"He's good with horses," Molly said, coming to stand beside her. Has a gift for it. Margaret used to say he could whisper the wildness right out of them. Margaret, always Margaret, the ghost that haunted every room, every conversation. Clara had found evidence of her predecessor everywhere.
A forgotten hairpin under the bureau. Recipes written in a flowing hand tucked into the cookbook. A half-finished letter to a cousin in Texas still sitting in the desk drawer. The whole house was a monument to a dead woman's memory. She was beautiful, wasn't she?
Clara said, not really asking. She'd seen the photograph on the mantle, the delicate features and laughing eyes captured forever in sepia tones. Inside and out, Molly confirmed. Never knew her to say an unkind word about anyone. She had a way of making everyone feel special, like they were the most important person in the world when she talked to them.
Everything Clara wasn't. She was too tall, too sharp tonged, too educated, too eastern. She'd never had that easy way with people that seemed to come naturally to women like Margaret. She'd always been the one standing at the edge of gatherings, book in hand, watching others dance and laugh and fall in love. "You're not trying to be her, are you?" Molly asked, and there was something almost kind in her voice.
"How could I? I don't even know who I'm supposed to be here. Not a wife, certainly. Not a mother. I'm a placeholder, Mrs. O'Brien.
A warm body to satisfy the bank and the town gossips. Molly was quiet for a moment, then said, "You know, when Margaret first came here, she didn't know how to do anything. Couldn't cook, couldn't sew, couldn't tell a chicken from a rooster. She'd grown up in town. Her father was a shopkeeper.
First time she tried to milk a cow, she got kicked so hard she had a bruise for 3 weeks." Clara turned to look at the older woman, surprised. The perfect Margaret had been imperfect once. My point is, Molly continued, everyone has to start somewhere. Even saints were sinners once. Before Clara could respond, Sophie burst through the back door.
Her face streaked with tears and dirt. Papa's horse threw him. He's hurt. Clara's heart stopped. She was running before she consciously decided to move, following Sophie's frantic figure toward the corral.
She could see a crowd gathering, the ranch hands who'd been working nearby, all clustered around something on the ground. Ethan was sitting up when she reached him, blood streaming from a gash above his left eye. His shirt was torn and she could see scrapes along his ribs where he'd hit the ground. "I'm fine," he was saying to Tom, his foreman. "Just got careless." "You're bleeding," Clara said, dropping to her knees beside him without thinking.
She pulled her handkerchief from her pocket, pressing it against the cut. "And you might have a concussion. Can you see straight? How many fingers am I holding up?" I said, "I'm fine," he growled, trying to pull away, but she caught his chin with her free hand, forcing him to look at her. "How many fingers?" Their eyes met, and for a moment, the rest of the world fell away.