Chapter Seven
Grace yelped and threw a clump of dirt at him.
Which, alright, fine, Logan had snuck up on her.
He’d come around the side of the house to check on the downspout bracket that’d been working loose since the last rain.
Instead, he’d found Grace on her knees in his mother’s flower beds with dirt up to her elbows and the baby strapped to her chest like some kind of tiny sack of grain.
For a second, he just stood there, even with the dirt sliding down his cheek and Grace looking at him with her mouth open.
Because the beds looked different.
Half of the crabgrass and the thistle that’d swallowed everything over the past two years—all that choking green tangle—sat in a pile on the porch step.
While underneath, where he hadn’t looked in longer than he cared to admit, three rose bushes clung to their spots along the railing with new shoots reaching up through the cleared soil.
She blinked and closed her mouth.
“You gonna just stand there gawkin’ or you gonna help?”
So, he helped.
Not because she told him to, mind. But because the alternative meant walking away from his mother’s rose bushes while somebody else tended them, and that sat wrong in a place he couldn’t quite get at. Besides, the downspout bracket could wait. It’d waited this long.
He knelt on the opposite end of the bed and started pulling weeds. Grip, pull, shake the dirt loose, toss. Grip, pull, shake, toss. The soil came apart easily under his fingers, and the smell of it caught somewhere behind his breastbone.
Ma used to smell like this soil after a morning in the garden. Like turned earth and green things and the faint sweetness of rose sap on her hands when she’d come inside to start supper.
“These bushes got some fight left in ’em.” Grace worked a root free and held it up. “Your ma knew what she was doin’. The roots run deep enough to survive just about anything.”
“Yeah.” He pulled at a clump of crabgrass. “She had a way with growin’ things. These roses, she, uh, ordered the cuttings special from a nursery in Denver. Took her three tries to get ’em to take in this altitude.”
“Three tries?”
“She don’t give up easy… Didn’t.” The tense snagged on his tongue like a fishhook. “Didn’t give up easy.”
Grace nodded and went back to weeding.
He appreciated that more than she probably knew. The next words in that story led to places he couldn’t go right now, not on his knees, in the dirt, at ten in the morning, with the sun warm on the back of his neck and the baby making those little grunting noises against Grace’s collarbone.
“I’ll take care of ’em.” Grace sat back on her heels and brushed her palms together. “Every day. I’ll weed and water and make sure they get what they need to come back proper.”
He grabbed and pulled the next clump of crabgrass way harder than he needed to.
“Grace, you don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
The way she said it, plain and sure and without a lick of sentiment dressed up around it, made him believe her. Because Grace didn’t say things she didn’t mean. He’d figured that out within the first forty-eight hours of her being here.
He opened his mouth to say something back, something about what it meant to hear that, except, right then, the baby decided she’d tolerated enough peace and quiet for one morning.
The baby scrunched up her face, pulled a breath so deep her whole body puffed out against the sling, and let loose with a wail that scattered the brown birds right off the porch eave.
“Oh, here we go.” Grace stood and bounced on her heels, rubbing circles on the baby’s back through the cotton. “Shh, shh, little bird. What’s the fuss about, hm?”
But the baby had committed. She’d bypassed the whimper stage entirely and gone straight to the full-throated howl, the one that hit a pitch somewhere between a barn cat at midnight and a saw blade catching a knot. Her face turned the color of a ripe tomato.
Grace shifted the sling and tried the side-to-side rock, which had usually worked the past few days, but the baby arched her back and screamed louder, and Grace winced.
“My arms are shakin’ from all the pullin’. Here.” She held the baby out to him. “Take her a minute while I stretch.”
“I don’t think that’s a good—”
“Logan. Take the baby.”
He took the baby.
The baby’s skull fit in his palm in a way that made every nerve in his body stand at attention because one wrong move, one slip, one moment of not paying close enough attention, and something awful could happen to this small thing.
