He pulled out a white handkerchief and held it to his nose, like my presence might carry the plague.
Heated embarrassment bloomed across my skin, crawling up my neck in sharp, mortifying waves. I wasn’t what he’d imagined, and the look on his face was letting me knowlive, in front of a full audience, instead of through a letter weeks after the wedding.
This was the kind of story one of my friends would write me about in hushed tones, begging me to guesswhat happened next. But this wasn’t a letter. This was me. And I already knew the ending.
When I wrote home, I’d tell them Ealy was charming. That the house was made of marble. That I was lucky. I’d write it the way I’d practiced it.
But standing there on that platform, I knew better.
He was still rattled by the delay. I could see it in his eyes.My lateness disrupted the schedule.The engagement had unfolded out of order. It should have been, abeautiful womanarriving precisely on time. Agrand engagementunfolding precisely as planned. We were alike in that way. It was why I had agreed to be his bride from hundreds of miles away. Ealy did not forgive that sort of thing. Not easily.
The townspeople had started whispering. Pointing. Watching. I could feel their scrutiny gather and press into me. And Ealy, panic-stricken Ealy, only started walking faster, beads of sweat breaking across his upper lip.
Something else was going on here.
And it looked likeIwould be the last person to find out what it was.
OMELETTE
The bath, I would begrudgingly admit,wasdivine. The water was warm and thick with lavender oil, the kind that clung to your skin long after the steam cleared. The tub was deep enough to lose myself in, and for a few decadent minutes, I allowed the fantasy to bloom: I had arrived. This was it—the kind of life where things were soft and perfumed, where someone else boiled the water and love came in the form of silence and soap.
But even paradise feels odd when you’re the only one living in it.
The towels were too white. The silence too curated. Not even the bathwater seemed to ripple unless I moved. It was like being wrapped in satin-lined museum glass.
Once I was scrubbed to gleam, powdered, and poured into a silk gown that cinched my waist into submission, Ealy returned to take me on a tour.
He beamed like a boy at a school presentation as we crossed the threshold of his home—the only marble house in Carsondale, he told me proudly, as if it had grown there naturally. In truth, it looked like a baby’s first tooth: pale, sharp, and strangely out of place in the dry, red dirt of the West.
Inside, the house was just as grand. Silk curtains I suspected had never been drawn. Rugs imported from somewhere expensive. China so delicate it looked see-through. The whole house smelled faintly of lavender, lemon polish, and nothing at all.
I noticed the dining room first. The table was set for twelve,but not a single plate showed the faint trace of use—no scratches from a knife, no heat mark from a soup tureen. Pristine.
Looking around the kitchen, I thought of Lessie Mae at the boardinghouse. Her sleeves rolled. Her arms full. Baby Freddie Karol swaddled tight against her back while she kneaded bread with the same hands she’d used to catch him.
Ealy, meanwhile, had shifted into a monologue about efficiency, about how help should be quiet and skilled and preferably invisible.
“You know,” I said, tapping a finger thoughtfully against the marble countertop, “I met a young woman on my way here—Lessie Mae. She’s looking for work as a cook.”
Ealy, mid-preening, turned to me, adjusting his lapel. “Well—this is what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, already fidgeting. “You were late and, well… someone came. A lovely woman, a chef. Bertha. She was trained in France. Studied under… um… Jefferson’s people.”
“Ealy. I know you wrote several letters to women.”
He opened his mouth, no doubt ready with some fiction about mistaken identities or bulk postage. But he surprised me with the truth.
“No harm was meant,” he said quickly. “Women get cold feet, you see? Four of the seven declined me at the last minute. You can’t predict these things.”
I said nothing, mostly because I wasn’t sure which part to respond to.
“My brother didn’t understand my process,” he went on. “But you don’t become the richest man in Carsondale by putting all your eggs in one basket. Only three women were bold enough to come. Could’ve been less.”
“Bertha is one of the wives you sent for.” I ticked one finger.
“Yes. And—”
“And the other?”
“She hasn’t arrived. As of yet.”
