“I don’t like anybody staring at me while I’m eating,” he said.
A hot cloud grazed Phoebe’s eyelids. “I ain’t starin’. I’m admirin’,” she said brazenly.
Gage gave her an icy glare. “You can’t soften me up. I’m not the kind of man that’d take a pound of flesh for what’s owed me. Even if it was offered by a woman who could spare it.”
Phoebe’s gall rose. She swallowed it back. “I ain’t offerin’ you anything. And I don’t need your permission to admire a thing or not. Howsomever, you’ve been misinformed by somebody. Your looks ain’t nothin’ special to draw the eye. I was admirin’ the manners you have.”
His cynicism was expressed in one dark spiky eyebrow, arched as if it’d been plucked to appear that way.
“Day after tomorrow is Sunday. We Hawleys are church-goin’. I was just wonderin’ if you know of a good Baptist church hereabouts. One that’s right strict and preaches damnation against fornication. I ain’t for loose fornicators.”
His cynical expression faded, replaced by—Phoebe couldn’t put a name to what replaced it. She felt her heart compress uneasily. He wasn’t taking to her solution right.
“Who the hell do you think you are? To come into my home and pass judgment.”
Phoebe was thunderstruck. “Are you a fornicator?”
“Don’t try to cover up what you meant,” he sneered. “You gossiped at the crab house about Velma. My wife is dead and I won’t hear bad talk about her. Not in this house. Now you get your things—your brother and sister—and get out.”
Lost! Everything lost.
Phoebe tried to speak and couldn’t. Blood drained from her face, the paleness having the effect of making her eyes seem to take up her whole face. Her legs were trembling so she feared they wouldn’t hold straight to take her into the living room to call Maydean or to the bedroom for Willie-Boy.
“What’s wrong?” Maydean asked.
“Start packin’,” Phoebe said.
“You got us throwed out! I knew it would happen. You’re so mean-mouthed.”
Willie-Boy was whimpering. “I hurt so bad, Phoebe. I feel like I’m on fire.”
“I got to wrap you in a blanket. I’ll fix you in a nice pallet in the back of the truck.”
“Don’t touch me, Phoebe. I can’t stand it.”
She wrapped him and picked him up. He cried, great gulping pain-filled sobs.
“Hush now. Hush.” Phoebe carried him back through the house, the kitchen, ignoring Gage who was standing at the sink. She pushed the screen open with her hip.
In the truck bed she made Willie-Boy as comfortable as she could. Maydean was sniffling. Phoebe felt she was close to tears herself. “You stay in the back with Willie-Boy. I got to get my change purse and the keys.”
Gage accosted her as soon as she was inside the kitchen door. “What’s wrong with the boy?”
“Nothing,” she said stiffly as she passed on by, went into the bedroom, checking for left-behind belongings and retrieving her purse from beneath the mattress. Gage blocked her passage from the bedroom.
“You can’t get far without a tag.”
“What business is it of yours? Move outta my way. I take back what I said out admirin’ your manners. You ain’t nothin’ but a arrogance-filled bully. I ain’t of a mind to stay in a house with a man who misdirects everything that’s said to his own cause.”
“It’ll be dark in two hours. Where’re you going to sleep, put up for the night?”
A rest stop beside a highway, Phoebe thought, heartsick, or a side road somewhere that was dark and scary. “I’ll make do. Hawleys have been makin’ do for better’n two-hundred years. We’re good at it. It’s none of your worry.” She tried to push past him. The length of her brushed him. An odd restlessness shot up her spine, making her scalp tingle. She looked up at Gage. His face was expressionless.
“I know it’s none of my worry. I don’t know why I am worried. I didn’t mean you had to leave tonight.”
“You did so.”
“Well, now I’m saying wait until morning.”
“No sense to that. We’re packed up now. Packin’ and unpackin’ don’t suit me. I like to get where I’m goin’ and stay put. I thank you for your hospitality, what little there was of it. When I get the money up I owe you, I’ll stop by.” The soap and man smell of him filled her nostrils undermining her strength of purpose.
“You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. You don’t have any place to run to and you know it.”