He tucked her against his chest the way he’d watched Grace do it, cradling her head in the crook of his neck, and tried the bounce.
The baby screamed harder.
“You’re as stiff as a fencepost.” Grace rolled her shoulders and flexed her fingers. “She can tell. Babies know when you’re nervous.”
“I ain’t nervous.”
“Then why’re you holdin’ her like she’s a stick of dynamite?”
Because she might as well have been.
Every time he held this child, his whole body locked up with the understanding that she depended on him entirely, and he had no idea, not one single clue, what he ought to do when she cried like this.
Now, cows, he understood. Horses, fences, timber, ledgers, and the price of feed grain in Gunnison. All that made sense. But this tiny creature, with her balled-up fists and her screaming, operated on some language he’d never learned.
“Bounce softer.” Grace wiped her hands on her skirt and reached over to adjust his elbow. “There. And hum somethin’.”
“Hum?”
“A song. Any song. Just somethin’ low and steady.”
Easy for you to say…
For the life of him, he couldn’t think of a single song. His mind blanked the way a creek freezes over in January. So, instead, he just made a noise. A low tuneless rumble in his chest that vibrated against the baby’s cheek.
She paused mid-scream. Hiccupped. Drew a shuddering breath.
Then she screamed again, louder than before, and he surrendered her back to Grace the instant she held out her arms.
“Alright, alright, come here, little bird.”
Grace tucked the baby into her practiced hold, and the crying dropped by half inside of three seconds. By ten, the baby had stuffed a fist in her own mouth and gone quiet, blinking up at Grace with those round, watery eyes that always looked half surprised to find themselves in the world.
Grace swayed on her feet with dirt still packed under her fingernails and rose-bed soil ground into the knees of her skirt, and the shift in Logan’s chest happened again.
It was like it was…rearranging. Before he could figure out what to do about it, though, the rattle of a wagon drifted up from the main road.
Pa and the boys must be back.
The wagon crested the rise and rolled through the gate with Thomas driving and Mason riding the tailgate. Pa sat up front next to Thomas, and, even from this distance, Logan caught the way the old man’s gaze tracked straight to the porch, the overturned dirt, and the pile of weeds on the step.
By the time the wagon pulled up to the house, Pa had already climbed down without waiting for the brake to set. He crossed the yard with that hitch in his stride that got worse when something other than his hip bothered him, and he stopped at the edge of the flower bed.
For a long, bad moment, nobody said anything.
Pa looked at the cleared soil. The exposed rose bushes. Grace standing there with the baby and the dirt on her hands.
“I told you not to touch them beds.”
“I saw they needed tendin’, so I—”
“Them beds ain’t yours to tend.”
“Mr. Foster, the roses were gettin’ choked out. Another season under all that mess and they’d have—”
“I know what they’d have done!” Pa’s hand shook where it gripped the porch railing, and a vein jumped along his temple. “You think I don’t know what’s growin’ under my own porch? That I don’t see it every mornin’ when I walk out this door?”
“Pa.” Logan stepped forward. “She didn’t mean no harm by it.”
“I told her plain as day not to touch them beds, Logan. Second night she come here, I looked her straight in the eye, and I said—”
“You said not to touch the beds, and she didn’t touch ’em, she weeded ’em. There’s a difference.”
“Don’t you parse words at me, boy!”
Mason and Thomas had stopped halfway across the yard, frozen in that particular posture of men who’d walked into a room at exactly the wrong second and couldn’t decide whether to keep going or back out slowly.
“She’s tryin’ to save Ma’s roses, Pa. That’s all. Look at ’em.” Logan pointed at the cleared bed. “They’re still alive under there. Three of ’em. And they’d have died if somebody hadn’t—”
“Your mother put those in the ground with her own two hands!” Pa’s voice cracked on the word hands. “Every spring she’d be out here on her knees just like that, and I’d bring her coffee, and she’d get that dirt on my good cup and I never once—”
He stopped. Pressed his lips together under the mustache until they disappeared. His chin wobbled, and he turned and walked into the house.
