King of the Mountain

by Fran Baker

  “The money.” When she’d heard the mine was hiring, she’d quit her low-paying secretarial job and signed up for a training class. “Where else can a woman make that much around here?”

  “Is your husband a miner?” He remembered her mentioning she had a daughter.

  “I’m divorced,” she said shortly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “I’m not. And no, he wasn’t a miner. He was an insurance agent.” She reached for the door handle again, wondering what had prompted her to divulge so much personal information. “Good night, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Call me Ben,” he said irritably.

  “Ben.” She tested his name on her tongue and was alarmed to find that it felt so right. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said quietly.

  “Look for me at the next bargaining session.” She opened her door and the overhead light came on. “I’ll be the one in the red neckerchief.”

  “I mean socially.”

  “Socially?” she repeated feebly.

  He nodded firmly. “Socially.”

  “I—I’m afraid that’s impossible.” She prayed he wouldn’t ask why.

  Her prayer went unanswered. “Why?”

  “Because—” She struggled to come up with a good reason, but all she could manage was “Owners and miners mix like oil and water.”

  “But add the right ingredients,” he countered in a cajoling voice, “and they make a spicy vinaigrette.”

  “Save your clever comebacks for someone else, Mr. Cooper,” she retorted. “Someone who doesn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning.”

  That said, Kitty got out of the car.

  “Hey, wait a minute …” Ben reached to keep her from slamming the door. The overhead light limned his masculine features, playing grooves and hollows against prominent cheekbones. “What time do you usually get up?”

  “Five-thirty.” She took a step backward, feeling unaccountably threatened. “Why?”

  “I’ll have a car in your driveway by five,” he promised, then pulled the door closed and drove off.

  As she watched his taillights disappear down the street and around the corner, she felt unaccountably lonely. Confused by all that had happened and wondering what had come over her tonight, she turned to go in the house.

  The first thing she did when she got inside was to check on Jessie. As quietly as her work boots would allow, she walked down the hardwood hallway to her daughter’s bedroom door.

  It was early, only a little after eight, but Jessie was fast asleep. She lay on her back, one arm possessively clutching a stuffed tiger: the only gift her father had ever given her.

  Except for the long legs she’d inherited from him, Jessie reminded Kitty of herself as a child: twelve going on twenty when it came to assuming responsibility, and when it came to placing her trust, as innocent as a newborn babe.

  Kitty turned to leave the bedroom.

  She wished that she’d been able to spend time with Jessie tonight, and she felt guilty because she had to work. But she’d feel a lot worse if she quit her job and went on the dole. She felt guilty because her marriage had failed. But she’d tried to stick it out, and what had it gotten her? She shuddered, just remembering.

  In the bathroom she averted her eyes from the mirror as she stripped off her work clothes and used an apricot scrub on her face and neck and hands to keep the specks of coal dust from becoming permanently embedded in the pores of her skin. She hated the dirt with a passion, but it was part of the job. Third-generation miner that she was, she’d known that going in.

  She usually cleaned up right after work, in the women’s trailer. But tonight she’d been in a hurry to get to the union hall and have her say. No telling what the coal—what Ben Cooper had thought when he’d gotten a good look at her.

  Not that she cared, she reminded herself as she adjusted the shower taps. But as her mother used to say, you never got a second chance to make a first impression.

  Kitty washed with the dish detergent that removed the black coal dust better than regular soap, then worked a handful of apple-scented shampoo into her hair. The warm water spraying needlelike on her body was just the ticket for her sore neck and stiff shoulders. She was beginning to feel achy from the accident.

  Random thoughts flitted through her mind as she slathered herself with baby oil and blow-dried her hair.

  Where on earth would Ben Cooper find her another car by five-thirty tomorrow morning? And where would she find the money for all the other essentials?

  Jessie needed braces, and the dentist had already started the preparatory work. But if the miners took a wage cut, she wouldn’t have the money to pay for the part her insurance didn’t cover.

