Stuck Together

by Mary Connealy

  Dare came up. He squeezed liquid out of his mustache for a second while he glared down at Tina. He then studied Jonas, shook his head. “Let’s take a look at that arm. Come on over to my office.”

  Jonas gave Tina such a beady-eyed look, she almost faltered in her determination to stop the scourge of demon rum that flowed from the unholy saloon. The Schusters actually only sold cheap whiskey, but demon rum still described the problem nicely in Tina’s opinion.

  Jonas quit glaring and limped off. Once he was around the corner and no longer looking at her, she renewed her resolve to serve the tiny mission field right in front of Duffy’s Tavern.

  Glynna asked, “Do you need help, Tina? Maybe a bath?”

  Both of Glynna’s children, mostly grown Paul and little sweetheart Janny, stood close at Glynna’s side, staring. Tina considered telling them it was rude to stare, but then Vince grabbed her under her arms and dragged her to her feet.

  She stood, slipped in the mud, and fell against him, adding mud to the front of his ruined vest. He closed his eyes as if he were exhausted, then scooped her right off her feet, swung her into his arms, and sloshed through the mud as he marched down to the diner.

  Glynna shooed her children inside with Vince right behind, Tina being toted along like a parcel. A muddy parcel.

  Glynna held the door. Once inside, Vince set Tina down on one of the benches that lined Glynna’s tables. The man showed little if any care for Tina’s rather tender backside—she’d sat down too hard, too many times. Of course she hadn’t mentioned her tender backside and she never would. Still, she gave him a disgruntled look, wasted on him because he was already walking away.

  He left the diner, closing the door firmly behind him. Tina went ahead and admitted that he just plain slammed it. He went along the board-walk past Glynna’s large front window until Tina couldn’t see him anymore. Standing quickly to catch him in the act if he went into that vile saloon, she watched him walk straight for her placard, pick it up, and swing it into a post holding up the porch roof. The stick held, but her painstakingly hand-painted placard smashed into four pieces.

  Tina didn’t bother to scold the brute. She would nail those pieces back together and be right back on her picket line tomorrow.

  Vince picked the pieces up and threw them in the mud, then stomped on them until they were toothpick-sized.

  “Fine, I’ll make a new sign.” She spoke aloud, but of course Vince couldn’t hear her.

  Then Vince took two steps and found the sign that had started this whole thing.

  Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

  Tina hoped he appreciated her literary leanings. Not everyone could apply Dante to her daily life.

  Vince turned to look at the diner and saw her watching him. Glowering, he took the sign along with her stick and stalked off. Tina lost sight of him as he rounded the short row of Main Street buildings. Tina hated to lose her stick. She’d be hard pressed, in this little Texas town, to find another one half as nice. She was still trying to figure out how to get it away from him when she heard the crack of an ax.

  With a sigh of disgust, she didn’t even run to stop Vince from turning her placard stick into kindling.

  “If he knew me well, he’d know I don’t discourage easily.”

  “We all know you very well, Tina. Why do you think Vince is being thorough in his destruction?” Glynna came out of the kitchen. Her words were withering, but she didn’t seem to be overly upset at Tina. No decent woman wanted that saloon in town.

  “Let’s go over to the parsonage. You need a bath. I’ll pour the rinse water for your hair.”

  The hacking stopped, and Tina followed Glynna out the back door of the diner just in time to see the door to Dare’s doctor’s office shut hard with a loud click. But why not call it as it was? Vince slammed a door again.

  Chapter 2

  Vince walked into Dare’s office and slammed the door hard.

  He’d brought firewood.

  He took some pleasure in stoking Dare’s stove with Tina’s picket stick and what was left of her sign marking Duffy’s Tavern as the gateway to hell.

  Vince wasn’t a drinker, but honestly, Duffy wasn’t so bad.

  “She’ll just find another stick.” Jonas sounded exhausted. Being a big brother was too much for him and that was a fact. Vince couldn’t see a single strand of hair that showed red on Jonas’s soaked head. His face was so muddy none of his freckles showed through. And as Jonas sat there, getting Dare’s examination table filthy, a big clump of mud fell off his shoe.

