by Chloe Garner
“Oh,” Sarah said. Kayla nodded.
“And then I’ll get some good burgundy drapes to hang from the ceiling. I’ll need dressing rooms.”
Plural?
“How many women do you think there are in Lawrence?” Sarah asked. Kayla frowned.
“Does it matter? More than one, obviously, and they all need dresses.”
Sarah sighed, and Kayla spun.
“You met Rhoda yesterday.”
“I did,” Sarah said. Kayla turned again, looking up at the ceiling.
“What did you think of her?”
“She’s small and pretty,” Sarah said. “Not the normal for Lawrence.”
“No, she’s not normal for anywhere,” Kayla said distantly. “That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? You write for a wife because she’s special.”
“Write,” Sarah said. “For a wife.”
“Uh huh,” Kayla said. “It does smell. What is that?”
Sarah didn’t tell her.
“Where is she from?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, Intec,” Kayla said. “The boys knew her from before. I even met her a couple of times. She’s been writing Jimmy and Thomas for a little while, now, I think.”
“Jimmy and Thomas,” Sarah said.
“Uh huh,” Kayla said. “She and Thomas have been friends for a while. Jimmy...” She turned, putting her fingers up to her cheek. “Oh.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow.
“Jimmy what?” she demanded.
Kayla sighed.
“Not like telling you or not telling you changes anything. Apparently Jimmy asked her to come last week or the week before, I don’t know. They had a thing in Intec, but he was coming here and...”
There were things that she was carefully cutting out of her understanding of the story. Sarah could have shaken or slapped them out of her, but that wasn’t fair to Kayla, no matter how Sarah might have felt about it.
“I don’t know why he decided to ask her,” Kayla finally said diplomatically. Sarah suspected she did, she just didn’t want to confront Sarah about having dismissed Jimmy’s interest.
She’d done this.
He’d asked her. Asked her upfront and outright to marry him, to be his wife. She’d said no. She still meant it.
That he’d written another woman so soon after that was a bit insulting, she thought, but Kayla was right about there being politics with sons and their birth order. If he wanted a family at all, if he wanted to have sons to pass on the control of Lawrence to, he needed to get a foot in the door in that race with Little Peter and Lise.
It just reaffirmed what she’d done. She didn’t want kids. Wouldn’t have known what to do with them. Didn’t know that she had it in her to love, Jimmy, children, or anyone else. If he was looking for a woman to raise his family, well, Rhoda was probably a much better choice.
Though she wasn’t going to fit into that pretty little dress very well, afterwards.
Sarah wondered where that thought had come from, thought herself above such pettiness, and shook her head.
Kayla was watching her.
“I’m happy for him,” Sarah said. “Didn’t know who she was.”
“He didn’t introduce her?” Kayla asked. Sarah raised an eyebrow.
“What would he have introduced her as?” she asked. “And who would he have said I was, exactly?”
Kayla twisted her mouth with a shrug.
“I guess.” Then she turned to look out the window. “I’d be madder than stinging brents.”
Sarah had heard of the legendary insects out of Intec, and she allowed herself a small smile.
“He’s a grown man, Kayla. He can do whatever he wants.”
“But to leave and come back and to be like he is and...”
Kayla was dancing all around it, and Sarah was torn between just putting it out there so Kayla would stop trying to refer to the non-romance between Sarah and Jimmy without actually referring to it, and letting her dangle.
As was her nature, she let the woman dangle.
“He ain’t got any entanglements,” she said. “No reason for anyone to be angry.”
Kayla spun, mouth contorted with the effort at self-control.
“Everyone knows,” she finally said. “Everyone knows and no one says.”
“That’s how it goes in Lawrence.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Maybe so, but that’s how it goes,” Sarah said. Kayla contorted her mouth again.
“She seemed like a nice enough woman,” Sarah finally said. Kayla shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“Better than Lise or Sunny.”
“Not like that’s hard.”
“Maybe you’ll have someone to talk to,” Sarah said. Kayla looked at her and gaped, again at a loss. Sarah didn’t need friends. The last one she’d had, she’d shot in the chest for being too smart for his own good. As much as Kayla’s lack of guile charmed her, it was better if Kayla found an ally in Rhoda. Cauterize the wound and move on. The Lawsons would be a coherent family, Jimmy would have his wife, yes, that was how it needed to be. She nodded to herself.
“This is a good thing, Kayla. Don’t worry about it so much.”
“It isn’t right,” Kayla muttered. “Everyone knows but no one says.”
“You’re going to need a new door,” Sarah said. “That one don’t fit no more.”
“Oh, I plan on a much nicer one,” Kayla said. “I have a catalogue. I’m going to order a pair of doors and cut a wider entrance. I think I can get frosting glass, too.”
Frosting glass was something Sarah had come across in Oxala. It was glass that, with the correct current applied to it, would frost, giving a sense of privacy when a shop owner wanted it, and leaving a nice display window the rest of the time. Sarah shook her head.
“Lawrence ain’t gonna know what hit it,” she said.
Kayla grinned.
