CHAPTER 2
A Rancher Short on Household Help
The Cross Ranch, outside Goldpine — the same week
Nathaniel Cross had built the Cross Ranch out of eight hundred acres of unpromising Wyoming grassland, a small herd of cattle, and the same stubborn, unhurried determination that had once made him, by all local accounts, the most sought-after bachelor in three counties before he'd had the good sense, some seven years back, to marry Mary Talbot and stop wasting the county's collective hopes on a man already thoroughly spoken for.
He had, in the two years since Mary's death, discovered that a ranch built for two people to run together did not shrink obligingly to accommodate one person running it alone, and that the particular arithmetic of raising two children while managing eight hundred acres of cattle country worked out, by his own careful reckoning, to considerably more hours than any single day contained.
“Mrs. Halloran's given her notice,” he informed his foreman, a weathered, laconic man named Otis Grimm, over the ranch office's morning coffee, in the flat tone of a man reporting a fact he had already spent several sleepless hours absorbing.
“Marrying that freight agent from Cheyenne. Leaves at month's end.”
Otis received this news with the particular unhurried consideration he brought to most matters, ranch business and otherwise.
“That's the second housekeeper you've lost to marriage in two years, boss.
Might want to consider whether there's something in your household water making the women fall in love and leave.”
“It's not the water, Otis, it's the simple fact that any capable woman willing to work a ranch household for wages is also, by definition, exactly the sort of woman a sensible man wants to marry, and Goldpine's got no shortage of sensible men looking.” Nathaniel rubbed his jaw, the particular gesture of a man calculating a problem that had no clean solution readily available.
“I'll need to find someone new before month's end, and I'll need Sam and Lily settled with whoever it is, which is rather more particular a requirement than the last two times, given how Lily took Mrs. Halloran's notice.”
This was, if anything, an understatement.
Nathaniel's daughter Lily, five years old and possessed of a memory considerably longer than her years, had greeted the news of Mrs. Halloran's impending departure with a storm of tears that had taken the better part of an evening to weather, on the theory, articulated with the merciless clarity children sometimes achieve, that grown-ups who came to live in their house always left again eventually, same as her mother had, and there seemed little point getting attached to any of them.
Sam, at nine years old, had taken the news with rather more stoicism, though Nathaniel had noticed, in the days since, that his son had grown quieter than usual, watching the household's daily rhythms with the particular careful attention of a boy trying to work out how much of his own security depended on arrangements liable to change without warning.
“Reverend Larson's sister runs that bride ministry out of the church,” Otis observed, with the deliberate casualness of a man who has been waiting for an opening to raise a subject he suspects will not be warmly received.
“Matched up Jed Thorne not a year back, and from what Bess Beal tells my own missus, that arrangement's turned out about as well as any marriage in this territory.
Might be worth a word with the Reverend, if you're wanting a woman who'll stay put rather than marry off the moment some fellow takes a shine to her.”
“I'm not looking to remarry, Otis.”
“I never said remarry, boss. I said housekeeper. Though I'll note you've gotten considerably touchier on the general subject than the question strictly warranted, which tells me plain enough you've thought on it more than you're letting on.”
Nathaniel did not dignify this observation with a response, which Otis, after some years in his employ, had learned to correctly interpret as confirmation rather than denial, and the matter was set aside for the remainder of that morning's ranch business, though it lingered, uninvited, at the back of Nathaniel's mind through the whole of the day's work — the plain, practical problem of a household wanting a woman's steady hand, and the rather less practical, considerably more complicated question of whether he had it in him to trust another woman with the daily running of a life he had built, once, with Mary, and had not properly imagined sharing with anyone else since the fever took her.
He raised the matter with Ruth Larson himself, some days later, finding her at the mercantile counting out change for Mrs. Petty with the brisk efficiency she brought to most tasks, church ministry very much included.
“I'm not looking for a match, Ruth,” he said, by way of opening, before she could mistake his purpose. “Just a capable housekeeper who won't run off and marry the first eligible man who comes calling, the way the last two did. Someone patient with children, and willing to stay put a good while.”
Ruth regarded him with an expression he could not entirely read, though it carried, he thought, rather more private amusement than the plain request seemed to warrant.
“As it happens, Nathaniel, I may know of someone.
An old friend of mine, from back east, writing to ask after precisely such a position.
I couldn't rightly say whether she's ever kept house a day in her life, mind you, but she's steady, and kind, and in need of a fresh start considerably more urgent than most, from the tone of her letter.”
“What's her name?”
“Callie Reyes,” Ruth said, “and I'll write to her directly, if you're willing to have her, though I'll tell you plain, Nathaniel Cross, that a woman coming that great a distance for a housekeeping position is generally running from something rather more particular than a desire to see the Wyoming Territory, and I'd ask you to extend her the same patience I'd expect you'd want extended to yourself, whatever she does or doesn't see fit to explain of her reasons.”
Nathaniel considered this, and found, turning it over, that Ruth's careful phrasing raised rather more questions than it answered, though something in her tone persuaded him not to press further.
“I'll extend whatever patience the position requires, Ruth.
I'm not in the business of interrogating a woman's history, only her willingness to do the work and treat my children kindly.
Write to her, if you would. Month's end doesn't leave a great deal of time to spare.”
That evening, riding back out to the ranch beneath a sky just beginning to color with sunset, Nathaniel found himself turning the whole exchange over with rather more attention than a simple hiring matter seemed to warrant.
