Summary
In a frost-bitten hamlet where the post office doubles as coliseum, Jessie Wilcox—spinster in calico armor—endures the annual Valentine’s massacre of mockery. Stung, she forges an epistolary bridegroom, commissioning perfumed lies from a cousin in the metropolis. Her dowry becomes a solitary ring; her trousseau, the whispers she leaves behind. But the city is no cathedral of reinvention: a dime-store Sibyl imprisons her in a velvet-lined cell, and a trafficker of white-slavery dismisses her as too pallid for profit. Salvation arrives via the obituaries—an anonymous cadaver becomes her convenient “husband,” a death certificate her marriage license. Enter Allan Avery, the deceased’s flesh-and-blood brother, lantern-jawed executor of an estate that now includes a self-declared widow. The coffin ships north; so does Jessie’s conscience. When the lid lifts on her fabrication, truth crawls out like winter smoke, yet Allan—bewildered, beguiled—trades skepticism for wedlock. The final bouquet is thrown not to destiny but to defiance: a kiss on the lips of the living, while the town’s matriarchs choke on their own unspent dreams.
Synopsis
Shy Jessie Wilcox receives no tributes of affection on Valentine's Day, instead she receives ridiculing remarks from the young people who congregate at the post office. So the next day when Jessie receives a letter from her city relatives, she says that it is from her fiancé. She arranges for her cousin to send her daily "love" letters, buys a ring, and leaves, she says, to get married. In the city, Jessie seeks advice for her predicament from a fortune-teller and is locked in a room for several days until a white slaver says that she is not the kind of girl he wants. After Jessie reads about an unidentified body at the morgue, she claims it as her husband and plans to bring it home as proof of her marriage. The dead man's brother, Allan Avery, arrives to settle the estate with his brother's "widow." After Jessie confesses the ruse, she and Allan fall in love and marry, to the chagrin of Jessie's aunt, who wanted Allan for her daughter.
