The Bridal Veil (6 page)

Cora’s champing jaws and full mouth
belied his statement but Emily took her seat and delicately put her
napkin in her lap.

“
You found your room? The
nice one at the end of the hall?” he asked, handing her a bowl of
green beans. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

“
Yes, thank you. Mrs.
Hayward showed me upstairs.”

Luke only nodded.

Serving dishes were kept in motion in
a circle around the table, and Emily soon found herself with a pile
of food that was mostly white: white potatoes, white bread, white
gravy. The only color came from a pink slice of ham and the beans.
The meat was dry and tough, the beans boiled to a pale, sickly
green.

Luke pushed around his piece of ham
with a noticeable lack of interest. Cora gobbled her food as if she
feared it being taken from her, and Rose busied herself by seeing
how many string beans she could stack on the tines of her fork. No
one told the girl that playing with one’s food, especially at her
age, was not acceptable, and only two hours a wife, Emily didn’t
feel it was her place to correct her yet.

She cut her own leathery meat into
small, chewable pieces and dabbed them in the gravy to give them
some moisture. The meal was ruined and she knew it was her fault.
She’d made them late—she’d made them wait.

But her guilt was short-lived. Cora
interrupted her feeding long enough to comment, “Well, at least the
ham is still good. I was afraid it would be overcooked.”

Dear God, this was awkward, Emily
thought. She took a bite of bread and did her best to hide her
surprise over the taste of the butter. It looked all right, but it
had a stale, rancid taste. No one made pleasant small talk, such as
asking about her trip, or for that matter, anything else about her.
She was an outsider among them, and apparently was destined to
remain so, at least for the time being. They showed no curiosity at
all. Outright prying would be rude, but a little interest on Luke’s
part would be welcome. He simply kept his eyes on his plate. Didn’t
he want to know something about his new wife? She certainly wanted
to know about him, more than she’d learned from his letters to her
sister. Little things, like how much cream did he like in his
coffee, or did he like to dance? For a moment, it seemed that it
was just the two of them sitting there in uncomfortable silence.
Then she remembered that they were not alone, and that it was rude
to ignore the others at the table.

The ability to make pleasant small
talk was a basic and vital social necessity. Feeling much less
confident than she was willing to show, she plunged ahead into
polite dinner conversation. “The landscape in Oregon is
breathtaking. I was amazed by the change from near-desert at The
Dalles to the lush vegetation here. Have you always lived here,
Mrs. Hayward?”

Cora sopped up some white gravy on her
plate with a piece of white bread. In her reddened hand the bread
looked like a handkerchief. She answered as she chewed, and Emily
had a passing glance of partially masticated food. “I came out here
in ’60 with my husband. We left out of St. Joe and followed the
Oregon Trail.”

Sorry that she’d asked, Emily forged
on anyway. “Goodness, what an exciting trip that must have
been.”

The other woman shook her head and
waved off the suggestion as she chewed. “It was a blame fool idea
my man had. We had perfectly good farmland in Missouri but he got
some notion that he wanted to come out here. He came into the
kitchen one day and said, ‘Pack up, Cora, we’re going to Oregon!’
And just like that, I had to go. We went through every kind of
weather God put on this earth, and I had to dump half of my
belongings on the trail. Every time we crossed a wide river or
climbed a mountain, there went a chair, or a dresser, or a
bedstead.”

Emily glanced around the table, amazed
by the force of Cora’s oratory. Luke looked as if he’d heard it all
before and more times than he wanted, but Rose jumped
in.

“
Grammy, tell about how the
ox got sick and died,” she urged, her face animated, “and got all
bloated up with maggots because the weather was too
hot—”

“
Rose, for God’s sake—” Luke
began, but Emily, horrified by the girl’s suggestion and her dearth
of table manners, interrupted.

“
Young lady, that is not
appropriate table conversation! In fact, it’s not proper
conversation at all. It is also not proper to create artistic
arrangements of your food.” She indicated the beans stacked on the
fork.

Rose dropped her gaze to her lap, a
scowl wrinkling her face. “I don’t like beans,” she
mumbled.

“
Then leave them on your
plate.”

“
Grammy says I have to eat
everything on it.”

