This Grieving Cowboy Hadn’t Smiled in Years — Until A Clumsy Mail-Order Bride Stole His Heart!

…

I appreciate that you’re worried, Harrison said in a voice that was entirely without warmth.

I appreciate that mama is worried, but I am managing my own affairs just fine, and I don’t need you or anyone else arranging my life for me.

Are we clear? Samuel had nodded slowly.

Crystal clear, he said, and Harrison had believed him.

He should not have believed him.

The telegram arrived on a Tuesday.

Harrison was in the middle of cutting a fender and Tom Riss, Marshall Tom Riss, a broad shouldered, perpetually uncomfortable looking man who had been Fort Laramy’s law man going on 8 years, pushed open the door of the shop with a look of a man who’d been handed a problem he did not ask for and was not sure how to put down.

Morning, Harrison.

Harrison didn’t look up.

Marshall got a situation.

You always got a situation when you walk in here.

Harrison kept his eyes on the leather.

Would somebody break this time? Tom cleared his throat.

It’s not exactly a breaking situation.

It’s more of a arriving situation.

Harrison paused, looked up slowly.

What does that mean? Tom held out the telegram.

Harrison took it.

Read it once.

Read it twice.

His face did not change expression, but something behind his eyes shifted hard.

The telegram was from the Central Pacific Line Depot.

It had been sent 2 days prior, which meant it should have arrived 2 days prior, which meant that whoever had been sitting on it, he was looking directly at Tom Riss, had been sitting on it long enough to build up nerve.

It read, “Miss Daisy Jennings arriving Fort Laramie Tuesday morning.

Stop.

Traveling from Boston.

Stop.

Arranged correspondence with Mr.

Samuel Cole regarding marriage to Mr.

Harrison Cole.

Stop.

Please advise.

Harrison read it a third time.

Then he set it down very carefully on the workbench.

Then he said, “Where is my brother?” It was not a question.

It had the cadence of a question, but none of the genuine inquiry.

It was the sound a man makes when he is deciding how much trouble he is about to cause.

Samuel’s not in town today, Tom said.

He rode out to the Caldwell Ranch yesterday morning.

Convenient.

Harrison, where is she again? Not a question.

Tom shifted his weight.

That’s the thing.

She’s She’s already here.

Harrison stood up from the workbench.

Blank.

The cold hit him the moment he pushed out the door.

A hard, flat Wyoming cold that in February had no mercy in it at all.

The kind of cold that gets into the joints and stays.

He didn’t reach back for his coat.

He was running on something that wasn’t entirely rational, and he knew it.

But knowing it didn’t slow him down any.

Tom half joged to keep up.

Now Harrison, let’s just stay calm.

I am calm.

You’re walking like you’re about to arrest somebody.

I’m about to have a conversation with my brother’s very poor decision-making.

Your brother’s poor decision-making is standing on the platform right now, looking cold and lost.

So maybe Harrison stopped.

He’d come around the corner of the telegraph office and now he could see the platform clearly and there she was.

And whatever picture he’d built in his mind during the 2-minute walk from his shop, it wasn’t this.

She was small.

That was the first thing.

Smaller than he’d expected, wrapped in what was very obviously a city coat.

the kind of coat that was made for stepping out of a carriage in Boston, not standing in the open February air of Wyoming territory.

Her hat had been pushed sideways by the wind.

She was clutching a carpet bag that looked like it had been sat on repeatedly during a very long journey.

Her nose was red, her cheeks were red, and she was looking around with wide brown eyes that had the particular expression of a person who has arrived somewhere and is only now beginning to understand what they’ve agreed to.

She hadn’t seen him yet.

He watched her for exactly 3 seconds, and in those 3 seconds, something complicated moved through him.

irritation, yes, and the firm, resolute sense that this whole thing was an outrage, but also beneath that, something else.

Something he didn’t want to name, and therefore didn’t.

Then she took a step forward on the platform, caught her heel on a loose board, pitched sideways, and went directly into the water trough.

Not almost into it, not a near miss, all the way in.

Carpet bag and all.

The splash was extraordinary.

