Chapter Fifteen
Four hours. Four hours of screaming.
Not crying. Crying, Grace could handle. Crying had a shape to it, a beginning, a peak, and a slope down the other side, where the baby ran out of steam and hiccupped into sleep.
Grace had mapped every variety of Miriam’s cries over the past month.
Hunger made them sharp, rhythmic, and building in volume like somebody turning a dial.
When she wet herself, they came out whiny and low, more complaint than distress.
Tired ones sounded wobbly, like a drunk kind of fussing that petered out in under ten minutes if you rocked her right.
This?
This came from the gut. From someplace deep and furious inside that tiny body, a sound so raw and sustained it scraped the inside of Grace’s skull like a spoon against the bottom of a tin pot.
Miriam had gone red from the jaw to the hairline, her gums had swollen to twice their normal size, and, every few minutes, she’d shove both fists into her mouth and gnaw on them and then scream harder.
Teething.
Grace had tried everything. A cold rag from the well water.
Miriam spat it out. A piece of soft leather rolled into a tube for her to chew.
Miriam threw it across the kitchen. The bottle, rocking, singing, walking, bouncing, that thing where you pat their back in a rhythm and shush close to their ear.
All of it. Every trick she’d picked up, every instinct she’d cobbled together from a month of on-the-job mothering.
Nothing!
Miriam screamed and screamed and screamed, and Grace paced the kitchen floor holding her against one shoulder, bouncing on each step, making that shh-shh-shh noise until her own lips went numb from the effort.
The clock on the mantel ticked past three in the afternoon.
Outside, the men worked somewhere on the far side of the property, which meant the house belonged to Grace and one furious baby.
The ringing that’d set in Grace’s ears about an hour ago showed no signs of leaving.
Her arms burned from the shoulders down.
A headache had planted itself behind her left eye and pulsed in time with Miriam’s wails.
And somewhere in the back of her brain, in that ugly corner where the worst thoughts lived, a voice whispered something she’d never say out loud.
You can’t do this.
She bounced harder. Shushed louder.
You don’t know what you’re doing. You never did. You’re a girl from a slum who answered a newspaper ad, and now you’re pretending to be a mother to a baby that isn’t even yours, and you can’t even get her to stop crying.
“Come on, little bird.” Grace’s voice cracked on the second word. “Come on, sweetheart, please. Just... gimme somethin’ here.”
Miriam arched her back and wailed.
Grace stopped pacing.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen with the baby pressed to her chest, her jaw locked tight, and her eyes burning from the inside.
She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth the way she’d done back in New York when the rent came due, and the cupboard held nothing but mouse droppings and a half-empty bag of barley.
You can do this. You’ve done harder things than this. You’ve gone three days without eating. You’ve slept on a floor in January with ice on the inside of the windows. You survived all of that. You can survive a baby with sore gums.
But the thing about surviving, the thing nobody told you, was that it just meant you got to the next day. It said nothing about how you got there. Or what shape you arrived in.
Grace had figured that out somewhere around age fourteen, sitting on the floor of that miserable hut, wrapping her feet in newspaper because her shoes had worn through, and Jonah couldn’t afford new ones.
Boots on the porch.
Grace’s stomach dropped because Rafe Foster had exactly two settings when it came to noise in his house.
The first involved that mustache twitch and a slow retreat to the porch, which meant he could tolerate whatever bothered him as long as nobody asked him to participate.
The second involved the voice. The low, flat, granite one that’d sent three grown sons scrambling like barn cats caught on the kitchen table.
Four hours of baby screaming at full volume would land squarely in voice territory.
And the flowerbed incident still lived fresh enough in Grace’s memory.
The way he’d snapped about her touching Miriam’s garden, that sharp edge coming out of nowhere like stepping on a nail buried in tall grass.
He’d apologized for that, sure. But an apology told you a man could feel sorry after the fact.
It said nothing about what he’d do in the moment with his patience ground down to a nub.
