Chapter Thirty-Two
Doc Merrick had cold hands.
He'd apologized for them twice, and Evelyn had said it didn't matter both times, but he apologized once more anyway while he pressed his fingers along her ribs and asked her to breathe deeply.
He was that kind of man. She'd figured him out inside of five minutes, and she'd decided she liked him, which was more than she could say for most doctors she'd met.
Most doctors were of the opinion that a woman's job in a sickroom was to lie flat and thank the man doing the talking.
"That hurt?"
"A little."
"How about here?"
"That's just tender, is all."
"Turn your head for me, ma'am. All the way to the left. Now the right. Now up."
She did what he asked. Her neck complained on the up part, but nothing gave out. He nodded and made a small sound in his throat and let go of her chin.
"Ma'am, you took a beatin', and I ain't gonna insult you by pretendin' otherwise.
But I can't find no fractures, no busted teeth, no blood in your ear, and your ribs are the color of a bad sunset, but they ain't cracked.
You're gonna feel wretched for the better part of a week, and then you're gonna feel wretched-plus-tired for another after that, but then you're gonna start to feel like yourself again. "
"Is that a medical opinion?"
"That's fifty years of watchin' folks get hit, ma'am."
"I'll take it."
"Rest. Eat. Don't lift nothin' heavier than a coffee cup for a spell. Don't ride astride till that hip settles down. And if you get a fever or you start seein' double or you can't hold water down, you send Sarah for me."
"Yes, sir."
He patted her hand once. His hand was still cold. She didn't mind.
***
Sarah wouldn't leave the room.
Sarah had her own particular way of not leaving a room. She'd go get something and come back. Then she'd go get something else and come back. Then she'd stand at the window and rearrange the curtains. Then she'd sit on the edge of the bed and pat Evelyn's foot through the quilt and get back up.
It went on for maybe an hour before Evelyn set down her cup and looked at her.
"Sarah."
"Yeah, honey?"
"You can sit down."
"I am sittin'."
"You're standin' at the curtains."
"Well, I was sittin'."
"Come here."
Sarah came. She sat on the edge of the bed, and she took Evelyn's hand, and she held it in both of hers, and her thumb worked over Evelyn's knuckles the way a person's thumb worked when they'd been holding onto something too tightly for too long.
"You come near to killin' me, Evelyn Granger."
"I know it."
"I laid in bed all last night thinkin' I'd never see your face again, and I was gonna have to write to a matron in Illinois about a friend who never come home."
"Sarah."
"I was."
"I'm here."
"I know you are. I know it. That's what I'm gettin' at."
She squeezed Evelyn's hand.
"Stay."
Evelyn looked at her.
"Stay here, Evelyn. In this house. With Sam and me. I don't mean for another two weeks, and I don't mean till you get your bearin's back. I mean stay. I mean take that little bag of yours that's still sittin' on the porch and unpack it in the loft and never pack it again."
"Sarah—"
"This house has felt right with you in it since the third day.
And I know it, on account of I come home, and I could tell straightaway that somebody had been livin' here who wasn't just passin' through.
You made this place a home the way it hasn't been since we come out here.
And that ain't nothin' I'm makin' up on account of what happened yesterday.
That's the plain truth of it. You already feel like kin to me, honey, and I ain't just sayin' that because you near got killed. "
"Sarah—"
"You don't gotta answer me right now. You don't gotta answer me today. I just want you to know it's on the table. It's been on the table. It ain't goin' off the table."
"I don't know what to say to you."
"You don't gotta say a blessed thing."
"I mean it. I don't. Sarah, I don't know what I'm doin'. I don't know if it's this house I'm scared to leave or if it's—"
She stopped.
"—or if it's what?"
Evelyn didn't finish.
Sarah smiled a small, tired smile.
"You think on it, honey. You just think on it."
She kissed Evelyn's forehead. Then she got up, and she rearranged the curtains one more time on principle, and went out.
***
Sam knocked on the door late in the afternoon. "Evelyn."
