Silver Lining (18 page)

"Maybe I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself," she admitted in a low voice. "Your family's being nice, but I know they blame me for all the trouble." She cast him a quick hazel glance. "Then I start blaming myself and feeling bad and thinking that everything would have worked out a lot better, just like you said, if I'd picked a piano or something else. But I didn't want a piano, and everyone including you said I should pick what I wanted. It's just not fair, and I don't see an end to it. How long are we going to be fighting blame? That's what I want to know. A few weeks? Months? A year from Sunday?"

He closed the book with a snap and laid it on the bedside table. Concentration had been impossible; he doubted that he'd read two pages in the last forty minutes. He studied the wallpaper, trying to pick out the seams.

"Acknowledging your responsibility isn't the same as blaming you," he said finally. "If anyone's to blame, it's me. I should never have gone to Piney Creek."

"That occurred to me, too. So why did you?"

The answer wasn't simple. He'd failed to make Philadelphia understand his reasons; he doubted Louise would. But he told her about Jason McCord anyway, needing to remind himself what had driven him into the mountains despite Philadelphia 's pleas that he stay here.

"I was born in Mexico ," he said finally. "Wally was born in California . Gilly arrived in a mining camp near Central City. What those places have in common is gold or silver."

"Your father was a prospector?" Surprise caused her to shift on the pillow, and he felt her gaze on the side of his face. "I thought your pa was a rancher."

"No, it was Ma who grew up on a ranch down south. She met my father when he was working in a nearby town to earn enough to stake his next prospecting venture." Why two people with such different backgrounds, dreams, and personalities had fallen in love and married remained a mystery to Max.

Maybe it had been a mystery to his parents, too.

"You remember the men in Piney Creek who brought their families to the diggings? My father did the same. In the early years maybe my mother enjoyed traveling to places she wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Maybe living in mining camps felt romantic and adventurous. My father would have been content to chase the dream forever, but one day Ma realized she had three children growing up in rough camps. No house, no security. Only a hand-to-mouth existence and no future."

"Go on," Louise said. She'd propped her elbow on the pillow and rested her head in one hand while stroking the end of her braid across her cheek with the other hand. If he hadn't been focused on his parent's story, he might have laughed as the stubby end of her braid reminded him of a shaving brush.

"Ma started selling bread and pies out of the tent we lived in. She earned enough to buy a boardinghouse on Central City's main street. Three years later, she bought this land. A year after that she sold the boardinghouse and the four of us left Central City and came here to the ranch. We lived in a tent by the creek while the main house was being built."

"The four of you?" He heard a frown in her voice.

"My father stayed in Central City," he said, the words coming hard even now. "The dream was so strong that he let his family leave the mountains without him." And Max had been old enough to read the pain in his mother's eyes, old enough to feel himself abandoned and rejected.

"By the time he decided that being with his family was more important than searching for gold, the house was built and the range stocked. He came home hat in hand. But he never forgave my mother for finding riches in the mountains when he couldn't. Never let her or himself forget that she had bought the ranch with her earnings and he was living off the fruits of a woman's labor."

"Nothing costs so much as what is given us," Louise murmured with a sigh, and he looked at her, startled by her understanding.

"When Ma left the mountains and camps, she found stability and security in the land. But my father lost some vital spark. He never went into the mountains again, but he was never fully here, either. He left the better part of himself up there. And during the time they were apart, their marriage changed. Maybe Ma couldn't forgive him for choosing a sluice and a pan instead of her. Maybe she'd discovered she didn't need him after all. Maybe he blamed her for the loss of his dreams. Or maybe they were never suited in the first place."

"And you?" Louise inquired softly, her steady hazel gaze fixed on his face. "Did you forgive him for choosing a dream instead of you?"

"Good God," he whispered, staring at her in shock. When he looked down, he saw that his hands were clenched into fists. "I thought I needed this summer to understand him," he said slowly, his thoughts racing ahead of his words. "But you're right. That was only part of it."