Harrison stood there absolutely still, and then from somewhere so deep in him that it surprised him the way sudden cold water surprises you, a laugh came out.

Not a polite sound, not a short exhale, a real laugh, a full, involuntary, helpless laugh, the kind that bends you forward slightly and takes your breath away.

He pressed a fist to his mouth trying to contain it and it didn’t help.

He laughed the way he hadn’t laughed in 3 years.

He laughed the way people laugh when something is both terrible and perfect at the same time.

Tom Hisses stared at him like he was watching a man come back from the dead, which in some ways he was.

The woman was pulling herself out of the trough.

She was soaking.

Her hat was now floating.

She stood on the platform, dripping in the February cold with a dignity that was almost more impressive than the fall itself.

Back straight, chin up, water streaming off her coat, and she looked directly at Harrison Cole, who was still laughing, and she said in a voice that was clear and sharp and not without its own sense of humor, “I take it your Mr.

coal.

He stopped laughing almost.

He pressed it back down behind his teeth and cleared his throat and managed something resembling composure.

Miss Jennings, he said.

Yes.

She looked down at herself.

I make quite an entrance.

You’re soaking wet.

I’m aware.

It’s 15°.

I’m also aware of that.

He stood there another moment looking at her.

This stranger, this utterly impractical, dripping, brighteyed woman who had traveled 2,000 mi to marry a man who hadn’t agreed to anything.

And the last of the laughter faded out, and the reality of the situation came back in its place, hard and cold and clear.

“Miss Jennings,” he said, and his voice had changed.

Not unkind, but firm.

careful.

I don’t know what my brother told you.

I don’t know what arrangement he made or what letters passed between you, but I am going to need you to understand something before we go any further.

She looked up at him.

She was still shaking from the cold, but she wasn’t flinching.

I did not agree to this, he said.

Whatever Samuel arranged, he arranged without my knowledge or consent.

And I am I am sorry that you traveled so far for this.

And I am sorry about the circumstances that brought you here, but I can’t I am not.

He stopped, tried again.

I’m not in a position to be what Samuel told you I was.

There was a pause.

The wind moved between them.

Then Daisy Jennings, still dripping, still straightbacked, still looking him directly in the eye, said quietly, “He told me you were a sad man who needed company.

” Harrison’s jaw tightened.

“He wasn’t wrong about the first part,” she added.

“Though you did just laugh for the first time in what I’m guessing is a very long while, so maybe he was right about the second part, too.

” Tom Hurus had the wisdom to wander off somewhere during the next several minutes, which Harrison appreciated because the conversation that followed was not one he wanted witnessed.

He took Daisy to the hotel, not his house, the hotel.

He was very clear about that, and waited in the lobby while she went upstairs to change out of her soaked clothes.

He sat in one of the lobby chairs with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and had a fairly intense internal conversation with himself about what he was going to do.

He could put her on the next train east.

He could pay for the ticket himself.

He could write Samuel a letter with some very specific language in it and be done with the whole thing before sundown.

That was the sensible choice.

That was the obvious choice.

He was still running through the arguments for it when Daisy came back downstairs in a plain gray dress, her hair damp but pinned back, her carpet bag on her arm.

She had the look of a woman who had made her peace with the situation, whatever it was going to be.

There was no performance in her, no pleading.

She sat down across from him and folded her hands in her lap and waited.

That undid him slightly.

He’d expected tears or demands or some form of pressure.

The stillness was harder to push against.

“Tell me,” he said finally.

“Tell me how this happened.

” She told him, [clears throat] “She’d been a seamstress in Boston, working for a dry goods family on Beacon Street.

She’d been with them 5 years.

The father had died 8 months ago and the eldest son, who had inherited the business, had decided that Daisy, among other changes, was unnecessary.

He let her go with two weeks wages and no reference.

In Boston, without a reference, a seamstress was nothing.

She’d spent 6 months stretching those wages, looking for work, finding doors closed.

She’d answered Samuel’s advertisement placed in a Boston paper of all things, not because she had dreams of frontier romance, but because she had $11 left to her name and a landlady who was running out of patience.

