Chapter Five
The house had gone dark.
Pa had turned in first, climbing the stairs with the hitch in his step that got worse in the evenings because the old man just wouldn’t admit that the old injury in his hip ground bone against bone whenever the weather shifted.
Thomas had followed not long after. Mason—who’d spent most of the evening shooting guilty looks at Logan from across the room, and Logan would give him a piece of his mind tomorrow—had finally slunk off to bed around nine with a mumbled g’night.
So, now, the house relaxed.
Well, it did so as much as it could with a baby sleeping in a dresser drawer in the spare room. They didn’t even have a crib. Mason had had to scramble one together from a dresser drawer and some folded quilts.
Logan changed into his last clean shirt, since the other four hung on the wash line out back, and stepped out onto the porch.
The night had cooled the air off the way nights under the mountains could do, dropping twenty degrees between sundown and full dark. The yard smelled of pine pitch and cold stone, and the chimney let off the faintest traces of burning wood.
I’ll have to top up the embers soon.
Out past the fenceline, a coyote called out with a note so thin Logan half expected it to snap, and another answered from somewhere up the ridge.
This right here used to be Ma’s favorite spot.
This porch. This view. This particular slice of quiet after a long day.
She’d sit in the rocker Pa had built her, the one that still filled the far corner, on which years of use had flattened the cushion, and she’d watch the stars come out while the boys finished their chores.
Sometimes she’d hum. Sometimes she’d just sit.
Since the day she died, everyone avoided the rocker like the plague.
Except now.
Grace sat in it and rocked without a care in the world, looking out into the distance as if she’d never seen proper nature. Then, as she noticed him, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders that looked like it’d been mended so many times that nothing remained of the original fabric.
For a stretch, neither one of them spoke. Just the coyotes and the wind and the house settling on its foundation, the way old houses did.
“Stars out here are somethin’ else.” She tipped her chin up as she whispered. “Back home, you’re lucky to see a handful on a clear night. Too much smoke and lamplight.”
“Gets even better in winter.”
She pulled the shawl tighter. Even in the dark, the set of her shoulders showed a woman bracing against a gust yet to come. Under the starlight, those freckles across her nose stood out against her skin like flecks of copper.
He exhaled. “I owe you an apology.”
That got her to look at him.
“My brothers had no business doin’ what they did. Placin’ that ad, buyin’ you a ticket, draggin’ you halfway ‘cross the country without so much as a word to me about it. That ain’t how I run things around here, and it sure as Sunday ain’t the welcome you deserved after four days on a train.”
“Yeah.” She stood up and walked up to the railing. “I figured you didn’t know.”
“Not a lick. If I had, I’d have put a stop to it ‘fore the ink dried on that letter.”
“Well,” she ran her thumb along the railing. “That does explain the rifle.”
A cough charged up from his chest, but he covered it up by clearing his throat. “Pa don’t trust strangers comin’ up on the property. Got his reasons for it.”
She nodded like she understood there might be more to that story, but wouldn’t push for it tonight.
Smart woman. Or maybe just tired. Probably both.
“What made you answer the ad?” He leaned against the railing next to her. “The real reason. Not whatever polished version you put in your letter.”
For a long moment, she just looked out at the dark, and the shawl shifted across her shoulders as she took a breath.
“Rats ate my hair.”
He blinked. “Come again?”
“Rats. In our house. One of ’em sat on my pillow while I slept and ate my hair like it was Sunday supper.
And I just...” She traced the wood grain with her nail.
“That morning, sittin’ on my cot cryin’ over a rat, I reckoned I’d hit the bottom.
My brother showed me the ad, and I figured living with a stranger in Colorado couldn’t be worse than what I already had. ”
The way she said it, stripped down to the bones with no lace on it, made it worse than if she’d done a whole speech.
Here stood a woman who’d traveled four days by rail to marry a man she’d never met because her life had gotten to the point where rodents chewed on her hair.