Yawning, Louise plumped her pillow, then slid under the covers as if she hadn't just delivered a stunning insight. "I think you needed to go to Piney Creek. And this summer was your only chance to do it," she said in a sleepy voice, turning her back to him and the lamp. "Good night."

"Piney Greek was like Central City used to be, before the boom, before shaft mining," he said, speaking to her braid.

Long after he'd extinguished the lamp and Louise slept beside him, he sat in the dark remembering his childhood. Camping in a series of tents beside a series of creeks and streams. Helping his mother knead bread dough or roll out piecrusts. And later, emptying slop buckets in the boardinghouse, washing the stairs every morning before he gathered eggs for breakfast.

And then the ranch and his joy in the land—knowing the wandering had ended and he'd come home to a place where he belonged. Eventually the pain of missing his father knotted into anger so deep that he resented it when Jason McCord finally did rejoin his family.

Had he forgiven his father for letting them leave? For joining them eventually but leaving his heart beside a mountain creek? Not when he stood dry-eyed at the grave site, holding his mother's arm while the Reverend Dawson prayed.

But now? After his summer at Piney Creek?

After a time he stretched a hand to Louise's side of the bed and adjusted the blankets over her shoulder.

It puzzled him that she understood so readily why he had needed a summer in the mountains, yet Philadelphia never had.

Philadelphia . Impossible as it seemed, he had forgotten for a while that tonight was Philadelphia 's wedding night. He raised a hand to his eyes, and pain exploded behind his ribs.

*

She was Mrs. Wallace McCord.

By four o'clock , they were climbing the steps of the Denver County Courthouse. Within half an hour Wally had found a justice of the peace who married them in a dingy office that smelled of stale cigar smoke, glue, and ink. Minutes later they were again on the outside steps, dazed and awkward with each other, amazed that their lives could be forever altered in so short a time.

From there, they went to the telegraph office and dispatched announcements to Livvy McCord and Howard Houser. The carefully worded telegrams were targeted to Mr. Graham who managed the Fort Houser telegraph office and who was not known to respect the privacy of the telegrams that passed through his hands. By tomorrow the official story would be racing through Fort Houser like a prairie fire.

Wally then asked if she was hungry, and feeling confused and adrift, she had nodded yes although she felt sick inside and doubted she could swallow a bite.

He'd taken her to the dining room at the hotel where they had registered earlier, and they must have eaten although she couldn't remember what they had ordered. After coffee, they hailed a cab and attended the theater, where everyone wore evening dress except them, or so it had seemed. She couldn't recall one scene of the production.

Now they were back in the suite Wally had taken at the Denver City Hotel. He sat across from her holding his hat on his knees, looking younger than she knew he was and uncomfortable and very manageable.

She had already removed the fashionable wool cape that matched the smart blue-and-crimson-trimmed suit she'd chosen for the brief marriage ceremony. No, she absolutely would not think about the sugary confection of a gown hanging in her closet at home, the gown she would never wear.

Lifting her arms, she removed long pins, then placed her hat beside her on the settee. "I thank you from the bottom of my heart," she said in a low voice, smoothing the net and feathers and silk flowers trimming the brim of her hat. She cast him a quick peek, then lowered her eyelids. "I'm so ashamed." Tears welled in her eyes, sparkled on her lashes, then spilled to her cheeks.

The ability to weep at will was such a useful talent. Some women turned red and blotchy when they cried, but she did not. She knew she cried beautifully because she had perfected the art by practicing before a mirror.

Clasping her hands in her lap, she dropped her head and shoulders, creating a tableau of abject misery.

"You must hate me," she whispered, letting tears fall on her hands. "You must hate it that you're stuck with a person of such low character."

In an instant he was kneeling in front of her, pushing his handkerchief into her hands. "Don't cry. I don't hate you, not at all." His hands lifted as if he wished to clasp her fingers, but he didn't yet claim the right to such intimacy. "You're not a low character." He drew a breath. "And I'm not stuck with you."

Now she covered her face with her hands and let her shoulders shake with sobs. "How kind you are.

