She looked at him.
“And if I’m simply afraid you’ll stop wanting me?”
Harlan’s expression softened.
He touched her hand.
“May I answer badly?”
“You usually do.”
“I wanted you when you were terrified, furious, half frozen, and wearing a corset that made you breathe like a dying mule.”
Josephine stared.
“You brought back the mule?”
“I warned you the answer would be bad.”
She laughed so hard she sat down.
Harlan smiled.
Then he knelt.
“I want you now.”
Josephine touched his beard.
“That answer was better.”
“I’m learning.”
They never had biological children.
For several years, Josephine grieved that quietly.
Then life brought children anyway.
A mining accident killed a widower named Thomas Reed, leaving his two daughters without relatives willing to travel west.
Josephine knew the girls from school.
Elsie was eleven.
Rose was six.
Harlan found Josephine sitting at the kitchen table after receiving the news.
“What?”
“They need somewhere to go.”
He sat.
Josephine looked at him.
Neither needed to finish the conversation.
The girls came the following week.
At first, Elsie called Josephine Mrs. Creek.
Rose called Harlan Sir.
Six months later, Rose accidentally called him Papa.
Everyone froze.
Rose looked horrified.
Harlan simply continued cutting bread.
“You want jam?”
Rose nodded.
He passed it.
Nothing more.
That night Harlan cried in the barn.
Josephine found him.
She pretended not to notice until he was ready.
Two years later, Elsie called Josephine Mama.
Choice again.
Always choice.
The family grew around that principle.
When Elsie became seventeen, a young rancher proposed.
Harlan hated him instantly.
Josephine found this delightful.
“You said women choose.”
“They do.”
“So?”
“She chose badly.”
“Harlan.”
“He walks strangely.”
“That is your objection?”
“He looks unreliable.”
“You cannot judge reliability from walking.”
“I can.”
Josephine laughed.
The young man turned out to be decent.
Harlan never admitted it until the wedding.
Before the ceremony, he pulled Elsie aside.
“If you want to leave, say so.”
She smiled.
“I don’t.”
“At any point.”
“I know.”
“Even at the altar.”
“Harlan.”
“Especially at the altar.”
Elsie hugged him.
“You taught me.”
He swallowed.
Then nodded.
Rose never married.
She became a teacher at Eleanor Vale School.
People whispered.
Josephine did not.
One evening Rose asked, “Does it disappoint you?”
“What?”
“That I don’t want what Elsie has.”
Josephine looked up from sewing.
“No.”
“Really?”
“You have a life.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Then I fail to see the emergency.”
Rose smiled.
Josephine thought her mother would have approved.
Edwin Vale died when Josephine was forty-six.
A letter came from Missouri.
He had moved east after losing his remaining property and spent his final years living with a cousin.
Josephine sat with the unopened envelope for nearly an hour.
Harlan did not ask what she intended to do.
Eventually she opened it.
Inside was a short note written two months before Edwin’s death.