Then she’d arrived to find no wagon, no welcome, and a rifle in her face, and—instead of falling apart—she’d walked three miles uphill and bullied four grown men out of their own kitchen.
Logan rubbed the back of his neck. “I ain’t gonna pretend I wanted this. Any of it. I figured I’d be the one choosin’ when it came time to marry. On my terms. In my time.”
“And instead, your brothers chose for you.”
“They did. And I aim to have words with both of ’em about that for a good long while.
” He paused. Out past the corral, one of the horses snorted and stamped.
“But you’re here now. And that baby in there needs tendin’ by someone who knows what they’re doin’, which, today, I have proved beyond any reasonable doubt ain’t me. ”
She chuckled.
“On top of that, the house needs a woman’s hand, whether I like admittin’ it or not, and you need a roof and a steady situation.” He glanced at her. “So, the way I see it, we got ourselves a practical arrangement starin’ us right in the face.”
She turned to look at him straight on. Those brown eyes of hers caught the starlight.
“Is this your idea of a proposal?”
“For a business arrangement. Yeah.”
“Nothin’ more’n what the ad laid out?”
“No, ma’am. You keep the house, help with the baby, cook, mend, and tend. In return, you get room and board and a proper roof over your head, and nobody eatin’ your hair in the middle of the night.”
She leaned forward across the rail. “You’ll want to get hitched proper, I assume?”
“It oughta be decent and proper in the eyes of the town. Beyond that, we keep things... simple.”
“Simple.”
“Straightforward. Clear. No complications.”
She hummed for a beat that stretched long enough to make the back of his neck prickle. Then she held out her hand.
“All right, Mr. Foster. You got yourself a deal.”
He took it.
She squeezed firm for someone with hands that small, and her palm had calluses in spots that spoke of garden work, scrubbing, and years of wringing out laundry by hand. Then he let go and turned back towards his yard, while his ribs shifted. A long day and the lack of supper did that to a man.
“Logan,” he nodded. “If we’re gettin’ hitched, you might as well call me Logan.”
She smiled. “Grace.”
“Tomorrow, then. Pastor Aldridge at the church in town. We’ll keep it small. Just the family.”
“Tomorrow.”
She nodded once, pulled the shawl up around her ears, and went inside.
The door clicked shut. Logan stood on the porch, listened to the coyotes, and tried to remember the last time a handshake left his palm tingling like that. He couldn’t recall one.
He went to bed.
***
Pastor Aldridge’s church, a clapboard building with a steeple that leaned about two degrees east from a windstorm that had blown through the previous spring, perched at the top of Pitkin’s one real street.
Nobody had ever gotten around to fixing the old building.
In a mining town turned ranching town, a crooked steeple ranked somewhere below fence repair and above painting the saloon on the list of community priorities.
The inside smelled like old hymnals and lemon oil and the particular mustiness of a building that was only filled with warm bodies one morning a week.
Six rows of pews lined up on either side of a center aisle, and a wooden cross hung above the pulpit on a nail that could’ve used replacing. No stained-glass windows, of course.
Logan stood at the front in his best shirt—the one he saved for Sundays and funerals.
Well, and the occasional trip to the land office in Gunnison.
He’d pressed it that morning with extra care, heating the iron on the stove until it hissed against the damp cloth, and the creases ran sharp enough to satisfy even his own standards.
Beside him, Pa stood stiff in his church coat, and Mason and Thomas flanked the front pew with the baby bundled between them in a nest of blankets.
Thomas held the child like a man holding a jar of something that might explode, while Mason poked at the blankets every few seconds to make sure she was still breathing.
Grace stood beside him in the same dress she’d arrived in.
Apparently, according to her, she owned only two, and she’d chosen the nicer of them to make her way to their door.
However, she did wash it and dry it, somehow, in the hours between last night and this morning.
Logan suspected she’d used the pressing iron to dry it, but that would’ve taken hours, and she looked completely rested.
Did she even sleep?