“
But you’re
not
eating
them.”

Rose’s chin began to quiver, and Emily
could have bitten her own tongue. She didn’t know what had come
over her. Maybe it was fatigue from her trip, or the hard,
assessing gleam in Cora’s eyes every time she looked at her. Rose
gave Emily a wounded glance from beneath her lashes, then suddenly
jumped up and ran from the table, sobbing. Her thunderous footsteps
were heard on the stairs and a moment later, a door slammed
overhead.

Aghast at her own behavior, Emily’s
gaze bounced from Luke to Cora and back again.

“
Well! Is that how things
are going to be around here now?” Cora demanded. “Luke, are you
going to let this woman talk to Rose that way?”

“
Oh, dear, I’m so sorry!”
Emily put her napkin by her plate and began to push her chair out.
“I’ll go to her—”

Luke stretched his hand across the
table toward hers as if to stop her. His expression showed no
anger, only weariness. “No, let her sit up there for a while. She
has a lot to get used to. We’ll just give her some
time.”

Stricken to the heart, Emily repeated,
“I truly am sorry. I didn’t mean to upset her so. I guess I’m not
used to hearing stories about dead oxen and—and so on.”

“
Oh, boo-hoo! Doesn’t
anything die in Chicago?” Cora snapped. She glared at Emily with
her hard blue eyes.

Emily paused a moment before
answering. “Yes, Mrs. Hayward. My sister died,” she reminded her.
“And my parents before her. In fact, I have no family left at all.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.”

~~*~*~*~~

Mrs. Becker?
Hah! Cora Hayward sat in the darkened parlor, her
jaw tight, her slippered foot pushing the rocker in which she sat
at a brisk pace. She let her gaze follow the line of the furniture
and Belinda’s keepsakes, still on prominent display. Her sewing
basket sat in the corner, its lid opened to display her
gold-handled embroidery scissors, her sterling silver thimble, and
the last piece of stitchery she had been working before she died.
The linen sat there, folded neatly, half-finished, and looked as if
Belinda might walk in any moment to take it up again. Cora herself
had no patience for the kind of fine needlework that her daughter
had done—life was too hard and too busy for that kind of froufrou
or gewgaw.
Fancy
was good for people who had nothing better to do. Get the job
done and move on to the next, that was what Cora did.

And they’d been getting on well enough
here, she and Rose. Her granddaughter almost made her forget that
horrible night that Belinda had died, thanks to Luke Becker. If it
hadn’t been for him—

But they’d managed just fine here at
the farm. Then Luke had to bring in Miss Fancy Manners and stir up
everything. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done that. Whenever
Cora thought she had things in place, Luke came along to upset the
applecart. She’d wanted Belinda to marry that doctor’s boy, Bradley
Tilson. He’d worked on one of the neighboring farms that summer all
those years gone now. But no, Luke Becker, the wildest boy in town,
had sweet-talked her and run Bradley off. Oh, Belinda had defended
Luke and told Cora that she was wrong, but Cora knew better. Those
Beckers were all alike, living down in that shack by the river,
their father no better than the drunken logger that he’d once been,
their mother nothing but a foolish, browbeaten female. Belinda
could have had a soft life in Portland married to a doctor, because
Bradley was studying medicine too. Instead, she’d had to marry Luke
and end up here.

Cora looked around the room. Well, it
wasn’t a bad house. Luke had done better than she’d expected. She
had to admit that he worked hard, too. But she knew her girl had
never been happy here, no sir, never. Cora had visited often enough
to know. She’d tried to get Belinda to take Rose and come home.
When she finally had, it was too late. Too late.

So now Cora had Emily Cannon to deal
with, in a house that Cora had come to think of as her own. Luke
claimed Rose needed a mother—well, what was she, the girl’s own
flesh and blood, if not a mother? Better her than a stranger from
Chicago with a lot of blame fool ideas about how people ought to
act and talk and eat and dress. She’d already made trouble and this
was only her first night under this roof.

Cora hoisted her considerable bulk
from the chair and adjusted the bun on her head. If the new Mrs.
Becker thought that Cora was just going to roll over and play dead,
she had another thing coming.

