It was Carrie’s turn to look surprised. Taking the photo from him, she looked at it again. She would have thought there was nothing new in it for her to discover, but now she saw it in a new light. All three of the people in the picture were indeed smiling. If they were smiling, how could she have thought they were sad? The little boy had his arm around the girl, and the father had a hand on each child’s shoulder. How could they be lonely if they had each other?
Carrie looked back at the old man. “Not sad and not lonely?”
“They look particular happy to me, but then what do I know?” He smiled at her. “If you want them to be sad, Miss Carrie, then I guess they can be.”
Carrie smiled back at the man as he tugged at the brim of his cap, then left the boathouse.
Not sad or lonely, Carrie thought. Other people saw a happy, smiling family, but that’s not what Carrie saw, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why she saw them as sad or what it was about the family that appealed to her. Cried out to her, actually.
She stayed in the boathouse another few minutes, then picked up Choo-choo and went back to her own house. That night there was a celebration dinner in honor of Jamie’s return, and all their Montgomery and Taggert relatives were there, which meant that the house was filled with so many people that no one noticed that Carrie was unusually quiet.
For the next three days Carrie was quiet. She went about her daily life, went to the old Johnson house every day and looked at the photographs the men sent, interviewed the women who wan
ted husbands, and tried to pretend that her mind was on something besides the family in the photograph.
She looked at the picture and read Josh’s letter until they were nearly worn out. She knew every sentence by heart, and she could have picked Josh’s handwriting out of hundreds of others.
At the end of three days she knew what she had to do. Just as she had originally planned, she was going to marry Mr. Joshua Greene. Josh seemed to think he needed a woman who knew about milking cows and whatever else one did on a farm, but Carrie was convinced that what he actually needed was her.
When Carrie told her friends what she was going to do, they were outraged. Even Helen, who was still smoldering with resentment over Carrie’s highhandedly taking Josh away from her, was upset.
“You are out of your mind,” Euphonia said. “You could have any man you wanted. With your looks and your money—”
At that, there was a gasp from the others, because it had always been prohibited to speak of Carrie’s money.
“Someone has to speak the truth,” Euphonia said with a sniff. “And this man wants a farm wife. Carrie, you can’t even sew, much less plant corn.” She narrowed her eyes. “You do know that corn silk isn’t really silk, don’t you?”
Carrie knew no such thing, but that was hardly the issue. “I have considered the possibility that if I were to write Mr. Greene, he might not think me suitable as a wife. Since he seems to believe that he needs a hired hand instead of a wife, I have therefore decided to marry him before I go to this town of his in Colorado, this Eternity.”
This announcement set the women to talking at once as they tried to reason with Carrie, but it was like talking to a wall. They pointed out that she would have to lie to Mr. Greene, and one of their policies had always been that they weren’t to lie to the men who requested brides. They didn’t tell a man who wanted a sweet-tempered wife that they were sending him a dear woman and then send him a virago. Mr. Greene had asked for a farm wife, and he should have what he asked for.
“He won’t be disappointed in me,” Carrie said with a little smile of confidence.
At this the women sat back in their chairs and looked at Carrie. She was so pretty that everywhere the women went men fell over themselves to get Carrie’s attention. Carrie had a way about her that every woman who saw her would have sold her soul to possess. Men liked Carrie. Men adored Carrie. Maybe being raised with seven older brothers and a father had taught her all there was to know about men. But whatever the reason, the fact was that Carrie could have any man she wanted. All she had to do was choose.
After two days of trying to “reason” with Carrie, the women gave up. They were tired of talking, and Carrie hadn’t budged an inch. Carrie said that if they were really her friends, they’d help her try to figure out how to get herself married to Mr. Greene so that he couldn’t back out of the marriage when he found out she knew nothing about farming. “He might be a bit, well…upset when he first finds out that I’ve embellished the truth of my abilities. He might be tempted to, maybe, tell me to return home. You can never tell about men. When they think they’ve been wronged, they don’t act rationally so I want to force him to give me a chance to prove to him that I am the perfect wife for him.”
The women had their opinions of what Mr. Greene would do when he found out that Carrie had lied, connived, plotted, and schemed, all in order to trap him into a marriage that he didn’t want. But Carrie was so determined that after a while they began to try to help her in her plan to deceive Joshua Greene. After all, it was all divinely romantic.
The first thing they did was try to find out about farming. All of the women had grown up around the sea, and all of them had lived comfortable lives with servants to care for them. Food came from the kitchen, and they had absolutely no idea how it got into the kitchen. Sarah said that a man brought it to the back door of the house.
With a goal in mind, the women set about researching farming just as they would have done a school project. Within a few days they realized that the subject of farming was very boring, so they asked a woman who came to them looking for a husband to write a sample letter. Carrie copied the letter in her own handwriting and sent a messenger off, at her father’s expense, to take it all the way from Maine to the tiny town of Eternity in Colorado.
Carrie and her friends had come up with an elaborate story to tell the unsuspecting Mr. Greene about how the woman who was perfect for him had to be married by proxy before she could come to Eternity. If Mr. Greene agreed, all he had to do was sign the enclosed papers, and the marriage would take place in Warbrooke. If he agreed, then when Carrie arrived to meet him she would already be married to him.
“Your father will never sign the papers,” Euphonia said.
Carrie knew that she was right. Her father would never allow his youngest daughter to marry a man she’d never met, a man he had not met. He would laugh at her statement that she had fallen in love with a photograph of a man and his two children.
“I’ll find a way,” Carrie said with more confidence than she felt.
After she sent the letter to Josh, she had to wait for months for his reply, for even with a messenger on the trip to Colorado, it took a long time for mail to get there and back. She had made a copy of her long letter to him, and as the days went by, she criticized every sentence of it. Maybe she shouldn’t have written this; maybe this sentence should have been left out; maybe she should have included this.
During the long months of waiting, she may have had her doubts about the letter, but she never once wavered in her conviction that what she was doing was right. Each night she kissed her fingertips and gave kisses to her future family, and every day she thought of them. She purchased fabric to make dresses for the little girl who was going to become her daughter, and she bought a sailboat for the boy. She purchased books, whistles, and boxes of hard rock candy for the children and eight shirts for Josh.
After six months of waiting, one morning Carrie walked into the old house, and her six friends were standing and waiting for her. With such looks of anticipation on their faces, Carrie didn’t have to be told that Josh’s letter had arrived. Silently, Carrie held out her hand for the letter.
With trembling hands, Carrie opened it, quickly scanned his letter, then hurriedly looked at the legal papers. As though the air had left her, she sat down hard on a chair. “He signed them,” she said, half in wonder, half in disbelief.