Chapter 1
Florence stirred the broth and tried to make it look like more than it was.
The kettle had been on since the afternoon, and the kitchen of the narrow Worcester house had filled with the brown smell of onions cooked too long.
There was a single bone in the pot, picked over twice already, and a half-handful of barley she had been saving against a worse week.
Gray light leaked through the back yard, neither day nor dusk, and a thin draft pushed under the door and made the candle on the table jump.
She lifted the spoon. A thread of broth fell back. She braced herself.
Her father didn't like a thin pot. None of them did.
When her brothers came back from a day in the city and put their boots in the hallway, they expected to find a table with weight on it.
If they didn't, the silence would last through supper and the next morning, and then her father would clear his throat at the door and say in his quiet, even voice that a man who worked for his bread liked to see his bread, and Florence would nod, and that would be the end of it, until the next time.
She set the spoon against the rim of the pot. Upstairs, in her mother's writing box, there was a letter she had been writing for a week.
"It'll have to do," she said, to no one.
The front door went, and her shoulders went with it. Three pairs of boots crossed the boards, then a fourth, slower, her father's. Then came laughter, and a thump that sounded like a flour sack being dropped, and her brother Billy's voice saying, "Florrie, come and see what we brought."
She wiped her hands on her apron and stepped into the hall.
They had brought a great deal. A canvas sack of potatoes.
A paper-wrapped slab of bacon. Two bottles of dark beer and a third clear bottle her father had already opened.
A brick of cheese, a tin of coffee, sugar in brown paper.
Eggs in a crate of straw. On top of everything, a string of dried sausage that, in better times, would have made her happy.
It did not. It made her cold from the soles of her feet upward.
"Where did this come from?" she said.
"Down by the river," her brother Tommy said. He winked. "Found a man who didn't want his money as much as we did."
“Tommy!"
"Don't fuss, Florrie."
Her father shouldered past with the easy weight of a man who had been on his feet all day and was pleased with it. "Put the broth aside," he said. "We'll have a proper supper. Will, get the pan."
Will, the youngest of the three brothers, was already pulling at the bacon paper with a knife.
Billy carried the potatoes through to the scullery as if they were a kind of furniture he had bought.
Her father set the open bottle on the table and poured himself a glass of something the color of weak rust.
"You're quiet, girl," he said.
"I'm tired."
"Sit, then."
"I'll cook."
"You'll cook and you'll sit." He smiled at her, and it was the smile she had liked when she was a child, the one that said the world was a place a man could keep on top of if he kept his wits about him. She had loved him for it then. She could not stop loving him now. That was the trouble.
She took the bacon from Will and laid out strips on the cold pan.
She built up the fire, then listened to her brothers tell each other the story of the day in pieces, none of which were the same story, all of which danced around what had actually happened.
Somebody had been kept watching the wrong door.
Somebody had been distracted by Tommy in the street.
There had been a wagon with bad locks. There had been a man with a soft voice who would not, they all agreed, come asking.
She didn’t ask.
She never asked.
She knew already. She had known since she was twelve. Her mother had been dead a year, her father coming home for the third time that month with a coat that smelled of another house. The knowing didn’t change. The pretending did it eventually.
She fried the bacon, turned the potatoes in the fat, set the table for four men and herself, and ate.
The food sat in her like a stone. She thought of the man with the soft voice.
She didn't know if he had a daughter. She hoped not.
She hoped he had only himself to worry about, and a thick coat, and the patience to start the week again.
Afterwards she washed the plates and listened to her father snore in the chair by the front window. Billy and Tommy had gone out again. Will was reading a newspaper at the table, mouthing the long words.
"I'm going up," she said.
"Goodnight, Florrie," Will said, without looking.
In her room she shut the door and pressed her back against it. The room was small and brown and clean, and against the far wall stood the writing box that had belonged to her mother. She lit the candle on the dresser, sat on the edge of the bed, and lifted the lid of the box.
The newspaper was inside. The Matrimonial Times, eight weeks old now, dog-eared at one page.
She didn't need to look at the advertisement again.
She knew the words. Widowed rancher, Prosperity, California, daughter twelve, hard worker, honest, looking for a partner in life, not a servant.
She had read the line about partner in life so often she could hear it in a voice she had invented for him, a quiet voice with hills behind it.
Under the newspaper lay the letter she had been writing all week. Three pages, in her best hand. She set it on the writing board on her knees and picked up her pen.
She read what she had written. She put a careful comma where she had been undecided. She read it again. She lifted the pen.
And so, Mr. Ferris, if you will have me, I will come west. I have very little of value to bring, only what I am, and an honest pair of hands, and the wish to be useful in a place where what I do is what I am, and not what others have done in my name.
She blotted the page. She folded it. She held it on her knees with both hands, and listened to her father's snoring downstairs, and to her own pulse in her ears, and waited until her hands stopped shaking before she sealed the envelope.