The front door creaked open.
She braced. Pulled Miriam tighter against her shoulder, already angling toward the stairs, already planning the retreat.
Upstairs, door shut, pillow over the gap at the bottom to muffle the sound.
She could manage that. She could disappear into the back bedroom and handle this alone, the way she’d handled everything alone for the past eleven years.
Rafe appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Rafe, I’m sorry, I know she’s loud. I’ve tried every single thing I can think of and she just won’t—”
“Hold on.” He held up one hand, palm out. Then he turned and walked down the hall toward the parlor.
Miriam shrieked.
Grace bounced and shushed and stared at the doorway, bracing for him to come back with a lecture about noise and propriety and how his wife would’ve had the baby quiet hours ago.
Because of course she would’ve.
Miriam Foster, the real one, the woman these men built a shrine to in their memories, would’ve known exactly what to do. Would’ve had some secret passed down from her own mother, some magic touch Grace couldn’t replicate because she’d lost her mother at ten and never got the rest of the lessons.
Rafe came back holding a handkerchief in one hand and a brown glass bottle in the other.
He set the bottle on the kitchen table. Brandy. The good stuff, from what Grace could tell by the label, the kind one only pulled out at Christmas and special occasions. Rafe uncorked it, poured a splash onto the folded handkerchief, and held it out to Grace.
“Twist the corner into a point and let her chew on it.”
Grace blinked. “That’s... liquor.”
“Just a drop. Won’t hurt her none.”
“You sure?”
Rafe eased himself into the chair by the stove, working the stiffness out of his knees the way he always did, one at a time, like he had to negotiate with each joint separately.
“Mason teethed like he was tryin’ to grow a full set of horse teeth. Two weeks of screamin’. Miriam, my Miriam, liked to lose her mind over it. Tried everything under the sun ‘til old Doc Farley told her to rub a bit of brandy on his gums.”
“And it worked?”
“Like a charm. Mason quieted down inside of five minutes. Thomas, now, Thomas was worse. Boy teethed for a month. We went through half a bottle of Kentucky bourbon on that child’s gums alone.”
Grace looked at the handkerchief with the amber stain spreading through the white cotton.
Miriam let out another wail, one so shrill it hit a pitch that made Grace’s teeth ache. That settled it. She took the handkerchief, twisted the corner into a tight point the way Rafe had said, and eased it between Miriam’s lips.
The baby clamped down.
For a second, nothing changed. The wail continued, if muffled around the cloth.
Then Miriam’s jaw worked. She chewed the handkerchief corner, rolling it across her gums, and the crying thinned.
Dropped from a scream to a cry. From a cry to a whimper.
From a whimper to a low fuss, like a storm blowing itself out over the ridge.
Then quiet.
Miriam sucked on the handkerchief, and her body unclenched against Grace’s chest, one muscle at a time, until she sagged into the sling like a little sack of flour.
Grace exhaled.
The breath shook on the way out, rattling through her ribs in a way that betrayed more than she’d intended.
She pressed her lips to the top of Miriam’s head and stood in the quiet kitchen with the clock ticking and the stove cooling and the sudden absence of screaming so total it buzzed in her ears like a sound of its own.
“There.” Rafe nodded from his chair. “See? Just needed the right trick.”
Maybe because of the quiet, or the relief, or the four hours of noise that’d ground her down to something thinner than she’d realized, Grace’s eyes filled up. She turned toward the window so Rafe wouldn’t catch it. But the man had raised three boys, so, of course, he caught it.
You couldn’t get anything past somebody who’d survived that much fatherhood.
“Grace.”
“I’m fine.” She blinked hard. The window blurred and re-sharpened. “Just tired, is all.”
“Sit down.”
“I should get the stew on. It’s past three, and if I don’t start the potatoes now, they won’t be—”
“Sit.”
She did. Miriam dozed against her collarbone, breathing those slow baby breaths that timed themselves to Grace’s heartbeat.