  Ben Cooper—there, she was getting better at it—had never married, though rumor had it he’d come close a couple of times.

  That last thought brought her up short.

  Honestly, she scolded herself as she straightened up the bathroom, she had enough on her mind without worrying about something like that. And she certainly hadn’t escaped her subservience to one man just to become entangled with another.

  She put on her flannel nightgown and brushed her teeth until they shone pearly white in the mirror, trying to forget she’d ever met Ben Cooper. When that didn’t work, she took the most drastic action of all. She went to the kitchen and raided the refrigerator.

  Like a lot of latchkey children, Jessie had learned to cook because her mother didn’t have time to do much more than slap a meal together at the end of the day. She fixed supper every week night and Kitty took over on the weekends.

  Jessie had made spaghetti and meatballs tonight, her favorite, and put the leftovers on the top shelf. Kitty took out the bowl now, and carrying it to the sink, ate it cold. After rinsing out her dish, she gave in to her exhaustion and decided to lock up for the night.

  Her living room was a monument to her expertise as an estate- and garage-sale buyer. The camelback sofa she’d reupholstered in a softly ruffled cabbage-rose chintz had been a real find, as had the two wing chairs she’d recovered in a practical woven plaid. Even her fireplace tools had come used. With a little elbow grease and lot of brass polish, they’d finally looked as good as new.

  She hardly ever crossed the living room without fluffing a pillow or straightening a picture. Tonight she paid her treasures no mind; she merely dead-bolted the front door, switched off the vaseline glass lamp Jessie had left burning for her and went to bed.

  But sleep wouldn’t come. No matter how hard she tried or which way she turned, she couldn’t relax. Kitty told herself it was the shock of the accident that made her restless, but she knew better.

  She finally gave up, and flinging the covers aside, got up.

  The encyclopedia she was reading still lay on the window seat, where she’d left it the night before. She’d picked up the entire set for a song at a tag sale. Granted, the volumes weren’t in the best condition. Some of them had broken spines and most of the pages were dog-eared. But having heard somewhere that reading the encyclopedia was the equivalent of a college education, she was devouring them from A to Z.

  Kitty had graduated from the school of hard knocks. She’d grown up in a company home where a man’s dreams were entombed in coal and a woman’s in marriage. Accordingly, she’d had a husband at eighteen, a baby at nineteen, and a miscarriage at twenty. By her twenty-second birthday she was divorced and the sole support of her daughter. And she’d been looking for the light at the end of the tunnel ever since.

  She wanted more for Jessie. She wanted Jessie to go to college and to have skills to fall back on should the need arise. She wanted Jessie to break the cycle of poverty and dependence that kept so many women trapped in bad marriages.

  Toward that end, Kitty worked all the overtime she could get. And if encouragement could be calculated in dollars, she’d already made a major contribution toward Jessie’s college tuition.
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  The encyclopedia beckoned now, but Kitty wasn’t in the mood to read. She lowered herself to the window seat, wrapped her arms around her knees, and simply stared out into the dark.

  Atop a far knob a smoldering pile of refuse from an abandoned strip mine glowed a gauzy red. The “gob” could burn for years—decades, even—before rain and melting snow finally smothered it and the land was returned to nature.

  Closer to home, she could see the roof of the mansion on the hill gleaming a cuprous green in the moonlight. She rarely paid it any mind, hardly ever noticed it, in fact. But something told her she would never look at it again without thinking of the man who owned it.

  And therein lay the rub.

  In spite of his arrogance, Ben Cooper seemed like an honorable man. But appearances could be deceiving, as she’d learned the hard way. Scratch his surface, and no telling what kind of monster she’d find beneath it.

  Three

  Come morning, Kitty knew she’d been in an accident.

  She wasn’t seriously hurt, just a few kinks in her neck and shoulders, and it certainly wasn’t worth using up one of her precious sick days for. So, as she had every day since her divorce, she got up and prepared for work.

