Chapter 2
Samson Tolliver was measuring out flour for Mrs. Abernathy when Billy came around the counter to help old Mr. Dutton find horseshoe nails.
"Top shelf, on the left," Billy said, dragging the step stool over. "Pa keeps 'em next to the harness leather because folks who need one usually need the other."
"Is that so?” Mr. Dutton watched the boy climb up and retrieve the small box without dropping it. "You know this store better than some grown men know their own, son."
"I been working here since I was five," Billy said, with the unabashed pride of a seven-year-old who considered two years a lifetime of experience.
Meg looked up from where she was refolding a bolt of calico that a customer had left in disarray. "He's not wrong. Papa says he could run the counter alone if the money didn't need counting."
"And can you count it?" Mr. Dutton asked her.
"Better than Billy can," Meg said, and Billy opened his mouth to argue, then apparently decided he agreed and closed it again. Seeing his response, she added, “but he’s getting better all the time. He’ll be just as good as me, soon.”
Samson watched them from behind the flour scale, and something in his chest pulled tight the way it always did when he saw how easily his children had folded themselves into the running of the store.
They were good at it. That was the trouble.
They were good at it because there was no one else to be good at it instead.
"Two pounds even," he said, handing Mrs. Abernathy her flour. "Anything else for you today?"
"Just the flour, Samson. How's business?"
"Business is fine. Business is always fine." He wrapped the sack and set it on the counter. "It's the rest of it that gets away from me some days."
Mrs. Abernathy, who had buried a husband of her own some years back, gave him a look that had more sympathy in it than he wanted from a Tuesday morning. "You're doing right by those children. Don't let anybody tell you different."
"I'll do better once I'm not the only one doing it," he said, and regretted it as soon as it left him, because it wasn't the kind of thing a man ought to say out loud in his own store.
Mrs. Abernathy only nodded, like she'd heard the rumor already, and left him to it.
By the time the afternoon lull came and the last customer had gone, Samson found himself standing at the window, looking past the dusty street toward the hills that ringed the west side of town.
He did that most days, somewhere around three o'clock, and most days he didn't notice he was doing it until Meg said something.
"You're doing the window thing again," she said now, from behind him.
"What window thing?”
"The looking-out-like-you're-somewhere-else thing. You do it every day about now."
He turned around. Billy had climbed up to sit on the counter, which wasn't allowed, but Samson didn't have the heart to say so today.
"I was thinking about your mother," he said, which was true enough, though it wasn't the whole of it. "We used to close up early on slow afternoons and take the buggy up past the creek. You remember that?"
"I remember the fishing," Billy said. "I don't remember much else. I was little."
"You were," Samson agreed. "Meg remembers more."
"I remember all of it," Meg said quietly, and there was something careful in the way she said it, like she'd been keeping the memory somewhere safe. More than that… like she’d been guarding its meaning.
That made this next part harder.
Samson came around the counter and sat down on the stool, which put him closer to their height, which he'd found over the last two years made harder conversations go easier.
"I want to talk to you both about something," he said. "And I want you to hear me all the way through before you say anything, if you can manage that."
Billy nodded. Meg's eyes went a little wary, the way they did whenever a conversation was announced instead of just allowed to happen in the natural way conversations normally did.
"You know I've been writing letters," Samson said. "To a woman in Boston."
"Mrs. Fenwick said you were looking for a wife," Billy said. "She told Mrs. Dutton and Mrs. Dutton told everybody."
"Mrs. Fenwick oughtn't to have said any such thing, but she's not wrong." Samson kept his voice even. “Although her news is a little out of date. I’ve been writing to a woman, and she’s been writing back to me. There were a few that I wrote to at first, but it was obvious before long that there was only one I should keep writing to.”
“What’s she called?” Billy asked. Meg glanced at him like it was the least important question, but it didn’t matter, it was a way to keep the conversation moving.
"Her name is Maria. I've invited her to come out here, to see if she'd like to stay and be part of our family. Help in the store. Help at home."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Meg was looking at her hands.
"Is she gonna be our new mother?" Billy asked.
"She's not going to replace your mother," Samson said, and this part he'd thought about for a long time, turning it over on quiet nights when the store was shut and the house was too quiet.
"Nobody could do that, and nobody's asking her to try.
But I think there's room in our family for more than just the memory of what we had.
I think your mother would want that for us. For you two, most of all."
"What if we don't like her?” Billy asked. His tone had the practical bluntness of seven year olds everywhere, who’d rather just tackle a subject head-on than try to dance around it.
"Then we'll figure that out when the time comes. But I'd ask you both to give her a fair chance before you decide anything." He looked at Meg, who still hadn't spoken. "What are you thinking, Meg?"
"I'm thinking it feels like we're supposed to be glad," Meg said slowly, "and I don't know if I am yet."
"You don't have to be glad yet," Samson said. “Or at all, if it falls that way. You just have to be kind when she gets here. The rest can come in its own time, or it might not happen. But I'd rather give it a fair try, and find out, than keep on the way we've been."
Billy looked at Meg, the way he always did before deciding how he felt about something. Meg was quiet a moment longer, then gave a small nod.
"We'll be kind," she said. "But we're not promising anything past that."
"That's all I'm asking," Samson said, and found, to his surprise, that it was true.