Chapter 10 #2
Lucy’s face tightened. Hannah did not take the answer back.
She could have softened it — could have said only if you’re comfortable, could have said we’ll talk about it first, could have wrapped the truth in enough kindness to make it harmless.
But harmless was not the same as honest, and this child had a mother who was dead and a father who had brought a stranger into her house and never asked her opinion of it, and she deserved someone who told her the truth even when the truth was hard.
“This is my home now too,” Hannah said.
“You’ve only been here four days.”
“Yes.”
“Mama was here forever.”
To a ten-year-old, perhaps she had been. Hannah looked at Lucy and saw the forever in her face — the kitchen forever, the braids forever, the crock on the shelf forever — and every change Hannah made was a crack in the forever, and the cracks were necessary, and they hurt.
“I am not trying to take your mother’s things away,” she said.
“You put her jar in the cupboard.”
“Because it was empty and I needed the shelf.”
Lucy glared. Hannah leaned forward.
“If you tell me something belonged to your mother and matters to you, I will listen. That doesn’t mean nothing in this house can ever be moved.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to live here. You and your father and I. And living means the house will change, because I am in it now, and I am not your mother, and I will not do everything the way she did.”
Lucy’s mouth trembled. “Mama lived here.”
“Yes. And now she doesn’t.”
The words sat in the kitchen between them, hard and bare and true, and Hannah hated them even as she said them, because there was no kinder version that was also true, and she had promised herself she would not lie to this child.
“I wish she did, Lucy.”
“You didn’t know her.”
“No. But I can wish you still had your mother.”
Lucy looked down. A tear fell onto the table. Hannah did not reach for her. Not yet. She sat across the table and let the silence hold, because some things needed to be put down before they could be picked back up.
After a while Lucy said, “Papa wanted you.”
“Yes.”
“He put the notice in the paper.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t ask me.”
There it was. Thomas had decided his daughter needed a woman. He had placed an advertisement, chosen Hannah, married her. At no point had he turned to Lucy and said what do you think?
Hannah sat back. “Did you want him to?”
Lucy shrugged. It meant yes. Or it meant she had not known she wanted it until Hannah arrived, and by then it was too late to want it, and the too-lateness had been sitting in her since the platform.
“Your father should have spoken to you about it,” Hannah said.
Lucy’s eyes lifted. Hannah could see the surprise, a child who expected the new wife to defend the father, because that was what wives did, and instead Hannah was telling her Thomas had been wrong.
“But he did not bring me here to replace your mother,” she said.
“He said I needed a woman.” Lucy’s voice had gone small. “He told Mr. Pryor.”
Hannah went still. Thomas had written almost exactly that in his letter: I am looking for a wife chiefly because Lucy needs a woman in the house.
To Hannah, reading it in Illinois, the words had made him a good father.
To Lucy, hearing them through a wall or across a yard, they had meant something else entirely.
A child could hear you need a woman and conclude that she had failed at being without her mother — that the sadness and the difficulty and the not-coping were a problem her father had solved by going to the newspaper and ordering someone to fix it.
“I think your father was wrong about that,” Hannah said.
Lucy stared at her.
“You don’t need a woman in place of your mother. No one can be that. Not me. Not anyone.”
“Then why are you here?”
The question was harder than it should have been, because the honest answer had too many pieces — Thomas’s advertisement, Hannah’s trunk, Mrs. Corliss’s will, eleven dollars, a boardinghouse, Miss Tate’s careful toast — and none of those pieces belonged to Lucy.
“I am here because your father asked me to marry him, and I agreed,” she said.
“Because of me.”
“You were part of the reason.”
Lucy’s face fell, and Hannah saw the falling, and reached across the table and put her hand over Lucy’s.
“But I did not marry you,” she said. “I married your father. And whatever he may have written in that advertisement, I assure you I would not have crossed half the country merely to braid a little girl’s hair.”
Lucy’s mouth twitched, barely, the ghost of it, and Hannah squeezed her hand.
“I like you very much. I hope in time you will like having me here. But you are allowed to miss your mother while I am here. You are allowed to be angry with me. You are even allowed to say so.”
“Papa won’t like that.”
“Your father does not have to like everything.”
That earned a small, watery laugh, more breath than sound, and Hannah smiled, and Lucy rubbed her eyes with her free hand, and the kitchen was quiet, and the worst of it had passed.
“You are not, however, allowed to lie about going to school and then hide by a creek.”
Lucy’s face sobered. “I know.”
“Good.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Very much.”
Lucy sighed. Then she turned her hand beneath Hannah’s and held on.
Only for a moment. A child’s grip, quick, fierce, gone almost before it arrived.
Thomas was at the woodpile.
He had already split enough for three days, and was working on a fourth, and he had the look of a man who is doing something with his hands because he cannot do anything useful with the rest of himself.
Hannah stood on the porch and watched him drive the axe into a log and split it clean and reach for the next one.
“You’ll have none left whole if you continue,” she said.
Thomas buried the axe in the block. He was breathing hard. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were damp and he looked at her the way he looked at a fence that had come down. The problem visible, the solution not yet clear.
“How is she?”
“Sorry. She’ll apologize to you for lying.”
“She ought to.”
Hannah came down the steps. “She will. But not for what she said to me. That is between Lucy and me.”
Thomas’s face hardened. “Hannah.”
“No.”