Chapter One
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, eleven days after Grace had mailed hers.
She’d spent every one of those eleven days inventing reasons it wouldn’t come.
The rancher had found someone else. The post had lost it somewhere between here and Colorado.
Or worse, and most likely, the man had taken one look at her careful handwriting and her modest little list of qualifications and tossed the whole thing into a stove.
So, when she came back from the market with a half-pound of dry rice and a heel of bread under her arm and spotted the envelope poking out of the mail slot, she almost walked right past it.
Almost.
Instead, she set the rice and bread on the step, wiped her palms on her skirt, and pulled the envelope free.
Miss Grace Linton, New York, New York.
The return address read Pitkin, Colorado. But the name above didn’t match.
M. Foster.
Not L. Not the rancher himself.
She broke the seal right there on the front step and unfolded two pages of loose handwriting that sprawled across the paper like it had places to be and couldn’t slow down long enough to stay between the lines.
Dear Miss Linton,
My name is Mason Foster. I am writing on behalf of my brother, Logan, who is not much of a hand at letter writing and would likely just send you one line telling you when to show up, which my other brother, Thomas, and I agreed would not make for the best first impression.
A laugh bubbled up in her chest.
We received your letter and were mighty pleased to read it.
Logan took a shine to what you had to say, even if he would sooner wrangle a bull than admit it out loud.
He has asked me to tell you that the position is yours if you want it.
We have a good-sized ranch house with a spare room that is clean and private, and a kitchen that could sure use someone who knows her way around a cookstove, as none of us three boys can cook worth a lick, and our father has just about thrown in the towel on the matter.
Now, I know the journey out from New York is a long haul and not a cheap one either. I have taken the liberty of purchasing a train ticket for you, which you will find enclosed.
The ticket is for the 9:15 out of Grand Central on the morning of the 14th.
You will need to transfer in Chicago and once more in Denver.
The whole trip runs about four days, give or take, depending on what the railroad sees fit to do with its schedule.
When you roll into the Pitkin station, somebody will be waiting for you.
We are looking forward to your arrival, Miss Linton.
Respectfully yours, Mason Foster
P.S. Bring yourself a warm coat. The nights up here will freeze you plumb solid if you are not prepared for them.
Grace read the letter twice more. Then she dug into the envelope and pulled out the train ticket, a stiff rectangle of printed card stock with her name on it, her actual name, and a departure date only twelve days away.
Her hands trembled. Just a little. Just enough that the ticket’s edge fluttered against her fingertips.
She gathered the rice and the bread and went to find her brother.
***
Jonah sat on an overturned crate in the backyard, whittling at a piece of scrap wood with a pocketknife that had seen better days. He looked up when the back door banged open, and Grace came through it waving the letter like a flag of surrender.
“It came.”
He caught the pages she thrust at him and read through them with that slight movement of his lips, balancing the pocketknife across one knee. His eyebrows climbed higher with every line. By the time he reached the postscript, the grin had already started pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in tar and hung out to dry.” He flipped the ticket over between his fingers. “Boy up and bought you the fare hisself. Didn’t even wait to be asked, just laid down the coin bold as brass.”
Grace dropped onto the crate beside him, tucking her skirt beneath her knees. The afternoon smelled like coal smoke and the sharp green bite of the weeds pushing through the yard’s cracked dirt—the only things that grew here without her help.
“Twelve days.”
Jonah folded the letter along its original creases and handed it back. “Twelve days.”
Something shifted in the line of his jaw, a tightening she recognized. The same look he’d worn the morning after their parents’ funeral, standing in the doorway of the empty front room, already working out how to carry what they’d left behind.
He shook it off quickly. “Well then. I reckon that calls for a celebration, don’t it?”
“Celebrate with what, exactly?”
“With all that fare money we been squirrellin’ away, that’s what.” He stood and stretched. “That Mason fella just gone and handed us back every red cent we scraped together. Way I figure it, that money’s burnin’ a hole clean through my pocket and we got ourselves cause to spend it.”
“Jonah, we ought to put it aside for—”
“Nah, nah, nah.” He spread both arms wide. “Tonight, sister mine, we eat like honest-to-goodness civilized folk. I’m talkin’ proper. I’m talkin’ sittin’-down, napkin-in-the-lap, say-grace-before-the-first-bite proper!”
