Chapter Nine
Two weeks, and not a soul had come looking for the baby.
Grace wiped the last supper plate and set it on the stack, turning the cloth over in her hands while the kitchen dimmed toward evening.
Through the window above the basin, the sun dropped behind the ridge in that way it did out here, slow at first, and then all at once, like it got tired of holding itself up and just gave in.
Logan had gone out to check the south fence right after eating.
Something about a post that’d shifted overnight, which, sure, maybe it had, or maybe the man just needed a reason to leave a room whenever the conversation drifted anywhere near the topic of the baby and what came next, because they’d all been circling it for days.
Every supper, somebody almost said it. Mason would open his mouth and then shove cornbread in it instead. Thomas would get that look on his face, the contemplative one he wore when his brain worked ahead of his tongue, and then Rafe would clear his throat and ask somebody to pass the salt.
So tonight, with Logan’s chair empty and the kitchen still holding the warmth of the stove, Grace hung the towel on its hook and turned around.
Mason sat at the table, whittling a piece of pine into something that could’ve been a horse or a dog or maybe just a lump.
Thomas leaned back in his chair with both boots propped on the rung of the one beside him, which Logan would’ve had words about if he’d seen it.
Rafe occupied his usual spot at the head, working a knot out of a piece of leather harness by lamplight.
The baby slept in the dresser drawer. Of course she did. This child had the supernatural ability to doze off the second anything important needed discussing, and wake up screaming the instant everybody settled down for the night.
“So,” Grace pulled out her chair and sat. “We gonna talk about it or we gonna keep pretendin’ the elephant ain’t standin’ in the middle of the room?”
Mason’s knife stopped mid-stroke.
Thomas brought his boots down off the rung.
Rafe kept working the leather, but his fingers slowed.
“Two weeks.” Grace folded her hands on the table. “Your brothers rode out twice askin’ at every homestead and farm for a day in each direction. Nobody’s come forward. Nobody’s sent word. Nobody’s posted a notice in town or asked at the general store or the church.”
“Could still happen.” Thomas picked at a scratch on the table. “Folks move slow out here. Could be the mother’s in another county and the news ain’t reached her yet.”
“And it could be the mother left her on purpose, Thomas. Because she couldn’t care for her. Or didn’t want to. Or both.”
The lamp on the sideboard flickered in a draft from somewhere under the door, and the shadows in the kitchen shifted.
Mason set down his whittling and brushed the shavings off the table into his palm. “What’re you gettin’ at, Gracie?”
“I’m gettin’ at the fact that we got a baby in this house who needs more than a dresser drawer and borrowed blankets and a family that keeps callin’ her ‘the baby’ because nobody wants to get attached.”
She glanced at the dresser drawer. One tiny fist poked out from under the quilt.
“We should keep her,” Logan said.
Four words, and the room changed temperature.
Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe that shift happened inside her own chest, right behind the breastbone, where she’d been carrying this particular knot for about ten days now without letting it unravel because she loved that child.
She had since the second morning, if she had to pin it down, when the baby had grabbed a fistful of her collar during the bottle feeding and held on with that ferocious little grip, and Grace’s whole body had understood something her brain took a week to catch up to.
“Keep her.” Thomas blinked. “As in... for good.”
“For good. Raise her. Give her a name and a home and a family.”
“I ain’t disagreein’ with you…” Mason held up both hands. “Lord knows I ain’t. But Logan...”
“What about him?”
“He’s been sayin’ since day one that the baby’s temporary. That we’d find her people, or find a family to take her in. He even mentioned the orphanage in Gunnison last week.”
“Over my dead body is that child goin’ to an orphanage.”
The words came out sharper than she’d planned, carrying an edge honed on years of knowing exactly what happened to children nobody claimed.
Back in New York, she’d walked past the foundling home on Randall’s Island enough times to understand what that word meant.
Rows of cots in drafty rooms and too many mouths and not enough hands, and the older kids with those flat stares that said they’d stopped expecting anything from anybody a long time ago.
Not this baby. Not while Grace still drew breath.