Rafe leaned forward, bracing both elbows on his knees.
“What’s eatin’ you, girl?”
She opened her mouth to say nothing. To deflect, pivot, change the subject to potatoes or stew or anything that lived on the safe side of her chest where the ugly voice couldn’t reach.
But the voice had teeth today.
“I don’t know what I’m doin’.” It came out small.
Smaller than she’d meant. “I don’t know the first thing about babies, and I can’t work the ranch, and the horse sneezed on me, and I broke the well pump, and the only thing I’m actually good at around here is cookin’, and even that I learned from a one-page recipe book my mother left behind before she died. ”
She swallowed.
“Your wife would’ve known about the brandy. She would’ve known about the gums and the trick with the handkerchief and a hundred other things I’m gonna get wrong because I’m just... makin’ it up as I go. Every single day. And one of these days, everybody’s gonna figure that out, and...”
The rest of the sentence dissolved somewhere in her throat.
Rafe sat quietly for a stretch. The clock marked the seconds. Through the window, the afternoon light caught the dust motes drifting above the table in slow spirals.
“You wanna know somethin’ about my Miriam?”
Grace wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“First week she had Logan, she fed him goat’s milk ‘cause her own hadn’t come in yet, and the boy screamed for three days straight ‘til old Mrs. Patterson next door told her to try cow’s milk instead.”
Grace looked down.
“She didn’t sleep more’n two hours at a stretch for the first six months. She burned supper at least twice a week for the whole first year of our marriage, and Lord, the woman could not grow tomatoes.”
“Really?”
“Every summer, she tried. They always came up small and bitter, like they took her efforts personally.”
He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Point is, she didn’t come out of the womb knowin’ how to be a mother or a wife or a ranch woman. She figured it out the same way you’re figurin’ it out. Day by day. Mistake by mistake.”
“But—”
“The fact that you’re sittin’ here worryin’ about whether you’re doin’ it right?” He put the spectacles back on. “That’s how I know you are.”
Grace pressed her lips together hard.
“You brought my roses back.” Rafe scrunched his eyes and took a deep breath. “I look out that window every mornin’ now, and those flowers got color in ’em for the first time in two years.”
“She did most of the work…”
“You named this baby after my wife, and she carries that name around this house like a little piece of Miriam has come back to us.” He cleared his throat.
“And my boy. That stubborn, stiff-necked, impossible boy of mine... You got him to laugh again, Grace. I can hear it from the porch when y’all come in from the fields.
I can hear it in the mornings when you’re in the kitchen together. ”
He stopped. Worked his jaw under that mustache. Blinked at the ceiling the way he did when the feelings outran the words, which for Rafe Foster happened about twice a year based on Grace’s calculations.
“You ain’t a fraud. And you ain’t doin’ everything wrong.” He leaned forward and set one rough hand on top of hers, where it rested on the table. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this family since we lost the last best thing. And I... I’m proud of you, girl.”
Grace’s throat closed.
Because nobody had said that to her. Not once.
Not in twenty-one years of scrapping and surviving and holding things together with both hands and her teeth.
Jonah loved her, sure, and showed it in his own joke-cracking way, but Jonah operated on the assumption that Grace could handle anything, which meant he never stopped to ask whether the handling cost her something.
Yet, this gruff, quiet, grief-worn man, who’d lost his wife and closed himself off from the world, sat here and told her he saw what she did for his family. That it mattered. That she mattered.
She stood up from the chair, careful not to jostle Miriam, and crossed the three steps between them.
Rafe opened his arms.
She leaned down and pressed her face against his shoulder. He put his hand on the back of her head the same way her own Pa had done before he’d died.
The clock ticked. Miriam sighed in her sleep. The brandy bottle stood open on the table, sending a sharp smell into the kitchen that mixed with the pine smoke from the stove and the soap on Rafe’s collar.
“Now.” Rafe patted her shoulder twice and pulled back. “You mentioned stew?”