***
Proper folk, it turned out, ate rice, beans, and a chicken breast from Moretti’s deli on the corner of Tenth Avenue—a whole chicken breast. Between the two of them, split right down the middle on a plate that Grace had to wash three times before using because the mice had gotten into the dish cabinet again.
But, sitting there, at the counter they used as a table, with steam rising off the rice and the chicken glistening with whatever magic old Moretti rubbed into his birds before roasting them, it could’ve passed for a feast in any fine dining room in Manhattan. To Grace, anyway.
She tore into her half, and the juice ran down her chin, and she didn’t even bother reaching for a rag. Jonah ate his in three enormous bites and then sat back, making sounds of satisfaction.
“Lord, have mercy.” He licked his fingers one by one with the ceremony of a man savoring his last meal. “That right there’s the finest grub I’ve had since... when did Mama make that stew? The one with the dumplings floatin’ on top?”
“The night before Papa’s name day. She used the last of the salt pork.”
“That’s the one. I must’ve been, what, twelve or so?”
“Thirteen. You’d just gotten tall enough to reach the top shelf, and you kept puttin’ things up there so I couldn’t get ’em.”
“Strategic repositioning, I called it.”
“You called it funny. I had a few other words for it.”
They sat together in the little, warm pocket of the memory while the evening light turned copper through the grimy kitchen window.
“She used to sing while she cooked.” Grace looked down. “Every single time. Couldn’t stop herself if she tried.”
“Near drove Papa plumb loco, is what it did. Man’d be sittin’ there tryin’ to read the paper, and she’d be in here just a-wailin’ away on some hymn fit to rattle the windows.”
“They weren’t hymns. They were the old songs, from home. The ones Mormor taught her.”
“Hymn, old song, all the same to Papa. Man just wanted five minutes to sit still and instead he got hisself a concert every suppertime.”
Grace gathered up the plates and carried them to the basin, running a thin stream of water from the pump. The pipes groaned and shuddered the way they always did, and for one second, she opened her mouth and let the first few notes of one of those old songs spill out.
A lullaby.
Something about a river and a girl walking beside it, and the melody came back to her the way melodies did, living somewhere deeper than memory, stored in the chest and the throat and the bones.
Jonah’s head came up.
The kitchen shrank around the song, or maybe it grew.
Hard to tell which, because, for the span of those few minutes, the cracked plaster and the warped floor and the stain spreading across the ceiling all retreated to the edges of the room, and what filled up the center had nothing to do with the house and everything to do with who stood inside it.
Jonah caught her by the wrist and spun her.
She barked out a startled yelp and stumbled into him, and he laughed and pulled her into a clumsy waltz between the counter and the basin. He hummed with her now, steering her around the bucket she’d placed beneath the leak and past the stack of firewood piled against the far wall.
Neither one of them carried a tune worth a damn anymore because the singing had dissolved into hiccupping laughter that made her ribs ache.
She exhaled. “You’re a terrible dancer.”
“I am a mag-nificent dancer, thank you kindly. You ain’t got the refinement to appreciate a man of my caliber.”
She shoved his chest, and he let go, and she staggered back against the counter and pressed a hand to the stitch in her side, breathing hard, as the laughter still bubbled up in little aftershocks.
Through the window, the last of the evening faded to deep purple over the rooftops. Somewhere on the docks, a ship’s horn sounded.
Twelve days, and then she’d never hear that horn again.
***
They packed her things the night before she left, which took less time than Grace would’ve liked.
Everything she owned in the world fit into one carpetbag and a canvas satchel Jonah had picked up off a stoop somewhere.
Two dresses, one for every day, and one for occasions that never came.
A wool shawl, so many times mended, it resembled a patchwork quilt more than a garment.
Underthings. A hairbrush with three missing bristles.
A bar of soap wrapped in cheesecloth. Her mother’s sewing kit, and, at the bottom of the carpetbag, a small wooden brooch in the shape of a rose.
Mormor’s.
The only thing they had from the old country that the years hadn’t stolen, broken, or burned.
