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

Chapter 7

The Hale Ranch sat in a wide green fold of land an hour’s ride from Stone Creek, and the house was bigger than Willa had pictured.

She had pictured a cabin, from his letters — a good cabin, solid and warm, the kind a man builds with his own hands when he has decided to stay. What she saw, when the wagon crested the last ridge and the place came into view below them, was a proper house, a real house, with a porch that ran the length of the front and windows that caught the afternoon light and a barn behind it that was bigger than the house in Ohio where she had buried her husband.

It was a house that had been built for a family.

Willa saw that immediately, with the same cold, clear eye with which she had learned to read rooms and faces and the space between what people said and what they meant. It was in the width of the porch, built for chairs and for children’s bare feet. It was in the size of the kitchen table — six chairs around it, and she counted them without meaning to. It was in the four rooms upstairs, and in the real parlor, which had a settee and a stove and not a single thing in it that suggested a person had ever sat there and been comfortable.

Gideon Hale handed the children down one by one, and he showed Ellis the barn — “later,” he said, “after you’ve eaten, I’ll introduce you around” — and he carried Lily inside, still asleep against his shoulder, and he set her on the big bed in the front room downstairs without being asked, and he tucked the quilt around her, and Willa watched him do it, and she could not decide what it meant.

She walked through the house that first afternoon, with Lily asleep in the front room and Ellis and Ada trailing her in that quiet, watchful way they had both learned from her, and she did a thing she could not help.

She counted the rooms.

Four upstairs. A parlor. A kitchen big enough for a table that could seat a dozen if you squeezed. A pantry stocked with more than she had seen in a year in Ohio, jars of preserves and sacks of flour and a smoked ham hanging from the rafters, and she understood that he had stocked it for them, that he had gone to town and bought supplies for a family he had only met in letters.

There is space here, Willa thought, standing in the middle of the parlor with her hands clasped in front of her, for us to be small in.

That was her plan. She had decided it on the wagon ride, watching the green land roll past, and she had been refining it ever since. The way to keep this arrangement alive — the way to make sure this kind man never remembered what he had agreed to, never started counting, never showed her the face she was sure he was hiding — was to make her three children as little trouble as a family of three children could possibly be.

She would keep them quiet. She would keep them out of his way. She would keep them grateful and small and invisible, tucked into the corners of this big house like mice in the walls, and she would make herself so useful, so necessary, so easy to have around, that he would never think to look at them and start counting the cost.

That was the plan.

It was a good plan. It was the only plan she had.

The first supper was a careful, painful thing. Gideon had made stew — a good stew, rich and brown, with meat in it, more meat than Willa had seen in a single pot in two years — and he had set out six bowls without comment, and he had served the children first, and he had asked Ellis about the horses he had seen from the wagon and Ada about the books she had brought and Lily, who was awake now and shy, about Winky’s button eye.

And all through it, Willa watched him the way she watched everything now, the way Ada watched him, the way you watch a floor for weak boards. She watched him not because she was looking for the good in him but because she was certain, with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had been taught by two years of hard living, that the good was a coat he was wearing and that underneath it there was a man who would eventually, inevitably, start counting.

After supper, Gideon showed Ellis and Ada their rooms upstairs — real rooms, with real beds, with quilts on them that had clearly been made by somebody’s hands and not bought — and Willa stood in the doorway of the room she had been given, which was the room at the end of the hall, the one with the window that faced east toward the rising sun, and she did not know what to do with the fact that he had given her the best room.

The children fell asleep quickly, worn out by the journey and the newness, and Willa sat on the edge of her bed in the dark with her hands in her lap and listened to the strange silence of the house.

It was not a silent house, exactly. The wind moved around it. The timbers creaked and settled. Somewhere below, she could hear Gideon moving around, banking the fire for the night, and she could hear him go to the front room and stand there for a moment, and she knew, without being able to explain how she knew, that he was looking in on Lily, who had been put to bed there because she was still too worn out to climb the stairs.

Willa sat in the dark and made her plan, and the plan was to disappear.

Not unkindly. Not rudely. She would simply make herself and her children so small, so quiet, so little trouble, that this house would forget it had ever been changed by their arrival, and Gideon Hale would never have any reason to remember what he had agreed to, and he would never send them away.

She had been small before. She could be small again.

She lay down on the bed that was softer than any bed she had slept in since Peter died, and she stared at the ceiling, and she thought about the platform, and the dust, and the slow smile, and the words he had said — I always wanted a big family — and she told herself, firmly, the way she told herself everything now: words are paper. Kindness wears off. Nothing is free, and everything is taken back.

She closed her eyes.

And somewhere in the dark, in a house that had been built for a family that had never come, Willa Brenner fell asleep still braced, still waiting, still sure that the floor she was standing on would not hold.

It was the only way she knew how to stand anymore.