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

Chapter 6

The stage from Helena reached Stone Creek a little after noon, and the first thing Willa saw when the dust cleared was the man.

He was tall. That was the first thing. Taller than she had pictured from his letters, though he had never written about his height, and broader in the shoulders, a man built for work, for lifting and hauling and holding things steady against the wind. He stood by the rail with his hat in his hands, and he had been watching the stage come in for long enough that his face had already settled into something — not quite a smile, not yet — that looked like a man bracing himself to be disappointed and refusing to let it show.

Willa climbed down with Lily on her hip and Ellis and Ada holding tight to her skirts, and the Montana dust rose up around her boots, and she stood in it with her three children pressed against her, and she looked at the tall man, and she said the thing she had been dreading to say for the whole long ride.

She said it before he could smile. Before he could do the kind thing. Before he could offer her his hand and his house and his patient, polite pretense, and spend the rest of his life regretting it.

“No one wants a bride with three children, Mr. Hale.”

Her voice was steady. It cost her more to keep it steady than anything she had ever done, but she kept it.

“I would understand if you have changed your mind. I would not blame you. I came all this way so that you could tell me to my face, because a man should be allowed to say no to a woman’s face, and you have not met me, and you have not met them, and you have only my letters and my word, and I will not have you trapped by either.”

She stopped. The wind moved the dust around their feet. Somewhere behind her, a horse stamped and a harness jingled, and the whole town of Stone Creek seemed to be holding its breath, though in truth it was only the three or four people on the platform, and none of them were looking.

Gideon Hale did not answer right away.

He looked at Willa. He looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he has been wanting for a very long time and can hardly believe is being offered, and then he looked down at the little girl on her hip, who was not yet four, who had a rag doll clutched under one arm, and who looked back at him with the open, unafraid face of a child who has not yet learned to be afraid of being too much.

Then he looked at the boy of seven, who was not looking at him at all, because the boy had already spotted the horses tied by the rail and was staring at them with the whole of his small heart in his eyes.

Then he looked at the girl of ten. The watchful one. The one who had her mother’s habit of bracing for the worst, who was looking up at him with her jaw set and her small hand white-knuckled on her mother’s skirt, as if the wind might take her mother away if she let go.

And then Gideon Hale smiled.

It was a slow smile, and it was not the polite smile of a man doing his duty. It was the smile of a man who had just been handed something he had wanted for a very long time and could hardly believe was real, and Willa had seen enough smiles in her life to know the difference, and the difference frightened her more than anger would have.

“Mrs. Brenner,” Gideon Hale said. His voice was low and easy, the voice he used on nervous animals and nervous children, and it carried over the wind without any effort at all. “I always wanted a big family. I just never thought I would be lucky enough to get one all at once.”

Willa stood very still.

She did not smile back. She could not. Some part of her — the part that had buried a husband and watched a jar go dry and seen a man’s face change over a knocked-over cup — was already waiting, was already braced, was already listening for the small tell, the flicker, the moment when this kind man would remember what he had agreed to and start counting.

The littlest one, Lily, looked up at the tall stranger with those open, unafraid eyes, and she said, around the thumb in her mouth, “I’m Lily. This is Winky.” And she held out the rag doll, the one with the button eye and the arm going loose at the seam, as if offering it to him, as if she had not yet learned that you do not hand the only thing that is wholly your own to a man you met four seconds ago.

Gideon Hale looked at the doll with the same grave attention he had given everything else, as if it were the most important object in the Territory. He did not laugh. He did not pat her head and turn away. He crouched down, slow and careful, so that his face was level with hers, and he said, very seriously, “That’s a fine-looking doll, Miss Lily. Does she have a name for that button eye?”

“Winky,” Lily said, delighted. “She only has one, but she doesn’t mind.”

“I expect she doesn’t,” Gideon said. “A doll with one eye sees just as much as a doll with two, and I’d wager she sees more, because she has to look twice at everything.”

And Willa stood there in the dust with her apology still in her mouth, unused, not knowing where to put it, watching a man she did not know crouch in the dirt of a platform to talk seriously to her youngest child about a rag doll, and she felt something in her chest give a long, slow creak, like a floorboard settling under a weight it had not been sure it could hold.

Gideon Hale straightened up, and he reached for her trunk — the only trunk, the whole of what she owned in the world — and he hefted it onto the wagon as if it weighed nothing, and he said, “Let’s get you all out of this wind. It’s a fair ride to the place, and the little one looks tired.”

And Willa let him take the trunk, because there was nothing else to do, and because her arms were full of Lily, and because her chin was up and she had decided, years ago now, that a woman keeps her chin up or she does not keep anything.

She let him help Ada and Ellis up into the wagon bed. She let him spread a clean horse blanket for them, and she noticed, with the corner of her eye, that he had put the blanket down where the sun would hit it, and that he had tucked the edge around Lily before he had even introduced himself properly.

And all the way out of town, over the rutted road and up into the green fold of land where the ranch sat, Willa Brenner sat in the wagon with her children around her and her chin up and her hands folded tight in her lap, and she waited.

She waited for the moment this kind man would remember what he had agreed to.

She had been waiting for that moment for two years, and she had gotten very good at it.