“Go.” Cliff handed Missy his sack. “I’ll find you.”
“It seems to be going well,” Cliff said.
“It’s hard to keep track, but my guess is that since Reverend Reed asked for a bread offering this morning, we’ve had a thousand loaves—and fifty pounds of meat we didn’t expect. Jesus would have been pleased with the multiplication of our simple gifts, don’t you think?”
“Certainly.” Cliff swallowed. “And your less edible donations?”
“Those are a bit harder to come by, but we continue to ask in faith.”
Clifford nodded. He no longer carried bills in his money clip. And after impressing on Georgina the necessity of economizing that very afternoon, it hardly seemed like the time to come prepared to make a cash donation to the Tabernacle.
“This is not sustainable,” Parson Tom said softly. “We need to be able to care for the women and children who were our focus before this crisis. The men need jobs that we do not have. Many of them would gladly leave for other cities if only they could afford it.”
Like Wesley, who was only still in Denver for simple lack of train fare.
“Perhaps a special fund for transportation,” Clifford said.
“I’m not sure how much longer the railroad companies will agree to reduced rates, but it would be something. If we cannot find a way to help the miners go to where there may be jobs in other industries, the city must be better organized about providing services. We can’t just leave them on the streets and in the parks. I’m going to press for a relief camp along the river.”
“Thank you for the information,” Clifford said. “Something to think about. I’ll go find Loren and Missouri and see if I can be some immediate help. Loren is one of mine, you know.”
“I do know.”
When all the bread had been distributed, Clifford let Loren walk Missouri home, keeping them within view but lagging a considerate distance behind the pair and closing the gap only when they were within a few blocks of home. If they were sneaking kisses—and he was sure they were—they would have to do it when they managed to find each other during daytime hours apart from his observation.
“I’ll speak to your mother,” he said to Missouri after Loren left them and they continued alone toward the house. “Not tonight, but perhaps later this week. I don’t think she will ever allow Loren in the house, but if he is willing to stay out in the stable—”
“Papa!” Missy threw her arms around his neck. “Anything to get him off the streets and know he’s safe!”
In the morning, news scorched the city that People’s National, German National, and State National were all on the brink of failure.
That brought the total to twelve shuttered banks.
Still, the one that held Cliff’s mortgage survived—which meant both that they would not be coming for his house today and that he must make his payment in another five weeks or they would. In this climate, no bank would offer extensions to a man whose income and assets were fully bound up in the failed silver industry.
The other news was the city’s decision to open a relief camp at Riverfront Park to house eight hundred men. Efforts of groups like the People’s Tabernacle were still needed to feed and clothe the men, but at least some of them had a place to go.
Very few, considering the numbers that had come down from the mountain mines, but if a few hundred at a time stayed while they could find their way out of town, it would be progress.
But they must get out of town. The city approved funding for some construction projects that could employ a couple of thousand men temporarily, but for most of them—and the best way to relieve pressure on the city—the greatest hope was to find ways to help higher numbers of men leave for other parts of the country.
It was after lunch when Clifford decided.
He went upstairs to the closet where he had hidden the safe and dialed the combination.
It opened. He pulled out some bills.
“Clifford?”
He turned.
“What are you doing?” Georgina stood with fists clenched at her sides.
“I had nothing at all in my money clip.”
“And what do you need money for? I thought we were economizing.”
“My men are suffering, Georgina. Wesley can get home for only six dollars. Maybe I can help one or two others.”
She closed the distance between them and snatched the cash out of his hands. “You most certainly will not. You told me I must let Graciela go, but you have money to give strangers? No. I won’t do it. Not on those terms.”
“Mama! Papa!”
Lity broke into the room. “Kittie’s father is writing another story for the paper. The men are taking over the train!”
“What men?” Clifford asked.
“What train?” Georgina asked.
“Miners,” Lity said. “They want to ride the train, but they don’t have money for tickets. They’re demanding the railroad let them ride anyway. They’ve taken over entire passenger cars, and they say they’re not getting off until the railroad takes them away from here. I need my sketch pad. I didn’t see it with my own eyes, but I can imagine, can’t I? I’m going to draw what that must have looked like.”
Lity left the study. Georgina tossed the loose bills back in the safe, closed the door, spun the dial, and glared at Clifford.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jillian’s new book was a historical volume about the families and counties surrounding St. Louis in the midtwentieth century that would be of no interest to anyone else she knew, but it might aid the project in the dining room. She dropped it on the ottoman in the living room as she passed through and went up the stairs to the shower. She’d been neglecting her morning runs lately, but today’s seemed to be giving her perspective. Drew was preparing for this weekend, and she was happy for his sake that the opportunity had come along. Being focused on singing in a concert didn’t mean he wouldn’t call her the minute it was over.