  “Rise and shine, Jessie!” She reached a little more gingerly than usual into her closet and took out her last clean pair of coveralls. Laundry tonight, she reminded herself with a grimace.

  Silence greeted her cheery reveille.

  “Five-thirty and all’s well!”

  Still no answer.

  With a mother’s sixth sense Kitty knew something was wrong. Jessie’s world revolved around basketball and morning practice, and she was usually a ball of fire at this time, bounding out of bed and into her clothes in a flash.

  But not this morning, Kitty discovered when she went to rouse Jessie in person. This morning Jessie was still in bed, her face buried in her pillow and the blanket pulled up over her head.

  “You’re going to be late for basketball practice, honey.” Every day on her way to work Kitty dropped Jessie off at the school gym.

  “I’m quitting the team,” came the muffled reply.

  “Quitting—” Kitty edged toward the bed. “But, Jessie, you love to play basketball.”

  “Not anymore.” The mound under the blankets moved defiantly. “I hate it.”

  Kitty saw the tail of the stuffed tiger sticking out from under the covers and realized that Jessie was having one of those rare but painful “fatherless child” days. She sat down on the bed, hoping if she didn’t pry, Jessie would confide in her.

  “Why don’t you just skip basketball practice today?” She rubbed Jessie’s back through the blanket with a gentle hand. “Coach Brown said you could have two absences, and you haven’t missed even once.”

  “Coach Brown.” Jessie groaned. “I hate her too.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I used to … until yesterday.”

  “Oh?” Kitty knew that a “Why?” would get her nowhere.

  “You know why?”

  Now she could ask it. “Why?”

  “Because—” Jessie rolled over and pulled the blanket down, her heart-shaped face streaked with tears. “She said at the end of the season the girls on the team are going to give their fathers a rose in some kind of special ceremony.”

  Kitty’s heart ached for Jessie.

  “Special,” she grumbled now. “I think it sounds stupid.”

  Since the divorce, they’d been through this at least a thousand times. Jessie pined for a “normal” family life with two parents under one roof and Kitty always consoled her daughter as best she could.

  It had been so much easier when Jessie was younger. Kitty could hold her and rock her, smother her with kisses and hugs and words of love until the moment of sadness passed and she went outside to play. And Kitty’s brother, Jack, had always been good about filling in as “father for a day” when it got too rough. But as the years had gone by, it had become harder to ease the sting of rejection.

  There were times—and this was one of them—when Kitty hated Jessie’s father for abandoning his daughter.

  It hadn’t helped that he hadn’t wanted a girl in the first place. Kitty could still remember the way he’d treated her when she’d awakened after the delivery. He’d mumbled something horrible about the plumbing being on the outside the next time and then disappeared on a three-day toot. Sadly, there’d been no next time.

  Her personal feelings aside, Kitty had never put him down to Jessie and she’d never let her wallow in self-pity.

  Nor did she now.

  “Why don’t you call Uncle Jack tonight and tell him about the ceremony?” Kitty knew her brother would be glad to do the honors.

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “You’re not the only girl on the team whose father doesn’t live at home. I mean, what’s Jamie Brooks going to do at the end of the season?” Jamie was Jessie’s best friend.

  “Her dad came home.” Jessie was at the age where she often talked in italics.

  “What?” The news sent a note of alarm through Kitty. She worked with Jamie’s mother, Carol, but she hadn’t heard a word about it. “When?”

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Jamie said they haven’t had even one fight.”

  The calm before the storm, Kitty thought.

  She smoothed her daughter’s mop of hair off her face and changed the subject. “I always say you shouldn’t make an important decision before breakfast, so why don’t you get dressed while I—”

  “I’ll make breakfast.” Jessie’s blue eyes, so like her mother’s, sparkled mischievously. “You fix our lunches.”

  “Is that a comment on my cooking, young lady?” Kitty feigned an injured tone.

  Jessie stuck out her tongue. “That oatmeal you fixed yesterday tasted like wallpaper paste.”

