Alice waited until Margery and the others had left, raising her head to mutter good-bye. She knew they would talk about her when they were gone but she didn’t care. Bennett wouldn’t miss her: he would be out with friends. Mr. Van Cleve would be late at the mine, as he was most nights, and Annie would be tutting about three dinners gone dry and shriveled in the bottom of the range.
Despite the companionship of the other women, she felt so lonely she could weep with the weight of it. She spent most of her time alone in the mountains and some days she talked more to her horse than any other living being. Where once it had offered her a welcome sense of freedom, now the vast expanses seemed only to emphasize her sense of isolation. She would turn up her collar against the cold, wedge her fingers into her gloves, with miles of flinted track in front of her and only the ache in her muscles to distract her. Sometimes she felt as if her face was set in stone, apart from when she finally stopped to deliver her books. When Jim Horner’s girls ran to her for hugs it was all she could do not to hold tight to them and let out an involuntary silent sob. She had never thought of herself as someone who needed physical contact, but night after night, yards away from Bennett’s sleeping body, she felt herself slowly turning to marble.
“Still here, huh?”
She jumped.
Fred Guisler had put his head around the door. “Just came to bring a new coffee pot. Marge said the old one had sprung a leak.”
Alice wiped at her eyes and gave him a bright smile. “Oh, yes! Go right ahead.”
He hesitated on the threshold. “Am I . . . disturbing something?”
“Not at all!” Her voice was forced, too cheery.
“I won’t be a minute.” He walked over to the side, replacing the metal coffee pot and checking the tin for supplies. He kept the women in coffee every week without so much as mentioning it, and brought in logs to keep the fire burning so that they could get warm between rounds. “Frederick Guisler,” Beth would announce every morning, smacking her lips at her first cup, “is a veritable saint.”
“Brought you all some apples too, thought you could take a couple each to work. You’ll be getting hungrier now the days are colder.” He pulled a bag from inside his overcoat and put them on the side. He was still wearing his work clothes, his boots hemmed by a layer of mud around the sole. Sometimes she would hear him outside as she arrived, talking to his young horses with a yip! And a “C’mon, now, smartypants, you can do better than that,” as if they were just as much his friends as the women in the cabin, or standing, arms crossed, beside some fancy horse-owner from Lexington, sucking his teeth as they discussed conformation and price. “These here are Rome Beauties. They ripen a little later than the rest.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I always like . . . to have something to look forward to.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“It’s nothing. You girls work hard . . . and don’t always get the credit you deserve.”
She thought he would leave then, but he hesitated in front of the desk, chewing the side of his lip. She lowered her book and waited.
“Alice? Are you . . . all right?” He spoke the words as if this was a question he had already rolled over in his head twenty, thirty times. “It’s just, well, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning, but you . . . you seem—well, you seem so much less happy than you did. I mean, when you first came.”
She felt her cheeks color. She wanted to say I’m fine but her mouth had dried and nothing would come.
He studied her face for a moment and then he walked slowly across to the shelves to the left of the front door. He scanned them, a nod of satisfaction escaping him when he found what he was looking for. He pulled a book from the shelf and brought it to her. “She’s a bit of a misfit, but I like the fire in her words. When I felt low, a few years back, I found some of these were . . . helpful.” He