“You can’t have it both ways, wantin’ me to stay and wantin’ me to leave. I didn’t make a comment to insult your dead wife. I was just lettin’ you know I don’t hold with un-Christian ways.”
“I realize that. I flew off the handle,” he said, hearing himself allude to an apology he had no conscious intention of making. She was somehow digging into the silent space of his soul. More than that...incredibly, he felt his body reacting to her. He discounted the sudden tightness in his groin. There wasn’t a handful of flesh on her. And he was a man who liked his pound of flesh.
“‘Scuse me,” Phoebe said, escaping the room and his closeness. The ripple in her body put her at sixes and sevens. She was talking Christian and thinking devil. Gage stayed on her heels all the way to the truck.
He peeled the blanket away from a whimpering Willie-Boy and winced. “You can’t go off half-cocked with the boy burned like that.” He turned and faced Phoebe. “You’re earning your keep. You can stay until you can find a place of your own.”
Phoebe chewed her lip. “I hate to eat crow worsen I hate burnt toast.”
“Must be that Hawley pride you’re always boasting of. Anyway, you’re too good a cook to burn toast.” He signaled Willie-Boy. “Haul yourself over here, son. I’ll carry you back to bed.”
Like a deer alert to every nuance in the forest, every shift in wind, Phoebe was struck with the metamorphosis in Gage. It hadn’t occurred to her that he actually might be good and kind without prodding, or display a tenderness, which he did in the manner he lifted Willie-Boy. She’d judged him on calluses, purse strings, bone and sinew. Now she had a different aspect of him to explore--different and confusing.
Maydean scrambled down from the truck bed. “What made him change his mind?”
“Goodness begets goodness,” said Phoebe, giving the only answer that arose out of her confused thoughts. “Get back here, Maydean. Tote that suitcase.”
“Meanness begets meanness,” Maydean huffed.
“I’m going to save you from yourself, Maydean. After you go to sleep tonight I’m goin’ to pluck out every dern one of your eye lashes. Save you from the sin of flutterin’ them at every man and boy you meet.”
~~~~
Phoebe soothed Willie-Boy, fed him aspirin and tea, and unpacked—for the last time, she hoped, if she had any say in it. It looked as if she might.
The kitchen needed straightening; she went to do it. Gage had pushed aside dishes and had ledgers spread out. “Can’t do my book work in the living room with the TV blaring,” he volunteered.
“I can run those girls outside till full dark if you want me to,” Phoebe said, keeping her tone neutral.
He shook his head. “Not necessary.”
The way he was looking at her, talking to her, made the rippling start up again. Phoebe rippled all over. She felt it in her legs, her stomach. It felt good. There was a subtle change in the climate between them. While she did the dishes, swept the floor and rinsed out the dishcloths she tried to fathom the nature of the change. Now and again, out of the corner of her eye she caught him tracking her. The rippling got more intense.
She was finished in the kitchen, but she didn’t want to leave the room. She made two glasses of iced tea, put one before Gage, and sat at the opposite end of the table. The sun sent a few stray fingers of gold through the window. In the dancing rays, Phoebe’s hair seemed to take on a life of its own, not unattractive.
“You change,” Gage obse
rved.
The rippling had got up to her throat and made it dry. She took a sip of tea. “I seem the same all the time to me.”
“When you’re not leading with your chin and barking orders, you look nice.”
Coy blushing wasn’t in Phoebe’s nature. When she got mad her face got red, but pure-out blushing, a warmth that spread from bosom to forehead was a new experience. She suffered it now. No one in the whole world had ever said she looked nice. She couldn’t cope with it. “The first time I laid eyes on you, I thought to myself you had a good straight nose and...and...tidily cut hair.”
Gage smiled. “I had just come from the barber shop. But looks don’t count for everything.”
Phoebe was electrified. “You think that, too?”
“I know from experience.”
“Me, too, brains is where it’s at. Brains and a strong back. I got both.”
“Brains, a strong back and maybe a bit of cunning, you mean.”
