Hank his start near Amarillo.
They were halfway through the meal before Charlie got a word in to ask about his sister-in-law Agnes.
“She’ll be along,” Dolly scolded her husband as if no one would have remembered the reason they’d all been asked to dinner if Charlie hadn’t mentioned it. “We’ll be eating at midnight if we wait on her.”
Hank pushed food back and forth on his plate, feeling like the walls were closing in around him. He’d always hated dugouts. Everyone said they were warm and protected from the weather since they were built half into the ground, but he felt like he was half buried in them. Even through the cooking odors, he could smell damp earth.
When he stood, mumbling something about taking care of his horse, no one in the room noticed him leave. He felt cheated. Though he had no hope of finding a bride, he had thought Dolly could cook. He would have had a better meal at the café by the train station.
Once outside, he stepped into the blackness between the two small windows and took a deep breath, wishing he could ride back to town. Waiting on the platform for the midnight train north would be better than going back inside. But if he just left, it would be an insult to both Charlie and the invisible Agnes. There was an unwritten law that said the girl, no matter how homely or dumb, had the right to turn away any man who came calling.
And he’d been dumb enough to come calling, even if it was wrapped in a dinner invitation.
He knew he’d be leaving alone. Both men inside were better looking, better dressed, and probably had more money than him. Potter said he could dance and was a crack shot. Hank had never shot at anything he couldn’t eat. William Randell bragged about building a two-story house in town and said he was up for a promotion at the bank. Potter swore he’d be in the cream of Fort Worth society in five years. They were dueling braggarts and Hank wanted no part of it.
“It’s bad in there, isn’t it?” a voice whispered from the blackness on the other side of the window.
Hank jerked away, almost knocking himself out on the low-hanging roof. He had no doubt the voice belonged to the missing sister, but she’d scared a year off his life when she spoke. In the night, he couldn’t make out even an outline of her. “Yep,” was all he could think to say.
“Dolly and Charlie Ray mean to marry me off,” she whispered after a long silence. “Dolly’s been planning it all day.”
He wasn’t sure if she talked to him or herself. “You Agnes?”
Dumb question, he thought. Who else would be out here this time of night?
“Yep,” she echoed him, but without the accent it didn’t sound natural. “I’m the old maid sister who’s being passed around. If I don’t get married here, I’m due in Austin at my oldest sister’s place next month. Kind of like a traveling sideshow. Dress me up and put an apple in my mouth.”
Hank couldn’t stop the laugh. “I’m sorry,” he quickly added. “I never gave much thought to the other side of this game.”
“Sorry for what? For laughing or for me?”
“Both, I guess.”
“My poppa sent me west before I rotted on the vine in Chicago. You see, I’m the last of five girls. The only one not claimed. As soon as I’m married, my poppa plans to take another wife. There’s not room in the little apartment behind his shop for two women. I’m delaying his plan. I’m as much in the way in my home as I am here.”
Hank smiled. He knew how she felt. “The runt of the litter, last to be picked,” he mumbled, then thought he might have offended her.
Before he could say he was sorry again, she laughed. “That’s right. I’m only half the woman my sister is.”
Hank glanced in the window and watched Dolly waddle past. He couldn’t say anything without insulting Charlie’s wife so he changed the subject. “Don’t you want to get married?”
“Not really. Do you?”
“No,” he said honestly. “I like living alone. Running on my own clock.”
“Me too.”
His eyes had adjusted to the night enough that he could make out her shadow. She appeared short, like her sister, but not as round.
“But why not marry? For a woman, it seems like the best life.” He couldn’t help but add, “Unless you hate the cooking and cleaning part?”
The shadow lifted her head with a snap. “Women do more than cook and clean.”
He’d said the wrong thing. She couldn’t even see how homely he was and she was still rejecting him. “I know, but it helps if they can cook a little.”
Agnes laughed suddenly and he liked the sound.
“You’ve been eating Dolly’s pot roast, haven’t you?”
“Trying to.” He wished she would step into the light. “What do you like to do…Agnes?” Her name stumbled off his tongue.
“Back home, I helped my father in his workshop. He was a gunsmith. Sold the best weapons in the state and repaired the others.”
“You liked working in his shop?”
“No,” she answered. “I liked repairing guns in the back. I wish I’d been born a man. I’d love working on my own little workbench all day and coming home to a hot meal. It’s always appeared to me that a wife was more an unpaid servant than a partner. I’d hate that, so I don’t see much point to marriage. If I could, I’d open my own repair shop, but I have no seed money and none of my family thinks it would be a respectable kind of place for a woman to have. So, I’m cursed to circle my sisters’ houses looking for a husband.”
Hank leaned against the building. He could hear Dolly’s voice asking if anyone wanted more pie, but he didn’t glance toward the window to see if any victims had volunteered.
“Would you marry someone if it was a true partnership? Each taking care of himself, taking turns with shared duties. Each supporting the other in whatever work.”
“No one bossing the other, or controlling?” She leaned closer, almost crossing into the light.
Hank had no idea where his thoughts were going, but for once he wasn’t talking to a woman about the weather, so he decided to keep talking. “Right. Just two partners sharing the same house. Both bring in what they can as far as money goes. Both respecting the other’s privacy.”
“No wifely duties? No children coming every year?”
Hank thought he knew what she was talking about. He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him and added, “None. They’d each have their own room, their own things, their own lives.” He’d seen men who ordered their wife around as if she were a slave. On the other side, he had watched a few women bossing their man in the same tone. In truth, he couldn’t remember ever seeing a couple stand as equals.
The one memory he had of his mother circled among his thoughts, not quite substance but more than dream. A tall woman sitting by the window, ignoring all the world around her, including him. Long after she’d gone, Hank remembered asking his father why she’d left. His father had only mumbled that she didn’t want children. They’d never spoken of her again.
Hank glanced across the darkness, pushing the image aside, trying to understand the woman only a foot away.
They were both silent for a few minutes, then she whispered, “I’d marry like that. A partnership. In fact, I’d consider it heaven. But even if I found a man willing to follow those rules, what’s to make him keep his word? He could lock me in the house and beat me, and no one would stop him.”
“You’re the gunsmith, Agnes. You should be able to figure that one out. Ask for his guns as a promise. No man but a fool would stand in front of a barrel, even in the grip of a woman.”