Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The church was small. Her hands were steady. She held her gloves in front of her and listened to Palmer’s voice and felt Thomas beside her — the warmth of his arm through her sleeve, the steadiness of him.
She had married strangers before, in a manner of speaking. She had entered Mrs. Corliss’s house knowing nothing and learned the rest by staying. This was the same. This was entirely different.
Palmer read from Ruth: Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people.
Thomas said I will plainly, all the way in.
She said it back.
He kissed her — brief, careful — and she felt it to the soles of her feet, and then the church came back around them and they were married.
Afterward she stood over the licence. Her name — Hannah Bell — beside his. For the first time in her life, her name on paper that mattered.
Lucy sat between them on the wagon with the remaining cake in her lap. She turned to Hannah.
“You’re really staying.”
“Yes,” Hannah said.
They reached the ranch and Lucy jumped from the wagon and ran for the house. Thomas came around to Hannah’s side and she took his hand and stepped down. The yard was the same yard she had crossed on Monday, but it was hers now, and she stood in it and felt the difference in her feet.
“You’re home,” Thomas said.
Hannah looked at the house. The porch. The door. The kitchen window where Lucy’s face had appeared on Monday with the wariness of a child meeting a stranger. Lucy’s face was in the window now, and the wariness was gone.
Thomas carried the trunk upstairs. One bed, one chair, brown curtains. His room was down the passage, door closed.
Lucy went to check the chickens without being asked twice. Thomas waited until her footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs.
“I thought you’d want your own room,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded and went downstairs. Hannah stood alone in the room that was hers and listened to the house settle around her.
She had lived in other people’s rooms for ten years — Mrs. Corliss’s spare room, then the boardinghouse, then Alma’s.
This room belonged to her. The bed was hers to sleep in.
The chair was hers to sit in. The window looked out over the mountains, and the mountains would be there tomorrow and the day after that.
She opened the trunk and took out her grey dress and hung it on the peg beside the blue one she was wearing. Two dresses on two pegs. She had arrived.
The stove fought her. She lit it wrong twice and the eggs stuck and she scraped them free and served them without apology, and Lucy carried the meal to the table talking the whole time, and the talking filled the kitchen.
Thomas ate without comment. Hannah ate and watched him not comment and liked him for it.
Afterward Thomas brought in water while Hannah washed the dishes.
She had not asked him to. He had not asked if she wanted him to.
He simply carried the buckets in and set them by the stove and went back out for more, and Hannah washed the plates and listened to his boots crossing the yard and thought about what it meant to be in a house where someone carried water for you and did not expect to be thanked.
Lucy went to bed. Her door closed upstairs and the house went quiet — a different quiet from the quiet at Alma’s, which had been the quiet of waiting. This was the quiet of a house with two people in it who did not yet know what to say.
Thomas came into the kitchen. Hannah was drying the last plate.
He stopped behind her and his hand found the strand of hair at her cheek, the one that never stayed pinned.
His fingers were warm against her temple and Hannah held still, the plate in one hand and the cloth in the other, and the kitchen was so quiet she could hear the stove ticking.
“Good night, Hannah.”
“Good night, Thomas.”
She had not said his name aloud before. It sounded different from the way she had written it in letters — heavier, more real, the name of a man standing close enough that she could feel his breath.
He went upstairs. Hannah set the plate on the shelf and banked the stove and checked the bolt on the front door, top and bottom. Then she went upstairs and took down her hair in the dark and lay in her bed and listened to the house.
The wall between them was thin. She could hear Thomas on the other side of it — not moving, not settling, just there. Hannah lay still and listened until his breathing slowed.