Stay a Little Longer

by Dorothy Garlock

  “I know this has to be hard for you to understand, Charlotte,” Mason said, “but I want you to believe that if I had known you were here, or that your mother had been sick with worry, I would have done everything I could to come back to you. Nothing I say can make it right, but I hope you can believe me when I tell you that I’m sorry.”

  “But… but, I…” Charlotte began, then fell silent.

  “Tell me,” Mason encouraged.

  “But… but does this mean that my mother might be alive, too?”

  “No, Charlotte,” he managed through the sorrow her question evoked. “I’m afraid she’s gone from us now, no matter how much we wish otherwise.”

  Suddenly, the little girl sprang from where she sat on the bed and turned into Mason’s arms, a move that startled him. As she sank into him, he tenderly embraced her, and from somewhere deep in his chest, he felt a growing sense of completeness, the filling of a void he hadn’t even known existed. That she hadn’t been repulsed by his scarring gave him a glimmer of hope that his life could be repaired. He felt a tear slide free from his eye and descend down his cheek, but he didn’t mind, not in the slightest.

  Their moment was broken by a sharp bark from Jasper.

  “Hush, now,” Charlotte scolded him. “You don’t have to be jealous… He’ll be your daddy, too!”

  Mason laughed heartily at his daughter’s words as he rose from the bed and walked over to where he had hung his worn coat. From the inside pocket he retrieved the photograph and letter he had treasured for so many years. “I have something for you,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “These were the last things I received from your mother… before I got sick,” he explained gently. “They’ve helped me through some very rough times, and whenever I look at them, I remember her as clearly as if she were standing right before me. Now I want you to have them.”

  “Really?” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, really. They’re yours.”

  Without having to be cautioned, Charlotte took the photograph and letter from Mason as delicately as if they were made of glass. As she examined the photograph, a bright smile spread across her face. Looking up at Mason, she said, “That’s my mother!”

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed as he again marveled at how much of Alice lived on in Charlotte.

  In that moment, he knew that Alice, wherever she was, was smiling.

  Rachel knocked gently on the door to her mother’s room before entering. Carefully balancing a tray with that afternoon’s lunch, she found her mother once again standing in front of the window, brilliant sunlight streaming in through the crack in the curtains; the rest of the room was still dark with gloomy shadows. Eliza glanced at her daughter for only a moment, her face a mask of frustrated anger and spite, her jaw rigid and her mouth pulled into a tight line, before returning her gaze to the street below.

  Setting down the tray, Rachel mumbled, “I’ll be back for it later,” and began to turn back toward the door.

  “How could you have lied to me in such a way?” her mother asked suddenly.

  Rachel sighed. As she had prepared her mother’s tray, she had known that this was going to happen. Even the night before, well after she and Mason had left her mother’s room, she had lain awake in bed, unable to sleep, thinking of how her mother had reacted to the surprising news that Mason was still alive. Over and over, she saw the horrified look in the woman’s eyes as she gazed upon Mason’s scars. While Mason had been the one slapped, she had known that Eliza Watkins’s ire would eventually find a familiar target.

  “It’s just as Mason told you, Mother,” Rachel explained, turning back to face the woman’s accusing stare. “He asked me to keep his identity a secret. Besides, when we first brought him to the boardinghouse, we had no idea who he was.”

  “I just bet you didn’t!” Eliza said sarcastically.

  “What I’m telling you is the truth,” Rachel answered defiantly. “If you had seen him lying in that cabin, if you had seen the disheveled mess he had become, you wouldn’t have known who he was either. Even if Zachary Tucker himself had stumbled across him in the woods, he wouldn’t have had any idea he’d found his brother.”

  The sudden realization that Zachary had no idea of his brother’s return sent shivers racing down Rachel’s arms. With everything that had happened lately, particularly the revelation of Mason’s true identity and the vicious attack by Jonathan Moseley, it had been easy to forget Zachary’s desire to own the boardinghouse and use it for the incoming lumber company. But the threat hadn’t disappeared.

