Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The wagon came on Wednesday. Hannah knew the sound of his horses before it stopped.
Alma was at the table cutting pieces for a boy’s shirt. Hannah looked toward the window.
Alma did not look up. “You’ve learned his wagon already.”
Hannah turned back. “I heard horses.”
“There have been horses going by since breakfast.”
Hannah had no answer worth giving. She went to fetch her bonnet.
She had changed her dress after breakfast. The grey wool was perfectly respectable, but the blue was newer and fitted her better through the waist, and she had put it on without explaining to herself why.
Thomas was taking her to the ranch to discuss the household and the marriage.
She was dressing for the occasion. The occasion happened to include the man. She left it there.
Alma had looked at the blue dress when Hannah came downstairs and had said nothing at all, which said everything, and Hannah had not given her the satisfaction of responding to it.
A knock came at the door. Hannah reached it before Alma could.
Thomas stood on the porch. He had shaved closely. His coat was dark and well-brushed, and instead of the work shirt she had seen at the ranch he wore a white one beneath his waistcoat, and Hannah looked at the white shirt.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
She let him look. The looking lasted perhaps two seconds longer than the question required, and then he held out his hand for the wagon step, and Hannah put her hand in his and climbed up.
His grip was firm and brief and the same as it had been on Monday, except that she had thought about it for two days since Monday and the thinking made the sameness different.
Thomas climbed up beside her and took the reins.
“You’ve settled in all right?”
“Very well. Mrs. Pryor has been kind.”
“Alma usually is.”
“She has been teaching me to use her sewing machine.”
Thomas glanced at her. “You’ve never used one?”
“No.”
“Sarah hadn’t either.”
Hannah waited for the flinch — the small discomfort of entering a room where someone else had been. It did not come.
Sarah had lived in the house Hannah would enter tomorrow. Her sampler hung by the kitchen door. Her garden was behind the fence. Her name could be said in this kitchen without the air going thin, and Hannah was glad of that.
“Alma says it saves half the time,” she said.
“Dell says it cost twice what it ought.”
“I believe Mrs. Pryor knows that.”
Thomas turned. “She told you?”
“She said he thought it dear. And she bought it anyway, with her own money.”
“Dell couldn’t do much about it,” Thomas said.
Hannah turned toward him. “Could he have done something if it were his money?”
Thomas frowned slightly. “I suppose he could have refused to buy it.”
Hannah looked ahead. That was precisely the difference.
She did not say so, because she had come to Colorado prepared to ask sensible questions, and the question she needed to ask Thomas was not about Dell and Alma’s sewing machine.
It was about her, and him, and what would happen after tomorrow, and she was not ready to ask it on a wagon seat with the ranch still two miles away.
The ranch appeared beyond the rise, and there it was, though it looked different in person — the same thing, but altered by being real.
On Monday she had seen a stranger’s house.
Tomorrow she would come back to it as Thomas’s wife, and the thought sat low in her stomach, not unpleasant, not comfortable, the feeling of something approaching that could not be slowed down or sped up and would arrive when it arrived.
“No Lucy?” she said.
“At school. I thought we’d do better going through things without her answering every question for me.”
Hannah laughed. “That might be wise.”
Thomas pulled up beside the porch and came around for her. She put her hand in his and stepped down — carefully this time, holding her skirt clear, and his hand steadied her at the elbow, and then she was on the ground and he let go, and they walked into the house.
Thomas put the coffeepot on the stove. Hannah removed her bonnet and gloves and sat at the kitchen table, the same table that would be hers tomorrow, the same window, the same view of the garden and the mountains beyond it.
She had to stop doing that. If she kept counting the things that would be hers she would have herself married before Reverend Palmer had opened his Bible.
Thomas brought two cups to the table and sat opposite her.
“I thought we’d go through what we agreed,” he said. “If there’s anything different from what you understood, say so.”
He did not treat the matter as settled merely because she had already crossed the country. He laid it out clearly, in order, with the expectation that the other person would speak up if something didn’t suit.
He began with the house. He expected her to manage it as she saw fit.