“That’s the point, isn’t it? You think it’s okay to leave that door open? I need to go back to the house and get some of the men to come help me clean out, here.”
Sarah shrugged.
“I ain’t gonna stand in your way.”
Kayla bounced on her toes.
“This is going to be so much fun. I’ll have something to do, again.”
There, Sarah actually felt for her.
“Keepin’ busy is a big part of keepin’ content,” she said. “Good luck to you, Kayla Lawson.”
“You too, Sarah Todd,” Kayla said distractedly, then bounced once more and left, rushing down the walkway to where she’d left her cart. At the buckboard, she spun and flung her arm the length of Main Street.
“What are they?” she asked, indicating the tiny little flowering plants.
“Hobflowers,” Sarah said.
“They’re beautiful,” Kayla said happily, getting into her cart. Sarah leaned in the doorway and watched as Kayla and the little mare took off back toward the Lawson house.
It was nice to see someone truly happy. Even if she did like hobflowers.
She went to get the black horse, checking her pockets for cash and finding as much as she figured she would need, then heading to the shantytown.
The men looked up as she arrived.
“We’ve got folk in need of labor,” she said loudly. “I reckon y’all are in the market as such. We need to raise barns and get a house rebuilt. I’m payin’.”
No one answered.
“First ones in line get the job,” she said.
“They’re all already spoken for,” Jimmy said, picking his way through the crowd on foot.
“What’s that?” she asked. He nodded.
“I’ve got three days and an awful lot of infrastructure to get up,” Jimmy said. “I told you it was top priority.”
It riled her worse than she could have put words to, knowing that he could out-bid her for labor if he wanted to. That he was going to get what he wanted.
Knowing that she wasn’t going to bid him up, no matter how
much it made her angry, because she was on his side, at the end of the day, angry or not.
She looked at him a long time, and he put his hands in his pockets, just watching her back.
She wanted to make fun of his shoes. Of his vest. Of the fact that if he wanted a cigarette, he always had to ask her.
She left.
She went to the Goodson house and made a list of what they needed to get the house back up, then spent the rest of the afternoon going to the rest of the homesteads trying to recruit help.
No one could spare any. The barns were down and planting season was only about a week away for the next crop of gremlin.
Everywhere, the hobflowers were opening. They weren’t thick, yet, but they showed every sign of being as prosperous this year as they were every year. The scent of them was faint, but growing.
They would grow, from sand, from rock, from clay, blooming for four or five days, thicker and thicker. It was considered a good omen of the growing season to come - the season after the rains was often the most bountiful, anyway, but the hobflowers heralded it. At some point, there would no longer be desert, just a sea of hobflowers.
They were mostly a faint lavender in color, but here and there, there were genetic mutations that brought magenta, yellow, blue blooms among the lavender.
That was what Jimmy’s investors were going to see.
The color, the speckles, the beauty of it.
Then they would leave. In six days, the world would be covered in the corpses of dried up hobflower blooms. Until the plants died for the season, they’d cover the spent blooms, hiding them away, and then, all at once, the plants would die and the blooms would finish drying, exposed in the sun, and blow. Like a plague of dead insects, they would blow and get into everything, impossible to sweep because they were so gossamer. Sarah preferred sand and dust to hobflowers. It took her weeks to get them out of her house, and they skittered like living things in drafts of air she couldn’t even feel on her skin. Ghosts of the heralds of desert spring. They were possessed, as far as she was concerned, and evil.
Never mind that everyone else loved them. She loathed the things.
She went home early, giving up on corralling the homesteaders into teams large enough to get anything done. They’d come to their senses, maybe they’d work it out amongst themselves to get the men in a single place at a time for building.
She didn’t want to think about what was going to happen when they ran out of building wood.
She found Jimmy on her porch, and she nearly threw him out unheard.
“I want you to supervise the build,” he said.
“Like hell,” she answered.
“No one else is going to think of everything,” he said.
“Get your concierge to do it,” she told him, and he chuckled.
“I’ll work with you on it, but I want you running it.”
“I’ve got a town’s full of folk need me a lot more than you do,” Sarah said. He peered at the sky.
“Home early, aren’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“You going to invite me in?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Even to finish that bottle you started last night?” he asked.
“Bastard.”
He shrugged.
“I’d have done the same.”
“You don’t get to talk to me like that, Lawson.”
“Like what?” he asked, standing as she unlocked and opened the door. She held it open for him then went in after him.
“Like you’re understanding. Or like you care at all what I’m thinkin’.”
“I do,” he said. “You know that. I always want to hear what you think.”
“Not right now, you don’t,” she said.
“Maybe not this precise second,” he said, drawing his lower eyelids tight with an invocation of humor. She nearly hit him.
“You’re a bastard,” she said. “You jump that girl at me with no warning at all...”
“You said no,” he said, going to sit at the table. “You got a cigarette?”
She sat down across from him, getting out the papers and rolling one for each of them. He lit his and went to get the bottle down out of the cabinet.
“I won’t say anything about either your taste or opinion in liquor this hard,” he said, bringing back a pair of glasses.
