Page 3 of Mail Order Moose

When David returned, he set the logs by the stove and did not remark on her belongings, though his eyes touched the shelf and warmed.

“Morning comes early here,” he said. “But not so early you need to meet it before you’re ready.”

Ella nodded. She could hear Lula in her mind, bold as brass, saying that husbands ought to be handled firmly from the start. Ella did not feel firm. She felt tired and raw and strange in her own skin. But as David lowered the lamp and turned his back so she could prepare for bed, she felt something else too.

Not safety. Not yet.

But the possibility of it.

And in a place as far from Beckham as Yeti, Alaska, the possibility seemed like a great deal.

Chapter Two

Ella woke before David did, though she did not know how long she had been awake before she opened her eyes. The cabin was dim and gray with morning, the kind of gray that made the walls seem farther away than they had been by lamplight. For a moment, she lay still beneath the blanket, listening. David’s breathing came slow and even from the pallet near the stove. The fire had settled low, but not out.

She remembered where she was before fear could make a question of it. David Sanders’s cabin. Her husband’s cabin. Her cabin now, too, though the thought didn’t feel quite right.

Carefully, so the bed would not creak, she pushed back the blanket and set her feet on the cold floor. The first thing she did was make the bed. Not because anyone had told her to, and not because David would expect it. She needed order in her life, and making the bed provided that order.

After that, she stood in the center of the cabin and began to count.

Not aloud. Never aloud. She counted with her eyes and placed each number where it belonged inside her mind. Half a sack of flour, less than she would have liked if the weather turned bad. One crock of beans, nearly full. Enough coffee for perhaps three weeks if David drank one cup in the morning and one at supper, less if he carried some to the mill. Salt. Pepper. A twist of dried herbs tied in brown paper. Two onions beginning to soften near the top. Six potatoes in a crate beneath the table, one already sprouting.

She opened the stove door and found the coals still red beneath the ash. Good. That meant breakfast could be made without wasting kindling. She hated waste. The wood stacked beside the stove would last the morning but not the evening. The bucket beneath the washstand was half full. The towel near it had dried stiff. His shirt, folded on the chair by the wall, needed mending at one cuff and laundering at the collar. Her own clothes from the journey needed washing more urgently than that, but David would go to work in his shirt today, and the tear would worsen if it waited.

Order was not only where things sat. Order was knowing what must be done first so nothing else became harder.

She put on her dress and braided her hair with quick, practiced fingers. By the time David stirred, she had coaxed the fire higher, set water to warm, sliced the bad spot from an onion, and decided that potatoes would stretch the beans better than flour would. Flour could be bread. Bread could become supper, breakfast, or a quick meal to eat between chopping down trees. Potatoes were only potatoes, and sprouted ones were best used before they stopped being food and became plants.

David pushed himself up on one elbow and blinked toward the stove. His hair was flattened on one side, and the sight of it startled Ella so badly that she looked away at once. Husbands, it seemed, woke up looking less like strangers and more like ordinary men.

“You’re up early,” he said, his voice rough from sleep.

Ella lifted one shoulder. “There were things to do.”

He looked around the cabin then, not quickly enough to make her feel inspected, but with the slow surprise of a man recognizing his own home after someone had made it more sensible. The kettle was nearer the stove instead of tucked behind the flour sack. The tin cups were stacked where a hand could reach them without moving the plates. His work gloves, which had been on the table the night before, now hung from the peg by the door where the damp would not touch the breadboard.

“I can find my coffee,” he said after a moment.

She froze with the knife in her hand. “Was it wrong?” She knew some people hated change, and though the changes were small, she now worried she shouldn’t have made them.

“No.” David sat up fully and reached for his boots. “That’s the thing. It’s where it should have been all along.”

Ella lowered her gaze to the onion. “It was in the way of the plates.”

“It was,” he agreed.

She did not know how to respond to that, so she put the onion into the pan.

Breakfast was plain, but it came together without hurry. David washed at the basin while she stirred potatoes and beans together with the last of the lard. When he reached for his work shirt, she noticed his fingers pause at the torn cuff.

“I can mend that tonight,” she said.

He glanced at her, surprised. “I didn’t ask.”

“It will tear more if you wear it twice.”

“It will,” he said.