The Lady's Arrangement (Help Wanted)

by Colleen L. Donnelly

  Jess’s eyes grew bigger than the plate when I stepped through the bedroom door. “Sit up. Time to eat.”

  “Ma said I can’t…”

  “She ain’t the only one wearing pants around here.” I stood above him. His gaze went to the heaping plate in my hands. “Had to pile it high since there ain’t much room on these dinky dishes.”

  He kept his eyes on the food as he squirmed his shoulders, trying to snake upward on the pillow behind him.

  “Looks like you need a hearty meal. Come on, get yourself a little higher up.” Run harder. Run faster. Don’t let the smoke get you. I held the dish just out of Jess’s reach, watched his white face as he struggled to sit up. He coughed when he finally righted himself, dropping back against the pillow.

  “Good man.” I settled the plate on his lap. “Gonna get you up and out of that bed in short order, too.” I saw his eyes swell, then narrow. I was the enemy in their family. But before I gave his mother the parting she wanted, I’d make sure this boy was ready to stand up and be a man.

  Regina was there as I stepped back into the kitchen. She’d slipped in quiet, looked worn, inside and out, tiny in the soiled wedding outfit I’d given her.

  “Fix a plate and go eat with him.” I kept to myself what I’d rather say, and how I wanted to say it, as I nodded toward her bedroom door I’d left open.

  She gazed at the food.

  “You gotta be starved after building fence and airing all that ground in the barn.” I reined in my tone. She looked so small. But still terrifying.

  “It’s part of my…” She stopped. “Never mind.”

  “Ted out there? He eat with you much?” I hoped not, to both questions.

  She shook her head as she went to the washpan and scrubbed her hands. She patted them on the towel I’d left wadded by the basin, then refolded it. “Sometimes he eats with us. Especially when Flynn was alive…around.”

  She filled a plate, taking more than I imagined a little woman like her could hold, and disappeared into her bedroom. The nice bedroom. The one with enough frills to tell me what that worn woman was really like underneath those trousers and the determined grit. Low voices came from her and her boy as I began fixing a plate for myself. Something about being married was messing with my appetite, making unappealing the cooking I knew was good. I set my plate on the table, leaving mother and son alone, and had laid a hand on one of the chairs to sit down when I heard a noise outside. Dirt, hard dirt. And metal.

  I stepped to the kitchen window, stayed to the side, and listened, then slipped outside. I made my way to the darker side of the barn, slid low and slow until I was near the door. Someone was digging inside. I glanced back at the house. She hadn’t come out without me knowing. She was too feisty to miss a chance to stop and tell me how awful she thought skillet cooking was. I glanced at the open window to her bedroom. The grunt I heard in the barn wasn’t her. I knelt lower, removed my hat, and eased an eye around the edge of the door.

  Ted was pretty capable with just one hand. He managed Regina’s shovel just fine with his good arm and a foot. He finished a hole, broke up the clumps with his hand, then refilled it before he moved on. Maybe Regina really was airing out her barn floor. Maybe she and Flynn did it every year and the joke was on me. This was Kansas; maybe things were different with brown dirt. Maybe.

  I started to slip backward and leave Ted to helping her, but he moved to the next hole. One she’d already dug. I watched him re-dig what she’d done, kneel down and sift through the dirt with his good hand while he pinned the shovel close to his body with the other arm. He grunted when he stood.

  I eased away from the barn’s door, staying low as I moved from the building. Whatever Regina had been doing earlier, Ted was redoing it now. My guess was he wasn’t helping.

  Chapter 32

  Giving is one thing. Being taken from is another. ~Regina

  Ben stood in the kitchen doorway, the door closed behind him, the length of him dwarfing it and everything else around. His size made my teacups look ridiculous rather than elegant like they were. Ben wasn’t the sort of man who could sip from daintily designed floral china like Flynn could. Maybe that was why Ben stood across the room, leaving a full cup of coffee and a plate of food on the table.

  I carried Jess’s and my dishes to the pan I used for washing, Ben still at the door, his eyes following my every move.

  “I’m cleaning up, but I won’t throw your food away…” I nodded to the table where his full plate sat.

  I waited for him to say something. I watched his lips. His lips. Warmth crept up from the neckline of my shirt. I looked down at the plates in my hands.

  “I was out at the barn…” He twisted to the side and looked through the window.

  My shirt swelled in my way as I looked down toward the washpan, at two plates nearly licked clean from Ben’s cooking. “You should eat before it gets cold. It was actually very good.” I looked over at him, at lips that were still now, at eyes pointed outdoors. At the barn? Surely he wasn’t thinking… He had to sleep out there. Properly. It was understood.

  One long finger rose and fell on the door frame, a series of taps. Ben looked from the outdoors to his finger as if he was counting its beats. When the last tap died, he looked at me.