“Won’t your wife be missing you?” she asked pointedly.
“Fiancée,” he said. “It’s not like we’ve had an opportunity to make it official.”
She gritted her teeth, leaving her cigarette unlit but taking the glass from him.
“You set a date?” she asked, trying not to sound as bitter as she felt.
“Not yet,” he said. “Need to know that things are going to work out here, first. After that, we’ll see.”
“And dear Rhoda is okay with that?” she asked.
“Rhoda is very... flexible,” he said. That, too, nearly sent the table over at him. His eyes sparkled and he sipped his liquor.
“Bastard,” she said. He shrugged slightly.
“So. I bought a parcel of land from the Kirks. It’s not far outside of town, the one we discussed. I’ve had the materials delivered there for the visitor encampment. I’ll think that you’ll find they’re of extraordinary quality.”
He held the glass and cigarette with the same hand, the cigarette between two straight fingers. His other hand rested flat on the table, the mark of a man who knew to keep a weapon hand ready, no matter what. He was never relaxed, was Jimmy.
Gray eyes.
“And if I say no?” she asked. He looked out the back window.
“You won’t.”
She wouldn’t.
“I ain’t your lapdog, Jimmy Lawson,” she said.
“No. Nor are you my wife. You’ve said that plenty of times, now. I hear you.”
She resisted standing, but only just barely.
“I won’t just do what you say ‘cause you say so.”
“You will,” he said, turning those intense eyes back on her, the fires in them visible now. “You will because you and I both know that this is the path forward. You just happen not to like it.”
“What about the homesteaders?” she asked.
“I’ll look after them,” he said. “Just not until this is done.”
“And if you fail?” she asked.
He licked his lips, leaning out over the table.
“If I fail, Lawrence dies.”
It was a whisper. A threat. It was evil and the opposite of evil: fact. He was right. It was why she’d shot Pete, and it was the reason he’d come home. No one could save Lawrence but him. If he failed, it didn’t matter who else was trying, who else had a life-stake in the town. It would die, and it would die violently.
“Bastard,” she whispered. He nodded, his eyebrows giving her a slight twitch that emphasized just how serious he was. He sipped his drink, then set it down and leaned back in his chair, looking out the window again and taking a drag on his cigarette.
“You held them together for a long time, Sarah. I don’t know if I’ve told you how impressed I am by that. But this is how it has to go, now. No more patchwork, no more fixing problems as they happen. I’m going to cause a lot more problems than I fix for a while, and you’re going to have to live with that.”
She flexed her jaw, staring at him with eyes that couldn’t move away. Her hands were frozen where they were. He spoke again, quiet with the inescapability of gravity.
“I’m saying it. You can’t do this. You need me, and you know it, too. You need the big plan. The Lawrence in me. Eli and Elaine. You can’t see the way forward the way they could, or the way I can, and you will follow me.”
There it was.
Out loud.
The real truth.
The one that everyone knew but no one said.
Kayla thought it was that Jimmy and Sarah were in love.
The truth was much nakeder.
Sarah was a slav
e to him. She would fight, she would quarrel, she would be angry, vocal, and difficult. But.
Yes.
But.
She would go along.
Because he could do what she couldn’t.
She shivered.
He could save Lawrence. It wouldn’t be her Lawrence any more, but there had never been any hope that Lawrence would be hers, once he came back.
“Yes,” she said finally. He looked at her, blowing smoke up at the ceiling and resting his poised fingers on his knee.
“You know it doesn’t make me happy, Sarah,” he said. It didn’t matter. They both knew.
“Is that all?” she asked. “Your fiancée will be concerned for your safety.”
Her voice was stiff, proper, without her Lawrence drawl.
It was everything she could do to get the words out through a paralyzed throat.
He licked his lips again, then put his cigarette back in his mouth thoughtfully.
She watched, mesmerized, lost.
“You’ll like her,” he said. “You’re going to hate that, I know, but you will like her. She’s a woman not entirely unlike yourself.”
“You said there was no one like either one of us,” Sarah said. There was a tick to the corner of one eye.
“I believe I said there was no one like us,” he said. “Maybe not. No one is unique. Too many people out there.” His head turned, a slow swivel, to look at her again. “If you’d had more opportunity to meet them, maybe you’d know that.”
She swallowed.
“Get out.”
He shrugged, tipping back the remainder of his liquor and dropping his cigarette into the glass.
“I’ll see you on the plot in the morning. I’ll show you how the designs work. I do think you’ll like them.”
She stood, woodenly, and waited. Finally he stood and let her follow him to the front door.
“Good night, Sarah.”
“Goodbye, Jimmy.”
He looked like he might say something else, then shook his head and went to get his horse.
She went back to the table and drank her glass empty in three swallows then went upstairs, washed her face, and went to bed.
––—
She was about to leave when someone knocked on her door. It was a quiet, timid little knock, and she was actually expecting to find the neighbor boy there with some news from his mother. She found, instead, one of the young vagrants, standing with a beat up hat in his hands.