Stuck Together

by Mary Connealy

  “Chasing Lana interrupted his courtship. He was looking for an excuse to come home.”

  Vince had to concede the point, but Dare didn’t renew his demand that Vince chase down the escaped prisoner. Instead, Dare sped up his pacing—not happy but not swinging a fist, either.

  “Luke,” Vince started.

  “Don’t say we let Wilcox go. I refuse to let that—”

  “Shut up for a minute!”

  Luke didn’t even pretend to come to attention, but he did stop his talking.

  “Wilcox is an idiot.”

  “True enough, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Let me finish.”

  Luke scowled.

  “Go ahead and find him. You don’t need me. Go back to your ranch and see if he’s there. A drunkard like him might have just gone back to the ranch and to bed. We didn’t have time to say much to Dodger. Tell Dodger to set your men to searching. Red Wolf’s mighty upset, and arresting that fool hasn’t got a chance of calming him down. He’s right—no court is gonna convict Wilcox of shooting an Indian. It ain’t right, but it’s a fact all the same. And Red Wolf knowing it’s true is what’s got him and his people in a lather.”

  “I want to catch him and charge him and bring him to trial. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “And we will do it, but we don’t have to do it today. It won’t appease the Kiowa one speck. In fact, go talk to them. Tell the Kiowa to go after Wilcox. If they want to start a war, tell ’em to aim it where it belongs.”

  “Which means,” Dare said grimly, “you’ve decided that taking care of your ma is what you’re going to spend the day doing.”

  Vince looked down at his mother, who was looking around the diner in a vague way, like maybe she was realizing she wasn’t home in her Chicago mansion and waiting for lady friends to come over for tea. “That, and maybe I’ll take ten seconds to resign as sheriff. I never wanted the job, anyway. You be sheriff, Dare. You decide which crime you want to solve next.”

  The front door to the diner swung open, and Sledge Murphy came clomping in. “Breakfast ready?”

  Glynna emerged from the kitchen with a coffeepot, smiled and said, “Virginia Belle, would you like to serve tea?”

  Mother brightened and headed straight for the hot, heavy tin pot. Sledge hurried forward and got the pot and took the cup Glynna had in her hand. “Let me pour it, Mrs. Yates, ma’am. It’s mighty heavy for you.”

  Mother smiled and produced a fan that Vince hadn’t noticed before. She fluttered it in front of her eyes. “Why, bless your heart, you are a fine Southern gentleman.”

  Luke and Dare both made about the rudest sound Vince had ever heard. And he’d spent nearly two years in Andersonville Prison, so that was saying something.

  Sledge poured the coffee. “Actually, ma’am, I’m from Wisconsin. I killed me a passel of Rebs during the war. But you sure do remind me of my ma, except she smoked a pipe, and last I knew she didn’t have much left for teeth. Still, you put me in mind of her. Can I pour you a cup?”

  “Yes, I’d love some tea, thank you.” Mother smiled and fanned and sat at the table, and suddenly Sledge was a waitress. He poured just as if the job were his own dream come true, then sat down beside Mother and asked after her health.

  “I’m riding out to the ranch.” Luke stalked into the kitchen, no doubt to report his every move to his wife before he made it.

  Dare shook his head again. “You’re a poor excuse for a lawman, Yates. I’m going to go check Lana’s trail. That lovesick parson probably had his head in the clouds and didn’t even look at the ground.”

  “There’s no denying that sheriffing isn’t my finest gift, Doc.” Vince gave Dare a sloppy salute. “And I see no sign of getting better at it anytime soon. Can I get you a cup of coffee before you go?”

  Dare growled and followed Luke into the kitchen to report his every move.

  Vince had finally figured out how to be the sheriff of a town as small as Broken Wheel that paid him nothing. He quit. Or at least he ignored the job and looked after his ma instead.

  Vince doubted Solomon would have approved the decision, but he made peace with it and refused to be shaken. Several had tried.

  Not Tina, though. Tina seemed mighty grateful he’d stayed around town to help. Much of the care of Mother had fallen on her, and by the end of the day she’d started calling her Mother.

