Chapter 23
She was at the cottage window with her hands around a cup of tea when she saw Beau coming up the path in the gray.
The sky over the western trees was the color of pale slate.
The cottonwoods had a wet shine from a dew that had not yet lifted.
A single quail made the same two-note sound it had made on her first night.
She knew the name for it now. Lydia had told her yesterday. She held the cup. She watched him come.
He had not slept. He had shaved at the basin she had left on the porch step last night. He had a clean shirt on. He walked the path slowly, his hat in both hands, turning it once by the brim.
She set the cup down on the windowsill.
She went and opened the door.
“Good morning, Beau.”
“Hello, Florence.”
"You're here early."
"Lyddie said before the kettle."
“Oh. My kettle's been off the heat for ten minutes."
"Then I'm late."
"You're not late."
He stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand the way he had stood here four days ago. He had a held look about him that, on a different day, might have undone her.
"Come in," she said.
He came in. He shut the door behind him with a care that was not the care of yesterday. He set his hat on the small chair by the door, and this time he didn't pick it up again.
"I've come to say something I should have said in the kitchen yesterday, in the kitchen the morning before, in the cottage on the first afternoon, and in any of the letters before you came at all."
"Let me. If I don't say it now I'll be in this room another quarter of an hour talking around the edge of it."
"All right."
He turned. He looked at her. He stood at the small table by the window where the canvas bag had sat for three nights, and he set his hand on the wood of the table, lightly.
"I've been a fool, Florence. I won't this morning take you back through each variety of fool I've been.
I told you in the kitchen what I knew from the first. What I didn't tell you is the part that matters more.
I've spent every minute since then ashamed that you didn't arrive into a life I could offer you.
I treated you as if my shame were a thing you had brought. It was not. I am sorry."
She did not move.
He drew a breath.
"I held back for fear of letting you down.
That's the whole of it. I would've stayed quiet if there had been no brother and no paper and no bag and no wood.
I would've found, in any week, a reason.
That's the man I've been for eight years.
I'm asking you, with no expectation that you should, to give me the chance to be a different one. "
She had set both her hands at the windowsill on either side of the cup. The cup was warm against her wrist. The pale slate sky outside had begun, while he was talking, to brighten at the eastern edge, the way it brightened most mornings here, into a clean color she had no name for either.
She turned to face him.
"I sat in the wagon trying to read the back of your hat and couldn't. I was angry at you across the supper because I couldn't understand why a man who'd written that letter wouldn't look at me.
Then I lay in my clothes on those sheets and thought I had made a mistake.
The next morning I told you a lie at your own table, and the lie cost me more than I had thought a lie would cost. After the bag, I didn't know what to do.
I'd spent years being a woman in a house where the men did things I couldn't condone, and I didn't want to be a woman in another house in the same way.
So I held a bag for those nights when I should have held your hand.
I'm as sorry, in my own way, as you are in yours. "
He did not move.
"What do we do?"
"What Lydia told us to do last night."
"You don't know what Lydia told me last night."
"I can guess."
She crossed the cottage. She set her right hand on his jaw, where she had wanted to set it in the dooryard on the morning of the chopping block. The small rasp of the place he had not quite shaved through was under her palm.
"We face it together," she said. "What's behind. What's ahead. What's been signed. What we said in the kitchen about the use of the ranch. Without another lie between us. Without another bag in a wood."
"Florence."
“Yes?"
"May I?—"
"Yes."
He did not hurry. He bent his head and pressed his lips gently to her forehead first. Then he tipped his head down further, and she lifted her chin, and he kissed her, once, slowly, with a seriousness she had not imagined a kiss could ever possess.
She kissed him back. He smelled of wood smoke and the early hour. His lips were dry and careful. When they drew apart he stayed near. He didn't let go of her shoulders. His forehead came to rest against hers. She closed her eyes.
"Florence Mills."
"Mm."
"Will you marry me?”
"Yes, Beau. Yes."
Outside, the eastern sky brightened a little more.
***