He had asked Ruth for a housekeeper, and Ruth had offered him a housekeeper, and there was nothing in the plain facts of the matter to account for the small, persistent curiosity now lodged in his thoughts regarding a woman he had never met, coming from a life and a family situation Ruth had pointedly declined to specify.
Sam noticed his father's distraction that evening, watching him from across the supper table with the particular careful attention he brought to most matters concerning the household's stability. “Did you find someone, Papa? For the housekeeping?”
“I believe I may have, Sam. A friend of Reverend Larson's sister, coming from a good ways south of here. I don't rightly know much more than that yet, but Ruth speaks well of her, and that counts for a good deal in my estimation.”
“Is she nice?” Lily asked, around a mouthful of potato, with the blunt directness that generally characterized her contributions to supper conversation.
“I expect so, sweetheart, though I haven't met her myself yet to say for certain. We'll all find out together, once she arrives.”
“I hope she's nice,” Lily said, with a seriousness that carried, beneath its childish simplicity, the whole considerable weight of a five-year-old's accumulated disappointments. “I hope she stays.”
Nathaniel felt the familiar ache that always accompanied his daughter's careful, guarded hope, and reached across the table to squeeze her small hand. “I hope so too, Lily. We'll give her every fair chance to prove herself worth the staying, same as we'd want given to ourselves.”
Later that night, after the children had been settled, Nathaniel found himself sitting alone in the ranch office reviewing the household accounts, though his attention kept drifting from the columns of figures toward the considerable memory of Mary that these particular late evening hours always seemed to summon most vividly.
He had married Mary Talbot seven years past, against the mild disapproval of her own family, who had considered a rancher's uncertain prospects rather less appealing than the steadier position of a town merchant's clerk who had also sought her hand, and he had spent the whole of their marriage grateful, in a quiet and undemonstrative way that he sometimes regretted not expressing more openly while she lived, that she had chosen him regardless.
He thought now, turning the accounts over without properly seeing them, of how she would have handled this current predicament — the household in need of a steady hand, the children requiring careful reassurance, his own guarded heart requiring some gentle but firm encouragement to remain open to whatever possibility a new arrangement might bring.
Mary had possessed a gift for precisely this kind of encouragement, delivered with enough warmth that it never felt like criticism, and Nathaniel found himself missing that particular gift now with an ache that had not properly diminished, despite two years' distance from her death, so much as it had simply become a familiar, if still painful, companion to his daily life.
“You'd tell me not to worry so,” he said aloud, to the empty office, in the particular half-embarrassed manner of a man who still occasionally spoke to his late wife's memory when no one else was present to overhear it.
“You'd tell me to give the woman a fair chance, same as I've told Lily to do, and trust that whatever's meant to happen will happen in its own good time.”
The office remained silent, as it always did, but Nathaniel found some measure of the peace he sought regardless, in the simple act of voicing his uncertainty aloud, and returned to his accounts with a steadier hand than he'd managed before the small, private conversation.
He rose early the next morning, as was his habit, and found Sam already awake and dressed, sitting on the porch steps watching the sunrise with the particular quiet contemplation the boy had adopted more frequently since his mother's death, a habit Nathaniel recognized, with some private guilt, as rather too similar to his own tendency toward solitary, unshared grief for comfort.
“You're up early, Sam.”
“I couldn't sleep much. Kept thinking about the new housekeeper coming, and whether she'll be nice, and whether Lily's right that she'll just leave again like the others.”
Nathaniel settled beside his son on the steps, the two of them watching the sun climb slowly over the eastern ridge.
“I can't promise you she'll stay forever, Sam.
Nobody can promise that about anyone, if they're being honest with you.
But I can tell you this — whatever happens, you and Lily and I, we'll manage it together, same as we've managed everything else these past two years.
You're not facing any of this alone, whatever fears keep you up at night.”
“I know, Papa. I just wish sometimes that things could go back to how they were before, when Mama was here and everything felt more certain.”
“I wish that too, son, more than I know how to properly say.
But I've learned, these past two years, that wishing for what's gone doesn't leave much room for finding what's still possible.
I mean to keep looking for what's still possible, Sam, for your sake and Lily's both, and I'd be glad of your help in that looking, whenever you feel ready to offer it.”
Sam considered this with his usual grave seriousness, then nodded slowly, some of his earlier anxiety visibly easing in the warmth of his father's honest, unhurried attention, and the two of them sat together a while longer, watching the day properly begin, before the ranch's ordinary demands called them both back to their separate morning tasks.
Lily woke somewhat later, finding her father and brother already well into their morning chores, and greeted the day with rather less philosophical calm than Sam had managed, expressing her continued anxiety about the impending new housekeeper through the practical medium of refusing her breakfast porridge until properly coaxed by Otis's own gentle, grandfatherly patience.
“You'll like her fine, I'd wager,” Otis told her, settling beside her at the kitchen table with his own considerable breakfast. “I've heard tell she's coming a very long way, from clear down in the New Mexico Territory, which tells me she's got some genuine grit to her, making a journey like that. Grit generally makes for a person worth knowing, in my experience.”
“Mrs. Halloran had grit too, and she still left.”
“That she did, though not on account of any failing in her grit, only on account of finding a man she wanted to marry more than she wanted to keep housekeeping.
That's a different matter entirely from leaving because she didn't care for you and your brother, which she surely did, same as I'd wager this new one will too, given half a fair chance.”
Lily considered this distinction with the particular careful attention she brought to matters of genuine emotional consequence, and found herself, by breakfast's end, willing to extend at least provisional goodwill toward the new arrival, whatever her deeper reservations about the whole enterprise of trusting new grown-ups continued to whisper beneath that provisional welcome.