Jo couldn’t run from reality forever, whether it was the reason she came from Chicago to Colorado, why she was dreaming of Los Angeles in the future, or why she was so intent on a puppy—if Dave Rossi was right—that she was allergic to and her lease didn’t allow. Nolan might help both uncle and niece find a starting point of understanding instead of chasing each other around the table.
And Tisha. What a tangled string of knotted attitude. The explosion at Ore the Mountain the day before had opened Jillian’s eyes.
“You ungrateful urchin.” Brittany’s words might have leaped straight out of a Dickens novel.
Yet the point of the work assignment for the rest of the summer was not merely to get signatures on a time sheet and send Tisha out to shoplift again—to get somebody to notice her pain. And Jillian couldn’t afford to spend the next six weeks being physically present in a room to perform constant quality control on someone working at subpar speed with subpar accuracy without making forward progress.
They had to come to an understanding.
They had to talk.
No more entrapping Tisha to talk to Nia with her invisible guidance counselor hat on or relying on Nolan to fix what he’d gotten her into. Jillian had to do this herself, but away from the stacks of work making every phrase feel urgent might still be the best way.
Jillian dressed in fresh khaki shorts and a loose red T-shirt before constraining as much of her mass of dark curls into a ponytail as she could. The weight of it wouldn’t take long to droop, but for now she’d enjoy having it off her neck on a day when the temperature was pushing eighty degrees. A couple of minutes of internet sleuthing produced a specific address to support Jillian’s vague idea of where the Crowders lived, and she stared at it on her phone. Three digits and a street name dared her to go while at the same time reminding her she wouldn’t know what to say when she got there.
Tisha might not even be home. Who would blame her if she was off somewhere licking her wounds after yesterday’s outburst at Ore the Mountain?
/> Jillian scooped up her keys and headed downstairs, calling to Nolan on the way. “Going out for a while.”
Jillian turned west on Main Street, away from downtown, opting to use Westbridge to get across Cutter Creek. Getting to Eastbridge would have taken her past too many distractions, too many people waving, too many friendly onlookers wondering where she was going. This way she could get across the water and into the neighborhood at the foot of Eastbridge with a minimal number of curious spectators. As she drove, Jillian tried on some opening lines by speaking them aloud.
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“We seem to have gotten off on a bad foot. Let’s clarify things between us.”
“I’d like for us to have a fresh start when you come to work on Monday.”
“Can I have a small piece of your Saturday so we can both feel better about things going forward?”
“I haven’t listened enough to your feedback about how I can help you be successful.”
None of them sounded right, and some of them sounded downright dumb, but here she was, pulling up in front of the Crowder home. Jillian put the car in PARK and shut off the engine. A few streets over, she knew, was a more modern subdivision with homes that didn’t date back to the Victorian days of Canyon Mines’s roots. The “new” houses, as everyone called them, only dated to the 1980s, a solid century more recent than most structures in town. This cluster of homes off the bridges, where the Crowders lived, was thrown up quickly for efficiency by people who lived south of Cutter Creek and ferried goods across to the main town in the days before permanent bridges. The oldest buildings, shored up and remodeled through the decades, had housed miners who came to clean up in the nearby water and sleep between long shifts in underground darkness.
The Crowder house was Victorian in era but small. Its original style was hardly recognizable under poorly executed efforts to modernize. Jillian guessed it had not more than three bedrooms, counting the attic, where an old-style air-conditioning unit sagged beneath a yellow curtain in one window. The exterior, screaming for attention, probably hadn’t been painted in Tisha’s lifetime. An old miner’s pickax hung on the front of the house in a peculiar attempt at decor but doubled as a threat to someone who felt as out of her depth as Jillian did at the moment. A pickax wasn’t a strange artifact for the old mining region, but hanging on the front of a house? That was a first.
Jillian was out of her car and only halfway up the overgrown, irregularly spaced pink pavement tiles that led to the front door when the rising voices erupted. Her steps froze.
“I’m not going to give up. Not ever!” That was Tisha.
“We can keep having the same fights we had when you were four,” her mother screamed back, “but you didn’t win then, either. I don’t know what’s worse, your stubbornness or your stupidity. You don’t learn.”
“I learn plenty.”
“You don’t learn when to shut up.”
Something crashed. Jillian winced.
Over a chain-link fence, a neighbor pulling weeds in a flower bed caught her eye. “Every day is like this. The landlord failed to mention it before I signed my lease. I guess I looked at the place when everybody was at work and school. I’m moving as soon as I can break the lease.”
Jillian nodded. Who could blame him?
“If I’m so stupid, maybe it’s because I have a stupid father. But how would I know?” Tisha shouted. The front door was open. Nothing but the screen door was between the family’s argument and the ears outside who didn’t want to hear it. “Maybe I’ll shut up if you tell me what I want to know.”
“Letitia, could you just give us some peace and quiet for once?” That sounded like Peggy, Tisha’s grandmother.
“I’m not the one who started the yelling!”
“Well, you’re yelling now, and you’re hurting my ears.”
