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

Chapter 20

Pearl — no. Lily.

Willa still caught herself, sometimes, wanting to call her by the names of all the children she might have been in another telling. But she was Lily, the littlest, and Lily grew the way the littlest ones do — fast and sideways, all at once and never in the order you expected.

Lily grew, and Lily followed Gideon everywhere.

That was the defining fact of her childhood from the summer after the wedding onward. Wherever Gideon was, Lily was — not far behind, not hovering, but simply there, the way a small shadow is there, attached and unshakeable and utterly certain of where it belongs.

If Gideon was in the barn, Lily was in the barn, sitting on an overturned bucket, talking to him in the unending, unfiltered monologue of a child who has decided that her opinions matter and intends to share all of them. If Gideon was mending fence, Lily was at the edge of the pasture, collecting stones and reporting on their quality. If Gideon was in the kitchen — which was rare, because the kitchen was Willa’s country — Lily was underfoot, and Willa would find them there, the big man and the small girl, Gideon moving around her the way you move around a piece of furniture you have decided to keep, stepping over her and around her and never once telling her to go play somewhere else.

Gideon led her, even when following meant underfoot.

Willa watched it and did not know what to do with the tenderness of it. She had been so afraid, in the beginning, that the children would be too much — too loud, too present, too costly. She had spent her first months in this house trying to make them disappear. And here was her littlest, her baby, the one who had nearly been taken by the fever, making herself impossible to miss, taking up space in Gideon Hale’s life the way a weed takes up space in a garden, and Gideon was not pulling her up.

He was watering her.

Willa came around the corner of the barn one afternoon and found them sitting on the ground in the shade, Gideon’s back against the wall, Lily cross-legged in front of him, Winky in her lap. They were having a serious conversation about whether Winky would prefer to live in the barn with the horses or in the house with the people, and Gideon was giving the question the same grave attention he gave everything, as if the housing preferences of a one-eyed rag doll were a matter of genuine importance.

“The horses might step on her,” Lily was saying, with the earnest concern of a child who has thought deeply about a problem. “Horses are big.”

“They are,” Gideon agreed. “But she’d have company. And there’s hay, which is soft.”

“But the mice,” Lily said. “There’s mice in the barn.”

Gideon considered this. “There are,” he said. “But the cats take care of the mice. And the cats are friendly. Winky would have cats to sleep with.”

Lily thought about it. “I think,” she said, with the air of a child delivering a verdict, “that Winky wants to sleep with me. Because she is used to it. And because I would miss her.”

“That’s a good reason,” Gideon said seriously. “That’s the best reason there is. A thing that is used to sleeping with you should keep sleeping with you. That’s how you know it’s yours.”

Willa stood at the corner of the barn and watched them, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, and she did not cry, because she had promised herself she would stop crying at every small, beautiful thing this man did with her children, and she was not doing a very good job of keeping that promise.

That night she said to Gideon, in the quiet of their room, “You’re going to spoil her.”

“I intend to,” Gideon said, without a trace of shame. “That’s what a father’s for.”

The word hit Willa like a wave. Father. He had said it so easily, so naturally, as if he had been saying it his whole life, as if he had not been waiting thirty-odd years to be allowed to say it.

“You didn’t have to take them on,” Willa said, very quietly. “You know that. You could have had — ”

“Willa.” Gideon’s voice was gentle but firm. “I told you on the platform. I meant it on the platform. I have meant it every day since. I always wanted a big family. I just never thought I would be lucky enough to get one all at once.”

Willa looked at him in the lamplight, at this man who had answered a letter from a widow with three children, who had written that a house with children in it was the only kind of house he had ever wanted, who had knelt in spilled milk and sewn a doll’s arm and ridden a hard hour in the dark and carried her daughter to the window to see the stars.

“Lucky,” she repeated. “You think you’re the lucky one.”

“I know I am,” Gideon said. “Every man in the Territory knows I am. They tell me about it in town, Willa. They say, ‘Hale, you got yourself a ready-made family, three fine children, a wife who can cook and keep a house and — ‘ ” he grinned, ” — a wife who can out-stubborn a Missouri mule. And I say, ‘That’s right. I’m the luckiest man in Montana.’ And I am.”

Willa laughed, and she leaned into him, and she did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that would not have come out broken.

She had been so afraid of being too much.

She had been so sure that a woman with three children was a debt, a burden, a thing a kind man might shoulder for a while and then set down.

And she had been so wrong.

She had not been too much. She had been exactly enough. She had been the thing he had been waiting for, the thing he had built his house for, the thing his money and his land could never buy.

And somewhere in the upstairs rooms, her littlest slept with a one-eyed doll under her arm, and the doll’s arm was held on by stitches that were big and clumsy and had been put there by a man who did not know how to sew and had sat down and tried anyway.

Willa remembered the night she had looked at those stitches and thought, That doll comes back at the end of this story.

She was beginning to understand what it meant.