Page 31 of Mail-Order Lady

Good. She had him.

“Did I ever tell you about the time Kate and I nearly burned down the church?”

He turned back to the road, but something in his shoulders had shifted. “You didn’t.”

“We were six and twelve.” She settled her hands in her lap and let the memory find its shape. “She had a plan, the way she always had plans, and this time it involved the preacher’s son. His name was Elias Fitch, and he made the tactical error of hiding a frog under my hymnal.”

He was listening. Not looking—he kept his eyes on the horses—but his stillness had changed.

“A live frog?”

“Extremely live. It leapt straight into Mrs. Alderman’s lap during the opening prayer, and her reaction could be heard three streets over.” She paused. “The frog survived. Mrs. Alderman’s dignity did not.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close enough that her chest loosened.

She pressed on before the silence could resettle.

“Kate decided the appropriate response was to replace every candle in the vestry with ones she’d treated with some powder she’d read about in one of Father’s chemistry books.” Clara tilted her head. “She was very confident in what the book suggested.”

“Was she wrong to be?”

“The candles did produce a rather spectacular green flame.” She let a beat fall. “They also produced a great deal more smoke than she’d accounted for.”

He glanced at her again. The real kind again.

“The vestry wasn’t damaged,” she added quickly. “Not permanently. The deacon got his eyebrows singed, but they grew back mostly even.” She tipped her head. “One side grew back slightly higher than the other, which gave him a permanently skeptical expression for the rest of his time there. Kate felt terrible about it. She still does, I think, though she’d never admit it.”

“And Elias Fitch?”

“Completely unscathed, which Kate found deeply unjust.” Clara had to bite back her own smile. “He had the audacity to laugh about it in church the following Sunday, right in front of his father, Reverend Fitch. Kate had to stand there and smile while her ears went red.”

Robert made a low chortle. Not quite a laugh, but the sound that came just before one.

Warmth slipped through her chest. “Reverend Fitch knew. He never said so directly. But the following week’s sermon was on the subject of righteous anger and its proper channels, and he looked at Kate three times during the passage about Samson.” She smoothed her skirt. “Kate counted.”

“Of course she did.”

“She also said the sermon was theologically sound, which I think was her way of admitting she’d gone too far. Kate doesn’t apologize directly. She compliments the principle you were defending when you corrected her.”

Robert was quiet a moment. The wagon creaked through a slight dip in the trail, then up the other side. His hands held the reins easily. Much looser than the tight, careful grip from this morning.

“What did your father say?”

That wasn’t a question she’d been expecting. Somehow he’d spotted the one detail she usually tried to avoid.

She looked at her hands. “He didn’t know. Mother handled it. Which meant a very long conversation about the dignity of the church and the reflection of a young lady’s behavior on her family’s name.” She kept her voice light like she always did when talking about Mother. “Father came home from his office that evening, and Mother had already resolved it to her satisfaction, so there was nothing left to say. He read his paper. We had supper.”

The horses’ hooves struck the earth in their steady rhythm. A hawk turned slow circles above the ridge on Robert’s side of the road.

The silence would settle back in if she let it. But maybe if she added a detail more personal, Robert would open up a little too. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “He was often like that. Not absent exactly. Just—” She searched for the right wording. “On the other side of a window. You could see him clearly enough. You just couldn’t get to him.”

Robert said nothing. But he wasn’t looking at the road either. He was looking at her, and not the brief careful kind. The kind that really saw.

That was as far as she could go though. For now anyway. She turned toward the mountains. “Anyway. Kate’s eyebrows survived intact, which she considered the real victory.”

A pause.

“Thomas hid a snake in Enoch’s boot once.” His voice had an easier tone now. A sound she hadn’t heard since before Fort Benton. “He was eight. Enoch was fourteen and a little too serious.”