  Jonas and Missy were off courting again. Vince wondered how long they could keep this up before they got married. Vince didn’t figure it’d be long.

  Mother had been moved into the last remaining bedroom of the Yates house, which seemed like a place suited for a horror story. Tina had stripped the room of all breakables, while Vince had hung and locked the shutters Sledge had built.

  Vince had left Tina to prepare Mother for bed and taken up sentry duty at the top of the stairway. He saw the door to Mother’s bedroom swing open and watched while Tina patted loyal Livvy on the head.

  She took a hard look at him and said, “You’ve got to get some sleep tonight.”

  Which Vince took to mean he didn’t look all that good. “I’m fine.” Vince rubbed his heavy eyes in direct denial of his words.

  “If you don’t want to sleep, don’t sleep.” She locked Mother’s door and pocketed the key. “I’m going down to wait for Jonas.” She headed for the stairs.

  Mother was now sleeping in the room on the south end. Vince’s was next. The empty room that still smelled of kerosene was between Vince and Melissa, who slept on the far north end.

  When Tina walked past Vince, he caught her arm. “Can we talk again tonight?” Vince hadn’t meant for that to come out sounding quite so friendly.

  “I don’t really want to talk. We both had an early morning and a long, hard day. I’m sorry Luke and Dare pecked at you today.”

  “Luke wasn’t so bad. At least he went home early on. He and his ranch hands are better suited to hunting Wilcox than I am.”

  Luke and Ruthy had gone home shortly after breakfast, and that had ended the nagging from them.

  “Dare made it a long day, though,” Tina said.

  “I reckon I don’t blame him for wanting me to chase after Lana. He didn’t want to leave Glynna and the children alone in town, so if someone was going to go after my escaped prisoner, it stood to reason it oughta be me.”

  “But when you told him no, that didn’t mean it was all right for him to keep pestering until he near to drove you crazy.”

  “Let’s don’t use the word crazy if we can avoid it,” Vince said.

  “I’m fine with having a talk. I think we should go over some ideas I have for keeping Mother safe.” Tina gave Mother’s bedroom door a longing look as if wishing she’d stayed in there.

  “Don’t call her ‘Mother.’”

  Tina rolled her eyes. “I don’t have a lot of choice.”

  “Why does she think she’s your mother but not mine?” Sighing, Vince turned and plodded down the stairs. He didn’t even check to see if she was following. If she wanted to hide, he’d just let her.

  Then he heard her footsteps behind him and was a little surprised at the smile that quirked his lips. He had his back to her so she didn’t know.

  When they got downstairs, Vince leaned so he could see the front door, the stairway, and Tina just like he’d done the night before. Tina took the chair. Two nights and they already had a routine down . . . like an old married couple.

  He let himself look at her beautiful blond hair and had one wild moment where he pictured himself pulling out her pins, one at a time, then sinking his hands into falling-down curls and getting another taste of those pretty pink lips.

  Snapping his head around to face sideways before she could catch him staring, he thought with a grim unhappiness that they were most certainly not like an old married couple in several really important ways.

  “We need to think ahead about how to make Mother safe.”

  “I said don’t call her that,” Vince shouted
, then reined in his temper and raised both hands as if surrendering before Tina fired a shot. “I’m sorry, Tina. You’ve helped so much. It’s just that . . . that . . .”

  “That it hurts to have her think I’m her daughter and not think you’re her son. I understand.” The gentle way she’d said those words helped a little. She did understand, to the extent anyone could.

  “We need to think of her as a child,” Tina went on. “What would we do if we had a child sleeping upstairs?”

  A child. Their child . . .

  Vince needed to get his unruly thoughts under control even if he had to ram his skull into the brick fireplace to do it. “We’d make sure there are no breakables she could get her hands on.”

  “With a child you can move sharp objects up high and lock doors with simple latches.”

  “But Mother is tall enough, and knowing enough, despite her troubles, that those things won’t stop her.”

