They were living in the hotel now. There was no denying that the girls had made it nice, and there was plenty of room. He’d taken the room farthest down the hall so he wouldn’t wake anyone with his coughing, or with his getting up to walk, either.
After coughing in a Valencia grove one day, he spit out the phlegm and stared at it. It was hard to tell, in the soft dirt, but that night in his room he had to spit in his white handkerchief, and it was unquestionably red. From then on he’d begun washing his own handkerchiefs, and drying them on a towel under his bed, but one day Ellie found one he hadn’t yet washed.
“What’s this?” she asked and he replied that he’d cut his hand and used it to staunch the cut, but she had always been good at recognizing mistruths and he had always been bad at telling them.
October was a slow month, with gusts of hot air blowing over dry hills. There was not much fruit to pick, though he did a fair amount of pruning, cutting the limbs from one whole grove of avocado trees down to their trunks, then spreading white paint over them to kill disease. The white trunks were like sculptures of unfinished men, the limbs stopped abruptly in the act of reaching out.
On the first day of November, he stopped into the post office and Bart Crandall, watching him, said, “Got something for you.”
Ansel thanked him and glanced at the letter and stepped out into the street without opening it because it was from Gilbert Dorado and bore the insignia of the Harvey House. His mind whirred but he kept his face expressionless on the way to the hotel and tucked the letter into his back pocket before he walked through the café door, almost deserted at this hour, though it smelled pleasantly of meat loaf and onions. Dr. Quigley was at the counter eating a slice of pie and Ellie was at work cleaning the counter. Quigley liked to come by at the end of the day for a slice of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee and Ellie never liked to finish her day at the café without putting a gleam to it all. Ansel nodded first at Quigley, then at Ellie and made his way to the stairs. He never sat down in a booth or at the counter when he was still wearing his picking clothes and smelling, as Neva put it, of “dirty sugar,” but it was more than that. He dreaded having a coughing attack in the restaurant with a customer present. Today this worked to his advantage—it permitted him to go directly upstairs and open the letter behind the closed bedroom door.
It was brief—even briefer than the one he’d sent. Gil had taken pains to write legibly, though, printing in block letters:
Estimado Anselmo,
I send my hellos to your family and youre so beautiful wife. New job for FH sends me every which way. It’s no busy but we are still working. The Scottish girl was very good worker but Mrs. Gore fire her when she turns up family way.
He read and reread and reread.
“Daddy?” Neva called. She knocked on the door and he heard the knob turn.
“Don’t come in,” he said. “I’m changing.”
She let go of the knob.
“Mama told me to come up and tell you to get presentable,” Neva said loudly. “She said Mr. McNamara’s coming to talk to you.”
“When?” he asked, sitting down on the bed and reading the last line of the letter again.
“She said hurry.”
“Okay,” he told Neva, but he sat holding the letter.
He read it one last time, searching for details that weren’t there, then folded it back into the envelope. Even on the second floor, the building smelled of meat loaf and onions. He looked around for a place to put the letter and couldn’t find one.
Feet were thudding up the stairs again—too fast to be Ellie, he guessed, but he stood up to unbutton his shirt and stuffed the letter in his pocket.
“Daddy!” Neva said again, knocking harder this time. “He’s here. And he’s all dressed up. Mama told me to get you right now!”
As he descended the stairs, Neva and Ellie were attending McNamara, but Ellie made her excuses and shepherded Neva out with her. Dr. Quigley had left, and his dishes had been cleared away. McNamara sat at a center table with an iced lemonade, and Ellie had left a cup of hot, honeyed lemon juice for Ansel, in case he began to cough. McNamara wore a linen suit with a seersucker vest and ivory shoes.
“Mr. McNamara,” Ansel said, extending his hand, and McNamara said to Ansel what he’d never said to Charlotte: “Please, please. Call me James.”
So on a hot November day that was like Kansas in summer, at five o’clock in the afternoon, James McNamara asked Ansel Price for Charlotte’s hand in marriage. Ansel took this in and while sipping his hot lemon juice considered the irony of a man renting a building to a married woman without consulting her husband and then asking that same man for permission to marry his daughter. But he said merely, “And I suppose Charlotte is agreeable.”
“Yes,” he said, and Ansel heard pride slipping into McNamara’s voice, giving it a fullness missing moments ago. “Yes, she is.”
Charlotte was not at home, but Ansel sensed Ellie listening through the kitchen door, and probably Neva, too. He knew he was supposed to say, Well, good then, I couldn’t be more pleased and be done with it, but for a few moments he picked tenderly at one of the small linear scabs on the back of his hand, and then looking up, he said, “And you don’t think Charlotte will grow restless?”
Unquestionably this took McNamara by surprise. “Excuse me?”
“The age difference,” he said.
“Ah,” McNamara said. He sipped his lemonade. He did not smell of sweat or the grit on orange peels, a distinction he seemed to relish. He looked at Ansel and said, “I’m going to tell you something that I have told no one in this town other than Charlotte.” He paused. “I married once before, and I chose badly. Her family . . . Well, she came from bad stock. They were nothing, nothing, men and women without background or bearings. Still, I was determined. I understood the meaning of ‘for better or for worse.’ My wife however did not. So that was a very different kettle of fish. Charlotte is a majestic girl. Majestic. She is her father’s daughter and she is her mother’s daughter. Your wife’s father is a very distinguished man, as I’m told your own father was sturdy and sure. Sound blood flows in Charlotte’s veins, and it shows.” He picked up his glass of lemonade, then put it back down. “Charlotte and I have discussed all this. My point, Ansel, and it’s no small one, is that I believe in Charlotte and she and I believe in the vows of marriage. For better or for worse. Like my own parents. Like you and Mrs. Price. You see what I mean, don’t you?”
Ansel nodded as if he did.
“Could she grow restless? Yes. Could I walk out this door and be run over in the street? Yes. But I don’t think either possibility is likely.” He smiled and said, “I look both ways when crossing a road. I believe ours will be vows that will endure.”