His sarcasm was light, but there all the same. Things were going too well to bite on it. Phoebe took another sip of tea. All sorts of ideas were racing through her head. Ideas like how she might do her hair to keep it from being so flyaway, ideas like maybe stuffing her bra with toilet paper to get a better shape. She discounted the last as a waste of a necessary item, but held her head up high so her neck might be in his full view. Gage took out a pocket knife and began to sharpen a pencil.
His fingers were thick, strong and nimble. Phoebe imagined his hands on her, but couldn’t figure a placement that pleased her that wasn’t unseemly. “I got to bunk down somewhere else tonight,” she advanced.
He looked up. A glaze, heightened by an inner chaos, lay on his dark eyes. “I’m not taking you into my bed. That’s not what I was leading up to, not why I said you could stay.”
Indignant, Phoebe’s flashing eyes ignited. “I never had such an evil thought!” Well, maybe her mind was skittering up to it in a roundabout way—sideways. “Willie-Boy has got to sleep spread-eagled. There ain’t room in that bed for him and me and Maydean. I was aimin’ to ask if I could bunk in one of them other rooms or on the sofa.”
“Suit yourself,” he said dryly, sounding as if he didn’t believe her protests.
“I aim to.” Phoebe could feel herself getting all fired up. The good rippling sensation shrank to the size of a pea. The skittering in her brain came to dead stop. Abruptly, Gage stood up.
“I’m going out.”
Phoebe wanted to ask where so bad she had to clench her jaws to keep the question from flying out. Going to drink? To get a woman? He was fair stirred up. She could sense it.
“I’ll see to Dorie,” she said with a dragging heart. She listened for his truck motor. When the sound faded she moved about the house with the quiet sobriety of a person attending a wake. She seldom allowed herself to feel down-spirited for long. If it got to be a habit, that’s where a body stayed. Down. But she couldn’t seem to pull herself up.
Halfheartedly she inspected the rooms along the side hall. In addition to the room she shared with Willie-Boy and Maydean, were Dorie’s room, two large hall closets bracketing the bathroom, two more fine-sized bedrooms, packed rat like with all sorts of furniture and debris. Last was Gage’s room. Phoebe put her hand on the doorknob.
It wouldn’t hurt to have just a quick peek. Most likely his bedding needed changing, clothes hung. Men were notorious about keeping up. She looked in.
The huge bed was the focus of the room and neatly made with several pillows leaning upright against the leather headboard. Probably special-made, Phoebe thought, to accommodate his huge frame. Why, she wouldn’t take up hardly a speck of room in that big old bed. That is, if it came to sharing—not that she would, but if.
An air conditioner framed in a window hummed on low. Phoebe stood in front of it reveling in the cooling air. Lor! The man liked his luxury. She opened the closet. The faint smell of scent and man rushed at her. She ran her hand along hangers. Not a single garment belonged to a woman. He’d cleared out all evidence of Velma except gossip. Somehow, it didn’t seem fitting. There wasn’t even a photograph on the dresser or on the walls. She pulled out a dresser drawer. Socks and underwear. No bobby pins, no half-used lipstick tubes, no nail polish. She searched into the depths of the drawer and found a small flat box.
Phoebe opened it, backed up and sat on the edge of the bed. There were baby pictures of Dorie, a lock of hair clumsily tied with pink ribbon, two baby teeth wrapped in tissue. Gage’s love of Dorie must’ve caused him to attend to these small items. But hate or an emotion as strong, had erased Velma Morgan with meticulous care.
Why, years and years after Grandma Hawley had died they were still finding her things lying about, a knitting needle in a chair cushion, her long hairpins and wire combs on the dresser, a lace collar in the bottom of the ironing basket. Each finding had caused a remembrance, a memory portrait. Phoebe looked around the room. It was sterile of woman. The man wanted no remembrance. To Phoebe’s way of thinking, that wasn’t healthy, not for Gage and not for Dorie. She spent another few minutes on the riddle of Gage Morgan, then roused herself to clear off a bed in one of the spare rooms.
Later, long after the house was quiet, Phoebe heard the back screened door slam, Gage thumping down the hall. She turned over and went to sleep.