"Yeah."
"You up for a walk?"
She looked at him. He leaned against the doorframe on his good shoulder, weight off his bad leg, hat in his good hand.
He'd shaved. That was the first thing that caught her.
He'd shaved his jaw clean, and it made him look younger and stranger and about ten years less like the man who'd walked into this house two weeks ago with a Colt in his hand and no idea what to do with a woman in his kitchen.
"How long a walk?"
"Ten paces at most. I ain't in shape for more."
"Where to?"
"The porch."
"That sounds about my speed."
He offered her his good hand, and she took it, and she got up out of the bed slowly, on account of the fact that everything hurt, and he waited for her without saying a word.
When she was on her feet, he tucked her arm through his, and they went out slowly, one careful step at a time, the both of them listing a little.
Sarah was in the kitchen. She looked up. She saw them going out. She turned right back to the stove and started stirring something that didn't need stirring.
The porch had that late-afternoon light on it.
Gold coming in low over the ridge, hitting the boards at a slant, warm on Evelyn's cheek where the bruise was still up.
He walked her to the top step, the creaky one that Sam had been meaning to fix for two years, and he eased himself down onto it, and then he eased her down beside him, and both of them let out the same breath at the same time.
He kept his hand on hers.
For a long spell they just sat.
The mare stood at the corral rail chewing hay.
A chicken was hollering about something behind the coop.
The Montana sky did that thing it did toward sundown—got bigger somehow, wider, like it was showing off.
Evelyn had opinions about that sky. She'd developed them in the second week, when she'd started noticing that Montana light was not Illinois light, and Illinois light had never made her want to sit down on a porch step and stop moving.
This light did. This light made her feel like the day owed her something and was fixing to pay up.
"Evelyn."
"Yeah."
"I was wrong."
She looked over at him. He was looking at the sky. Not at her. His jaw was set that way it got when he was working himself up to saying something he'd been putting off.
"On the buckboard. Yesterday mornin'. Feels like ten years past, don't it? But yesterday mornin'. What I told you."
"Yeah."
"I was wrong. Every last word of it. I ain't gonna dress it up any prettier than that. I was wrong, and I knew I was wrong while I was sayin' it, and I said it anyhow. I'd like to say I done it for good reason, but the reason was I was afeared. That's the whole of it. I was scared plumb through."
"Sam—"
"Let me get it out, honey. If I stop, I ain't gonna start again."
She hushed.
"I been livin' my whole life reckonin' I wasn't the kind of man could have a woman waitin' on him.
I told myself it was on account of the work.
I told myself it was on account of Wilkes.
I told myself it was on account of I was too rough and I moved around too much, and there weren't no room in me for a house and a wife and the rest of it.
I told myself them things for twenty years, Evelyn.
I told myself I weren't built for lovin' nobody, and I got to where I believed it, and then you turned up in my kitchen with a fryin' pan. "
She almost laughed. She didn't. She put her free hand up to her mouth to hold it in.
"And I have been fightin' it ever since. I ain't never fought a thing that hard in my life, and I done it every day, and I done a right poor job of it, because here we sit."
"Sam—"
"I ain't done."
"All right."
"I told you yesterday you deserved better'n me.
And you do. I ain't takin' that back. There is a better man somewhere for you than a busted-up bounty hunter with a broke leg and a scarred-up hide and a house what needs a new roof, and if you was to ride back to Springfield tomorrow and find him, I would understand it. But…"
He looked at her now.
"But I don't want you to."
She took a breath in.
"I want you to stay. I don't got a pretty speech for you, Evelyn.
I ain't a pretty-speech man. But whatever there is left in this chest of mine that's still worth anythin', I want it to belong to you.
It's yours if you'll have it. And I know that ain't much, but it's every last bit of what I got, and I'm holdin' it out to you plain. "
He worked his free hand into his coat pocket.
He brought out the little cloth bundle.
He unwrapped it in his lap, one-handed and slow, because his other hand hadn't left hers and wasn't going to.
