Firefly

by Linda Hilton

  “How did you know that?”

  Before Winnie could answer, both women’s attention was drawn to the footsteps coming down the stairs and toward the kitchen.

  “Because she came over with my supper and found me sprawled on the floor,” Morgan answered with a smile. If his head still throbbed, he showed no sign of the pain. “Good morning, Miss Upshaw. Is that my coffee you’re drinking?”

  Winnie vaulted to her feet with a furious blush on her round cheeks.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll get yours right now.”

  As serious as a clerk, she filled another cup and set it down in front of him. He took the seat she had vacated and sipped the coffee.

  Then he looked up at her with equal seriousness, but there was a hint of humor, too, in his voice.

  “I think now would be as good a time as any, Winnie.” She stood at attention, waiting for his next pronouncement. “Would you like the job of housekeeper here? Not full-time, because I know you have your sister’s family to take care of, but I’d like you to come in once a week, regular, and give the place a good going over.”

  She beamed, like a child who has just been handed a nickel outside the candy shop.

  “Starting when?”

  “As soon as Miss Hollstrom and I finish our coffee. We’ll be over at Horace’s most of the day.”

  “You want me to cook, too?”

  Julie imagined Winnie would have licked his boots and been delighted to be of service.

  “No, I don’t think so. And I can only afford a dollar a week.”

  The nickel had become a small fortune.

  “I’ll get started right away.” She gulped the rest of her coffee, ignoring the way it scalded her mouth, and bobbed her way toward the door. “I’ll do the laundry first, and then the floors, and I’ll have all the windows sparkling, and I’ll fill the lamps, too.”

  They could hear her mumbling to herself even after she had gone outside and was scurrying toward her sister’s house two doors away.

  When she had gone, when the silence had fallen again, Morgan looked across the table at Julie and said, “They say that sorrow shared is sorrow halved. Maybe I needed to tell someone. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago.”

  She didn’t answer, having no words to match her feelings. And she wished he wouldn’t talk about it.

  “I feel better now, Julie. I don’t think there will be a repetition of last night.”

  The old prospector’s death, the revelation Morgan had been forced to give Hans, the lack of sleep: no, that combination would hardly come again, Julie knew.

  “And I intend to see that it doesn’t,” she resolved, sticking an extra firmness into her tone. She swallowed the last few drops of coffee and set the cup down with a thump. “I believe we’ve been here long enough. We have work to do.”

  “Yes, we do. Oh, here, I almost forgot.” He pulled her spectacles from his pocket. “You must have dropped them again. I found them on the floor.”

  He handed them to her, but it was a moment before she could bring herself to reach for them. With the table between her and Morgan, however, Julie withstood the shock brought by the simple touch of his fingers on the palm of her hand as he dropped the glasses onto it.

  *

  They kept themselves occupied and out of each other’s way for most of the day. Julie concentrated her efforts on the kitchen, which Horace had used rarely but never cleaned, and Morgan set himself to the obnoxious task of sorting the late Dr. Opper’s collection of unlabelled bottles, boxes, and jars of medicaments. An empty nail keg was used for the discards, which far outnumbered the supplies Morgan deemed fit for use.

  On her hands and knees, with a bucket of hot, soapy water and a stiff-bristled brush, Julie listened to the muttered curses and snorts of disgust that accompanied the crash of glass containers into the keg. Morgan had clearly lost himself in his work and his mind was on it entirely, whereas hers kept wandering despite her most strenuous efforts at control.

  “What a mess you’ve got yourself into now, Julie Hollstrom,” she scolded with her teeth clenched tightly together.

  She scrubbed at a particularly nasty spot until the substance B something totally beyond recognition B came loose from the floor and could be picked up and dropped into the bucket. Breathless from the exertion, she swept the back of a wet hand across her forehead. Her hair had come loose from its tight coil at the back of her neck and now a thick braid hung over one shoulder to trail a bedraggled end in the dirty soapy water on the floor. Sweat dripped off the end of her nose.

  The glasses slid back down as soon as she had pushed them up. No sooner had she thought the word nuisance than her conscience seemed to say, “But you’ve known from the beginning that this was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “I didn’t!” She resumed a rhythmic circular scrubbing to discourage the mocking voice. “Next thing, you’ll say it’s all my fault.”

  “Well, not really. But you can’t deny you’ve taken advantage of every opportunity.”

  “Opportunity for what?”

  “To be with him,” the voice answered. “Admit it, Julie. You’re in love with him.”

  “I am not!”

  Now it was laughing at her with cruel taunts and accusations. “Of course, you are. Why try to deny it? You’ve fallen in love with another handsome but worthless scoundrel, as your mother would call him.”

  “No,” Julie insisted more sternly. She moved over a foot or two, half afraid she would wear a hole right through the floor with the force of her scrubbing. “To begin with, I’m not in love with him. And if I were, he isn’t worthless like…the others. And as for Mama….”

  She had taken too much of her frustration out on the floor. She needed to pause, catch her breath, but the voice would not let her rest.

  “Go on, say what you were going to say about your mother. She’s been acting odd lately, hasn’t she. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the way she’s made it so easy for you to be with him.”