~~*~*~*~~

Luke lay in his bed in the darkness,
his body deep in the feather tick. The clouds had finally begun to
break up and the moon cut a long white slash across the
quilt.

God, what a lousy damned day this had
been. He was dead tired but sleep wouldn’t come to him. He’d tossed
and turned so much the bedding was wadded into a lump. Tension
wound itself around the Becker house like fence wire pulled tight,
and he felt it.

Rose had closed herself in her room
for the rest of the evening. Eventually, he tapped on her door,
carrying a glass of milk and a lopsided sandwich that he’d made.
But his girl wouldn’t answer him, so he left the food outside her
room. When he came up to bed, he noticed it was gone.

Emily, his wife—hah, that was a sorry
kind of joke, wasn’t it? He linked his hands under his head and
stared at the darkened ceiling. She’d also stayed in her room after
dinner. He’d already asked himself a dozen times tonight if he’d
only made things worse by marrying her. And he got no answer. That
tall, skinny drink of water with her black clothes, stiff ways, and
city-bred notions—he was probably asking too much of them all in
bringing her here.

Still, she had to deal with Cora. Even
Alyssa, if she had come, wouldn’t have known about her until she
arrived. He hadn’t figured out a way to tell her about his
scolding, domineering mother-in-law. So if Emily was guilty of
trying to fool him, he supposed he was equally guilty of keeping
Rose’s grandmother a secret.

When Belinda died, he’d been so
wrapped up in his grief, he was glad to see Cora move in. After
all, what did he know about cooking and washing and keeping house?
Rose had been too young to shoulder that much responsibility and
stay in school. To Luke’s way of thinking, educating his daughter
had been more important than turning her into a housekeeper, and he
still felt that way. It hadn’t been easy, though. He’d taken on the
job of tending Cora’s property as well as his own. Her fields lay
fallow but he saw to the upkeep of the house and outbuildings. And
after a while he’d begun to chafe under her carping and domination,
until his nerves felt as if they’d been buffed with
sandpaper.

Whenever a disagreement
arose between him and Cora, she’d threatened to move out. To keep
the peace and a stable home for Rose, he would cave in like the
Three Pigs’s straw house. Every time he did, she became a little
more bossy, a bit more entrenched. These days, he got the
impression that Cora thought this was
her
home and Rose her own daughter,
and he was merely the one who put food on the table.

Sometimes he wondered why all the good
things in his life had been stripped away, one by one, leaving him
a nearly empty husk. Damn it, he’d changed his ways—he wasn’t a
no-account, shiftless fool that many had once believed. Didn’t that
count for something? Didn’t he deserve a little happiness? He had
but one true joy in his life, and that was Rose. The day she was
born, she’d made a man of him, even more than Belinda
had.

Just before he closed his eyes, he
glanced at the dim silhouette of the oval-framed photograph on the
dresser, the one of him and Belinda, two scared kids just starting
out. If only they’d had more time together. He stretched out a hand
to the other side of the bed and closed it around the emptiness.
Three years she’d been gone and he still missed her every single
day.

He wasn’t a scared kid any longer. He
was just worn to his soul from the bickering and the
loneliness.

CHAPTER THREE

Despite the stressful events of the
day, sheer exhaustion had claimed Emily, and she’d fallen into a
deep and dreamless sleep. She woke early with a renewed sense of
purpose and hope. Even though it was still overcast, she saw this
Saturday morning as a fresh day and she was determined to make a
fresh start.

In the hours following dinner, she’d
sat in the rocker in her room, her big shawl wrapped around her.
Though self-pity was a quality she frowned upon and warned her
students away from, she had come perilously close to indulging
herself last night. So many things had happened over which she had
no control, and it seemed she had come to the end of a long road to
find not a reward, but yet another trial. Briefly, her mind had
even strayed to the memory of her real father, Captain Adam Gray.
She didn’t often think of him, but last night he’d come to her
thoughts. She really couldn’t remember his face anymore—she’d been
just six years old when a November storm on Lake Superior claimed
his ship. Mostly she recalled that he’d seemed as tall as a mast
and had been light-haired. And he’d brought her the most dazzling
gifts from other ports. Then he simply stopped coming home and her
mother had told her that he’d gone to heaven.