon with those open, unafraid eyes and said, in the carrying voice of a four-year-old who has not yet learned to be quiet in church:

“Now you live with us forever, and you can fix Winky’s arm when it comes loose again.”

The whole church laughed. Even the minister laughed, a deep, warm laugh that shook his spectacles. And Gideon, who had just become a husband and a father to three children in the space of a single ceremony, knelt down in the aisle of the little church at Stone Creek and looked his smallest daughter in the eye and said, very seriously:

“I will. Forever, Miss Lily. That’s the deal.”

And he shook her hand, solemn as a treaty, and Lily shook it back, and the congregation laughed again, and Willa stood at the front of the church with her hand over her mouth and her eyes bright, and she understood that she was happy.

Really, truly, unguarded happy — a thing she had not been since Ohio, a thing she had been so certain she would never be again.

The wedding supper was held back at the ranch, in the big kitchen with the six chairs, and there were more than six people at the table that night, because the doctor and his wife had come, and the McAllisters, and a handful of the neighbors, and the children were everywhere, underfoot and overexcited and loud, and nobody told them to be quiet.

Gideon’s father had once said grace over a table so crowded you could not see the wood. Willa thought about that as she looked down the length of the table at the crowded, laughing, noisy gathering — at Ada passing the biscuits with grave dignity, at Ellis telling the McAllister boy about the time he had learned to groom a horse, at Lily asleep in Gideon’s lap with Winky clutched to her chest, at Gideon himself, his head bowed over the sleeping child, a smile on his face that he could not have hidden if he had tried.

She thought about the platform at Stone Creek, and the dust, and the words she had said before he could be kind. No one wants a bride with three children, Mr. Hale. She thought about the second line of her letter, written to scare him off early. She thought about the long ride west, and the changed faces of Ohio, and the cracked jar of savings going dry.

And she thought about the man who had answered her letter, who had written, almost as an afterthought, that a house with children in it was the only kind of house he had ever wanted.

Willa looked at Gideon across the crowded table, and Gideon looked up, as if he had felt her eyes on him, and he smiled — that slow smile, the one from the platform, the one she had not trusted and had come, over a year, to know as well as her own reflection.

She smiled back.

And the noise went on around them, and the fire crackled, and the wind moved around the house that had been built for a family and was, at last, full.