Five
Phoebe was awake and dressed before anyone else in the house stirred. She counted herself as reasonable as the next person, but this morning she felt hostile. She’d worked it out. Gage Morgan had allowed her to stay in his house with a grudging spirit. After which he’d taken himself off to drink or lollydab with a woman. Phoebe couldn’t decide which was the worst offense to her nature: whiskey or loose women or the man who indulged in either.
The facts stuck out for themselves. She’d lain awake half the night worrying about him, wondering who he was with and suffering stabs of jealousy. No doubt a single stab was enough to turn her soul black with sin. Gage Morgan ought pay for darkening her soul. He sure should. Atop that, here she was out of the kindness of her heart making a drudge of herself for a man who didn’t care whether she lived or died.
While brewing coffee, Phoebe rattled pots, slammed cupboards and banged the wooden back door open to allow in the fresh morning breeze. She crept down the hall and listened. No one had awakened, especially the person on whom she wished to vent her spleen. He was no doubt lying in his big old bed, snoring away. Her hostility thickened.
Taking the mop out of the pantry she shoved it across the floor. At the comer of Gage’s bedroom, she became more vigorous, shoving the mop so hard to and fro that the handle bumped and scraped his wall. For good measure she thumped his bedroom door two hard licks. She heard him snort and growl, heard his feet slap the floor.
Phoebe girded herself for battle.
His door opened. He stood there buttoning his pants, his chest bare, his hair awry, his beard stubble dark and his bloodshot eyes narrowed to slits.
“What in hell is going on?”
Oh, but he had leftover sin written all over him. Phoebe fixed him with a cold condemning eye. “I was just gettin’ the damp mopping outta the way afore the kids got up.” She sugarcoated every angry word.
“At five-thirty in the damned morning?”
“I got to be at the crab house by eight. Just wanted to make sure I earn my keep here, afore I go. Like as not if I didn’t, soon’s I got back you’d be threatenin’ to throw us out again. I can’t worry about that while I’m out makin’ the money I owe you.” She didn’t mean for it to, but her gaze seemed of its own accord to latch onto the spread of dark hair on his chest. Her eyes followed as it thinned and trailed down into his pants.
He muttered a low oath. “You’re another one. Damn it to hell.”
“Another one what?”
“Nag.”
Phoebe turned pale. “You like callin’ people names, don’t you?”
“I got a good name for anybody who wakes me up as rudely as you just did
.”
“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were still abed. How could I? Your door was closed. I can’t see through doors.”
“I’ll tell you what I see. You woke me up on purpose. I can see that.”
“Don’t know how you can see anything with them whiskey-coated eyes,” scoffed Phoebe, nit-picking as far as she dared.
“I can see all right. I can see your chin coming at me. Keep it coming,” he jeered. “Pretty soon you’ll stab me to death. Maybe then I’ll get my sleep out.”
“Won’t,” she returned petulantly. “I ain’t of a mind to bleed whiskey all over a floor I just mopped.”
“Listen here, woman,” Gage ground out, “if I want to have a drink, I’ll have it. You keep your long nose out of my business.”
It was wrong, of course, to enjoy quarreling. However, Phoebe did feel...satisfied. Yes, she did, wonderfully satisfied. She drew her chin back and sniffed. “Get back in bed if you want to. Stay there and be vile-tempered all day for all I care. I got breakfast to cook.”
“This is the thanks I get for opening my home to a bunch of road ticks,” he aimed at her departing back. “If I had any sense I’d let you take your bumper and be gone.”
Phoebe felt her heart stop. On no account did she want him worrying on that notion and laying waste to the rest of her life. “I got my pride,” she shot over her shoulder. “I ain’t touchin’ that bumper till I got you paid off. I told you, Hawleys don’t take charity.”
~~~~
“Hawleys don’t take charity,” Gage mimicked dourly, stalking into the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. The mirror over the sink returned his image. He made a fierce face. Hawley pride. Phoebe made it sound like something packaged in red, white and blue. The skinny stick! She was driving him batty. She almost made him feel like he ought to apologize for going out and having a few beers. It was the stupidest idea he’d had in weeks.
The second stupidest. The first was thinking it would do no harm to let Phoebe Hawley in the door. He should’ve known she’d make a general nuisance of herself.
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