The Bride Who Proposed (Red Willow Junction #2)

Chapter 1

The wallpaper was decided before Clara had so much as tasted the tea she had not asked for.

"The front bedroom takes the morning light. It wants the green." Mrs. Ferris tilted the open sample book to the window and frowned at the green, giving it its chance to disappoint her. "You'll thank me, Clara. Green wears."

"I'd thought the yellow." Clara steadied the cup and saucer on her knee. "It's cheerful of a?—"

"Yellow shows every mark." Mrs. Ferris turned the page without looking up. "The green. Elliot, write it down."

Across the parlor Elliot drew the memorandum book from his breast pocket and the pencil he kept sharpened to a needle and wrote the green into it, the way he wrote everything at Fredericks's store: by the pound, without comment.

"Now. The breakfast." Mrs. Ferris licked her thumb and turned a page. "June the tenth. Church at nine, the breakfast here after. Ham. Mrs. Doyle will bring her lemon cake and we shall let her, her feelings bruising as they do and her husband holding our note at the bank."

"I do love a lemon cake." Clara moved the cup a careful inch on its saucer. "Though for June I wonder if we mightn't set strawberries alongside?—"

"Strawberries weep on the cloth by noon. The cake keeps."

"The cake keeps," Elliot agreed, and wrote it down.

Clara let the strawberries go. Beyond the window February was doing its Kansas worst: mud to the axles, a sky the color of dishwater, the lilac by the gate bare and black with wet. She had turned eighteen in this parlor a month ago, over this same tea service. Mrs. Ferris had given her a thimble.

"And thirty steps from my own door." Mrs. Ferris reached across and patted her knee, twice, two short pats, the way you settle a horse.

"I've told Elliot, there's no sense in a second kitchen when mine stands so near.

You'll take your dinners with me. A young wife wants managing at the start, and I've a great deal of it laid by. "

Not one of those questions had been meant for Clara. The linens, the stove flue, the dinners — Mrs. Ferris asked and answered on the same breath, and Clara sat holding her cooling tea.

"Won't that be cozy," she said.

Mrs. Ferris looked pleased. Elliot looked at Clara and nodded, satisfied.

"Which reminds me — has Elliot told you about the Doyles' goat?"

He had. Twice. "I don't think he has," Clara said.

Mrs. Ferris folded her hands in her lap.

"Last spring, after service, the whole churchyard standing about — and up behind Mrs. Doyle comes that goat of theirs, meek as a deacon, and takes the trimming right off her Sunday hat.

Ate it. Ribbon and silk rose and all, and Mrs. Doyle still in the hat, wondering aloud why she kept being tugged. "

Clara laughed. The goat was funny, and she laughed hardest at the silk rose. Mrs. Ferris sat back pleased.

Mrs. Ferris finished the story and sat there. She had nothing else ready, and the parlor went quiet.

Clara knew this quiet. It had come into the house when she was eight, the winter they buried her mother.

Her mother had been the one who talked at supper, who kept the kitchen loud, who asked about the day and laughed at the answers.

And then the kitchen went silent and nobody at the table knew what to say.

Father sat with a newspaper he did not read.

Lydia took to the housework. And Clara found, somewhere in that first winter, that if she talked — about anything, the weather, the neighbor's dog — then nobody at the table had to sit in the silence.

"Did the Cluny lace come in at the store yet?" Clara said. "I saw it in the catalogue and I've wanted it since Advent." And from there it was the lace, the thaw, whether the church picnic would drown again this year, and the parlor was not quiet anymore.

"Clara." Mrs. Ferris held up two curtain samples. "The cream or the fawn?"

"The cream is lovely?—"

"The fawn hides the dust." She laid the cream aside. "Fawn, Elliot."

"Fawn," Elliot said.

The clock struck four. Clara set the untouched tea on the tray, rose, and said her thank-yous and her good-afternoons — and went out to the hall for her shawl.

The parlor door swung to behind her but did not catch. No door in the Ferris house quite caught; the frames had settled years ago and nobody had fixed them.

"She had opinions today." Mrs. Ferris, on the other side of the gap. Her voice was not unkind. "The yellow. The strawberries."

"She reads the ladies' pages," Elliot said.

"She'll come round. She only wants managing."

A pause.

