Chapter 4 #2
“I should like to meet her,” Hannah said.
Thomas helped her into the wagon. Her gloved hand closed around his, smaller than his own but not uncertain. She stepped up. He went around to the other side and took the reins, and her hand was still with him.
They left Silver Cliff with Hannah beside him and the trunk secured behind, and for the first mile neither of them spoke.
Thomas was comfortable with silence. He had lived inside it most of his life — before Sarah, during Sarah, and in the fourteen months since, and he had never found it empty the way other people seemed to.
But this was different. There was a woman beside him on the wagon seat, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her arm through his sleeve when the road jostled them together, and the quiet between them was not two people with nothing to say.
It was two people with too much to say and no way yet to begin it.
Beside him, Hannah’s head turned — slowly, the way a hand moves across a new table, feeling for the grain of it.
The mountains carried snow high up. Cottonwoods along the creek had begun to turn, and beyond them the grass ran pale toward the foothills, and the light was on it, and the country was doing what it always did in autumn, which was to look like the best version of itself.
“It’s larger than I imagined,” she said.
“The valley?”
“Everything.”
He had been here twelve years. He had stopped seeing the valley the way a stranger saw it, stopped noticing the size of the sky, the way the mountains stood around the edges of everything like walls around a room that had no ceiling.
With Hannah beside him the sky looked larger than it had this morning.
“You’re accustomed to it,” she said.
“I’ve been here twelve years.”
After another mile she asked how far the ranch was, and he told her six miles, and she asked about the Pryors, and he told her they were in Silver Cliff and he would bring her back that afternoon.
The questions were practical, evenly spaced, the questions of a woman who was filling in a map she had been building since his first letter.
Thomas answered them and kept each answer the size it earned, and after a while the practical questions were done and the silence came back, and it sat between them differently this time. Easier.
“How was the journey?” he said.
“Long.”
He glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead, her hands folded in her lap.
“Very long?”
The corner of her mouth moved. “Long enough that I have no wish to see the inside of a railway carriage again before Christmas.”
Thomas laughed. He had not intended to. It came out of him the way her smile had come out of her — before he could stop it, short and surprised. Hannah turned to him, and her face had changed. It took him a moment to see that it was surprise.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You looked at me.”
“I didn’t know whether you laughed.”
Thomas stared at her. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Mr. Jessup said you were a quiet man.”
“That doesn’t mean I never laugh.”
“No,” she said. She faced the road again, and he could see that she was trying not to smile, and he let her try, and his eyes stayed on her longer than the road required.
“Does Lucy know I was to arrive today?”
“She has known the day for a fortnight.”
“And that the wedding has been delayed?”
“No. I only had word about Jessup yesterday. I spent the day arranging Palmer and the Pryors, and by the time I got home she was asleep.”
That satisfied her. He could see her working through it: the girl waiting at home, expecting a wedding, not knowing it had been postponed, not knowing what the woman on the wagon would be to her when she walked through the door.
Hannah was thinking about Lucy — carefully, one piece at a time, fitting it into the map.
“Is she pleased?” she asked.
Thomas considered the question. He could have said yes and been close to right, but close was not the same as right, and Hannah had not come all this way for close.
“She asked yesterday whether the train could arrive early,” he said.
Hannah’s expression changed. Softened was the wrong word, because nothing about her had been hard, but her face opened, a guard dropping that she had been holding in reserve, and Thomas’s hands tightened on the reins.
“She misses her mother,” he said.
“I expect she does.”
“I don’t expect you to take Sarah’s place.”
He said it to the road. He had been carrying the sentence since before Hannah’s first letter.
He had thought about saying it in writing and had not, because some things ought to be said out loud, standing in your own voice, where a person could hear what was behind the words and not just the words themselves.
“She had a mother. I won’t ask her to forget that.”
“I wouldn’t want her to,” Hannah said.