Chapter 2
Beau had been a widower long enough to know how a kitchen sounded when something was missing from it. There’d been a time when he had no business going in there at all, but now it was a familiar place to him, and like all familiar places, he knew it not just by sight, but by sound and smell, too.
The morning broke clear over Prosperity, the fence posts still dark with frost. Light came through the window above the sink in two slanting bars, and the kettle ticked on the stove the way it always did, and his daughter Lydia sat at the long pine table with her elbows planted and her chin in both hands, reading through a stack of envelopes as if they were a hand of cards.
Outside, in the corral, one of the boys was working a young horse, and the soft tch-tch of his tongue against his teeth came in through the open back door. It was all the same as yesterday.
What was missing was the second chair at the end of the table. No, it wasn’t missing, it was pushed in. Its occupant was missing.
Hudson had gone again.
Beau set the coffee pot on the stove plate. Steam rose. Three weeks since the last time. Six weeks since the time before that. His brother had a pattern, and Beau had learned its rhythm the way he had learned the rhythm of a calving cow: you knew when it was coming, and it would not be tidy.
"Pa," Lydia said.
"Mm."
"You're frowning at the kettle."
"I'm thinking."
"You're frowning, though.”
"Same thing, some days."
She watched him for a moment with the look she had inherited from her mother, the one that said she knew where he was even if he was not telling. She was twelve, and she had been twelve for a hundred years. He sat down opposite her and pulled the nearest envelope toward him.
"Anything yet?" he said.
"Eighteen of them."
“Eighteen?"
"Pa, you put an advertisement in three papers."
"I put it in one paper."
"That gets it into three."
He grunted. He had not known that. Now that he did, he wasn’t sure what he could’ve done if he had known. He drank his coffee.
"Hudson said he'd be back by Saturday week," Lydia said, after a stretch.
"He says that?”
"He might."
“Lyddie?"
"He might."
Beau let her have it. He had learned, over years of watching her watch her uncle, that it was not his job to be the one who killed her hope; the world would do that on its own schedule, and his job was only to be the one she came back to when it did.
So he opened the first envelope and did not say what was on his mind, which was that Hudson would be back when Hudson had lost whatever he was now in the middle of losing, and not a day sooner.
The first letter was from a woman in Boston with a tintype of herself in a fur collar. The second was from a widow in Cincinnati who included a list of conditions about the temperature of her bedroom. The third was a single page from a girl who said she was twenty.
“Twenty?" Beau said, scratching his head.
"Too young."
"That's what I thought."
"Next."
They went through them. Lydia had a system.
She arranged them in three piles… a pile for the ones whose handwriting she did not trust, a pile for the ones whose tone she did not trust, and a small, hopeful pile of two or three for the ones she thought he ought to look at twice.
He let her sort. He was not a man who liked the idea of choosing a wife out of a heap of paper.
Or out of anything else, really. It seemed like a strange thing for a man to engineer.
He had said as much to her, when she had first pushed the newspaper across the table at him in January, and she had said, in the same quiet voice she had used when she was four and trying to make him eat a turnip, that the heap of paper was at least a place to start.
He had not had an answer to that. He still didn’t. If he had, they might not have been doing this right now. Although they probably would. Even if he’d had an answer, she would’ve had a better one.
He opened a thicker envelope toward the bottom of the stack. Worcester, Massachusetts. Three pages, careful hand, no flourishes. He skimmed the first paragraph and then he stopped skimming, and read the second paragraph properly, and at the third paragraph he set down his coffee.
"Lyddie."
“What?"
"Read this one."
He pushed it across to her. She read with her finger under the lines, which was a habit she would not give up no matter how many times her teacher had asked her to.
Halfway down the second page her finger slowed.
At the bottom of the third page she stopped, and looked up at him, and her face was very serious.
"This one," she said.
"You think so?”
"Yup."
It was not exactly the things that were in the letter.
The things in the letter were sensible. She wrote about wanting honest work in a place she could be useful.
She wrote about not being afraid of cold houses or long days.
She wrote one short sentence about her mother having died when she was young, and not a word about anything dramatic, and yet under that one short sentence he had the sense of a person who had spent a long time learning to live with a quiet kind of hurt.
Florence Mills. The hand was small, the letters straight, the final period set the same way his wife, ten years gone, used to set hers. He could not have explained it. He didn’t try.
"Reply?" Lydia said.
“Yes."
She went and fetched the writing paper and the pen. He took up the pen and held it over the page, and then he put it down, because he could not write the first word with her watching.
"Out," he said. She hesitated. ”Out, Lyddie."
She went, with great dignity, to the back step.
He wrote slowly. He set down that he was a rancher near Prosperity, that he had a twelve-year-old girl who was the best of him, that he ran cattle and a small herd of horses and three lean months out of every twelve.
He could not promise comfort, but he could promise honesty and a roof and his word.
If she would come, he would meet her at the station, and they would see what the two of them, and his girl, made of one another.
He blotted the page. He read it. He wrote her name at the top and his name at the bottom, and he felt a strange but undeniable feeling, putting his name on the bottom of a sheet meant for a woman he had not met, that he had just set a stone in a river that would not move until somebody moved it.
He went to the door and called Lydia back in.