I’m not telling you this so you feel sorry for me, she said.

I’m telling you because I think you should know what kind of situation I was in and what kind of person I am.

I’m not a fool, Mr.

Cole.

I understood what I was agreeing to.

I understood it might not go the way the advertisement suggested, but I had nothing left back there.

And at least out here there was a chance at something.

Harrison was quiet for a moment.

How old are you? He asked.

26.

Do you know anybody in this territory? Anyone at all? Not a single soul other than you and the man at the telegraph office.

He rubbed the back of his neck, looked at the floor, looked at her.

“I have a spare room,” he [clears throat] said.

“Above the shop.

It’s not,” he stopped, started again.

“It is not an offer of anything other than a roof and a stove until we can sort out what’s to be done.

” “Do you understand me?” “Perfectly,” she said.

“And you’d be helping in the shop.

I’m behind on orders and I could use an extra set of hands.

I can sew.

Leather is different from fabric.

I can learn.

He stood up, took his hat off the chair beside him, and put it back on.

Come on then, he said, before I change my mind.

The room above the shop had been used for storage for the better part of 2 years.

Harrison spent 20 minutes moving boxes while Daisy stood in the doorway with her carpet bag and did not comment on the dust or the cobwebs or the fact that the window had a crack in it stuffed with what appeared to be an old newspaper.

He found a cot in the back, brought it in, set it up, found an extra blanket, found the small iron stove in the corner, got it lit.

When he turned around, she was sitting on the edge of the cot, looking around the room with a careful, thoughtful expression.

Not disappointed, just absorbing.

“It’s fine,” she said before he could apologize for it.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“The stove will help.

” She looked at him.

“Mr.

Cole, what? Thank you.

” She said it plainly without embellishment.

I know you didn’t ask for this.

I know you’d rather I wasn’t here, but thank you.

He stood in the doorway for a moment.

He didn’t know what to do with gratitude.

He’d been so far outside the reach of it for so long that it sat strangely in his ears.

Get some sleep, he said.

Shop opens at 7.

He went back downstairs.

He sat at his workbench in the cold dark for a long time.

And for the first time in 3 years, the silence in that room didn’t feel entirely like his own.

The next morning started the way the previous morning had started.

Early, dark, cold.

But this time, when Harrison came downstairs and got the shop stove going, he heard footsteps above him.

Movement, the small sounds of someone else existing in the space near him.

[clears throat] He hadn’t realized how loud silence was until something broke it.

Daisy came downstairs at 10 6, which was earlier than he’d expected, wearing the same gray dress with an apron tied over it.

She looked at the workbench, looked at him, looked at the tools laid out in their places.

“Tell me what needs doing,” she said.

He pointed to a pile of leather strips on the secondary bench.

Those need to be sorted by width and rolled.

I’ll show you how.

She rolled up her sleeves and went to work without another word.

He watched her for a moment.

This strange woman in his shop, this arrangement made without him.

This person who had crossed a continent and fallen into a water trough and somehow ended up standing at his secondary workbench at 6:00 in the morning.

And then he went back to his own work.

They worked for 3 hours in something that was not quite silence and not quite conversation.

And Harrison Cole, who had not noticed much of anything in a very long time, found himself noticing the way she hummed very quietly when she thought no one could hear.

He did not say anything about it, but he noticed.

It was Samuel who arrived at noon.

Harrison heard his brother’s horse in the street and he sat down his tool and he walked to the door and he opened it and he stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and said nothing.

Samuel pulled up on his horse, saw his brother’s face and had the decency to look uncomfortable.

Harrison, he said, get down, Harrison said.

Samuel got down slowly like a man dismounting near a dog he wasn’t sure about.

Now, Harrison said, “You’re going to come inside, and you’re going to explain yourself, and I am going to stand here and listen to every word, and I am not going to say a single thing until you’re done because I want to hear the whole of it before I tell you exactly what I think.

I can explain inside, Samuel.

” They went inside.

Daisy was at the secondary bench.

She looked up, saw Samuel, and the look that passed between them told Harrison everything.

They’d corresponded several times.