  Jonas didn’t notice. Right now it was the least of his troubles.

  Dare was busy bending Jonas’s arm one way and another. At a glance, Vince diagnosed his friend from across the room. Jonas wasn’t bad hurt, no real swelling; he’d just taken a good whack. He’d be fine.

  Even though Dare’s eye was covered in mud, Vince could see it was going to be black.

  “You know, Duffy doesn’t really serve a lot of liquor out of that saloon.” Vince figured it was worth mentioning.

  “He does all right.” Dare almost sounded envious. He’d washed his face and hands, probably some law against doctoring with dirty hands. But his hair was starting to stand up in mud-hardened spikes, and his clothes were filthy.

  Vince thought that if Dare were doctoring him, he’d insist on the doctor taking a bath first even if he had a bone sticking out of his skin.

  It was no secret Dare didn’t make much money with doctoring. He’d had a growing practice for a while, back when Glynna was cooking at the diner. She had no gift for it, and Dare kept busy treating stomach ailments of men who’d eat at the diner in order to see Glynna’s pretty face. But Glynna had hired a cook and Dare had gone back to making a bare-bones living. “He built a house with real boards.”

  “You’ve got real boards too, Dare.” Vince swept a pointing finger around the room.

  “Yep, but only because someone abandoned this house, and I just moved in. Although”—Dare raised his head, perked up—“Duffy was here before us. Maybe someone abandoned his house, too.”

  “Can you think of anything that will get her to stop walking that picket line, Jonas?”

  Jonas gave Vince a disgusted look. “I’ve known her for the same length of time you have. You’re as likely to figure out a way to handle her as I am.”

  Vince had one very vivid, very shocking image of himself “handling” Tina Cahill. He’d toted her into the diner. She was slick with mud. An armful of shivering-cold sass. Her shining blue eyes like to stabbed holes in his hide. Like somehow he was to blame for her condition. Her pretty blond curls were dripping brown and plastered to her face. Her dress, earlier in the day, had been pink, and he had a particular fondness for the way Tina fit in her dresses. But now it was so coated with mire, the color was impossible to confirm. She was soaking wet—that dress clinging to her everywhere.

  Vince veered his thoughts away as fast as they occurred and hoped nothing showed on his face.

  Jonas wasn’t overly fond of any man paying attention to his baby sister. Which wasn’t much of a problem here in Broken Wheel, Texas, Tina being Tina.

  “You knew her when she was a child.”

  “I barely saw her.” Jonas flinched, so Dare must’ve found a tender spot. Jonas didn’t comment on Dare’s doctoring skills, or the lack thereof. “I was grown and gone from the time she was a toddler.”

  Jonas’s father had died, and his mother remarried a brute who took his temper out on Jonas and his ma. Jonas had run off several times before he’d left home for good when he was a half-grown boy. His one regret was abandoning his defenseless baby sister to the ugliness in his home.

  Because he’d ended up riding the outlaw trail for years, he’d only found out his stepfather had killed his ma and been hung for it after it was all over. When he’d gone home to see to his sister, he’d found her living with Jonas’s starchy aunt Iphigenia—Jonas’s father’s sister, who resented being asked to raise a child
who shared no blood with her.

  Iphigenia had refused to let Jonas stay with her; neither would she agree to let Jonas take Tina. And Jonas had to admit he was no fit caretaker for a little girl. He’d stopped by to see Tina, only being home a few times through her childhood. Tina had adored him and barraged him with letters in Andersonville. Those letters had helped keep Jonas and all the Regulators sane in Andersonville Prison.

  “Well, you got all those letters from her during the war.” Tina Cahill had been a letter-writin’ fool, no doubt about it.

  “I let you read them when we were locked up together. You learned everything I ever learned about her.”

  Vince, Dare, and Jonas had all spent time in Andersonville, a prison notorious for starvation, deprivation of every kind, and the relentless, ugly deaths of its inmates. Dare had learned doctoring there, which mostly amounted to throwing a blanket over a man’s head when he died. It wasn’t the finest medical training ground known to man. Still, Dare did okay.