  “I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me once you had learned the truth,” Eliza continued. “Regardless of what he asked you to do, there was no reason for you to keep it from me.”

  “Maybe I didn’t say anything because I could see how genuinely hurt Mason was to learn about Alice.”

  “He didn’t know?” Eliza asked incredulously.

  “How would he? He’s spent the last several years hiding in darkened rail cars, moving back and forth across the country. When he finally decided to return to Carlson, the first thing he did was to go to his and Alice’s old house, but before he could find an answer to any of his questions, he became ill. He didn’t know about Charlotte either.”

  “But Alice wrote to him,” her mother said. “She told him!”

  “He never received the letter.”

  “Does Charlotte know who he is?”

  Rachel nodded. “He told me that he was going to tell her.”

  “You can’t let him!” Eliza shouted, finally stepping away from the curtains and approaching her daughter, her face creased with worry. “Just imagine how much that would hurt her!”

  “Why?” Rachel frowned. “The poor child has had to live with the burden of her mother’s death her whole life, every birthday being dragged out to see a tombstone of a woman she never knew. She’ll be happy to have at least one parent! She and Mason get along wonderfully.”

  “How can you allow them to be together? Have you forgotten that it is his fault that Alice is gone?”

  Rachel knew that her mother’s angry words were meant to upset her, but she was beginning to see that there was another side, a different truth; what had happened to Alice was as much a result of her sister’s inability to deal with her grief as it was about Mason not returning from the war. For many years she had blamed Mason for what occurred. But now, even if there was still lingering anger in her heart, she knew that it was time to let it go and, just as Mason had begun to do, try to reclaim what was left of their lives.

  Clinging to the past won’t help any of us any longer…

  “Mother,” she began as gently as she could, “what’s done is done. I can’t keep hating him for what happened, and neither should you.”

  “Don’t think you can tell me how I should feel! It’s his fault!”

  “That’s not fair,” Rachel disagreed, standing her ground in the face of her mother’s ever-increasing fury. “Some of the blame has to rest with Alice. She was the one who chose not to live without Mason, even though she knew she was bringing his child into the world.”

  “Don’t say such things about her!”

  “But it’s true, Mother. Deep down, you know that I’m right.”

  Surprise and indignation filled Eliza’s face as she listened to Rachel’s defiant words. Crossing her thin arms over her chest, she declared, “I can’t believe you would say such things. For that matter, I don’t know how you can stand to even be around him!”

  “Because, just like Mason,” Rachel explained, her own ire rising right alongside her mother’s, “I want to put the past where it belongs! There’s no need to carry all of this anger and pain around anymore. Blaming Mason will do nothing to bring Alice back and will only cause more hurt. What has it gotten any of us but needless suffering? Look at yourself, Mother. All it has given you is such fear that you never leave your room!”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

&nbs
p; “It means that you’ve spent the last eight years carrying Alice’s death around as if it were your own personal cross to bear,” Rachel argued, allowing the thoughts she had held within herself for so many years finally to be let loose. “You lock yourself in this room as if you were in a prison! While life goes on as it always has just outside your windows, you remain here, acting as if we are still in the days when Alice and I slid down the banisters. You still act as if you expect her to come walking through your door!”

  “You can’t know the pain I’ve gone through!” Eliza shouted.

  “I do, Mother!” Rachel answered truthfully. “I went through it too, remember? I’m the one who has cared for Charlotte as if she were my own daughter! I’m the one who has turned away each and every suitor who ventured to court me because of my responsibilities here in the boardinghouse! I’m the one who has had to bring meal after meal into this gloomy room!”

  “I never asked you—” her mother began but was cut off.

  “Every one of us has suffered and sacrificed, and for what?” Rachel vehemently argued. “We keep living in the past, feeling sorry about what happened, but never doing a damned thing about it! Well, I’ve had it and it’s time for us to stop!”

