jaw tightened when she saw her boy out in the cold, wearing a thin jacket and no hat. He and Doss, her brother-in-law, were building what appeared to be a snow fort, their breath making white plumes in the frigid air.
Something in Hannah gave a painful wrench at the sight of Doss; his resemblance to Gabe, his brother and her late husband, invariably startled her, even though they lived under the same roof and she should have been used to him by then.
She nudged the mule with the heels of her boots, but Seesaw-Two didn’t pick up his pace. He just plodded along.
“What are you doing out here?” Hannah called.
Both Tobias and Doss fell silent, turning to gaze guiltily in her direction.
The breath plumes dissipated.
Tobias set his feet and pushed back his narrow shoulders. He was only eight, but since Gabe’s coffin had arrived by train one warm day last summer, draped in an American flag and with Doss for an escort, her boy had taken on the mien of a man.
“We’re just making a fort, Ma,” he said.
Hannah blinked back sudden, stinging tears. A soldier, Gabe had died of influenza in an army infirmary, without ever seeing the battleground. Tobias thought in military terms, and Doss encouraged him, a fact Hannah did not appreciate.
“It’s cold out here,” she said. “You’ll catch your death.”
Doss shifted, pushed his battered hat to the back of his head. His face hardened, like the ice on the pond back of the orchard where the fruit trees stood, bare-limbed and stoic, waiting for spring.
“Go inside,” Hannah told her son.
Tobias hesitated, then obeyed.
Doss remained, watching her.
The kitchen door slammed eloquently.
“You’ve got no business putting thoughts like that in his head,” Doss said, in a quiet voice. He took old Seesaw’s reins and held him while she dismounted, careful to keep her woolen skirts from riding up.
“That’s a fine bit of hypocrisy, coming from you,” Hannah replied. “Tobias had pneumonia last fall. We nearly lost him. He’s fragile, and you know it, and as soon as I turn my back, you have him outside, building a snow fort!”
Doss reached for the saddlebags, and so did Hannah. There was a brief tug-of-war before she let go. “He’s a kid,” Doss said. “If you had your way, he’d never do anything but look through that telescope and play checkers!”
Hannah felt as warm as if she were standing close to a hot stove, instead of Doss McKettrick. Their breaths melded between them. “I fully intend to have my way,” she said. “Tobias is my son, and I will not have you telling me how to raise him!”
Doss slapped the saddlebags over one shoulder and stepped back, his hazel eyes narrowed. “He’s my nephew—my brother’s boy—and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you turn him into a sickly little whelp hitched to your apron strings!”
Hannah stiffened. “You’ve said quite enough,” she told him tersely.
He leaned in, so his nose was almost touching hers. “I haven’t said the half of it, Mrs. McKettrick.”
Hannah sidestepped him, marching for the house, but the snow came almost to her knees and made it hard to storm off in high dudgeon. Her breath trailed over her right shoulder, along with her words. “Supper’s in an hour,” she said, without turning around. “But maybe you’d rather eat in the bunkhouse.”
Doss’s chuckle riled her, just as it was no doubt meant to do. “Old Charlie’s a sight easier to get along with than you are, but he can’t hold a candle to you when it comes to home cooking. Anyhow, he’s been gone for a month, in case you haven’t noticed.”
She felt a flush rise up her neck, even though she was shivering inside Gabe’s old woolen work coat. His scent was fading from the fabric, and she wished she knew a way to hold on to it.
“Suit yourself,” she retorted.
Tobias shoved a chunk of wood into the cookstove as she entered the house, sending sparks snapping up the gleaming black chimney before he shut the door with a clang.
“We were only building a fort,” he grumbled.
Hannah was stilled by the sight of him, just as if somebody had thrown a lasso around her middle and pulled it tight. “I could make biscuits and sausage gravy,” she offered quietly.
Tobias ignored the olive branch. “You rode down to the road to meet the mail wagon,” he said, without meeting her eyes. “Did I get any letters?” With his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers and his brownish-blond hair shining in the wintry sunlight flowing in through the windows, he looked the way Gabe must have, at his age.
“One from your grandpa,” Hannah said. Methodically, she hung her hat on the usual peg, pulled off her knitted mittens and stuffed them into the pockets of Gabe’s coat. She took that off last, always hating to part with it.
“Which grandpa?” Tobias lingered by the stove, warming his hands, still refusing to glance her way.
Hannah’s family lived in Missoula, Montana, in a big house on a tree-lined residential street. She missed them sorely, and it hurt a little, knowing Tobias was hoping it was Holt who’d written to him, not her father.
“The McKettrick one,” she said.
“Good,” Tobias answered.
The back door opened, and Doss came in, still carrying the saddlebags. Usually he stopped outside to kick the snow off his boots so the floors wouldn’t get muddy, but today he was in an obstinate mood.
Hannah went to the stove and ladled hot water out of the reservoir into a basin, so she could wash up before starting supper.
“Catch,” Doss said cheerfully.
She looked back, saw the saddlebags, burdened with mail, fly through the air. Tobias caught them ably with a grin.
When was the last time he’d smiled at her that way?
The boy plundered anxiously through the bags, brought out the fat envelope postmarked San Antonio, Texas. Her in-laws, Holt and Lorelei McKettrick, owned a ranch outside that distant city, and though the Triple M was still home to them, they’d been spending a lot of time away since the beginning of the war. Hannah barely knew them, and neither did Tobias, for that matter, but they’d kept up a lively correspondence, the three of them, ever since he’d learned to read, and the letters had been arriving on a weekly basis since Gabe died.
Gabe’s folks had come back for the funeral, of course, and in the intervening months Hannah had been secretly afraid. Holt and Lorelei saw their lost son in Tobias, the same as she did, and they’d offered to take him back to Texas with them when they left. She hadn’t had to refuse—Tobias had done that for her, but he’d clearly been torn. A part of him had wanted to leave.
Hannah’s heart had wedged itself up into her throat and stayed there until Gabe’s mother and father were gone. Whenever a letter arrived, she felt