He bought staples in quantity when he went to Silver Cliff: flour, sugar, coffee, the things that kept.
Meat generally came from the ranch. The kitchen garden would be Hannah’s to plant in spring, though Thomas would do any heavy work she required.
Harlan ate with them when he was working close to the house, but not every day. He slept in the cabin past the barn.
“And Lucy?” Hannah said.
Something shifted in Thomas’s face, slight, but she was beginning to recognize it. Everything concerning his daughter received more thought than anything concerning himself — more time given to the column that mattered most.
“She can dress herself. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Buttons give her trouble when she’s in a hurry.”
Hannah smiled.
“She makes her bed badly,” he said.
“Most children do.”
“She’ll tell you she’s done it.”
“Most children do that too.”
His mouth moved. “She goes to school when the weather allows. I don’t expect you to wait on her.”
“I wouldn’t. She should have work of her own. Nothing beyond her age.”
“I agree.”
“Then we agree about Lucy.”
“Seems so.”
Hannah picked up her cup. The coffee was strong and not quite hot enough. She drank it and set it down.
Money after marriage.
She could wait. Ask tomorrow, face to face, after the wedding. But there would always be a reason to wait, and she had spent ten years in a house where the important thing was always going to be done tomorrow.
She put both hands around her cup.
“How do you manage household money?”
Thomas answered without hesitation. “Rooker keeps my account in town. Flour, cloth, lamp oil, whatever the house needs — you tell him to put it to me.”
“And if I buy elsewhere?”
“Same thing if they know me. Otherwise pay it and tell me what it cost.”
“And if it isn’t for the house?”
Thomas looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Something for myself.”
“If you need something, buy it.”
“On your account?”
“If Rooker has it.”
Hannah tried again, and it was harder than she had expected, because Thomas was not being difficult — he was being reasonable, and that was the problem. He could not see the gap between what he was offering and what she needed, because from where he sat there was no gap.
“Suppose it is something I want rather than something I need,” she said.
Thomas sat back. “What sort of thing?”
That was the difficulty. She had spent so many years saving what she could from wages that were hers, small as they were, that she could not immediately think of anything specific enough to make the point — and the point was not about a thing.
It was about the asking. It was about whether she would spend the rest of her life requesting permission for every purchase that was not flour or lamp oil, the way her mother had spent her life believing the savings were safe because her father said they were, the way Hannah had spent ten years believing she would be looked after because Mrs. Corliss said she would be.
“Alma’s sewing machine,” she said.
Thomas frowned. “You want a sewing machine?”
“No. I mean something of that sort. Something I might choose to buy simply because I wanted it.”
Thomas considered her. He was trying. She could see him trying, the words were there but the meaning wasn’t landing.
“If you want something, tell me,” he said. “If we can afford it, we’ll get it.”
Hannah looked at him. It was not a bad answer.
It was not a small answer. Another woman might have heard it and been satisfied, and the woman would not have been wrong.
Thomas was offering to provide for her — generously, without meanness, without conditions she could see.
The trouble was the structure of it. She would tell him.
He would decide. They would get it. Every step of that sentence ran through Thomas, and Hannah had come to Colorado to stop living in a house where everything she had ran through someone else.
But she did not know how to say that to a man she had known for three days without it sounding like an accusation, and it was not an accusation.
Thomas was not her father hiding debts. He was not Mrs. Corliss loving her and forgetting the will.
He was a man sitting across a table answering her questions as plainly as he knew how, and the answer he was giving was the only answer he had, and it was not wrong. It was just not finished.
“I see,” she said.
Thomas’s brow remained furrowed. He rested his forearms on the table.
“Hannah.”
Her name in his voice for the first time — said as though he had not noticed he had crossed into it. She held still.
“If there’s something I haven’t thought of, you’ll have to tell me,” he said.
The frustration went out of her. The question was not settled — it wasn’t — but he meant it.
He meant what he said. He had not thought of it, and he was telling her that the not-thinking was his and he would need her help with it, and that was not everything she wanted, but it was a door she could walk through.
“I will,” she said.
He nodded. The matter was closed. For now.