  Once again, the voice was right, and Julie felt a prickle of apprehension down her back as she answered, “He’s a doctor, and she’s concerned, as always, about her health, nothing more.”

  “I don’t recall that you fought very hard against her suggestions.”

  To that, Julie had no answer, only a furious hot blush.

  “Are you admitting you’re in love with him now?”

  “Of course I’m not!”

  Julie pushed the glasses up one more time, angry at herself and tired of this idiotic conversation. How could both sides be right? And how could one side be wrong, when she was both sides?

  “Not in love, or just not admitting it?”

  “Neither.” She removed the glasses and wiped her face on her apron, though it, too, was wet. “And he’s not worthless. He’s going to quit drinking, and he’s going to be a very fine doctor again. As soon as the right opportunity presents itself, I’ll tell him about Hans and me.”

  The voice laughed.

  “Talk about worthless!”

  Confused as well as angry, Julie swore, “Damn it, he’s not!” And when the spectacles she had just put back on slid instantly down her nose and nearly fell off, she shoved them into an apron pocket so furiously that she tore the corner of the pocket. Getting her emotions under control again, she murmured, “I may not feel about Hans the way I have felt about other men, but that just goes to show how much better he must be. Besides, even if I were in love with Dr. Morgan, what good would it do me?”

  That question apparently silenced the voice and Julie resumed her scrubbing.

  “What good would what do you?” the object of her ruminations asked.

  Startled, Julie turned and tried to get up at the same time. She was in too awkward a position to do so gracefully, and being in that position too long had left her back and leg muscles painfully cramped. She became tangled in her wet skirt and petticoats and ended up sitting flat on the wet floor, her feet spraddled and her face b
eet red.

  “Oh, I…I was just…talking to myself,” she stammered. Had she been talking aloud the whole time? And had he heard any more of her conversation with herself than that last line?

  “Glad I’m not the only one. Although most of my comments were for the late and less lamented than ever Horace Opper.”

  His green eyes left their momentary inspection of the figure on the floor and examined the work she had done. Julie struggled to her feet, successfully this time, and tried to smooth some of the wrinkles from her skirt, though she knew it would take much more than that to make her presentable.

  “Uh, we seem to have a problem here, Miss Hollstrom.”

  Her head snapped up.

  “A problem? What problem?”

  A sizeable expanse of wet kitchen floor separated them, for which Julie was immeasurably grateful. Having Morgan something slightly less than five feet away from her was not enough to keep her palms from sweating and her knees, still half numb after kneeling so long, from quivering weakly.

  “Well,” he went on in a slow, teasing drawl, “I have this barrel of garbage to dump down the privy and I can’t get to the back door.”

  “Can’t you just take it out the front and walk around the house?”

  “Of course I can, but what are you going to do?”

  By the time he had uttered those words, Julie realized what a stupid thing she had done. She stood in a corner, with wet floor completely surrounding her. The nearest escape was two or three long strides to the back door. And the floor was slipperiest there, with the risk of falling greatest, too.

  “I haven’t rinsed and waxed it yet,” she informed him. “We can walk across it with no damage.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t.”

  She took the first step, carefully placing her foot where there was the least chance of slipping, but Morgan’s shouted “Wait!” stopped her.

  “Can you see?” he asked. “Where have you put those glasses to now?”

  He must have forgotten this morning, which was just as well. But when Julie reached into her pocket for the spectacles, she encountered a greater disaster.

  “Ouch!” she cried, withdrawing a hand that quickly dripped very bright drops down the front of her skirt and onto her clean floor.

  Morgan ignored the wet spots on the floor and crossed the room in a few easy strides to take her hand in his.

  “Come into the other room,” he urged. “The light is terrible in here; I can’t see a thing. What in heaven’s name have you done?”

  What she had done was very clear. The spectacles were now nothing but a few pieces of twisted gold wire and a hundred shards of broken glass.

  “You must have broken them when you stumbled getting up,” Morgan observed as he dumped the contents of her apron pocket onto the table in the surgery. “But then, you don’t really need them, do you.”

  He had remembered after all.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she admitted in a guilty whisper, “No, I don’t.”

  She sat on a plain wooden chair beside the enameled table and rested her hand on the cold surface while Morgan adjusted a lamp with a small reflecting mirror so that the light concentrated on the injury. The bleeding had already stopped from the two tiny stabs in the end of her third finger. Morgan pulled his stool in front of her and sat down. He had a pair of tweezers close at hand.

  “I don’t see any other slivers,” he announced. “It’s a wonder you didn’t cut your knee.”

  “Then may I leave?”

  “Leave?” he echoed. “Why?”

  “It’s late. I need to go home and fix supper.”

  “Let me put a plaster on that first. And some iodine. I don’t want it getting infected, and after being on that floor all day, you’ve probably got a Mongol horde of germs on your hands.”

  But she jerked her hand away and said, “I can take care of it at home. Please, let me go.”