  Eliza could only stare at her daughter in disbelief.

  “Mason is right,” Rachel said, suddenly aware of just how much she had finally allowed herself to say, but not feeling the slightest bit sorry at having said it. “We have to go on living. Though we all miss Alice, Mason included, we have to go on if we truly want to live again. These days alongside him have reminded me of all that we have lost, and I know, in the bottom of my heart, that Alice wouldn’t want that… for any of us.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Rachel turned and walked to the door. With her hand on the doorknob, she turned to find her mother still silently staring, emotion beginning to get the better of her.

  “I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive, Mother,” Rachel explained. “Because if you can’t then you will have lost the part of you that Alice and I loved best.”

  With that, Rachel went out and shut the door behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  ZACHARY TUCKER STOOD silently at the side of his father’s bed, watching the old man as he slept. Outside the room’s windows, the breaking November morning was brilliant; rays of golden sunlight streamed down from a nearly cloudless sky, warming away the stubborn frost that had settled upon the ground overnight. The weather, however, would go unnoticed by the room’s sole occupant; in Sherman Tucker’s narrow world, there was no longer much of a difference between day and night.

  Though he was just sixty years of age, Sherman Tucker bore the outward appearance of a much older man. Deep, insistent wrinkles lined his worn skin; age spots dotted his scalp, swept over by wispy, thinning hair as white as snow. While he slept soundly, dark circles underlined his rheumy eyes. Once upon a time he had been a fit, robust man who had led his bank through tough times with a fiery, strong resolve that never wavered. Now he was a shell of that man. The reason for such a profound change was simple.

  When his older son had first gone off to war, Sherman Tucker had been very proud to be his father. But after he received the fateful communication that Mason had been reported as missing, presumed killed in action, he had gradually lost interest in the world. All he had worked for was gone. The legacy he had sought to leave his son no longer mattered. In the beginning, his despair showed in a slumping of his broad shoulders, a watery look in his eyes as he tried to carry himself through another day at the bank. Soon it became a chronic pain in his back, a nagging cold that never seemed to go away, before finally depression overcame him, sending him to his bed, never to leave.

  And that was the day when all that you had created became mine… Zachary gloated at the thought.

  When Sherman’s misery forced him to step away, Zachary had filled the void in his business that had been left behind, even if that had never been his father’s intention. Within months, he had consolidated control, removing anyone stubborn or unwise enough to stand in his way. The power and authority he had always lustfully craved from a distance was finally his. Now, with his father’s death more imminent, he felt no remorse, no impending sense of loss. In fact, he found himself filled with anticipation.

  You’ll finally be out of my way, Father… just like Mason…

  Zachary had never been his father’s favorite. Where Mason seemed to be able to do no wrong, every attempt that Zachary made to please his father met with unmitigated failure. He could still see the look of displeasure in the man’s eyes when he made a mistake in the bank’s ledgers, the first of many such disappointments. Mason had been the brother brought before important investors and visitors from out of town looking to bring business to Carlson. At Christmas parties and other celebrations, Mason was marched up before the throng and asked to say a few words about how much their work was appreciated.

  Sherman Tucker had known that his younger son would never be able to emulate his sense of fairness and honesty in business, his strong ethic of doing what was right in preference to what was profitable. That was why Mason had been given every opportunity to be the one to replace him.

  “But then he had the good sense to go and get killed,” Zachary muttered to himself.

  He walked over to the window and looked down upon Carlson. As pleasant as it was to be reminded of how he had managed to acquire all he desired, gaining control of his father’s financial empire, his thoughts at such an early hour were more troublesome.

  Inside his coat pocket, pressed against his chest, was yet another telegram from the Gaitskill Lumber Company pressuring him for an immediate update on the status of the boardinghouse property. He didn’t need to look at it again to remember the impatient tone that had been used.