  “Ben…” I wiped my hands on the towel he’d soiled. “We both understood about this arrangement, certainly the beginning and end of it. I think it’s right to clarify the middle.”

  He leaned toward the window and glanced back to the barn, then turned to me, a frown on his face.

  “Clarify. To make clear.”

  “I know what clarifying is.”

  I nodded. Folded the towel again. “Okay, good. Then you understand we need to clarify the time between the wedding and the parting.” I draped the towel across the dry sink. “We live civilly through the middle so we can part civilly at the end.” I nodded toward the window. I meant the barn, knowing he’d understand. “That’s why no matter what we do during the day, especially in front of others, you have to sleep out there at night.”

  The jaw squared, the muscles at each side bulged as his brows lifted. He looked at me, the bulge waning. He opened the door, and I watched it close behind him. Gone. Again.

  The kitchen began to waver, its walls and all within it. Different from when Flynn was killed, but wavered just the same. I groped for a chair, scooted Ben’s plate aside, propped my elbows on the table’s edge, and dropped my head into my hands. I was used to hard work and being tired. That never made the room dip and sway. Maybe I’d eaten too much.

  Or…maybe I was suffering some silly desperation that had come with Ben’s blasted kiss. Some freshly widowed part of me that wasn’t sure how to act with a man around. A tall man. A… My shirt heaved and sank again as I stared at the table.

  This wouldn’t do. I had a ranch to run, a boy to get back on his feet.

  I stood, bracing myself with fingers perched at the table’s edge. It had been a long day. I’d even married, earlier. That had to be it. I cleared Ben’s food and coffee, washed my china, and scoured Ben’s skillet. I wouldn’t bother to learn to use it. He wouldn’t be here that long.

  Chapter 33

  My stepmom said a seed is no good until it falls into the ground and dies. ~Rex

  I lay awake in the barn’s loft, morning in the air before the sun said it was so. The squeal of the pump shrieked through my thoughts and over the few birds that had started to sing. The same squeal that had kept me here, for the boy that had pumped water for my horse. The boy and his mother. The two I kept hurting. The squealing stopped.

  “You want some breakfast?” Regina was at the opening to the barn, her voice rising to the loft, offering an invite I didn’t expect after last night. “It’s ready, if you plan to get up.”

  “I was afraid I’d fall in one of those holes you dug all over the barn floor. Hard to see them in the dark.”

  She was so quiet I thought she’d left. I listened to the birds, to my b
reathing, and for the voice I finally heard. “I made coddled eggs.”

  Coddled eggs? I sat up. “Does coddled mean they’re not cooked in lard?”

  “I never cook in lard. My parents send me oil from New York.”

  “Well, I cook in lard.” I could feel her tasting last night’s supper again.

  “Mr. Miller, you’re incorrigible!”

  “Is that anything like coddled?”

  Her feet, most likely in her wedding boots, stomped across the hard brown barnyard. I stood, slipped my shirt and trousers on, and laid a hand on the ladder’s posts. My palm stung, reminding me where my father’s barn’s splinters were. It would sting even more if I took this hand to my wife’s pretty backside. That would create a memory I’d never let go of.

  I stepped through the widow’s…Mrs. Miller’s…kitchen door. I did it carefully, but loud enough she’d know I was there in case she’d changed her mind and taken her invite for coddled eggs back. Her back was to me, red hair pinned loosely on and around her head. I liked the way it tried to escape, snaky strands wiggling down past her shoulders, where that shirt was I’d bought her, and those boy’s pants below that. I took a deep breath of toast and those eggs as I looked from her head to her toes.

  “You just going to stand there?” Yesterday’s—or maybe it was this morning’s—fire burned in her eyes as I looked up from her boots that had turned my way.

  “Smells good in here.” I saw four plates lined up on the table. “Ted joining us?”

  “No. He had something to do.” She marched to the table and snatched his dishes away. “Well, he always seems to have something to do in the mornings, but I didn’t like the way he left this time.” She turned back to the stove, lifted a lid, and peered at the fire within. She dropped the lid with a clatter. “He said something about your…”

  The sound of a horse brought her to a stop. Hoof beats in the barnyard, and Ted’s gravelly voice as he slowed Boss. Regina glanced at the darkened window.

  She returned his dishes to the table, less of a clatter for dishes I was pretty sure couldn’t survive much commotion. “He didn’t stay away as long as I suggested he might.”

  The door eased open behind me, I stepped aside as early morning air and Ted drifted in. “Morning,” he said. I nodded. He was looking past me, to Regina. “Morning again, I mean.”

  “You can sit after you wash up. I’ll take a plate in to Jess.”

  “How is he?” Ted asked. The gravel was still there, but tempered. A man carving his way back into a woman’s good graces. She was sharp, and she was cold as she answered him with a shrug. Nothing like the blazing hot answers she gave me.