This was not an anonymous transaction.

His brother had told this woman things about him, about Margaret, about the baby, about the three years.

His jaw tightened so hard it achd.

outside,” he said to Samuel.

“Now they stood behind the shop in the cold, and Samuel talked.

He talked fast, the way he always did when he was defending himself.

But this time, there was less bluster in it than usual, more honesty.

” “I know you’re furious,” Samuel said.

“You’ve got every right to be.

I went behind your back, and I did it knowing you’d be furious, and I did it anyway.

Why? Because I watched you for three years, Harrison.

His voice cracked on the last word just slightly.

3 years.

I watched you go from the man I grew up knowing to a man who doesn’t even You don’t smile.

You don’t laugh.

You don’t talk to anybody.

You just work and sleep and get up and do it again.

And I He stopped, pressed his hand over his mouth for a moment.

I’m not ready to lose you, too.

And I felt like I was losing you.

Slow and quiet and one day at a time.

Harrison said nothing.

She’s a good woman, Samuel said.

I talked to her for months, letters, back and forth.

She’s not trying to replace Margaret.

Nobody can replace Margaret.

I know that.

But you can’t.

You can’t keep living like this.

Margaret wouldn’t want this for you.

You know that.

Don’t say her name.

The words were in Harrison’s mouth, hot and ready, and he held them there.

The wind blew.

You had no right, Harrison said.

His voice was very quiet now, which was worse than yelling.

You had no right to go into my life and move things around and decide what I need.

I am a grown man, Samuel.

I have been taking care of myself.

You’ve been surviving, Samuel said.

That’s not the same thing.

Harrison stopped.

That word, the same word he’d thought himself, lying awake in the dark.

Surviving.

He turned away from his brother and looked at the back wall of his shop and breathed.

“She has nowhere to go,” Harrison said finally.

She told me she used everything she had to get here.

I know, Samuel said softly.

That puts me in a very difficult position.

I know that, too.

A long pause.

I’m keeping her on for now, Harrison said, not looking at his brother.

She works in the shop.

She stays in the room upstairs.

That’s all this is.

Okay, Samuel said.

And if you ever Harrison turned around, looked at him.

If you ever go behind my back like this again about anything, we are going to have a very different conversation than this one.

Samuel nodded.

He looked like he might say something else.

Something about being glad.

Harrison laughed.

Something about the water trough because it had probably already gotten back to him.

But he had enough wisdom to keep it behind his teeth.

Thank you, he said instead.

Harrison walked back inside without answering.

The that evening after the shop closed, after the tools were put away and the stove banked down, Harrison sat at the workbench with a half-finished saddle in front of him and found himself not working on it.

He was thinking about what Samuel had said.

He was thinking about a woman upstairs who had come 2,000 mi with $11 and a broken employment history.

Who had fallen into a frozen water trough on her first minute in Wyoming and gotten back up with her spine straight.

Who rolled leather in the morning without being asked twice.

Who hummed when she thought no one heard.

He was thinking about a laugh that had come out of him without permission.

The way a sob sometimes does, involuntary, unstoppable, real.

He was thinking about Margaret, about the particular way she used to stand in the kitchen doorway, about how he’d once believed without question that his life was going to be one specific shape, and how the fever had taken that shape and broken it into pieces on the floor, and how he’d been sitting in the wreckage ever since, telling himself it was fine, telling himself he was managing.

He reached up and touched the photograph on the mantle, just the edge of it, just his fingertip on the corner of the frame.

Then he pulled his hand back and picked up his all and went back to work.

But something in that room had shifted.

It was small.

It was almost nothing, but it was there.

The third day was the one that changed things, though Harrison wouldn’t admit that until much later.

He’d been telling himself it was a temporary arrangement, clean and simple.

A woman who needed shelter, a man who needed help in the shop, and nothing more than that between them.

He’d said it to himself every morning when he heard her footsteps on the stairs.

He said it every time she handed him a tool without being asked, or sorted the leather without making mistakes, or asked him a question so precise it surprised him.

Temporary, practical, nothing more.

But on the third morning, she burned the coffee.

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