Chapter Fifteen #2
“Pray with me, Zoe,” he said, low.
“I will,” she answered, the wet at her lashes coming down at last.
Wade lowered his head over their joined hands at the edge of the quilt.
“Lord,” he said, the word rougher than the breath he had drawn before it.
“I have been a poor man with You. I have been a poor brother to my sister. I have been a poor uncle to her child. I am setting the harshness down and I am asking You to take it. I am asking You to keep my sister’s child through the night.
I am asking You for a kinder man in this house in the morning. ”
“Amen,” Zoe answered, more a breath than a word.
“Amen,” Wade said, his forehead coming down briefly against the top of her hand at the quilt and staying there for the count of three.
He set his hand down and looked at her.
She was sitting on the braided rug. The sun lay across her dark hair.
The dark blue of her eyes was very steady.
There was a small smudge of dirt on her left temple from the squash bed.
A thin line of dried blood ran across the cuff of her grey dress from where she had carried Sadie across the pasture.
She is beautiful, Wade said inside himself, with the honesty he had been keeping at the back of his teeth since she arrived. She has been beautiful the whole time. I have been seeing it. I have been refusing to say it.
Wade had a single startled thought, complete and intact, which was that no person had ever looked at him in this house, his mother included, with quite the combination of clarity and patience and absolute lack of fear Zoe was.
The thought went unspoken.
“I need to ride into town,” he said after the quiet had stretched out between them.
Zoe lifted her face. Her brow came up by an eighth of an inch.
“Now?”
“In an hour.” His thumb moved once at the back of her hand on the quilt. “There is something I need to do for her.”
Zoe held his eyes a count longer than the answer had earned. She was looking, Wade understood, for the shape of the something. He let her look. He kept his face steady.
Zoe’s mouth pulled once at the corner.
“Sadie will sleep until evening, the doctor said. The aconite is strong. There is no harm in your going, as long as you ride steady.”
“I will ride steady.”
He stood up off the rug at a careful pace, the line of his shoulder coming up off the side of hers an unwilling inch at a time. Zoe stayed where she was. Her green eyes stayed at the level of his coat as he reached for his hat at the bedpost.
“Ride steady,” she said, the dry edge gone gentle at the back of her tongue.
***
The road to Bozeman ran south along the valley in the high cold sun of a Sunday afternoon, and Wade rode it at the steady, measured pace, though the inside of him would have preferred a hard gallop and the punishing comfort of speed.
He reached Morrison’s Mercantile at twenty minutes to two.
The mercantile was open on Sundays only for the hour between the morning service and the afternoon Bible study. An irregularity of Bozeman commerce and a matter of considerable convenience to Wade who, having ridden eight miles, found the door unlocked.
Mr. Morrison was behind the counter with his ledger.
“Wade Collins. Twice in two days,” he observed, glancing up over his spectacles.
“Mr. Morrison,” Wade replied, lifting his hat off his head.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Embroidery supplies,” Wade said, setting his hat down on the counter.
Morrison set down his pen and looked at him for a long, careful moment.
“Embroidery supplies,” he repeated, with the air of a man checking a fact against the evidence of his own ears. “Mr. Collins. I sold you embroidery supplies yesterday.”
“You sold Miss Preston and my niece embroidery supplies yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“I would like to purchase more of them today. The same colors they chose. The full set of needles in the small leather case. The book of patterns at the front of the case. The carved wooden hoop with the brass screw.” He paused, the brim of his hat turning slowly between his fingers.
“Wrap them in brown paper, please, and tie the parcel with red ribbon if you have it, and write To Sadie, from her uncle, with apologies, on the outside in your own hand. My hand is not equal to the work today.”
Morrison looked at him for another long moment, then folded his ledger closed with great gentleness.
He set the threads, the carved hoop, the needle case, and the pattern book on the counter at Wade’s elbow. He looked at Wade. He looked at the items. He looked at Wade again.
“Eight dollars and seventy-five cents, Mr. Collins. On a Sunday. For an apology to an eight-year-old.”
Morrison’s eyebrows lifted by a careful quarter inch toward the line of his thin grey hair.
“Mr. Morrison,” Wade said evenly, the brim of his hat back between his fingers. “Wrap the parcel, please.”
Morrison began wrapping the parcel.
***
Wade stepped out of the mercantile with the parcel under his arm just as the church bell of the Lutheran congregation across the street began to toll the hour. He stood for a moment on the step.
Three years had passed since his last Sunday inside a church door.
The bell rang out the second note, then the third, then the fourth.
Wade stood there a moment longer than required.