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