  He was tempted to accede to her wishes. She could be awfully moody and stubborn at times. But he had bared his soul to her this morning, and he decided it was time for her to do the same. Obviously she disliked his touch, for she had drawn away from him as though burned just now, and he remembered how horrified she had looked the other day in McCrory’s when he had held her hand. Maybe she had had a bad experience with a man before.

  “It’s not even half past three,” he argued. “You have plenty of time, if you use common sense and fix something appropriate to the climate. Besides, I want to show you the proper way to bandage a minor laceration.”

  “What for?”

  He reached behind him for a bottle of tincture of iodine.

  “There may be times when you’ll have to handle little emergencies on your own. Here, give me your hand again and let me show you.”

  She bit her lip, not against the pain but against the more torturous sensations caused by his touch. As he bent his head over the wounded finger, which didn’t hurt at all, Julie felt an insane desire to slide the fingers of her other hand into his hair. The tousled curls, dark with a few stray strands of grey, tempted her, so comfortably within her reach. She knew how they’d feel, soft and silky and springy to her touch.

  Why, oh why, couldn’t he go back to being the wretch he had been two weeks ago? Why couldn’t he still be dirty and drunk and disreputable, instead of this highly desirable man who was holding her hand and dabbing it gently with iodine?

  She jerked at the sudden sting.

  It brought her back to reality.

  “Keep it out of water, if you can, for a day or two,” Morgan ordered as he wrapped a sticking plaster around it. “You may have to ask your brother to help with the dishes.”

  Julie stared at the white bandage.

  “I didn’t think it was all that serious.”

  “I just don’t want to take any chances. I can’t afford to lose you.”

  For all his seriousness, he gave her a smile. The wound wasn’t anything to worry about, not really, but he liked the idea of making someone else pamper her for change.

  “What about the rest of the floor? And don’t tell me you’ll just have Miss Upshaw finish it. I won’t have you taking advantage of her.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to do it myself. Will you show me how?”

  He smiled again, this time with pleasure at having made her smile again. She was quite a sight in her dirty, wet clothes, with that thick rope of braid hanging down her back and streaks of grime like war paint on her face. When she smiled, he forgot all that. He saw only the glow in her eyes, the pink curve of her lips, the lift of her delicate chin.

  He wiped the thought of kissing her out of his head. When it tried to sneak back, Willy’s shouts from the waiting room chased it safely away. The boy had come to have his stitches removed.

  *

  “What do you mean you aren’t going to replace them?” Wilhelm bellowed. Katharine shushed him with a finger to her lips, but he waved her gesture aside. “Such a decision is not yours to make.”

  Julie had fully expected this outburst when she told her father about the eyeglasses. She sighed, partly with exhaustion and partly with relief. She had had to wait until after Willy was safely tucked in bed before braving this discussion, and by then she was more than ready for sleep herself.

  “Papa, I don’t need them. I can see perfectly without them, and they only get in the way.”

  “That is no excuse. Your mama and I decided long ago that they were necessary. Tomorrow you will purchase new ones.”

  Wilhelm leaned back in his chair and picked up the newspaper.

  “I won’t. Besides, Dr. Morgan knows I don’t need them, so if you think—”

  The newspaper snapped down.

  “Wilhelm, please,” Katharine begged. “Don’t wake Willy.”

  That, Julie calmly told herself, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  “Of course!” she shouted. “Don’t wake Willy! Never mind wha
t happens to Julie, so long as you don’t wake Willy!” She saw a pained look come across Katharine’s face but ignored it. She knew her mother too well. “For once, just once, you’re going to listen to me, and to hell with Willy!”

  She got to her feet and faced her father. She was shaking and flatly refused to listen to anything that resembled better judgment, but the consequences of her actions could hardly be worse than the consequences of inaction.

  “I am not going to wear those ridiculous glasses any more,” she announced firmly, her voice far steadier than her knees. “I don’t need them, and there is no way you can make me wear them. If I did, Dr. Morgan would only want to know why, since he knows I can see perfectly well without them, and I don’t suppose you want me to tell him the truth. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

  She stormed out of the parlor, but at the bottom of the stairs Wilhelm caught her, grabbing her by the arm so harshly that she knew there would be bruises.

  “You think you can fool me,” he growled at her, “but I am not fooled. For once you are the fool. Go ahead and flaunt yourself at that man, but it will do you no more good than it did before. And Morgan is less of a man than the horse-thief or any of the others.”

  “I am not the child I was nine years ago, Papa. The dreams I had then died a long time ago. And if they hadn’t, Dr. Morgan is the last man to answer them. He’s still in love with his wife, and even without the precious eyeglasses, I would never be able to replace her. I have enough self-respect not to make a fool of myself trying.”

  She pulled her arm free of her father’s grasp, though she heard the soft tearing of worn fabric as he held onto the sleeve of her dress a second too long. It didn’t matter; she would have left the man’s presence even if he had ripped the garment to shreds. By the time she reached the top of the stairs and stormed into her own room, the tears were hot on her cheeks. She slammed the door as loudly as she could, but it drew no angry retort from her father or complaint from Willy in the next room.

  She had lied. Guilt brought the tears, not only for the lie but for the shame of the truth.