Chapter 7 #2
They drank their coffee, and the kitchen was quiet, and the quiet was easier than it had been on the ride out — the quiet of two people who have said a hard thing and come out the other side of it without damage.
Thomas looked out the window at the garden.
Their eyes held when he turned back, and for a moment they sat across the table with nothing between them but the cups and the afternoon light coming through the window and tomorrow.
Then the kitchen door opened.
“Papa?”
Lucy came in with her schoolbooks under her arm.
She saw Hannah and stopped, and her face went through a series of changes so quickly that Hannah could not have named them all — surprise, then delight, then the careful rearrangement a child does when she has shown too much and wants to take some of it back.
“You came,” she said.
“I did.”
Lucy dropped the books on the table. “You didn’t tell me she was coming,” she said to Thomas.
“I told you you’d see her before Thursday.”
“You didn’t say today.”
“I didn’t know I was required to give you my appointments.”
Lucy ignored him. She came around the table to Hannah, and Hannah could see that she wanted to take her hand the way she had taken it on Monday and was stopping herself, because she was ten and she had shown too much already and she was working out how much more she could afford to show.
“Are you staying for supper?”
“No. Your father is taking me back to Mrs. Pryor.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
“Tomorrow you won’t have to go.”
“No.”
Lucy brightened — fast, like a lid coming off. “I’ve been thinking about your room.”
Thomas frowned. “My room?”
“Hannah’s.”
Hannah waited.
“The blue curtains should go in there,” Lucy said.
Thomas opened his mouth, and Hannah looked at Lucy instead, because she had heard something in the way Lucy said it — the blue curtains, not some blue curtains — and she wanted to know which curtains they were before Thomas said whatever he was about to say.
“Which blue curtains?” she asked.
“Mama’s. They’re in the chest upstairs. They used to be in the front bedroom.”
These were Sarah’s curtains. Lucy had gone into a chest where her mother’s things were kept and chosen them for Hannah’s room, because she was giving Hannah something of her mother’s to sleep under, and what she was giving was enormous, and Lucy did not appear to know it, and perhaps that was the point.
“They were your mother’s,” Hannah said.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Lucy nodded. She was sure. She was ten and she was sure the way ten-year-olds are sure — completely, without reservation, because the doubt had not occurred to her yet and might never.
Hannah glanced at Thomas. He was watching his daughter, and his face was open. Something more open than the almost-smile, and more painful, and she did not think he knew it was showing.
“Then perhaps you can show them to me,” Hannah said.
Lucy caught her hand — she had given up trying not to, and pulled her toward the passage.
The curtains were in a cedar chest at the top of the stairs.
They were blue cotton, faded at the folds where the light had found them, and Hannah held them up and saw the stitching along the hem, neat, even, done by the same hand that had made the sampler downstairs.
Lucy stood beside her and watched her hold them and waited for the verdict with the particular intensity of a child who has offered a gift and is not certain it will be accepted.
“They’re very fine,” Hannah said.
“Will you use them?”
Hannah folded the curtains carefully and put them back in the chest. “I’d like to. But I think your father and I should talk about it first.”
Lucy’s face tightened. “He’ll say no.”
“He might. But they were your mother’s, and it’s his house, and some things ought to be talked about before they’re decided.”
Lucy looked at her with an expression that suggested she found this policy deeply inconvenient but could not find a flaw in it.
“You’ll ask him, though?”
“I will.”
Lucy went downstairs satisfied, and Hannah stood alone at the top of the stairs with her hand on the lid of the chest and the smell of cedar around her and thought about Sarah Avery, who had hemmed these curtains in this house, and whose daughter was downstairs giving them away to a woman she had met two days ago, and whose husband was standing in the kitchen with an expression on his face that he was not aware of.
By the time Hannah came downstairs, Thomas had put the cups away.
“We should go,” he said.
Hannah put on her bonnet. Lucy came to the porch with them.
“Tomorrow morning?” she said.
Thomas nodded. “Tomorrow morning.”
Lucy looked at Hannah. “You’ll come back with him?”
“Yes.”
“And stay?”
Hannah looked at Thomas. He was looking at her too, and for a moment the three of them stood on the porch — Thomas in the doorway, Lucy on the step, Hannah between them with her bonnet tied and her gloves on — and the word stay was in the air between all of them.
“Yes,” Hannah said. “Tomorrow I stay.”
The valley was in late afternoon light with long shadows running east and the cottonwoods along the creek gold and still. Neither of them spoke.
Hannah was aware of him beside her — the length of his arm, the way his hands held the reins, the shift of his weight when the wagon rocked.
She had felt it since the platform. In his kitchen looking at the garden.
Across the table talking about money. In the doorway watching his daughter give away her mother’s curtains.
That was done. The question was what to do with it, and the answer was nothing, because tomorrow the answer would be something else, and she could wait.
Thomas drew the horses up before the Pryors’ house and came around to help her down. She put her hand in his and stepped to the ground, and he held her hand a moment after her feet were steady — a moment, no more, and then let go.
“Nine o’clock,” he said.
“I’ll be ready.”
Their eyes met. The yard was still and the light was going and Thomas Avery was standing in front of her with his hat in his hand, and she could see that he wanted to say something and was holding it back, and she was holding back the same thing.
“Good evening, Mr. Avery.”
“Good evening, Miss Bell.”
He put his hat on and went to the wagon, and Hannah went inside.
Alma was in the kitchen. Hannah hung her bonnet on the peg and sat at the table and Alma set a cup of tea in front of her without asking, and for a while neither of them spoke.
“Well?” Alma said.
“We went through the terms.”
“And?”
“We agree on most things.”
Alma waited.
Hannah drank her tea.
Alma waited some more.
“He called me Hannah,” she said, and did not know why that was the thing she said, out of everything — the money, the curtains, the garden, Lucy’s hand in hers — except that it was the thing that had stayed with her on the ride back, the sound of her own name in his voice, said without thinking, as though it had always been there.
Alma looked at her across the table with the expression of a woman who has been married long enough to know what a name means when it arrives without being asked for.
“Well,” she said again.
Hannah finished her tea and went to her room and unpinned her hair and sat on the edge of the bed in the quiet.
Tomorrow she would stand beside Thomas Avery and say vows before a minister.
Then back to the ranch, the dress in the wardrobe, the account book on the nightstand, a room that might have blue curtains.
The day after that she would get up and build a fire in the stove and begin.
She set the last pin on the nightstand and sat in the dark.
In nine hours Thomas would be at the door.