They Called Her the Last Choice—Until a Wealthy Cowboy Chose Her as His Only Bride

Chapter 2

Widow Hensley came in for thread she didn’t need.

“Is it true?” she said breathless. “Forty dollars a month to go up to that house alone? A young woman? Oh, Clara honey—you can’t think of your reputation.”

“My reputation,” Clara said, weighing out thread she hadn’t asked for, “has been the town’s favorite meal for a decade. I don’t reckon there’s much left to spoil.”

The Apprentice sisters came back with their mother, all three of them arranged into looks of tremendous concern.

“We only mean it kindly, Clara,” Mrs. Apprentice said. “A man like Carter—and a girl in your position. People will say things.”

“People say things now,” Clara said. “You said things this morning, ma’am, standing right there by the calico.”

Mrs. Apprentice’s mouth pinched shut like a coin purse.

The pastor came.

Reverend Aldis Finch, a gentleman who’d baptized half the county and buried the other half, stood turning his hat in his hands. “Clara, I don’t wish to add to your burdens. But I’d be failing my office if I didn’t ask—do you think it wise? A man of his means and his solitude. What could he want with the daughter of a shopkeeper, if not something a Christian woman oughtn’t provide?”

That one landed, because the reverend said it kindly, and kindness has more edge than cruelty when it’s cutting the same way.

“Reverend, you’ve known me since I was in short skirts. Have I ever once in all that time done a thing I was ashamed of?”

“No,” he admitted. “You have not.”

“Then trust me to know the difference between an honest wage and a shameful one.”

She softened it because he was a good man who meant well. “He wants his books put right. That’s all. And Lord knows I can put books right. If the whole county’s decided my mind is the only thing about me worth nothing—well, here’s a man willing to pay forty dollars a month for it. Seems to me the county might be wrong.”

Reverend Finch looked at her a long moment. Then he set his hat back on his head.

“You were always the smartest child in my Sunday school, Clara Whitmore,” he said quietly. “It shames me that it took Nathaniel Carter to make this town remember it.”

He left, the only one all day who left having said something kind and meaning it.

That night, after the store was shut and her father was abed with his tonic, Clara sat at the kitchen table with the cream-colored card in front of her and the household ledger open beside it. And she did what she always did when her heart wanted one thing and the world wanted another.

She did the arithmetic.

Forty dollars a month. Four hundred and eighty a year. The Denver doctor for her father. The mortgage on the store. She knew to the penny how far behind they were because she was the one who’d been juggling it—robbing the flour account to pay the note, robbing the note to buy the flour, keeping the whole leaning thing upright by main force for two years while her father’s lungs gave out under him.

Forty dollars a month would fix it.

Forty dollars a month would fix all of it.

And forty dollars a month came with a house on a hill and a widower with sad eyes and a whole town certain she was selling something other than her sums.

“Clara.”

Her father stood in the bedroom doorway in his nightshirt, holding the frame.

“Pa—you should be sleeping.”

“I heard you thinking.”

He came and sat across from her, slow, careful. His breath whistled. For a while, he didn’t say anything.

Then: “Your mother would have known what to tell you. God rest her. She always knew the right thing.”

He looked at his daughter, and his eyes were wet.

“I don’t. I’m no good at this. I’ve watched this town treat you cruel for years, and I never—I was too tired, Clara. Too sick and too tired, and I let them, and I’m sorry for it.”

“Pa, don’t—”

“A father ought to have found you a good man, or run off the bad ones, or at least—at least made sure you knew you was worth choosing.”

He put his thin hand over hers on the table.

“I never made sure you knew that. And now some rich stranger rides down off a mountain and tells you in one afternoon—in front of Doyle’s boy and the whole store—what I should have been telling you every day of your life.”

He squeezed her hand.

“You take the work, Clara. Not for the doctor. Not for the note. You take it because a man looked at you today and saw what I see. And by God, you deserve to be seen.”

Clara Whitmore, who had not cried when Caleb Doyle called her worthless in her own store, who had not cried when the reverend questioned her virtue or the Apprentice women pitied her out loud—put her face down on her father’s thin hand and wept.