The Bridal Veil Read Free

and
skirt. She couldn’t leave her trunk. Everything was in there—her
only family photograph, Luke’s letters, her mother’s wedding gown.
The veil.
    Luke lifted his head and scanned the
plank sidewalks along the stores. Spotting a group of boys playing
mumblety-peg, he called to one of them. “You, Jimmy! Jimmy Edwards!
I’ll give you a quarter to come down here and watch this trunk
until I come back.”
    “ You can’t mean to leave it
out here in the pouring rain.”
    Luke heaved another sigh. “They can
drag it over there.” He pointed to a lean-to next to the dock that
sheltered firewood.
    The boy scrambled down the muddy path
to the dock with his friends following close behind, and the fine
points of the arrangement were worked out.
    “ All right,” Luke said to
her. “Let’s go.”
    When Emily last glimpsed her
belongings, they were surrounded by boys with knives, the blades
falling perilously close as they took up their game
again.
    ~~*~*~*~~
    Luke Becker eyed the woman sitting
across the table from him in Fairdale Sandwich Shoppe. Her spine
was as straight as a rake handle, and her back never touched the
slats of her chair. She stirred her tea with slow, precise turns of
a spoon that didn’t even clink against the rim of the cup. For his
own part, he wished he could have taken her into the saloon and
ordered a glass and a bottle of whiskey instead of the coffee that
sat before him now, untouched.
    Every eye in the place was on him and
Miss Cannon. How could they miss a woman as tall as she was? There
wasn’t much that happened in Fairdale that went unnoticed, but she
seemed oblivious. Coming from a big city like Chicago, she probably
had no idea of how small-town minds and curiosities worked. He was
so put out by the turn of events, it was difficult for him to be
civil to her.
    What was he going to do about this
mess? It had been hard enough, deciding to advertise for a wife,
even though he had no intention of giving away his heart again. It
wasn’t really his to give, anyway.
    That hadn’t stopped the
women in Fairdale from trying to pair him off. It seemed that no
more than a month after Belinda’s death, two or three of the
unmarried females in town had begun inviting him to Sunday dinner.
He’d known them when he was still a single man, known them very well, but that had
been years earlier, and he’d been a carefree young buck back then.
The first year after he lost Belinda, he’d been drunk a lot of the
time, anyway, and he’d had no interest in their obvious
maneuvering. Eventually, he’d realized that Rose needed a mother,
someone besides her grandmother. But he hadn’t thought that any of
those women would be good to his girl. And that was his chief
concern.
    At first, he’d kept the
decision a secret from both Rose and Cora. God, especially Cora.
Then, after placing the advertisement in the Chicago Tribune , he’d come to town
every Saturday, looking for a reply. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen
Chicago. It just seemed that he’d stand a better chance of finding
a woman who knew nothing about his past, one who would help him get
a fresh start on life.
    Franny Eakins, who ran the general
store and was Fairdale’s first postmistress, had been none too
subtle with her probes into Luke’s interest in the mail. She was
also one of the women who’d pursued him these past three years.
She’d been so obvious and persistent in her flirting that he began
to hate going into her store.
    Ordinarily, he didn’t get much mail—a
farm journal or two, maybe a seed catalog or an order from Burpee.
Then he had a few different replies to his ad. He pored over them,
and only one woman’s caught his eye, Alyssa Cannon’s. And when her
creamy envelopes had begun arriving for him, all bearing a fine
hand and the faint scent of roses, Franny’s eyes widened and her
dark, caterpillar brows inched up her forehead. Pretty soon she’d
started asking him some pointed questions, which Luke had done