Grace ran her thumb over the petals.
Jonah leaned against the doorframe. “You oughta take the quilt, too.”
“It’s yours.”
“Shoot, it’s got more holes than a quilt at this point. Go on and take it. That Mason boy said to bring a warm coat. A holey quilt beats no quilt, and that’s a fact.”
She folded it up tight and wedged it into the satchel. It barely fit, bulging out at the sides, and made the whole bag look like a stuffed sausage. It wasn’t the most elegant way to arrive at one’s new life—lugging a sausage-shaped bag and a carpetbag held together by stubbornness and old leather.
Though it ain’t like elegance has ever been on offer.
“Gracie.”
She glanced up.
“You’re gonna do just fine out there, you hear me? Better’n fine.”
Something thick and hot climbed her throat. She swallowed it down and cinched the buckle tight. “Course I will.”
“I ain’t just jawin’, neither. You are hands down the toughest soul I ever come across, and I’ve run with some mighty rough characters in my time.”
“That don’t inspire the confidence you think it does.”
He snorted. “What I’m gettin’ at is, some cattleman out in Colorado ain’t got a snowball’s chance against the likes of you. You’ll have that whole outfit runnin’ tighter’n a new fiddle string inside a week.”
“I don’t even know what the man looks like.”
“Don’t make a lick of difference what he looks like. What matters is the cut of the man, and a fella who puts out an honest ad like that, askin’ for help plain and simple… well, that ain’t a bad place to hang your hat.”
“All right.” She buckled the satchel and gave it a pat. “All packed.”
“That’s my sister. Tougher’n rawhide, you are.”
***
“Platform seven.” Jonah steered her left, past a newsstand and a shoeshine boy calling out prices. “Right this way, ma’am.”
The platform stretched long and loud with hissing steam and the clang of luggage being loaded into cargo cars.
“That there’s your car.” Jonah nodded toward a passenger car near the middle. “Nine-fifteen to Chicago. You hop off there, switch over, then do the same in Denver. You still got that schedule Mason wrote out for you?”
Grace patted the pocket of her dress. “Right here.”
“And the letter?”
“In the bag.”
“And the—”
“Jonah.” She set the carpetbag down on the platform and turned to face him. “I’ve got everything. I promise.”
He stood there with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, rocking on his heels, looking for all the world like a man trying hard to hold the shape of himself together. The steam from the engine drifted between them and broke apart in the morning air.
“A couple of months. That’s all it’ll take. I’ll get my affairs in order and hop the next westbound train, they’ll sell me a ticket for. You won’t even have time to miss me proper.”
“I already miss you.”
His jaw worked. He pulled one hand from his pocket and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Now don’t you go doin’ that to me, Gracie. Not here, not in front of all these good people. I got a reputation to uphold.”
But his voice came out rough at the edges, and when he blinked, his lashes stuck together.
She stepped forward and wrapped both arms around his middle and pressed her face into his chest. He folded over her like he always did, tucking his chin on top of her head, and his arms tightened until her ribs creaked.
“You look after yourself out there, you hear?” He ruffled her hair. “You eat proper meals. And don’t let nobody push you around, not one solitary soul.”
She nodded against his shirt.
“And you write me. Every blessed week. I wanna know the whole of it. What the house looks like, what them mountains look like, whether this Foster fella’s got all his teeth or if he’s chewin’ with his gums.”
A wet laugh broke out of her. She pulled back and swiped at her eyes with both palms.
“All his teeth. That’s your top concern.”
The conductor’s whistle cut through the platform noise, sharp and final.
“All aboard! Chicago line; all aboard!”
Jonah picked up her carpetbag and handed it to her. Then the satchel, adjusting the strap on her shoulder with a fussiness that didn’t suit him, smoothing a wrinkle in the canvas that didn’t exist.
“Go on, now.” He stepped back. “Git, ‘fore I lose my nerve and haul you back home.”
She grabbed the railing of the passenger car and climbed the steps. At the top, she turned. Jonah stood exactly where she’d left him, hands back in his pockets, holding that crooked grin of his firmly in place even though the rest of his face told a different story entirely.
She raised one hand.
He raised his.
The train lurched forward.