"Yes," Elliot said.

Clara stood with the shawl half onto her shoulders.

Through the gap she could see a wedge of the parlor: the sample book open to the green, the teapot, the curve of Elliot's shoulder.

Her whole future was on that table, written down in Elliot's memorandum book, and they were discussing it without her, and they were done.

The shawl settled on her shoulders. The bright face went back on. Clara opened the door and said she was ready whenever Elliot was, and wasn't the light holding longer now, wasn't that a mercy.

Elliot walked her home. "We lost a whole crate of tinware somewhere the far side of Kansas City," he said, stepping her around the worst of the ruts.

"And a man came in and tried to pass a Confederate note at the counter, bold as brass — called it a joke when I wouldn't take it.

" He went on — the seed orders, the tinware again, the price of nails — in the same even voice he always used.

Clara said "mm" and "oh" and walked beside him through the mud.

At the Crowell gate he stopped and took off his hat and held it against his chest.

"Mother's taken a real shine to you," he said. "She doesn't, to everyone."

"I know she doesn't."

"The green'll look handsome. In the morning light."

"Elliot." Clara worked the glove from her left hand.

The cold had come down and her fingers were slow and the ring caught at the knuckle the way it always caught, so that they both stood a moment watching her fight it, which was not the dignity she had planned.

It came free. She held it out on her open palm, where it looked very small.

Elliot did not take it. He looked at the ring, and then at her, and his face did what a ledger does when a column will not sum.

"I don't understand," he said.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Is it the paper? You can have the yellow. I'll tell Mother?—"

"It isn't the paper."

"Then what's wrong?" He meant it. He always meant what he said. "Clara. Nothing's wrong."

Clara turned the word over and he was right. Nothing was wrong. Elliot was decent. The house would be sound and the green would wear and the dinners would come hot from thirty steps off. She stood in the mud in the last of the light trying to say what was missing instead, and could not find it.

"I can't marry you," she said. "I'm sorry. You've been nothing but kind."

He took the ring, in the end, because she went on holding it out and he was too courteous to leave her arm in the air. He turned it in his fingers, once, the way he might check change he half-suspected of being short.

"Mother said you'd want a long engagement," he said at last. "I could speak to her. There's no hurry on the paper."

"Good night, Elliot."

She went up the walk. Behind her he stood at the gate a moment more, and then his boots went away down the road, unhurried and even, back toward the store. He would be all right. She knew that standing on the doorstep, and it should have been a comfort, and it was not.

At supper she was bright.

She waited until Helen had served the plates, watched Father settle into his first bite.

"You will not believe what Mrs. Ferris told me about the Doyles' goat.

" She gave them the churchyard, the hat, Mrs. Doyle being tugged — and then she paused, and let Helen wait for it.

"And the whole time — the whole time — Mrs. Doyle is standing there saying what is pulling at me, and nobody can tell her because they're all dying.

" Helen — Father's second wife, and the easiest laugh in the house — put her fork down laughing.

"And then — a man came into Fredericks's last week and tried to pass a Confederate note at the counter. In 1886. Elliot showed him the door."

Under his beard Father's mouth moved once, which counted.

"Helen, how are the peas coming? You said last week they were slow."

"Oh — slow, yes, but the rain's helped. I think we'll have them by June if the frost stays off."

"And the roses? Papa, pass Helen the salt — Helen, tell me about the roses."

She kept it going clear through the dried-apple pie — the church sewing, the barn door, had Father seen the new calf at the Henrys' — and by the time the plates were cleared her left hand had gone unnoticed the whole meal.

Tomorrow would do. Mrs. Ferris would have the news around town before breakfast, and the house would need a great deal of brightness then. Tonight the ring was off and nobody knew, and Clara wanted one night with that before the rest of it started.

Upstairs she set the candle on the sill and sat down to the window.

Her reflection looked back at her — hair coming loose, sitting very straight in the cold room.

Past the reflection the yard had gone blue, the woodpile and the well-sweep black against it, the ruts shining faintly where the day's wheels had cut them.

She looked at the girl in the glass until the girl left off smiling. It took a while. And the face left behind was one she did not know what to do with.

Below, Helen banked the stove. Father's chair let out its creak. The clock ticked on.

Clara leaned to the candle and blew it out.