the store to Avis; it’s only natural for his wife to have a hand in running it. No
point getting all fired up about it.”
Olivia rose from the bed and stood facing him, her fists on her hips and a scowl on her face. “Well, that’s just fine. Next thing I know, you’re going to be
telling me to simmer down.”
Tobey smiled sadly and shook his head. That was what their father had
always said whenever one of them displayed a definite sign of life – “Now
simmer down. Just you simmer down there.”
“No, I’m not going to tell you to simmer down. But it is true that you’re a young lady now and can’t be going down by the river to throw rocks and holler
like a banshee every time something isn’t to your liking. You got to start trying
harder to fit in. Mabel’s got that nail hit right on the head. And you got to learn
to take things like they come. You like to think you can change everything if you
want to bad enough, but you can’t.”
“I know I can’t change everything. I’m not stupid. I know one person can’t
change hardly anything at all.” She paced to the window and back. “But you can
try to fix some things in your own life. How do you think the world gets to be
the way it is? If everybody lay down and lapped up whatever flowed down the
road, our grandparents would never have come over here. There wouldn’t even
be any United States of America to come to. We’d all be back in Ireland, bowing
down to the Queen of England, or doing whatever they did before some fool got
all fired up. We’d be living in caves or mud houses, is what we’d be doing.”
Olivia sighed and started down the stairs. No, she thought, Tobey is not going to come to Michigan with me. Doesn’t have it in him. What’s the word?
Gumption. He doesn’t have the gumption. So who? Who can I get to come? No
one is who. I’ll have to go by myself, to that Fae’s Landing place. Find someone
to hire when I get there.
But the prospect of traveling alone made her queasy. Even more frightening
than taking a stage to Erie and a steamboat to Detroit was the problem of how
she would get from Detroit to Fae’s Landing. Buy a wagon in Detroit and drive
through the woods all alone, no idea where she was going? She wouldn’t know
how to go about buying a wagon, let alone how to replace a wheel or fix a broken axle. She tried scolding herself. Shame on you, how do you think you’re
going to run your own farm, if you’re too lily-livered to even get there? It didn’t help. She’d ridden horses and gone hunting, but always with her Uncle Scruggs.
She’d never driven anything, not even a little one-horse buggy, and had no idea
how to handle one of those big farm wagons.
She went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of the bitter black coffee Mrs.
Hardaway kept on the stove, and sat at the table, chin resting on the heel of her
hand. She felt despair creeping over her, which Mrs. Hardaway mistook for
sorrow.
“There, there.” The housekeeper set down her bowl of biscuit dough and
washed her hands so she could pat Olivia’s head. “It’s so hard losing our loved
ones. Takes it a while to sink in.” She launched into a long tale of the death of
her own parents.