  “You need a sling.” Dare went to get a rag out of his stack.

  Vince was relieved Dare didn’t resort to his main skill: amputation. That and blanket throwing were about all he had real experience with.

  Vince said to Dare’s back, “You should put a cold cloth on your eye before it swells all the way shut.” There, Vince was now a doctor, too. He was a doctor and a lawyer. Neither job paid much, and that made Vince glad he hadn’t bothered with law school. No sense making an investment like that for a job that earned a man so few dollars.

  Of course, he might’ve made a better living elsewhere. Broken Wheel was a north Texas town set smack-dab in the middle of Indian Territory. Only idiots lived here, and idiots rarely needed a lawyer. Vince figured it was only fair to count himself and all of his friends among the idiots.

  Vince could have gone home, of course. His father had written about building a new mansion on South Prairie Avenue, no doubt the fanciest address in Chicago. For that was how Julius Yates did things.

  Vince had stopped home for a time after the war to regain his health, and he’d only done that because he was too weak to direct his own affairs. The Army had simply shipped him home. He’d been half starved and weighed barely one hundred pounds when he’d gotten there. Father had seemed unable to even look at him. Mother had gone one better. She’d forgotten she had a son. Vince had left as soon as he was able. Except for that visit, he’d been away from home for most of his adult life. He wondered if a new house, with no old memories, would be easier to handle.

  Not likely.

  Any home shared with his father would be a bigger wasteland than this Palo Duro Canyon.

  Now Luke was married to a woman he’d rescued from a flood, then brought along to a land war. Not the usual courtship.

  Dare was married to a woman whose husband he’d killed. Even though Flint Greer had needed killing bad, that wasn’t the normal way to round up a wife.

  And Jonas had been hunted down by his baby sister, Tina the Picketer, who had moved in and promptly turned the whole town on its ear.

  Well, not the whole town, just the saloon. But there were really only five businesses in Broken Wheel: Sledge Murphy’s smithy; Tug Andrews’s general store; Glynna’s diner; Asa Munson’s boardinghouse; and of course Duffy’s Tavern. Vince didn’t count his own law office, nor Dare’s medical practice, as both were mighty quiet establishments.

  So Tina threatened one-fifth of the Broken Wheel economy, and that attracted notice.

  Most of the townsfolk had gotten used to her walking back and forth, her little twenty-step-long picket line. Her cute little boots clicking out a persnickety rhythm on the boards of Broken Wheel’s short sidewalk.

  She was there five days a week, from one to three in the afternoon, weather permitting. And this was Texas desert country, so the weather usually permitted. She picketed right after she’d gotten the diner cleaned up after the noon rush.

  The men tipped their hats, admired her pretty face and fussy dresses, complimented her biscuits, ignored her scolding and went about their drinking.

  But it was the end of December, payday at a few of the area ranches and New Year’s Eve besides. The cowpokes had a bit more cash money than usual and they were in high spirits. That had drawn a slightly bigger crowd to the saloon than normal. And that crowd had more to drink than was probably wise.

  “I warned her things would be different at Duffy’s today,” Jonas said, wincing at Dare’s medical treatment. “I told her it was payday, besides being a holiday, so Luke and the other ranchers around these parts weren’t expecting a long workday from their men.”

  “You shoulda warned her a little harder,” Dare said, rigging the sling.

  “And louder,” Vince added. “Maybe you should’ve applied your hand to her backside.”

  Jonas rolled his eyes. “I might not survive giving Tina a hiding. I’d rather take a beating in a brawl at Duffy’s than even attempt it.”

  Vince had to admit he agreed with that.

  Even though Tina’s presence had become routine, today—probably because the liquor was flowing more freely—just as Jonas had feared, Tina had stirred up a hornet’s nest. Vince thought of that Abandon Hope sign. He was surprised by a momentary urge to smile over the sign the little minx had come up with. She was a bright little thing. It wasn’t everyone who could apply Dante to her daily life.

  Part of Vince thought it was just as well to ignore the whole thing. They could just make a note on a calendar and worry about Tina once a month—on payday.