  “The sturdy latches you and Sledge put on the windows took care of that.” Tina pulled a folded-up paper from her pocket. “I’m starting a list of other things we need to do.”

  “No,” Vince said. He strode across the room to face her. “You’re trying to figure out how to keep her safe?”

  Her brows arched in confusion. “Well, yes. Of course I’m trying to keep her safe.”

  “I don’t want her safe!” It then hit him how backward that sounded. “I mean, of course I want her safe, but that’s not what we need to talk about.”

  Looking wary, Tina said, “It’s not?”

  The way she said it made him think of kissing her. From her expression he suspected that was exactly what she was thinking, too. “No, we need to talk about curing her.”

  “You . . . you think there’s a cure? Isn’t it just old age? Nothing can cure that.”

  “She’s not that old. If she were in her dotage, I’d agree that we just need to accept things as they are. But Mother isn’t sixty yet, and most folks don’t become addled at her age. Her father too had something wrong with him—wrong in the head. I was never sure what, though. But it’s not simple old age, so there might be a cure for it.” Vince swooped his arms wide in frustration. “Did you really think I rode all the way to New Orleans to find a way to treat Lana Bullard?”

  “Actually, yes, I did think that. I know you were thinking of your ma also, but mostly it was because of your prisoner.” Tina’s blue eyes were wide, and she gave a little shrug, as if she were the tiniest bit afraid of him and didn’t want to do anything to set him off. Which was how people often treated lunatics. “So you didn’t go there for Lana at all?”

  “No!” Vince paused, then let out a big sigh. “I went to New Orleans because I’ve been tryin’ to find a treatment to help cure my mother.”

  Dead silence settled thick over the room, to the point that Vince could barely breathe.

  After a minute or two, Tina said quietly, “I know this has come on her at a young age, Vince, but . . . well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think she can get well from what’s ailing her.” Tina’s words were nothing but kind, and her eyes were full of compassion.

  He wished she’d have slapped him instead. It would have hurt less.

  “She’s been like this for years, getting worse all the time. I have to do something. I can’t just give up on her. I can’t stand . . .” He didn’t know what else to say. Words suddenly seemed stupid, useless.

  “You can’t stand knowing that most likely she’s never going to call you Vince again.”

  “She did after she fell. For that little while, she knew me.”

  “And she may again on occasion, just not very often.”

  “Which means that for the rest of my life, my mother’s going to confuse me with a cruel tyrant.”

  Tina shook her head. “You’re angry with your father, but surely he wasn’t so bad you hate the idea of being called by his name. Maybe you can learn to accept it.”

  “My father started trying to groom me to take over his company when I was only four years old.”

  “Four? What can a four-year-old do?”

  “I had a tutor. I spent every afternoon studying.”

  “Most four-year-olds spend their afternoons napping.”

  Vince felt a grim smile twist his lips. “My earliest memories are of being summoned to my father’s office, and that was just when I did poorly in my studies. It was the only time I saw him.” With a humorless laugh he added, “Mother came to me at different times. Not every day, but if she wasn’t out with friends, she’d visit and we’d have afternoon tea together. She was always kind in a distant sort of way—if I behaved myself and acted gentlemanly. I used to live for those days she’d come and see me.”

  “I can’t imagine a life where parents visit their children. Aunt Iphigenia was always around. At the time I wished she’d leave me alone.”

  “We come from different worlds, I guess. I’d have probably studied to please my mother, but she never asked much of me. And Father criticized mistakes and rarely commented when I did things right.” It might have been exhaustion, but before he knew it Vince found the story of his seventh birthday pouring out of him.

  “He really had the pony killed?”

  Vince nodded. “After that, I enjoyed seeing how far I could push him. But a boy who pushes a man, especially someone like my father, learns to stay on guard.” Vince thought of a hundred other cruelties his father had meted out, but he didn’t want to burden Tina with them.

  “Makes sense,” Tina said. “It was the only way you could get attention from him.”

