I Need a Wife by Tomorrow
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Calder
The first week taught me things about LilLi I hadn’t thought to ask when I stood in her doorway with my hat in my hands. I hadn’t asked whether she could keep a garden alive, or whether she knew one end of a hoe from the other, or what she made of a kitchen that ran on a woodstove instead of a shop counter. I’d asked her to marry a stranger and save a child from the asylum, and everything else I’d left to find out the hard way, same as she had.
She turned out to know more than I’d given her credit for, which I suppose was foolish of me to have doubted in the first place. A woman who’d run a dry-goods store alone for two winters hadn’t done it soft. By the third morning she’d found the rhythm of my kitchen better than I had in a year of cooking for myself and Emmie both, and she’d taken one look at the sorry, half-dead vegetable patch behind the house — Millie’s, once, before grief and then death had let it go to weed — and set about reviving it with the same unhurried, unbothered competence I’d first noticed in her behind the counter.
I found myself, more mornings than not, working alongside her instead of leaving her to the house the way I might have with a wife who expected to be left to it. Partly that was Emmie’s doing — the girl had taken to trailing after LilLi through her chores, watching from a careful distance, and I didn’t want LilLi carrying that weight alone while I was off mending fence three pastures away. But if I’m honest with myself, and there wasn’t much reason left not to be, it was more than that. I liked being near her. I liked the quiet she carried into a task, steady and unhurried, the way she didn’t chatter to fill the silence the way some women might have, and the way that silence, worked into over the course of a morning, started to feel less like something borrowed from strangers and more like something we were building together.
We rebuilt the chicken coop that first week, the two of us, after a fox got in and took two of my hens and left the whole structure half-collapsed on one side. LilLi held boards steady while I nailed them, and more than once she caught a measurement I’d gotten wrong before I’d swung the hammer, quiet and matter-of-fact, no scolding in it, just a fact laid down plain the way she seemed to lay most things down. By the second afternoon we’d worked out a rhythm without either of us naming it — her handing me nails before I asked for them, me shifting a board’s angle because I’d learned, without being told twice, that she noticed things a beat before I did. It wasn’t much, as work goes. But there was something in it, working alongside a person and finding your hands falling into step with theirs, that felt like the first real thing that had passed between us since the leather cord I’d tied around her finger.
“You’ve done this before,” I said to her, the second day, watching her drive a nail clean and true on the first strike.
“Tian built half our store shelving with his own hands,” she said. “I held the boards then too.” She didn’t say more than that, and I didn’t ask, because I’d learned already that she spoke of her first husband the way a person speaks of weather that’s passed — plainly, without flinching, but not lingering in it either. I respected that. I had my own weather I didn’t linger in, and I understood the shape of not wanting to be asked about it before you were ready.
Emmie watched us from the porch most of that week, same as she watched everything, a small silent sentry keeping her own accounting of what had changed in her house. She didn’t come close. But I noticed, the way a man notices small things about the child he’s raising even when he can’t always say what to do about them, that she’d started leaving the porch to sit closer, near enough now that she could hear what LilLi said without being part of the conversation herself. Progress, maybe. Or maybe just curiosity. I didn’t know enough yet to tell the difference, and I found myself watching LilLi for a read on it more than once, the way a man watches someone who understands a language he’s only beginning to learn.
I got a piece of her that week too, though it came sideways, the way most things with Emmie did. She’d taken to sitting on the fence rail while I worked the horses in the evening, quiet company I’d grown used to over the past year, and on the fourth night she asked me, out of nowhere, whether LilLi was going to stay even after the judge came through and there was no more need for a wife on paper. I told her yes. She turned that over a while, swinging her feet against the rail, and then asked whether that meant LilLi was going to be her ma now, the same careful, testing way she’d asked me weeks back whether I meant to marry at all.
I chose my words slow on that one, because I didn’t want to hand her either a lie or more than she was ready to carry. “She’ll be here every day you wake up,” I said. “Same as I will. Whatever you want to call her is yours to decide, in your own time. Nobody’s going to rush you to it.”
She nodded, satisfied with that in the way children are satisfied with an honest answer even when it isn’t the tidy one they might have been hoping for, and didn’t ask anything more about it that night. But she sat a little closer to me on the rail after that, and when I lifted her down at full dark to head in for supper, she let her hand stay in mine a beat longer than she usually did, and I counted that, same as I counted most everything that week, as its own small kind of progress.
LilLi told me about the offerings on the fourth night, after Emmie had gone to bed. We were sitting on the porch steps, the evening gone soft and cool the way it does out here once the sun’s fully down, and she mentioned, careful and almost offhand, that she’d found a smooth river stone on her windowsill that morning, set there deliberate, the way a person sets something down when they mean for it to be found.
“I didn’t put it there,” she said. “I checked. It wasn’t there the night before.”
I didn’t need to ask who had. “She does that,” I said. “Did it for Millie too, the first months after her folks died, before Millie got sick herself. Little things left where you’d find them. Never says a word about it. Never lets you see her do it either.”
“What does it mean, do you think?”
I turned it over before I answered, because I’d wondered the same thing myself plenty of nights without landing anywhere solid. “I think it’s the only way she knows how to say something she can’t say out loud yet. Millie used to leave the stones out for her right back, same spot, so Emmie’d know she’d been found and it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Never said anything about it either. Just an understanding between the two of them, without a word passing.”
LilLi was quiet a moment, and when she spoke again there was something careful in her voice, like she was setting down a thought as gently as she might set down glass. “Then I should leave it where it is. Let her find it there again.”
“That’d be my guess,” I said, and something in me eased, hearing her land on the same answer I’d have given, without my needing to spell it out for her. It was a small thing. But it was the kind of small thing that told me, clearer than any long conversation could have, that she understood Emmie in a way that wasn’t going to need explaining twice.
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