The Bride's House by Sandra Dallas

tragedy. Besides, in Charlie’s case, if he wasn’t working, he’d be hanging around the boardinghouse. She didn’t want that, either.
    “Well, I’ve not been laid off. I just took a day to work my claim is all. I’ve found blossom rock, and I mean to follow it.”
    “That’s fine,” Nealie said, holding her tongue, because she did not want to say that every man at the boardinghouse claimed he’d found blossom rock, which was an outcrop of mineral-bearing rock. “I wish you good luck,” she said, and surely she did. After all, she liked Charlie Dumas. She just didn’t like him that much.
    Charlie leaned forward on the bench, his knees apart, his cap between his heavy hands. He cleared his throat a couple of times, as if he was trying to say something but couldn’t. Nealie waited, watching Charlie twirl his cap, until he burst out, “There’s a play at the opera house on Saturday night. I’d like it awful well if you’d go. With me, that is. Would you?”
    Nealie didn’t answer right away. She loved the opera house more than anything in Georgetown, was enchanted with the way it took her into another world, and she wanted to go in the worst way. But she’d hoped that Will Spaulding would invite her. He hadn’t mentioned going out a second time, however, and that troubled her. She’d turned it over in her mind and wondered if maybe he’d been embarrassed by her table manners. Since that night at the hotel, she’d studied the way he ate his supper at the boardinghouse and was trying to imitate it. She’d read every romantic story in Mrs. Travers’s Peterson’s Magazine to learn how to act, and she’d consulted a book on etiquette that Mrs. Travers kept on a shelf in the kitchen. She’d memorized what to eat with a fork and what with a spoon and how to hold utensils and cut food with a knife. But it was awfully confusing, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever get it right.
    Or maybe it wasn’t her manners but the fact that Will just plain hadn’t liked her and was too mannerly to say so. After all, she was only a hired girl, and he was used to ladies like the ones she’d seen on the streets of Hannibal. There were enough of them in Georgetown to tempt him. Maybe he’d found somebody else and hadn’t told her. So if she wanted to go to the opera house, Nealie realized, she’d better accept Charlie’s invitation. “Why, I’d like that,” she said at last.
    Charlie beamed. “I already asked Mrs. Travers if you could have the night off so’s I could take you to supper someplace,” he said. “I hope you wear that green dress. I never saw anything so bright.”
    Nealie smiled prettily at him, for after all, she was not immune to compliments.
    *   *   *
     
    Of course, it wasn’t more than a day later that Will Spaulding, too, asked to squire Nealie to the opera house on Saturday. “I should have told him yes, Mrs. Travers. I wish I had,” Nealie said later. “I could have told Mr. Dumas I had a sick headache and couldn’t go or that you forgot and needed me here.”
    “You’d do no such a thing. He’d find out and know right off you put him aside for Mr. Spaulding. You’d shame Charlie, and him being so nice to you.”
    Nealie was a little ashamed of herself then, although she couldn’t help but wish she’d turned the big man down and risked staying at home.
    “Besides, it’s not such a bad thing to go with Mr. Dumas,” Mrs. Travers continued. “You’ll make Mr. Spaulding jealous.”
    Nealie had to think that over, because she’d had no experience with men—with gentlemen, that is. She’d had plenty with the other kind, and she didn’t like them—her father and his friends. They were animals. They’d put their hands on her and tried to kiss her and more. Her own pa was the worst of the lot. She’d seen farm animals coupling and figured the same thing went on between her ma and pa. She heard her pa rutting in the bed, her mother crying out in pain, because the old man