The Bride of Willow Creek(109)

For ten years Angie had waited for her life to begin. She had believed life couldn’t begin for her until after she divorced Sam, but she had been wrong. Blinking back tears, gazing at her sleeping daughters, she understood that her life had begun when she stepped off the train at the Willow Creek depot.



They had a picnic for supper, eating donated food in the girls’ bedroom. Afterward, Sam delighted everyone by telling a bedtime story about a mother and father and two little girls who were accident prone. Someone in the family was always swathed in bandages.

“Like us,” Daisy said, clapping her hands.

“Was the oldest little girl very very brave?” Lucy asked.

“Very brave,” Sam said gruffly. “One day she fell down and skinned her knee to the bone. It hurt badly, but she just waved a hand and said, Pish, and carried on.”

Angie hid a smile. “She said pish?”

“That’s what she said. Pish.”

Daisy and Lucy giggled and shouted “Pish!” over and over until they were all laughing. When it came time for goodnight kisses, the girls held out their arms to Angie, too, as if they always had. She kissed them both, her fingertips lingering on soft smooth cheeks, and she felt like crying.

At the doorway, she looked back into the room. “Daisy? Will you feel safe without a lamp in the sink? Your papa and I will be just outside your door.”

Daisy yawned, immediately sleepy from the nighttime dose of laudanum. “I think so.”

Angie blew them another kiss and quietly closed the door.

“I saw a couple of beer bottles in the icebox,” Sam said. “Do you want one?”

“Thank you.” She would have liked to go outside and sit on the stoop as they always did, but Molly’s house had only two steps and besides, the odor of ash was unpleasantly strong. They sat at Molly’s table, and Angie smiled at the old faded oilcloth, remembering Molly’s diamonds spread across it. “What’s this?” she asked when Sam slid an envelope toward her.

“It’s two thousand dollars.” He rolled the beer bottle between his fingertips. “That should keep you comfortably during the year you’re waiting for the divorce to be final.”

Now it was real. But her life felt as if it were ending rather than beginning.

“I wish I could give you more.”

“No, no,” she whispered. “This is plenty.”

Sam cleared his throat and raised his head. “I have a favor to ask. Will you stay until after Daisy’s operation? I think it would comfort her and help her through the ordeal. And it’s only another two weeks.”

Now it was real. They were talking about her leaving.

“Some time ago I promised Daisy I’d be with her for the operation. If you hadn’t said something, I would have asked your permission to stay until it’s over.”

“Asked my. . . ?” He shook his head and rested his bandaged hands on the tabletop. After a lengthy silence, he drew a breath. “We’ll take the train to Colorado Springs. Stay in a hotel near the hospital.”

“Did you decide to allow the Govenors to be there during Daisy’s surgery?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “I’d be happy never to see Herb and Winnie Govenor again.”

“Do you think that’s what Laura would have wanted?” Angie asked gently. “You said yourself that she hated being estranged from her parents.”

“I can tell you this. If Herb and Winnie had won custody, they sure as hell wouldn’t have allowed me to see my daughters!”

“That would have been wrong.”

“Damned straight it would have.”

She let his words hang on the night air. He wouldn’t like it, he’d hate it in fact, but in the end, Sam Holland would do the right thing. Angie would have staked her life on that.

They sat in discomfort and quiet, the good mood of the bedroom picnic behind them.

“Are you still planning to move to Denver?” Angie asked finally.

He slammed the beer bottle on the table hard enough that the reverberation must have hurt his injured hands, then headed for the back door. When he didn’t see his favorite hat on the hooks, he swore, then pushed one of the donated hats on his head.

“I’m going to the Gold Slipper. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Angie sat at the table until very late, remembering everything that had happened since she had arrived in Willow Creek. The tears and the laughter. The disappointments and the joys. Eventually she dropped her head into her bandaged hands.

She loved him. Loved him as deeply as she had known she could way back when she had first met him. She loved the look of him and the sound of his voice. Loved the gentleness in his gaze when he smiled at his daughters. She loved him for meeting life head on, for his thoughtfulness and dependability. She loved it that he could make her laugh. She even loved his stubborn, hard-to-understand sense of personal honor.