“I’ll find a clerk to help us,” Martin says, and off he goes to find an employee to tally Kat’s choices.
I help Kat select a second doll so that her first one can have a friend, and some dresses for them and one of the doll-sized tea sets. We choose wooden beads with string and the wax crayons and a tablet of paper, and sets of children’s picture books and three jigsaw puzzles meant for older children, but which Kat is clearly interested in.
“She likes figuring them out,” Martin says of these, after he returns to us. “She’s good at those. You’ll see.”
Our last stop is a grocer’s, where I am able to get the things for the kitchen that Martin did not think to buy. Martin arranges for all our purchases to be delivered to the house. The day has been a stretch of satisfying hours so foreign it is almost as if I am watching another person’s day unfold. We leave the grocer’s and walk to the cable-car stop.
“Kat is tired,” Martin says, as the cable car clacks to a stop and people start getting off and on. “And all those deliveries are coming. You need to be there to receive them. Here you go.” He lifts Kat onto the open car and then holds out his arm so that I can board. I turn to face him once I’m standing on the car’s polished floorboards. Martin’s arm is outstretched; he is handing me the key to the house. Our house. I encircle my gloved hand around it.
“I’ve got details to see to before I leave tomorrow. I’ll be home later,” he says.
I nod, draw Kat toward me, and take a seat on one of the benches. The car clangs as it grasps the cable deep in the slot, and we begin to move forward and up. Martin turns from us and walks away. I watch him until he is gone from view.
Back at the house, Kat and I explore all the cupboards and closets, discovering a great many things the doctor and his family decided to leave behind. The china cabinet still holds a good supply of dishes and glassware, and the linens closet is half-full. I imagine the doctor’s wife had to choose just her most favorite items to take, perhaps only those things that had been given to them as wedding gifts. I wonder if Candace was given beautiful linens and dishes when she married Martin, and if she was, where are they? Did Martin abandon everything that was theirs when she died? Did he sell them to pay for the move from Los Angeles to San Francisco? I wonder how long it will be before I can ask him a personal question like that.
In the boys’ room I take off the toy soldier bed linens as we await the delivery of the new pink bedcover and linens we purchased at the Emporium.
“Do you want that extra bed in here?” I ask Kat, who is silently watching me. Kat looks at the second bed and then back at me. She slowly shakes her head.
“That’s what I would do, too. You’ll have more room for your new doll carriage in here if we dismantle it and take it upstairs. Shall we?”
With minimal help from Kat, I drag the frame, the posts, and finally the mattress upstairs to the empty maid’s room and lean them up against one of walls. We head back downstairs, and I make tea for us—sugar tea for Kat like my gram used to make—and we sip our drinks as we await the first of the deliveries and also Martin’s return.
The groceries arrive first, then the Emporium goods, and then the undergarments and corsets and hosiery from the ladies’ clothing store. The new clothes for Kat arrive last.
Dusk begins to fall and I am anxious for Martin’s return. I set about turning on the electric lights in the house, and then the gas fireplace in the sitting room, as the day’s warmth is leaving the house. As we wait, Kat and I sit by the fire and work on one of the puzzles she chose—a tableau of sketched butterflies of every shape and color. When darkness falls completely and Martin is still not home, I light the stove and place pork cutlets that I rubbed with butter and dried sage into a roasting pan alongside potatoes and carrots so that supper will be ready when he finally returns.
But he is still gone when the food is ready, and Kat is yawning. I fix her a plate, which she eats, and then I take her upstairs and draw her a warm bath, all the while expecting to hear Martin’s footfalls on the stairs. But I don’t. After her bath, I tuck Kat into bed.
I kiss her good night and close her door nearly all the way, but not quite, despite what Martin said the previous night.
Back downstairs I don’t know what else to do but sit in the dining room with our now-cold meal and wait.
When Martin finally arrives home, it is after nine o’clock and I have fallen asleep at the dining room table, slouched in my chair with my chin at my chest. I awaken to his touch on my arm as he says my name. I startle, nearly knocking over a goblet of water. Martin catches it. Relief mixed with anger races about inside me as Martin sits down in front of his cold supper.
“Where were you?” I say. “I was worried.”
“I told you,” he answers calmly. “I had details to take care of.”
“But . . . you were gone so long.”
“There were a lot of details.”
He doesn’t sound angry or defensive or even conciliatory. I can’t name the tone with which Martin is answering me.
“I was concerned. I didn’t know . . . I didn’t . . .” My voice drops away as the right words don’t come.
“Did you need something while I was out? Did all the deliveries arrive? Was anything amiss?”
“No. Everything is fine. Everything arrived. I put it all away. I made supper. I fed Kat and I put her to bed. And I waited for you.”
“Then what is wrong?”
He is looking at me with those eyes that still nearly take my breath away.
“Your supper is cold.”
“It’s easy enough to warm up, isn’t it?”
I stand to take our plates. Martin bends down to retrieve a newspaper from the satchel he placed by his chair leg.
Martin works as he eats, and I wonder if this is how he was with Candace the night before he left for a spell on the road, absorbed in his preparations. How did Candace sit through a meal like this one with their daughter already in bed and the scraping of tines on plates, the scratching of Martin’s pencil, and the rustling of a newspaper being the only sounds at the dinner table?
After five minutes of watching him work and eat, I break the silence.
“The pork tastes good, I trust?”
He looks up briefly, chewing a bite. “It does.”
His tone is sincere, but the next second he is back to his work.
I hesitate only a moment. “May I ask you a question?”
“What is it?”
“It’s about Candace. If you don’t mind.”
I thought he might glance up at the mention of his first wife’s name, but he does not. “Yes?”