“Didn’t I tell you to put your laundry away?” Brittany again. “Why are you always so lazy?”
“Maybe because you always think I am. I might as well be.”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“I thought I was stupid. Now I’m smart?”
Jillian took a couple of steps back. She didn’t want to hear this. Or she’d heard enough.
“Just get out. I’m tired of looking at you.”
Jillian backed up again, faster.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
The screen door flapped open, and Tisha stumbled out, phone in hand. With no closer arm to slow its speed, the screen door slammed as soon as she let it go. Or she might have given the door a shove for emphasis. Jillian wasn’t sure.
Practically at her car now, Jillian glanced over her shoulder. Tisha caught her eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jillian jangled her keys. “It’s a bad time. I’m leaving.”
“You think I don’t know I’m in trouble.” Tisha charged at her. “You think I don’t know you’re not happy that I don’t make perfect labels and perfect solitaire piles in your high and mighty important work? Or do you think I’m stupid too?”
“I didn’t say that, Tisha.”
“Well, I have bigger things on my mind right now.”
“I can see that.”
Tisha exhaled a hard breath. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough.”
“I’m not so stupid that I don’t know it’s terrible that anyone should hear that.”
“No, you’re absolutely not stupid at all.”
“It’s just …” Tisha dug a side of one flip-flop in the crack between pavement tiles and stared at the ground. “Well, none of it matters.”
“Yes, it does, Tisha. How you feel matters.” Jillian gestured toward the house. “Living with that. It matters.”
Tisha raised her eyes for a second. “Do you really believe that?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
“Whatever. Forget it. Not that this matters, either, but I figured out where I’ve seen that painting your mother liked. The original is up in our attic.”
“That’s incredible. Was it in the house when you moved in?”
The screen door squealed open, and Tisha flinched.
“Hey!” Brittany stepped out on the stoop. “Why are you out here talking to my kid?”
“Mom, stop it,” Tisha shouted.
Brittany flashed her daughter a scowl before rapidly shifting her attention back to Jillian. “Mind your own business, Jillian.”
Jillian’s heart rate throbbed like Cutter Creek rising in a storm. “As you know, Tisha is working for me. I wanted to check in with her about how things are going.”
“You think because you live in that fancy house, you’re better than we are.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. None of you has to say it. Nobody asked for your help.”
“My dad asked for my help,” Jillian said, “because your lawyer asked for his help.”
“That’s right. Rub it in. This one has to get in so much trouble that it takes two lawyers to dig her out. But you can get out of my yard.”
“Mom, leave it alone,” Tisha said.
“I told you to shut up,” Brittany snapped. She followed Jillian’s gaze. “Ah, you see the pick. It’s some old thing my grandma Ora is attached to, but I can always yank it off the wall and use it if I need to.”
“Brittany!” Tisha cried.
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to call me that. I’m your mother.”
“Then act like one!”
“No need to take anything off the wall, I assure you.” Jillian gestured to her car only a few feet away. “As you can see, I was just about to leave.”
“Not fast enough.” Brittany retreated into the house, and the screen door slammed once again.
Jillian turned to speak to Tisha one last time before she left and discovered the girl was halfway up the block, gone without even her bike. She sprinted after her.
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br /> “Come home with me,” Jillian said, finding Tisha’s pace.
“You want me to work today?”
“No. Not that. You need to be away from here, so come cool off with me.”
“Thanks, but I have my own friends.”
“My dad would be glad to see you.”
“Everybody always thinks they can fix me. Fix that!” Tisha jabbed a finger back toward her house. “No stupid alternative sentencing is going to fix that. It won’t change anything, so what’s the point?”
“It might not change them, but it might change you.”
“What? Change stupid, lazy, stubborn, piece of trash Tisha?”
“I don’t think you’re any of those things.”
Tisha stopped now and met Jillian’s eyes. “Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You use different words, and you don’t scream, but it’s the same thing. Nothing ever changes.” Tisha resumed stomping down the sidewalk.
“Tisha, please.”
“Give it up, Jillian! And stop following me.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
July 12 has been one of my favorite days ever since I started babysitting a little girl with that birthday.” Nia flashed a grin at Jillian.
Jillian returned the smile. “Thanks for suggesting a hike today.”
“I’m no substitute for a weekend on the ranch with Drew, but since that didn’t happen, I thought this would be nice.”
“It is.” Jillian placed her hiking boot solidly on the incline and pushed off. “But promise me we won’t dissect my relationship with Drew on my birthday.”
“You got it.” Nia huffed slightly, coming up the hill behind Jillian. “Lots of nice birthday greetings at church this morning.”
Jillian nodded. “I was prepared, after going to that church since I was two.”
“And the whole business of putting everyone’s birthdays in the newsletter.”
“Right.”
“It’s nice to have a place where you belong. You have a lot of big fans in this town.”
Jillian pushed out her breath. “None of them has the last name Crowder, however.”
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