  “I didn’t want his attention. I just wanted him to know he couldn’t control me. I managed to get expelled from every boarding school he found for me. If they didn’t kick me out, I’d run away. I learned to save up my allowance and sneak off from school. I could run wild all over Chicago for days, so long as the money held out.”

  “And that’s how a rich boy from Chicago never got himself much schooling.”

  Vince said, “But I learned anyway, only on my own. And reading Blackstone set me on the path to being a lawyer, even without the schooling.”

  “Those are the books you read that taught you how to be a lawyer?”

  “Yep. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. And I’ve studied everything I can find about insanity as it applies to the law, and now I’m going to study up on the medical treatment of my mother’s condition until I can find a cure.”

  “Vince—”

  “Don’t say it.” He knew she was going to say it was a hopeless dream. “I won’t live out my life with his name on Mother’s lips every time she speaks to me. I won’t!”

  “But I hear affection in her voice when she says ‘Julius.’”

  Vince grimaced at the mention of the name. “I don’t deny it. When she calls me that, she doesn’t sound as if she hates my father.”

  “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  Shrugging one shoulder, Vince repeated, “Whatever’s wrong with my mother isn’t the normal confusion that comes with age. It happened too young. So we have to be able to treat her, and I’m going to find out how. I’m not quitting, not when it’s something as important as my mother. I’m going to keep reading and hunting for a way to bring her back.” A wave of exhaustion washed over him then, and he thought that tonight, maybe just this once he could stop standing guard enough to sleep. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Tina jumped at his words.

  Vince looked at her and realized what he’d said. “Uh . . . I mean . . .” He felt his cheeks coloring, and he never blushed. But she sure did. Her head was turning the color of a ripe cherry.

  “I’m sorry . . . I’m going to bed now. Good night, Tina.” This was why they needed a better chaperone than Mother. Who right now was fast asleep, snoring.

  “Good night. I’ll wait here for Jonas.” She turned away, but not before Vince saw another bright flush spread across her face.

  Chapter 22

  Jonas walked Tina ov
er to the boardinghouse the next morning and then ran off with Melissa. Tina got Mother dressed and over to the diner. Jonas and Melissa showed up over an hour later looking incredibly happy.

  Mrs. Yates set her heavy coffeepot down with a clang. “Missy, you are discharged.” Then Mother picked the pot up again and called Sledge Murphy a honey pie.

  Tina took in Missy’s befuddled expression and said quietly, “Come in the kitchen.”

  Missy got there just as Vince came in the back door. Vince looked at Missy and said, “Good, we need Jonas. You women need to watch out for Mother today. Luke sent a hand in and told us we need to get out to his ranch and help him hunt Quince Wilcox.”

  Vince went on through to the dining room.

  Missy arched a brow at the high-handed orders and turned to Tina. “What happened? Why am I fired?”

  “She thinks you tried to burn down the boardinghouse yesterday morning.”

  Quietly nodding as if this were no surprise, Missy said, “I’ll work with you in the kitchen while someone else cares for her. We’ll hope she forgets she’s upset with me.”

  Tina appreciated the help. Maybe she could get off work a little early and put in some time marching her picket line. She missed the exercise. She wondered if Mother was good at tidy lettering—and maybe she’d like to have her own sign and march with Tina out front of Duffy’s place.

  “Glynna is making sure she doesn’t leave the diner for now. We’ll worry about it after we finish up here.”

  Tina and Missy kept busy cooking. They worked well together. A few questions flickered through Tina’s mind, but they all circled back around to some version of How do I fit in Jonas’s life if he marries you? That seemed selfish, so she just kept working.

  The kitchen door swung open, and Vince poked his head in. “Can you two come here a minute so we only have to say this once?”

  There was nothing that could burn, so they rushed into the dining room in time to see Vince and his Regulator friends pulling on coats and gloves. Their horses were tied in a line to the hitching post in front of the diner.

  Vince looked at her, and she remembered how he’d been last night. Her heart had come near to breaking as he talked of his childhood. Neither one of them had it easy. Maybe no one ever had it easy.