Chapter 5
She laid the breakfast and sat down in the corner with her hands in her lap before any of them came to the table.
That was the first warning. Florence didn't come to the table until the men were eating.
They knew it, the way they knew the sound of her sweeping in the back room.
When she sat with her hands folded and the bacon already cooling on a plate, all three brothers paused at the doorway of the kitchen, and her father came in behind them and stopped, and looked at her, and said nothing, and crossed to the head of the table and took his chair.
"You'll be ill, Florrie," he said. "Get something in you."
"I want to speak first."
"Speak when we've eaten."
“I'll speak now."
He looked at her again. She had not raised her voice.
She had not lowered her eyes. He had been her father long enough to recognize the line in her shoulders, and after a moment he set down the bread he had picked up, and sat back, and gave her the whole of his attention.
The brothers, slower, did the same. Billy sat with his hands on the edge of the table, ready to do whatever needed doing.
Tommy leaned in. Will, the youngest, took his cap off, which was as close as Will came to making a ceremony of a thing.
"All right," her father said. "We're listening."
She had practiced the sentence in her bed for three nights running. She had said it out loud into the dark. She had pared it down, and pared it again, and now she opened her mouth and gave it to them whole.
"I'm leaving on Tuesday's train," she said. "I'm going to California. I've written to a rancher there and he's asked me out. We're to be married."
The kitchen went perfectly quiet. The kettle hissed once and then settled.
"You're what?" Billy said.
"Married."
"Florrie."
"I've decided."
Her father had not moved. His hands lay flat on the table. There was a slow color climbing his neck, and when he spoke, his voice was the voice he had once used on the man at the door who came to ask about a stolen watch, and it was not loud, and it was the worst voice he had.
"To a man you've never met."
"To a man I've written to for months."
"A man you've never met."
"Yes."
"Pa," Will said quietly.
"Quiet, Will. Florrie. You'll sit in this house tonight and you'll think about it and you'll think harder than you've thought about anything in your life, because if you go out that door on Tuesday morning, you will not come back through it."
"I know."
"You know?”
"Yes, Pa."
Tommy stood up. He stood up the way he stood up when he was about to swing for somebody, and Billy reached and put a hand on his arm without looking at him, and Tommy sat back down, slowly, like a child who had been told.
“Why?" her father said.
She did not look away. "Because I can't live on what isn't ours."
"Don't."
"I haven't said it."
"Don't."
"You asked me why."
He pressed both palms against the wood of the table as if it were a thing he was about to lift off the floor.
The color in his neck rose into his jaw.
Will's eyes were on the bread plate. Billy was watching her with an expression she could not quite read, which was as close as Billy ever got to looking sad.
"You think we're not honest, then," her father said.
"I think you love me. I think I love you. I think I can't be in this house and still be myself."
"That's a hard thing to say to a father."
"I know it is."
He sat back. He looked away from her, at the window, where the morning light was coming up over the brick wall of the house behind and making the yellow oilcloth on the table glow.
He sat that way long enough that the kettle began to whistle in earnest. Will got up without being told and lifted it off the heat. Billy let go of Tommy's arm.
When her father spoke again, the worst voice was gone. What was left was tired.
"Like your mother," he said.
She caught her breath.
"Pa."
"She was too sensitive for anything less than an honest life." He drew a slow breath. "I never could make her one. I told myself I'd make it up to her in you. Looks like I didn't."
"Pa, please."
"Hush, Florrie. I'm not angry."
But he was tired. A tired that had nothing left to put words to, and that was the thing thatbroke her, briefly, in a way she had not expected. She had to put her hand against her mouth.
"How much do you need?" he said.
"Pa, no."
"How much, Florrie. The train. Boarding. Get yourself across the country properly. How much?”
"I won't take it, Pa. I've saved. I've enough. I won't take it from this house."
He looked at her. His face shifted. He didn't argue. He nodded once, slowly, and pushed his bread away from him on the table as if he had lost interest in it.
"Tommy," he said.
"Pa."
"Don't speak, son. Not now."
Tommy did not. Billy reached again and put his hand briefly on Tommy's shoulder, and then took the hand back. Will set the kettle on a folded cloth and stood with his back to them all, breathing.
"Tuesday," her father said.
"Yes."
"You'll tell me the time."
"Yes, Pa."
"We won't come to the station."
"I didn't expect you to."
He nodded. He picked up his bread again.
He bit into it, slowly, and chewed it as if it were a thing he was making himself do.
The brothers began, one at a time, to eat.
Florence sat with her hands in her lap, with the morning light yellow on the oilcloth, and listened to her family eating their breakfast around her as though she were already on the train.
She thought of Beau's letters. She had read the last one until the paper went soft at the folds, until she knew the shape of his handwriting in a way she had yet to know the sound of his voice. She had wondered what his hands looked like. Whether he was a man who noticed things.
She didn't know yet.