  … for unless this matter is resolved to our satisfaction per the letter of our earlier agreement, we will have no choice but to…

  Not an hour passed without Zachary cursing the stubborness of Eliza Watkins and her family. Even after the savage beating of that damned drunkard Otis, they still refused his demands. He had begun to realize how misguided his faith in Rachel was; in the end, she had proven no smarter than the rest of them, and all his entreaty to her had done was waste more of his valuable time, time he wouldn’t be able to regain.

  Below, Carlson was still awakening to a new day, but Zachary’s mind was already working at a feverish pace. As his stomach tied itself into spastic knots, he was busy formulating his next plan of attack, something that would undoubtedly have to involve Travis Jefferson.

  It’s nearly time to let him do whatever is needed…

  Zachary turned back to where his father still slept soundly. In that moment, he knew that he and his father actually did have something in common: both precariously held on to what they deemed valuable, a hold that was slipping away, for both of them, by the hour. The difference was that Zachary wasn’t willing to go without a struggle. He would do whatever was necessary, no matter how unseemly or violent, as long as in the end he was the victor.

  His father and Mason’s memory be damned.

  “The way I hears it, a fella out travelin’ them there rails can find himself with a whole mess of good drinkin’, what with the ’shine and road whiskey and such,” Otis offered in all seriousness. Wincing, he rubbed at his broken arm; he’d just returned from the doctor’s office with a new plaster cast. When Rachel had pressed him about what had happened out behind the boardinghouse, his recollection of events was hazy at best; flashes of a face he couldn’t recognize mixed with a great deal of pain.

  “I can’t say that I’ve ever been one to do much drinking,” Mason answered.

  “And that right there is a damned shame!” With that declaration, Otis fished out his flask from his shirt pocket and took a gulp. When he noticed Rachel glowering at him, his voice rose in mock indignation. “It’s for the pain, darlin’! Honest it is!”

  Mason sat opposite Otis at t
he rickety table in the back of the kitchen of the boardinghouse, the cramped quarters made tighter by the fact that the other man’s enormous belly couldn’t fit under the table’s top. Rachel worked diligently on supper, and soon the scent of roast and boiled vegetables filled the room. She glanced at Mason, holding his eyes for a moment to share his amusement at Otis’s bravado. Charlotte sat at the end of the table, Jasper contently curled on the floor beneath her.

  When Rachel and Mason had first approached Otis with the obvious, startling fact that Mason hadn’t died in France as had been claimed, the man had at first thought that he was in the clutches of a drunken hallucination. When he’d been convinced that he was indeed sober, he’d reacted with little more than a whistle and a shrug of his shoulders, although he eventually admitted that he could see little of the old Mason in the man with the ugly scars on his face and had been surprised to learn that Charlotte hadn’t minded. Now, sitting in the kitchen, he seemed happy to have a captive audience for another of his drinking stories.

  “Every man goin’ about on his own, travelin’ the rails or otherwise, should always count on doin’ some drinkin’,” Otis explained. “Hell, if it ain’ the law it oughta be!”

  Mason laughed in answer.

  Rachel’s heart leapt to hear Mason’s laugh; it was low and gravelly, as if he hadn’t used it in a long time. When he noticed her watching, he shot her a grin, his mouth crooked; but even with his scarred face, she saw a glimmer of the man she had once known. Conscious that she was staring, she turned back to her guffawing uncle. “Don’t you ever get tired of talking about drinking?”

  “Why on earth would I?” Otis said in mock indignation. “Why, the very best things that have ever happened to me have occurred while I’ve been drinkin’… although what they might be seem to be escapin’ me at this here moment…”

  “Surely you can’t mean that,” Mason said. “What about your arm?”

  “What about it?”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t had so much to drink down at the tavern, you might have been able to fend off whoever it was who attacked you. If nothing else, you could’ve been clearheaded enough to be able to identify the man.”