Oh how can I ever repay you for rescuing me from abandonment and scandal?"

" Philadelphia ." It was the first time he had addressed her as anything other than Miss Houser. "Please look at me."

After patting her eyes with his handkerchief, she allowed herself to be coaxed into a sad gaze. He looked so earnest. So upset and eager to soothe.

"It's a bad beginning, yes," he said, trying to peer past her misery. "But others have made good marriages from bad beginnings. I intend to be a devoted husband and a caring father. You have my word on this." A wave of scarlet swelled up from his collar. "I hope someday you'll care for me as much as you—" Halting, he swallowed and knots ran up his jawline. "What happened before today doesn't matter. What happens from here on is what's important."

"Thank you," she murmured through the tears. Then she leaned forward and rested her head on Wally's shoulder, inviting him to offer comfort. After a moment, his arms came around her and he clumsily patted her back, whispering soft words and promises for the future.

Oh yes, he was manageable. Every man she had ever met was manageable. Except Max. Max was the only man who had ever said no to her. The only man who had not placed her desires before his own. She hated and loved him for that very reason.

Oh Max, she thought, and suddenly her tears were angry and genuine. It should have been you here tonight.

«^»

S
horty Smith reminded Louise—she was still trying to think of herself as Louise—of Stony Marks, and another of the boys put her in mind of a fellow she'd known in the Dakotas. She took to the cowboys at once and would have liked to spend more time at the barn and corral except Max made it clear that the boss's wife could be friendly to but not friends with the hands. In a small act of defiance she spent the afternoon baking chokecherry pies sweetened with plenty of dark brown sugar. When they were cool, she delivered four of the pies to the bunkhouse.

Most of the day she devoted to discovering the nature of her wifely duties. No one had to explain, the chores swept her along. It was obvious that the bed needed making and breakfast needed cooking. First she had to go into the pearly dawn and rummage around beneath the hens to gather eggs for frying. Then bring in some kindling and stoke up the stove, something she would do before gathering eggs from now on so she could return to a warm kitchen. Before she cleaned up the breakfast dishes, she bundled up again and hurried down to the barn to milk Missy before Missy mooed the walls down. Then the cream had to be skimmed, and she had to decide if she needed to churn up some butter. Then turn Missy into the pasture before she washed out the bucket and dashed back to the house to tidy up the kitchen and start thinking about what she would feed Max for dinner and supper. Knead some bread and put it aside to rise. Clean up the flour mess. And feed the chickens. She'd forgotten about the damned chickens.

After the barn tour, she fried up some ham and potatoes for Max's dinner. The bread wasn't ready to bake, so they had to do without. Then it was clean up the kitchen again and run though the house with a dust rag, doing a hurry-up job so she'd have time to pick the chokecherries she needed for the pies. And she didn't dare leave the kitchen while the pies were baking, not until she'd learned the quirks of the oven and if it cooked evenly or if she needed to turn the pans every few minutes.

Before she knew it, the sun was sinking and it was time to set the table again and the day was almost over.

"I'm plum tuckered out," she said to Max when they sat down to supper. The butter that Livvy and Gilly had provided was almost gone, and she gazed at the dish unhappily, wondering where she'd find time to churn up more. Heaven only knew what happened to the everyday chores on wash day.

"The boys were grateful to get those pies," Max mentioned, snapping his napkin across his lap in a way that made her remember the maître d' at the Belle Mark. "I guess it wasn't an inappropriate gesture. As long as you don't make a habit of it."

"I wasn't sure how the pies would turn out since I haven't baked in a real oven since I can't remember when."

Already she was wondering how she would accomplish all she needed to do tomorrow when Max and the hands left for the roundup. She'd need to care for her mule Rebecca and the horses they were leaving behind. More chores.

"I'm starting to think that shoveling gravel and panning for gold was a walk in the woods compared to being a wife."

Max smiled. "Is it really that difficult?"

"The work isn't hard; there's just so much of it. I feel like I'm cooking and cleaning up from cooking all day long and hurrying to do the other work in between cooking."