The ring sat there in the cloth. Gold band, thin, worn near smooth on the top where the little bit of scrollwork had almost gone away. His mother's ring.
"This here was my mama's."
"Sam—"
"Sarah give it to me to buy you back with. I told her it was comin’ home. I told her if I could get you out with just the money, this ring would come home."
He looked at her.
Her whole face went hot at once.
"I ain't got a proper way to ask you. If I was a better man, I'd have done this over supper with a candle lit, or up at the falls, or somewhere with a better view than a porch step that creaks. But I ain't a better man, and I don't reckon I got the time to wait for the day I might be one. So."
He held the ring between them.
"Marry me, Evelyn Granger."
She looked at him.
His face was still so gray, and there was pine sap on his shirt he hadn't noticed, and one of his ears was red on top from the cold.
He'd shaved and missed a spot right under his jaw on the left side.
His eyes were the color they went when he was looking at her, that steel gray with the smoke in it.
She thought about a lot of things.
She thought about David Morrow, just for a second. She thought about the man who'd told her she wasn't enough. She thought about how far away that felt, how small, and how it belonged to a different woman entirely—a woman who used to be her and wasn't her anymore.
She thought about the orphanage.
She thought about Mrs. Krauss telling her she had good hands, and about Mrs. Montgomery calling her family, and about Sarah's letters for twelve years, and how each one had been a rope somebody threw across fifteen hundred miles of country to a girl who didn't rightly know she was drowning.
She thought about Amos Wilkes.
She thought about the muzzle under her jaw.
She thought about the fact that Sam Cooper had ridden four miles on a broken leg with his mother's ring in his pocket to buy her back with, and she thought about how there wasn't going to be a day for the rest of her natural life when he wouldn't do that same thing over again if he had to.
Danger. Yeah. There was going to be some.
He was a bounty hunter, and he'd stay a bounty hunter, or he'd stop and be something else that would come with its own troubles.
Either way, there'd be nights she'd sit up watching the road for him.
She figured she could do that. Sitting up watching the road for somebody was better than sitting alone with no road worth watching.
She'd done a lot of the latter in her life, and she was good and done with it.
"Sam."
"Yeah."
"You missed a spot."
"Ma'am?"
"Right there. Under your jaw. When you shaved."
He put his hand up to his jaw, felt it, and made a small sound.
"Damn."
"You look about half twelve years old with your face like that."
"Evelyn—"
"I love you, Sam Cooper."
He went still.
"I love you, and I loved you the whole while you was tellin' me on that buckboard yesterday to go on back to Springfield, and I loved you when I was tied to a rock in them pines, and I have loved you every step of the way, and I aim to keep on doin' it.
I don't want a better man. Whoever that better man is, he can go find somebody else.
I want you. I want this house, and this porch and this creaky step, and I want the mare, and I want Sarah, and I want Mrs. Montgomery makin' jam till she's a hundred and ten.
I want all of it. I want it, Sam, and I'm sayin' yes.
I'm sayin' yes plain, and don't you make me say it a third time on account of my ribs is sore. "
He was staring at her. "Yes?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"I said yes, Sam Cooper. Three times now. Put that ring on me before I take it back."
He took her hand.
His fingers were shaking. He worked the ring onto her third finger, and it was a little loose because his mother had been a bigger woman than Evelyn. He twisted it around so the worn-smooth bit of scrollwork sat on top, and he closed her fingers over it.
Then he kissed her, being careful of her split lip. Careful of the bruise. Careful of everything.
It didn't matter. She was crying anyway, and he was too, though he'd probably deny it later, and she was going to let him deny it because a man like Sam Cooper needed a little dignity now and again, and she was fixing to spend the rest of her life giving it to him where she could.
Behind them, the kitchen door creaked open an inch, and then it creaked shut again fast, and Evelyn heard a small pleased noise from the other side of it that was, unmistakably, Sarah Cooper trying and failing not to celebrate too loudly.
Sam smiled against her mouth. "Your sister-in-law's a snoop."