Rafe set the harness down.
“The boy’s scared.” His voice came out gravelly and quiet. “He won’t call it that, ‘cause Fosters don’t scare, but that’s what it is. He’s scared of lovin’ somethin’ he might lose.”
Which made a painful kind of sense when she lined it up against everything she’d learned about this family in two weeks. The mother they’d buried. The way Logan checked every lock twice before bed, counted heads at supper, and kept the world at arm’s length.
Grace hadn’t asked yet what had happened to Logan’s mother, but she could guess.
“He’s already attached.” Mason shook his head. “Yesterday, I caught him in the stable talkin’ to one of the mares about how the baby’d smiled at him that mornin’. Full conversation. With a horse.”
Thomas snorted.
“I’m serious! He told that mare every detail. How big the smile got and how she grabbed his thumb and how he reckoned she might be startin’ to recognize him.”
“That don’t mean he’ll agree to keepin’ her.” Thomas crossed his arms. “You know how he gets. Man’s got a head like a fence post once he sets his mind.”
“Then we gotta un-set it.” Grace tapped the table. “Because that baby deserves better than bein’ called temporary.”
“I don’t disagree with a single thing anyone in this room has said. But what happens when Logan walks through that door and we tell him we voted on his household without him bein’ present?” Thomas shuddered. “You recall how well that went with the mail-order bride situation?”
Fair point.
Thomas had more sense than he let on, buried under all the complaining and the boots-on-furniture business. He played at being lazy the way some men played cards, letting people underestimate him because it suited his purposes.
“I’ll talk to him.” Grace straightened up. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, I’ll sit him down and—”
The front door opened.
Boots thudded on the hallway floorboards. A hat swished as it slid on the hook by the door, because Logan never tossed a hat when he could hang it properly.
Then he appeared in the kitchen doorway. Sawdust on his sleeves. Dirt on his knees. That piece of hair that always escaped whatever he did to tame it, hanging over his forehead, and he pushed it back with the heel of his hand while he surveyed the room.
“Y’all look like you just got caught stealin’ the preacher’s horse.” He leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep the baby.”
He said it the way he said everything, plain and level, like he’d announced he planned to fix a hinge or re-shoe a horse. Then he pushed off the doorframe and walked past all of them to the stove, where he poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot Grace always left warming on the back burner.
Nobody made a sound.
Mason’s mouth hung open wide enough to catch flies. Thomas had frozen mid-lean in his chair. Rafe looked down at his harness leather and worked his jaw under that mustache of his in a way that could’ve been a smile or could’ve been him working a piece of gristle loose from supper.
“Well?” Logan took a sip and looked at them over the rim. “That what y’all were fixin’ to discuss, or did I walk into the wrong conversation?”
“You...” Grace blinked. “How did you—”
“Y’all’re bein’ way too secretive for it to be anythin’ else.” He sipped again. “Unless Tweedledum or Tweedledee over there are getting’ hitched too?”
Mason and Thomas frowned.
“And you…” Grace shook her head. “You’re just… agreein’?”
Logan set the cup down. “She smiled at me yesterday.”
Then he pulled out his chair and sat. The chair scraped on the floor, and the scraping woke the baby, who let out one sharp complaint before settling back into her quilt with a snuffle.
Under the table, Grace pressed both palms flat against her thighs to keep them steady.
Because the way he’d said it, she smiled at me, with no decoration on it and no defense around it, carried more weight than any speech he could’ve given.
This man, who’d spent two weeks insisting the baby belonged somewhere else, who’d held her like a stick of dynamite and told Grace their arrangement required no complications, had just surrendered to a gummy smile from a baby who couldn’t even sit up yet.
“Well, all right, then.” Rafe set the harness aside. “If she’s stayin’, she’s gonna need a proper name. Can’t keep callin’ her ‘the baby’ till she’s old enough to object.”
“I been sayin’ that for a week.” Mason leaned forward on both elbows. “How about Charlotte? That’s a fine, sturdy name.”
