Chapter 3
Cordelia found her seat on the eastbound and then, when she discovered she had taken the wrong train, found her seat all over again on the right one and sat down hard.
It was, she decided, better to have figured her mistake out now than later.
The carriage smelled of wet wool and coal dust and the small, sweet rot of an apple somebody had been eating two seats ahead.
She set her valise between her feet. She placed her hands flat on her lap and asked them, please, to stop trembling.
They did not, much. Outside the window the sheds of the Cottonwood yard slid backward in the grey of an April noon, and then the town itself slid backward, and then her whole life so far went after it.
"You all right, dear?"
The woman across the aisle was perhaps forty, with a round, kind face and a hat that had given up most of its battles with the wind.
A travel rug was tucked across her knees.
She held a sandwich on a square of brown paper in one hand and held Cordelia's eyes, without any of the politeness strangers use to keep each other at a distance.
"I'm quite well, thank you," Cordelia said.
"You are not, but I admire the bravery." The woman extended the brown paper. "Half a sandwich?"
The kindness was nearly worse than rudeness would have been. It got in under her ribs, where the morning was still raw.
She shook her head and said, "I couldn't."
"You could and you should. You've just sat down on a train looking like a girl who's left half her heart on the platform, and the only cure I know is bread."
Cordelia took the sandwich. It was cheese and apple and rather good. She ate it slowly because the alternative was to cry into it, and she had cried enough already that morning to last the journey.
"Jacqueline Mears," the woman said. "I'm going as far as Liddleton. You?"
"Fox Hollow."
Saying the name out loud made it real in a new way. A town she had never seen, and her whole life forwarded to it like a parcel.
"Ah. Sage country. You have people there?"
"I have a Mr. Barclay there."
Jacqueline's eyebrows went up the polite distance that meant she had understood without needing the rest of the sentence.
"Mail order?"
"Yes." Cordelia held the woman's eyes and waited for the verdict.
"Good for you."
Cordelia had not expected the words. She turned her face to the window because she did not want this kind stranger to see what they did to her.
"You said that as though it were ordinary," she said.
"It is ordinary. And it's brave, and in my own experience it's often the best thing a woman my age has heard a woman your age admit to. Eat the rest of the sandwich. What does his handwriting look like?"
Cordelia ate the rest of the sandwich. The cheese was sharper than she was used to and clung briefly to the roof of her mouth. The train picked up and the windows rattled and the fenced green of home gave way, with no apparent effort, to open grass the color of dried sage.
"Round and clear," she said. "His name is Rufus. He has a ranch outside Fox Hollow. He raises beef and a handful of horses for the army at one of the forts. He's thirty-two. He lost his older brother to a fall four years ago and inherited the place sooner than he had wanted to. He sends me sage."
"Oh?"
"Pressed in a letter. He said the smell of his country might recommend it to me better than his words could."
She heard her own voice go soft on the last of it and didn't correct it.
Jacqueline made a soft sound that was half laugh and half approval. "Show me," she said.
Cordelia hesitated. Then she opened the valise at her feet and drew out the bundle. There were nineteen letters and they were tied with a piece of green ribbon. She did not untie the ribbon. She drew the top letter from under the bow and unfolded it and held it across the aisle.
Jacqueline read with her head tipped down and her lips moving very slightly. After a minute she folded the page and handed it back and looked at Cordelia.
"That," Jacqueline said, "is a kind man."
"I think so." Cordelia slid the letter back under the ribbon and took her time with the bow.
"What else does he tell you?"
"He writes about the country as if it owes him nothing.
There is a creek at the back of his home pasture.
He told me the cottonwoods turn yellow before the rest of the country knows the season is changing, and that I would have the first warning each year.
The house is rough, he wrote. He asked me twice if I would mind. "
"And what did you write back?"
Cordelia looked at the ribbon a moment. The true answer was a year of evenings she had never said out loud to anyone.
"I told him I had spent my life in a house in Cottonwood with my mother, and that a house without my mother in it was the house I had been looking for. I tried to make it sound less than it was. I don't think I managed."
"You didn't need to manage. He read the letter you wrote, and he answered it." Jacqueline put the empty brown paper into her basket. "A man who answers the letter you actually wrote is rarer than sage."
Cordelia set her hand on the bundle in her lap and did not lift it.
"Why aren't you happier?"
Cordelia opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, because there was no point in pretending with this woman, "My best friend is in jail. I'm leaving her behind."
"Oh, my dear." Jacqueline was quiet a moment, a person who let bad news arrive before she answered it. "And I bet you've been telling yourself, since you bought your ticket, that this is a kind of desertion of her."
Cordelia's eyes stung. "Yes."
"It isn't." Jacqueline's voice was gentle.
“I know. Sort of. It just feels like it." Her thumb pressed into the soft of her palm, hard, where the glove hid it.
"Of course it does. But you can't serve her by staying behind to be miserable alongside her." Jacqueline smiled a little. "Write to her. Write often. Tell her about your rancher and your sage. Give her something to look forward to that isn't the next meal."
"I will." She meant it. It was the first promise of the day she was sure she could keep.
"Good." Jacqueline tucked the brown paper back into her basket. "Now, may I ask the indelicate question? Is he handsome?"
Cordelia laughed before she had decided to. The sound came up out of her and surprised them both.
"I don't know," she said. "I have only a daguerreotype, and the man in the picture looks as though he'd been told not to smile under any circumstances and was holding to that order with great seriousness."
"That's a yes."
"That is not a yes." Her face had gone warm. The window glass was cool, and she didn't lean into it, because leaning would have been admitting.
"It's always a yes, in my experience, when a man holds a smile back that hard in a picture. It means he has one to spare. And there’s little that’s more handsome than a sincere smile.”
They rode on. Outside the window a hawk lifted off a fencepost and the green-grey country opened up and Cordelia, against every promise she had made to herself that morning, began to look forward to the end of the line.