Chapter 13
Florence washed her face at the basin in the cottage and tried not to listen to the silence.
The cottage was a clean, simple house, with a stove and a table and a bed with white sheets pulled flat.
The travel case lay open on the foot of the bed.
The canvas bag lay on the small table, both buckles done up tight.
She had not opened it. She had only stood, twice, in the middle of the room and looked at the bag from a distance, as though looking would tell her what to do.
A knock came at the door at six.
"Florence?" Lydia called. "It's me. Are you ready?"
She was as ready as she was going to be.
She walked up the path with Lydia chattering at her elbow about the horses.
The ranch house had two stories, a wide porch, a yellow lamp in the front window.
Florence took the steps one at a time. She had brought the canvas bag over her shoulder.
She had not been able to make herself leave it in a cottage with a lock that any boy could pry.
Inside, the table was set for four.
The fourth was a tall thin man named Quint, who turned out to be one of the ranch hands, who had cooked, because Mrs. Letts had gone to Prosperity for the day.
Quint nodded at her and didn't speak. He served a stew with potatoes and put a pan of cornbread on the table and sat down at the far end, uncertain he had a place at it.
Florence sat. Lydia sat opposite. Beau sat at the head and didn't look at her once.
"This is good, Quint," Lydia said.
"Ma'am."
"You salted it right."
"Ma'am."
That was the most anyone said for the first half of the meal.
Beau ate. He cut his cornbread with a careful turn of the knife.
He didn't look up. Twice Quint cleared his throat to begin a sentence and the sentence didn't come; the second time he said, "Boss, about the south fence," and Beau lifted his head and said, "Tomorrow, Quint," and put it back down.
Lydia tried twice to start a story; both times the story died.
Florence ate. The stew was decent, the broth dark with dried sage and the potatoes thick.
The lamp oil and the cedar of the walls sat under it all, and faint beneath that, nine days of train still in her own hair.
The lamp threw a kind, soft light across the wood, and there was, in spite of everything, the look of a house she had wanted to live in.
The man at the head of the table would not meet her eyes.
She had thought she might catch him at it again. He kept his eyes on his plate.
She set down her fork. She put her hands in her lap.
She made conversation with Lydia because Lydia was the one person at the table making any.
She heard her own voice be polite, asking about the school in Prosperity, and the teacher there, and the books Lydia had read.
She heard Lydia answer, brightly, and she watched out of the corner of her eye for the lift of Beau’s head that didn't come.
Quint cleared his throat again.
"Boss," he said, "the man from town. He was up at the rail about three. I told him to come back tomorrow."
"Quint," Beau said, very quietly.
“Boss?"
"Tomorrow."
Beau looked up then, not at Quint but at her, one second only before he put his eyes back down at his plate.
Quint stopped. He bent his head over his bowl.
Lydia looked at her father once and didn't look again.
The lamp made its quiet hiss. Florence had not understood the comment about the man from town, and the not understanding was somehow worse than understanding would have been.
The room had gone tight in a way she could not read.
She helped clear the table. Beau stood at the parlor door with his hat in his hand and said quietly, "Florence. Thank you for coming. Lyddie will walk you back."
"Thank you for supper."
"It's not what I'd hoped to feed you."
"It was good food, and it was home-cooked.”
He didn't answer. She went out with Lydia, down the steps, along the path, the air cooler now, the quail still sounding, the stars beginning.
At the cottage door Lydia hugged her, briefly, and ran back.
Florence shut the door behind her, relieved that Lydia had hugged her again after she fumbled it the first time.
She sat down on the edge of the bed with her hat still on her head and her gloves still on her hands.
She had been a disappointment to him. She didn't know how. The man at the head of the table tonight had been a different man from the one who had looked at her at the cottage window, and she didn't know which was true.
She sat that way until the lamp in the ranch-house window across the yard went out.
* * *
When the house was dark, she did what she had decided.
She took the bag, and put her shawl over her shoulders.
She slipped out through the back door of the cottage and crossed the dooryard on the side that was not visible from any of the ranch-house windows.
Then she walked, with her boots soundless on the dust, down to the wood at the edge of the ranch where the cottonwoods thinned to scrub and a single big oak stood with its branches low.
The moon was a quarter. Enough.
She dug with a split board taken from the lean-to, until her hands were sore and the hole was deep enough that a man would have to have a reason to find it.
She laid the bag in the hole. She covered it, tamped the earth, and set a stone on the disturbed place, then beside it a smaller stone, a marking her mother's father had shown her when she was a child. Only she would know.
She crept back and let herself into the cottage, and lay down in her clothes on the white sheets and pressed her cheek against the pillow.
She had made a mistake coming here. She didn’t know what she should have done, but it wasn’t this.