Chapter 4
Maria was refilling the flour bin when she heard the boy from the post-house’s step on the stairs below, and something in her went warm and tingly all at once before she even saw the letter in her father's hand.
"This one's yours," he said, holding it out with a knowing grin. "Arizona."
She took it and turned it over once, twice, before she made herself open it properly. The paper was plain, the hand careful, and she read it standing right there at the top of the stairs with her father watching her.
I have thought on it a good deal, and I believe it would do us both good to meet properly, rather than go on trading letters alone.
She read that line twice, slower the second time, and with a smile on her face.
The children ask after you more than I expected they might. Since I told them about you, they’ve become curious. Positive, even.
Her chest did something complicated. Something that made it feel hollow and full of something warm, all at the same time.
If you are willing to come and see whether we suit, I would be glad to have you, and glad to show you the town and the life it offers, such as it is.
She folded the letter along its crease and held it against her, and for a moment she didn't trust herself to say anything at all.
"Well," her father said, watching her with his eyebrows raised. "I take it that's an invitation?”
“Am I that easy to read?”
“Not always, but you are at this moment.”
"It is an invitation." Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "He's asked me to come see if we might suit. Truly asked, not just talked about it."
Her father set down the flour scoop and came to sit at the small table by the window, the one they used for supper most nights. Maria sat across from him, the letter still in her hands.
"I knew it was coming," he said. “The look on your face when you told me your letters had become more serious was enough to tell me it would happen."
"Papa."
"I'm not asking you to stay. I gave that up already, near enough.
" He looked at his hands on the table, then up at her.
"I just find myself wishing there was a way to have all things.
You here, and you safe from Fletcher's meanness, and you chasing after whatever it is that's got hold of you.
I can't work out how to give you all three at once. "
"I don't think there is a way," Maria said gently. "I've turned it over every which way I can think of. We’ve simply reached a time when it’s not your job to give me all things in life. I have to find some for myself, and earn others.”
“I know it’s probably the right thing, it just doesn’t feel like it.”
“So tell me why it’s the right thing, like you were having to explain it to me.”
"If you go, he'll have nothing left to be angry about. No engagement to feel foolish over, no girl in town to remind people he was jilted. He'll find some new thing to occupy his temper, and it won't be us."
"That's part of it," Maria admitted. "But it isn't all of it, Papa.
I keep thinking about what's out there. Not just this one man's store, or this one man himself, though I think a great deal about him too.
The whole of it. A country that isn't finished being built yet, and folks pouring into it every day to build it.
I want to be one of the ones building it, not one of the ones who stayed back east wondering what it might have been like. "
Her father was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had gentled. "Your mother used to talk that way. About wanting to be part of something bigger than the shop and the street it sat on. I never much understood it. I was content with what I had."
"Are you content now?"
"I am," he said, and when she looked doubtful, he went on.
"I've got Thursday whist with Colston and the Hendry brothers, and church of a Sunday, and Mrs. Pruett two doors down who I suspect has been trying to feed me dinner for a year now under the excuse of being neighborly.
I won't be sitting up here in the dark missing you, if that's what you're picturing. I'll manage."
"You make it sound easy."
"It won't be easy," he admitted. "But it'll be bearable, and bearable is enough to be getting on with, while you go and do the thing that's been sitting in your chest for months now, plain as day to anybody who's looked at you."
Maria looked down at the letter again, at the careful hand and the plain paper, and felt something settle into place inside her, something that had been restless for a long while and had finally found a direction to point itself in.
"I'll write him back today," she said. "Tell him I'm coming."
Her father reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. "Then you'd best go and do it, before you talk yourself out of it or I talk you out of it for you."