  Kitty pulled a face of her own. “I have to admit it was kind of thick.”

  Mother and daughter looked at each other and burst into laughter.

  “I think I’ll skip basketball practice and take the school bus,” Jessie said around a yawn.

  Kitty nodded. “I’ll give Coach Brown a call at home this evening and—”

  “Please don’t make a big deal of it,” Jessie pleaded.

  “I won’t,” Kitty promised, knowing how sensitive Jessie was about the subject. “I’ll just let her know how you feel and see what she has to say.”

  “I wonder if it’s going to rain today.” Jessie got out of bed and padded to her window, which overlooked the driveway. She peered out, then turned back with a puzzled expression on her face. “Mom?”

  Kitty paused in the doorway. “What, darling?”

  “I thought you went to your union meeting last night.”

  Kitty realized she hadn’t said word one about the accident. “I started to, but—”

  “You bought a Blazer instead!” Jessie ran across the room and threw her arms around her Kitty’s waist, hugging tightly. “Oh, Mom, I’m so glad. I just hated that ugly old car!”

  “A Blazer?” Confused, Kitty broke out of Jessie’s embrace and went to the window. Sure enough, a brand new blue Blazer sat in the driveway.

  “Radical!” Jessie waltzed about the room, gathering up her jeans and sweater and socks. “I think I’ll have you drop me off at school after all. I mean, I can practice with the team even if I don’t play.”

  Kitty stood there in a stupor as Jessie whirled out of her bedroom and into the bathroom. A Blazer? She couldn’t keep it, of course. It was far more expensive than the car she’d lost. Still, it couldn’t hurt to just go look at it.…

  When she opened the front door, a large manila envelope that had obviously been wedged between it and the screen door sometime during the night fell at her feet. She picked it up and broke the seal.

  Inside she found a receipt stamped “Paid in Full,” a title made out in her own name, two sets of keys, an
d—most important of all—her billfold. She checked to see that Jessie’s baby pictures were all there.

  Setting the other contents of the envelope aside, Kitty carried the keys out to the Blazer and unlocked the driver’s door. Her pit helmet and lunch pail, dented but still intact, sat atop her neatly folded coat on the console between the seats.

  “Can I sit in it?” Jessie came flying out the front door, her hair still a-tangle and her sweater buttoned crookedly. She didn’t wait for permission, but just climbed into the driver’s seat and grabbed hold of the wheel. “Wait’ll Jamie sees this!”

  Kitty didn’t want to burst her daughter’s bubble by telling her they couldn’t keep it. Not yet, anyway. So she merely said, “Let’s go eat.”

  Jessie chattered happily all through breakfast and even did the dishes without complaint. Kitty fixed their lunches and put her dirty coveralls to soak in the washtub on the front porch. Then mother and daughter took off in the new blue Blazer.

  They pulled into the school parking lot just as Jamie’s dad was dropping her off. Bob Brooks didn’t recognize the Blazer, of course, but Kitty recognized his surly expression and knew it didn’t bode well for his wife.

  Jessie rolled down her window and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Hey, Jamie, look at me!”

  “Really radical!” Jamie came running toward the car.

  Jessie wasn’t content until every girl on the team had inspected the Blazer from the front bumper to the back. Coach Brown’s timely arrival put a crimp in their plans to take turns sitting in the driver’s seat.

  As she waved good-bye to Jessie and Jamie, Kitty wondered what had possessed Carol Brooks to let Bob come home after what he’d done to her the last time. Then, seeing as how she had some time to kill before the whistle blew at work, she decided to settle this business about the Blazer. Wheeling out of the parking lot, she headed toward the mansion on the hill.

  Made of graceful stone, fine woodwork, and Tiffany glass, Ben’s mansion had been home to three generations of coal barons. Its size cowed her some as she topped the hill and parked in the cobble-stoned driveway. But as she stepped up to the door and rang the bell, she made up her mind to look confident.