The screen door banged shut behind him.
Thomas let out a slow breath. Mason took his hat off and held it against his chest as if somebody had just lowered a coffin.
Grace stood in the middle of all of it, bouncing the baby, who’d started to fuss again, and the look on her face landed somewhere between stung and sorry, which made Logan’s gut tighten.
“Go on inside.” He kept his voice even and steady; the foreman’s voice he used when a situation needed managing, not feeling. “Take the baby upstairs and get cleaned up. I’ll handle Pa.”
She opened her mouth.
“Please, Grace.”
Something in the please must’ve done it, because she nodded once and went inside, holding the baby close, and the screen door clicked shut behind her a whole lot quieter than it’d shut behind Pa.
Logan turned to his brothers. “Either of you say a word right now, and I will put you both to work muckin’ out stalls ‘til Christmas.”
Mason put his hat back on. Thomas discovered something fascinating about his own boots.
***
Supper came and went, and Grace’s chair sat empty.
Logan had set the table himself since nobody else bothered to get the forks facing the right direction, he’d ladled out the leftover stew Grace’d made the day before, and sliced the bread she’d baked that morning.
Then the four of them ate in the kind of quiet that tasted worse than burned cornbread.
Mason pushed a potato around his bowl. Thomas ate fast and excused himself. Pa chewed like he owed each bite a personal grudge.
By the time Logan finished washing the dishes, the sun had dropped behind the ridge, and the house had gone the color of tallow. He dried his hands on the cloth, hung it on the hook where it belonged, and climbed the stairs.
Pa had beaten him to Grace’s door.
The old man held his hand raised as if he’d been about to knock, but couldn’t get the rest of himself to follow through. He wore his housecoat over his shirt, and his hair stuck up in the back where he’d been lying on it.
“Pa,” Logan frowned. “What’re you doin’?”
“Mind your business.”
“If you’re fixin’ to go another round with her, I ain’t gonna—”
“I ain’t fixin’ to go another round with nobody, Logan.” Pa turned and glared at him over his shoulder. “I came to apologize. That all right with you, or do I need written permission to talk to somebody in my own house?”
Logan blinked.
“I shouldn’t have hollered at her like that.” Pa’s hand dropped from the door. “Your mother...”
He rubbed the back of his neck the same way Logan did.
“Them flower beds, they’re the last thing she touched. Last thing in this world that’s still the way she left it. And seein’ somebody else’s hands in that dirt, it...”
“Pa—”
“No. The girl’s right. Miriam wouldn’t have wanted her roses to die on account of an old man bein’ too proud and too sorry for himself to pull a weed.”
“You—”
The door opened.
Grace stood in the gap wearing her second dress, the everyday one, with her hair down around her shoulders and the baby propped on her hip. The baby blinked at both of them with that owlish look she got after naps, all round eyes, and milk-drunk calm.
“Y’all know these walls ain’t made of stone, right?” Grace arched an eyebrow. “I could hear every word you said. So could the baby, and she just got down.”
Pa pulled himself up straight. Squared those old shoulders.
“Mrs. Grace, I owe you an apology. I spoke harsh and I spoke outta turn. Them roses needed what you done for ’em, and I had no cause to bite your head off for doin’ it.”
Grace studied him for a beat. Then she shifted the baby to her other hip.
“Apology accepted, Mr. Foster. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You show me where your wife kept her gardenin’ gloves. Because I’ve been pullin’ thistle barehanded and my fingers look like I lost a fight with a porcupine.”
Pa’s mustache twitched.
“Bottom drawer of the hutch. Leather pair with the yellow stitchin’.”
“Then we’re square.” She looked between the two of them and bounced the baby on her hip. “Now, is there any of that stew left, or did y’all eat it all without me?”