Chapter 3
Florence sat at the foot of her bed with Beau Ferris's letter open on her knees and listened to her father laughing downstairs.
It was a low, easy laugh, the kind a man gave when the week had gone well and nobody had come to the door.
There had been a great deal of that laugh in the house lately.
Two days ago her father had come home with a new hat, the felt so fine and fresh it still had a sheen along the brim.
Yesterday Billy had brought home a brass clock with a chip out of one side, and had set it on the kitchen mantel, and had spent the evening winding it and listening to the tick like a man with a child.
Tonight there had been a roast on the table and the bottle from the cabinet under the stairs, the one with the printed label, the one her father said he was saving for an occasion.
She did not want to be told what the occasion was. She did not ask.
Outside the window, Worcester was a dark map of chimneys and the steeple of St. James's, and the cold pressed against the glass. She had drawn the curtain only halfway. The candle on her dresser made her own reflection float in the bottom corner, ghostlike, indistinct.
The letter had come at noon. The boy at the door had not looked at her twice.
She had taken it upstairs without opening it and laid it on her pillow, and then she had gone back down and washed dishes for an hour with her hands shaking, because she had been afraid the answer would be no, and she had been more afraid that the answer would be yes.
Now she had read it three times, and read it again, and the paper had the soft creases of a thing that had been folded and unfolded too many times in one afternoon.
He wrote a plain hand. He used short sentences.
He told her about his ranch in three lines and about his daughter in four, and the four lines about his daughter were the ones that made her smile.
He did not promise comfort. He had been honest about lean months.
He had written, near the end, the sentence she could not stop turning over: If you will come, I will meet you at the station, and we will see what the two of us, and my girl, make of one another.
The two of us, and my girl.
The phrase had a shape in her mouth. She tried it once aloud, very quietly. It sounded like a place a person might walk into without being asked to leave.
She set the letter on the bed beside her and reached for her writing box. From the bottom drawer she took a half-sheet of paper, and on it she began to write the list she had been writing in her head for weeks.
Wool dress, dark.
Wool dress, brown.
Two aprons.
Sunday dress.
Boots.
Stockings (six pairs, mend before).
Mother's writing box.
Bible.
Brush, comb.
The shawl.
She paused over the last. Her mother's shawl, gray with a thin red thread woven through the border, had been folded in the bottom drawer of this very dresser for thirteen years.
She had not worn it. She had taken it out twice a year to air it and folded it back.
It would be the only thing she took that had a story attached to it.
Everything else on the list belonged to no one in particular, and she liked it that way.
She wrote the date at the top. She underlined it.
Then she wrote, at the bottom of the page, the two harder lines.
Speak to Pa.
Speak to the boys.
She held the pen above the paper as if waiting for someone to give her permission to put it down.
The laugh came again from downstairs, louder. Will was telling a story, trailing off and starting again three times before he found his thread. Tommy was singing under his breath. Her father laughed at the end of every sentence, easy and full of himself after a good meal.
She closed her eyes.
She loved them. That was the part nobody who had told her, over the years, that she ought to walk away had ever quite understood.
She loved her father. She loved Will leaning his cheek on his hand when he was working a difficult word in the paper.
She loved how Tommy made a clown of himself on purpose to make her laugh when she was crying.
She loved Billy's careful hands, his slow tenderness with the smallest animals, and how he had wept silently into his sleeve at her mother's funeral and pretended afterwards he had not. She loved them entirely.
But she couldn’t stay.
Because if she stayed she would be one of them, in the end. She would put on her mother's shawl one day and feel that it disapproved of her, and the disapproval would be right.
She couldn’t turn them in either. She had thought it through.
She had thought it through so often that her mind had worn a path around the thought, the way feet wore a path across a field, and the path always ended in the same place, every time you walked it.
The man with the badge two streets over had asked her, last winter, in the kindest voice, if there was anything she wanted to tell him.
She had said no. She would say no again.
To say yes would be to put her own father in a cell, and Billy and Tommy and Will after him, and she could not be the hand that did it, no matter how often she lectured herself on the difference between justice and cowardice.
She didn’t want them to be caught, but she didn’t want thieves to run free.
That was her predicament. The only way out was the train.
It didn’t make anything here better. It didn’t solve a moral problem.
It simply passed that moral problem into other hands.
Hands that weren’t so tied by family loyalty.
Everything after that had to just happen as it would, without her.
She opened her eyes and looked again at Beau Ferris's letter.
The two of us, and my girl.
"Yes," she said quietly to the page, as if the page might carry the answer back to him by itself. "Yes, Mr. Ferris."