She’d pinned her dark hair up with a wooden brooch shaped like a rose. Under the light breaching the aisle in stripes, her skin caught the warmth of the sun, and those freckles of hers stood out across her nose and cheeks.
Pastor Aldridge, a thin man with spectacles and a voice better suited to a room three times this size, opened his Bible and began.
The ceremony took all of eight minutes.
Standard vows, regular scripture, usual pronouncement.
Logan repeated the words when prompted, and listened to Grace repeat hers, trying not to think too hard about the fact that his mother’s name had been spoken in this same church at her funeral, from this same pulpit, by this same pastor, and now here he stood pledging himself to a stranger while a foundling baby gurgled in the front pew.
Why did my life have to get this strange?
“You may kiss the bride.”
Right. That part. He’d completely suppressed it all day long until now. He’d had to. How was he supposed to kiss her? They were performing a fake wedding so that she could work a job. Kissing her would be completely improper.
Gotta do something, though.
He couldn’t back out or refuse to kiss her. They had to finish the ceremony.
Then, Grace turned to face him. This close, he could count the freckles on her face if he’d wanted to. The window light caught in the brown of her eyes and turned it to honey at the edges, and she held still, watching him with an expression that gave nothing away.
Wait… Aldrige just said kiss. It doesn’t have to be on the lips.
So, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to her cheek.
Just the cheek. Brief. Proper. The kind of kiss a man gives his aunt at a holiday supper.
But, where his mouth met her skin, where she smelled faintly of the soap she’d brought in that carpetbag, her cheek softened under his lips and made his chest jump.
Then he pulled back, like touching a doorknob in winter after scuffing across a wool rug.
There and gone. Over before he’d fully registered it.
He straightened up. She blinked. And then she almost smiled, just a twitch at the corner of her mouth, quick as a trout in a creek before she turned away to accept Pa’s handshake and Mason’s enthusiastic clap on the shoulder.
From his spot in the pew, Thomas caught Logan’s eye and raised one eyebrow. Logan gave him a look that communicated, in no uncertain terms, that he ought to keep whatever observation he’d just made to his own self.
***
By afternoon, the ceremony had faded into the catalog of the day’s concerns, somewhere between mending the north fence and ordering feed from the supply depot in Gunnison.
In truth, that suited Logan just fine, because the catalog had grown long enough already without adding whatever that jolt on his lips had meant.
Because, on top of a new wife, a new baby, and two brothers, he still owed a reckoning. The ranch needed tending.
It always needed tending.
Predators and bad winters had thinned the herd over the last two years, and the spring calves numbered fewer than he’d projected, which meant less to sell come autumn, which meant a tighter year than the one before it.
The north fenceline sagged in three places where the posts had rotted through.
The barn roof leaked when the rain came from the east.
Rain in Pitkin came from the east more often than not.
On top of all that, Pa’s hip had gotten worse. The old man hid it well, but Logan caught the way he gripped the banister coming down the stairs and lowered himself into a chair like a man easing into a hot bath. Testing every inch before committing his weight.
As much as the stubborn old goat refused it, he needed a doctor.
And now a baby. No name, no parents, and no explanation beyond a wicker basket, depending on this household for every breath and every meal.
They’d need bottles, cloth for diapers, and a proper crib, not a dresser drawer stuffed with quilts.
Logan sat at the kitchen table after supper, running figures in a ledger by lamplight, adding columns and scratching out lines.
The numbers never came out differently, no matter how many times he worked through them.
Not enough hands for the work. Not enough money for the supplies. Not enough hours in the day.
From the spare room down the hall, the baby fussed, and then Grace’s voice drifted through the door, humming that same lullaby as before.
Logan put down the pencil and looked at the doorway.
His wife. A stranger who’d arrived yesterday on sore feet with a carpetbag and a temper, who’d taken over his kitchen and his baby and apparently, as of this morning, his last name.
Simple, he’d told her. No complications.
He picked the pencil back up and went back to the numbers.