  The other part of him lingered over the thought of turning her over his knee and spanking some sense into her.

  Vince didn’t figure he dared do that. And he knew better than to volunteer. Not just because Jonas would object. Dare once in a while made some comment that reminded Vince that Tina was the only single woman in this town—if he didn’t count crazy Lana Bullard, and he didn’t. And Vince was single himself, which was just how he liked it.

  If the men in town were to vote on it, they’d probably elect to throw Tina into the jail along with Lana. They’d probably amend the vote to allow both women—who were both mighty fine cooks—out to make breakfast and dinner at Glynna’s diner.

  Vince wondered, not for the first time, how that diner qualified as belonging to Glynna. She had just moved into an abandoned diner, then hired a cook.

  The fact that Glynna claimed to own it and then kept all the money she didn’t spend on supplies and wages was a deeply questionable legal issue that a lawyer might be expected to have trouble with. But no one seemed to care, and so Vince didn’t, either.

  A knock on the front door of Dare’s house sent Vince, the only one not busy, to answer it. Paul, Glynna’s son, stood at the door, holding a letter. “Mr. Andrews had a letter for you at the general store. He said you hadn’t been in to check and I oughta bring it over.”

  “I never get mail.” Vince looked at the handwriting and felt a chill rush up his spine, because he did in fact on rare occasion get mail. His father’s letters were never easy.

  Paul shrugged.

  “Are you done at the diner, Paul?” Dare called to his stepson. The two of them had a rocky start, but they were getting along well now. Paul was a more cheerful youngster than he’d been when his ma was married to Flint Greer. Who wouldn’t be upset about his ma being married to a hardfisted sidewinder like Greer?

  “We’re done for the day. Ma’s busy helping get Tina cleaned up from the mud-wrestling fight.” With that, Paul turned and left.

  Vince’s eyes were frozen on the unmistakable handwriting on the envelope in his hand. He walked over to a chair at the side of the room, away from his friends.

  As he sat, his stomach twisted, which made Vince mad. He’d have sworn nothing about home could touch him anymore.

  He’d repeated that vow when he’d left after recuperating from Andersonville, but he’d made that decision a long time ago—long before he was old enough to strike out on his own. The day his
father had taught him to always be on his guard.

  “Vincent, darlin’.” Mother fluttered her pretty fan as she stepped into his playroom.

  She came. Today was his seventh birthday, and he’d hoped she would come. He’d dressed in a little black suit and had a neat neckcloth on and his black boots shined. He felt very grown up.

  “Yes, Mother?” Vincent said.

  “Your grandmama sent you a present for your birthday.” She smiled her beautiful smile and spoke with her musical Southern accent.

  His only living grandparent was his mother’s mother, who lived in Georgia. She was kind and lavished wonderful gifts on him, and he and Mother spent at least a month with Grandmama every winter at the plantation.

  “Can I see it?” Vincent threw himself at Mother and hugged her.

  “Vincent, land sakes!” Mother’s voice broke.

  Vincent stepped back so fast he stumbled and fell on his backside. Sitting, braced on his arms, he looked up knowing what he’d see and dreading it.

  Mother dabbed at her eyes. Tears. Always he upset her, and he hated doing it.

  “Children are such undisciplined creatures.” Mother cried delicately into her lace handkerchief while she brushed at her skirts, as if they were now ruined. “I despair of your manners, Vincent.”

  He tried to remember not to touch her, but he loved her so. Struggling to his feet, he said, “I’m sorry, Mother.” He clasped his hands neatly behind his back and looked up at her. Terrified of her tears.

  “I declare, you will never grow up to be a gentleman if you can’t remember simple decorum.”

  Mother stood before him like a magical creature. So fine and beautiful, how dare he touch her? What if she gave up on him becoming a gentleman and never came to see him again? What if she banished him? His best friend had already been sent away to boarding school, and Vincent knew that his time would come, but not yet. He couldn’t bear to be away from Mother.

  Her tears eased and finally, with trembling hands, she tucked her kerchief away. Slowly, as if she feared what he’d do next, she reached out her delicate white fingers and took his hand. That was more gift than he’d expected.