Chapter 5  

Hannah was practically his neighbor.

Marcus wanted her closer still. He wanted her in his house, as his wife. But he hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell her that.

Yet.

But her moving to town seemed like progress, if a man measured progress at the speed of an elderly gout-riddled tortoise.

Or if a man was an idiot.

She walked the length of Main Street at ten minutes after four every afternoon on her way home from school, right past the bank window.

Mark knew because he was newly in the habit of going for coffee at the diner at exactly ten minutes after four.

Even now he was standing near the bank window, watching down the street. If he was attentive—and he was—he could see her coming out of the schoolhouse at the far end of town. The school was set apart just a bit, and there was a livery stable that blocked that end of town, but Hannah was visible for about three seconds as she walked down the steps. Then she vanished behind the livery and was too close to be visible as she walked along the bank’s side of the street.

But he knew she was coming.

He had just enough time to get his coat on and step outside casually just as she came up to the bank.

“Marcus, going for coffee?”

“I am. How was school?” Why didn’t he ask her to join him for coffee? Why didn’t he tell her he’d like her to stay and have dinner with him? Why didn’t he tell her everyone in the whole town called him Mark and had for years? Why didn’t he stop being such a half-wit?

It had taken him two weeks to come up with “How was school?”

“We had two boys out today with the measles. I think the rest of the students have had it before, so . . .” Hannah always had a story, told in her quiet way. Which was good because it required no talking from Mark’s tied tongue. They walked nearly one full block together. The best two minutes of Mark’s day.

Then he’d get to the diner door and tell her good-bye and turn in.

One of these days he’d ask her to stay with him, join him for coffee. Except the coffee was so awful it would be an offense to lure Hannah into drinking a cup.

They reached the diner. “Good-bye, Hannah.”

“Good-bye, Marcus.” Hannah didn’t even pause. She took a few more steps, turned, and went down the alley to reach the back door to the diner, which led to a stairway up to her room.

And Mark had to go into the diner and drink that foul-tasting burnt mess they called coffee. It was none too good any time, and by this time of day it was nothing but black sludge and bitter dregs. Not unlike Mark’s life. He shuddered through every sip, gulping it fast, like bitter medicine, then carefully did it all over again the next day.

He went back to the bank, and his father was standing just inside with his pocket watch open. When Mark came in, Father snapped the lid shut on the watch. “Two minutes for the walk. Two minutes for the coffee. One minute to walk back. Five minutes of your life, every day.” Shaking his head, Father added, “Why don’t you just ask the girl out to dinner, for heaven’s sake?”

Mark shrugged out of his coat. He’d pretended that he didn’t know what Father meant the first time they’d had this talk, and now he was beyond pretense. “She barely knows I’m alive. She only glances at me; she never even slows down. It’s like she can’t wait to get our little walk over with. No, that’s not right—she doesn’t walk faster, either. She doesn’t even care enough about me to dislike me. She’d pay more attention if a stray dog trotted beside her.”

“Well, you could ask her to put a collar around your neck. Buckling it would slow her up a bit.” Father laughed.

“Mark, what is wrong with you?”

Wincing, Mark looked past his father. “Ma, I didn’t see you there.”

“You’re clearly not up to the task of asking that woman to spend time with you,” she said.

Ma was small and round. She always wore beautiful dresses and had her white hair coiled neatly atop her head. She had a pleasant smile and the temperament of a steaming locomotive that would run you right over if you didn’t get out of her way.

“I declare it’s time someone stepped in,” she said.

Mark felt his face heating up. He knew it would be flaming red in moments. His normal reaction was to run and find a private place until his head turned back to a normal color, but not today—not with his mother saying such a thing.

“You wouldn’t say anything, would you?” Mark stood right in his mother’s way as if he’d block her from leaving. He loved his ma dearly, but right now he was tempted to drag her home and lock her in the attic, as he would any mad relative. If he had an attic.

His mother of course had no fear of him, which was a terrible shame.

“I would never embarrass you, Mark.” She tapped him on one of his red cheeks.

“It’s just that she’s been through so much, with Charlie dying and all.” Charlie was the boy Hannah had intended to marry, one of Mark’s best friends. Charlie’s death had been such a shock to all of them. Mark wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching Hannah as she was grieving his loss. But that had been nearly six years ago now. “Then her ma was ill, and then her ma died. And her brothers needed her after her ma’s death.”

“Well, they certainly don’t need her anymore, now that Essie is caring for them.”

“But I can see how being dumped in that attic room affected her. She needs time to get over the shock. I’m waiting until she’s adjusted.”

Ma snorted. “The earlier reasons may be good ones, but having to live over the diner isn’t shocking enough to stop a reasonable man.”

“Implying I’m not reasonable?” Mark, who’d excelled in math and balanced account books for a living, was the very definition of reasonable.

“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying it out loud, straight to your face that you, a man I’m proud to call my son, one of the finest, smartest, most handsome young men imaginable, are ridiculous when it comes to Hannah, and you know it.”

He’d been enjoying her kind words until she said “most handsome.” That was his mother’s love affecting her eyesight.

Ma wasn’t done. “Leaving her in that room to get over her shock is the very opposite of reasonable. She’s a lovely woman living alone in a tiny room. It’s probably cold up there. It’s probably tainted from years of fumes from Rosella’s miserable cooking. It might be infested with vermin. It might even be a firetrap.”

Ma was making things up now, but she was good at it. Now there was frozen in Mark’s mind a vision of Hannah, cold, dodging rats, dying in flames. Not fair.

“I just want to give her a bit more time.” In truth, he needed to give himself a bit more time. But he’d speak to Hannah of personal things soon. He just had to work up the nerve. “Promise me you won’t meddle.”

“Now, Mark, you know I’d never do anything to cause you unhappiness.”

He gave a sigh of relief. She patted his fiery cheek and swept around him, moving very fast for an older woman.

Marcus considered himself a bright man, but for some reason it didn’t occur to him until he was lying in bed that night that, honestly, his mother’s promise was incredibly vague.