“Charlotte.” Thomas pulled a face. “Sounds like a schoolmarm.”
“What’s wrong with schoolmarms?”
“Nothin’, if you want the girl growin’ up correctin’ everybody’s grammar.”
“That ain’t how names work, Thomas.”
“How ‘bout Josephine?” Thomas leaned back again.
“Too fancy.” Logan shook his head. “This is a ranch, not a ballroom.”
“Oh, so now you got opinions on names?”
“I got opinions on everything.”
Grace bit the inside of her cheek to keep the grin off her face, because this right here, the four of them bickering over baby names at a kitchen table after supper, came closer to family than anything she’d known since her parents died.
Jonah would’ve loved this.
He’d have thrown in some ridiculous suggestion just to watch them all argue about it, something like Petunia or Gertrude, and then he’d have laughed until his ribs hurt.
“Abigail.”
“Too biblical.”
“We’re in a church-goin’ household, Thomas.”
“Don’t mean we gotta name her like we’re readin’ roll call at Sunday School.”
Rafe chuckled.
Grace blinked because she hadn’t heard the old man laugh since she’d arrived. Not once. The closest he’d come amounted to that mustache twitch he did, the one that suggested amusement lived somewhere behind it but couldn’t quite find its way out.
“What about Rose?” Logan glanced at the window, toward the porch where the flower beds held their three stubborn survivors. “On account of the roses.”
Mason hummed. “That’s sweet.”
“It’s too sweet.” Thomas shook his head. “Like namin’ a dog Spot because it’s got spots.”
“Who asked you?”
“Everybody, on account of I’m the only one in this family with any taste.”
“You wore the same shirt three days runnin’ last week.”
“That’s fashion, Mason. You wouldn’t understand.”
Grace looked at the dresser drawer. At the tiny fist poking out from under the quilt. The baby’s fine pale hair catching the lamplight.
“Miriam.”
Everybody stopped talking.
Rafe’s hands went still on the table. Mason lowered his whittling knife. Thomas brought his chair legs down flat on the floor. Logan’s coffee cup paused halfway to his mouth.
“I never got to meet your Ma, but… From what y’all have told me, and the roses she planted, and the way this family loves her...” She swallowed. “Seems like the kind of name worth carryin’ forward.”
For a long stretch, the only sound in the kitchen came from the stove ticking as it cooled and the baby breathing in her dresser drawer. Then Rafe lifted one hand and pressed it across his mouth. His shoulders hitched once, and he blinked at the ceiling.
“Pa?” Logan crouched in front of the old man. “You good?”
Rafe pulled his hand away from his face and set it flat on the table. His eyes had gone glassy in the lamplight, but his jaw held firm.
“I think...” He cleared his throat. “I think my Miriam would’ve loved nothin’ more than to know her name kept on in this house.”
Mason made a noise that he covered by coughing into his fist. Thomas looked at the floor and stayed quiet, which said more about how the name had landed than any words could have.
Logan set his coffee down and looked at Grace.
Those pale blue eyes held on her across the table, and his throat moved once.
Then the muscle along his jaw loosened the way it only did late at night on the porch, when the work stopped, and the man underneath all that fencing and fence-mending surfaced for air.
She’d seen that version of him maybe three times total since arriving.
Four, now.
“Miriam.” He nodded once. “That’s her name.”
From the dresser drawer, almost as if on cue, the baby gurgled.
Mason laughed first. Then Thomas. Then Rafe’s mustache gave way to a full, honest-to-God smile that crinkled the skin around his eyes and took ten years off his face.
“Well, Miss Miriam Foster.” Mason pushed back from the table and peered into the dresser drawer. “Welcome to the family. I’m your Uncle Mason, and I’m everybody’s favorite, so don’t let Thomas tell you otherwise.”
“I’m right here.”
“That’s why I said it.”
Grace leaned back in her chair and let the laughter fill the kitchen, let it soak into the walls and the floorboards and the beams of the house.
Across the table, Logan caught her eye again.
One corner of his mouth tugged upward.
She smiled back.