  Ted went past her, mindful of the thin ice he was on, to her open bedroom door, and disappeared through it. I could hear him and the boy talking in there. He did it the way I’d always wanted to talk with a boy. With Luke when we were younger, when nothing I said ever seemed to be right.

  “Smells good,” I said again and looked at Regina.

  She set three teacups on the table and filled each with black coffee. Flowers decorated every side, dainty saucers underneath.

  I looked at my fingers and the tiny cup’s handle.

  “Oh, I forgot.” Her hands shot beneath one of the saucers and she lifted it from the table.

  “Wait, where you going with that?”

  “Next time I go to Liberal, I’ll buy you a mug.”

  “I still need coffee today, though.”

  She set the cup back on the table. “Just be careful.” She returned to her cookstove.

  I took a seat, wrapped my hands around her teacup, and lifted it to my mouth. It was hot, delicious, and black. I swirled the tiny bit of liquid, wishing it held more than a swallow. “No grounds in the bottom.” I looked up.

  “Of course not.” She brought the pot to the table and refilled my cup, then fixed a plate for Jess. I sat alone where I was, holding a nearly emptied cup, listening to three voices in the other room—my arranged bride, her ranch manager, and my arranged stepson. Stepson. I could never do for him what my stepmother had done for me. Getting him on his feet would have to be good enough.

  “The boy’s looking good,” Ted said as he and Regina came back through her bedroom door. He beat her to her chair and pulled it out. She thanked him as she sat. She did it proper, the way she and I were to act toward each other. Maybe I needed to take lady-handling lessons from her one-armed ranch manager before I went.

  The house Flynn had built was small, and so was the Eastern furniture he and his wife had brought with them. She, Ted, and I sat too close to each other for my taste, filling our mouths with coddled eggs and toast until our plates were empty, mine scrubbed clean by the last corner of my toast.

  Ted wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin Regina laid out, folded it into a triangle with one hand, and set it beside his plate. “So I guess we have a Miller family here, now.” Ben-Whoever-You-Really-Are was there in his look, the one he gave me as he stared my way. Ted was a skeptical man. To be skeptical was wise. It helped a fellow live longer. But to openly challenge, like I saw in his eyes… Experience told me a man who did that had something to hide.

  “This is business, Ted, not a family.” Regina glanced at her open bedroom door, and lowered her voice. “This is an arrangement between Ben and me for the sake of the ranch.”

  “What good is this arrangement to him? To Ben?” Ben-Whoever-You-Really-Are now in his tone.

  “None of this is your concern. I’ll keep you informed what you’re to do to help out, and the rest is up to me.” She raised her napkin to her mouth. She kept it there, hiding those lips. Those lips that…

  Ted stood. “Thank you for the breakfast…but a simpler arrangement could have been made. We could have held onto Flynn’s land for you without a complete stranger being a part of it.”

  “You’re wrong.” Regina laid her napkin aside. “We couldn’t have saved this ranch any other way.”

  “I’m afraid it’s you that’s wrong, no offense intended.” Ted looked past me, the stranger they didn’t need, and focused on Regina. “My name would have kept the ranch better than an unknown’s.”

  “I’m not wrong.” Regina said it like she believed it, but her eyes were too wide, her voice a bit rangy. Her ranch manager was planting seeds she didn’t want. Error. Doubt. “I’ve done everything just as I planned, to hold onto this ranch.”

  “Everything except use my name.” Ted took a step back. His chair snagged at the rug the table sat on. His good arm swung back, caught the chair before it fell. He glanced at my two good hands, both on the table, and righted the chair before he turned back to Regina. “You were too quick with your plan. It won’t work and will slow us down. Enough time has been wasted, and we can’t afford to waste more. We don’t need him, it turns out, but we do need to plant.”

  “That’s not right. That’s not right what you just said.” Regina’s face was flushed, almost as red as her hair. She looked at me, Ben-Whoever-You-Are and Why-Did-I-Marry-You growing in her eyes. “Is it?”

  “Only the planting part.” If even that. I stood and stared down at Ted. He knew too much. And it would be best for this ranch and for him if he cared a lot less.

  Chapter 34

  I want one man to be where he’s supposed to be, do what he’s supposed to do, and say what he’s supposed to say. Just once. ~Regina

  I rapped against the wood of Doc Harris’s door. Loud. And hard. I’d show my ranch manager how wrong he was and how right my plan was by satisfying the bank and its ridiculous rules. It was early. Doc should have been in. I knocked again, harder, stepped to the front window, and cupped my face to the glass, feeling like a child peering into a candy shop. The room was dark. Nothing. No one. Why didn’t men keep sensible routines and plan as well as I did?

  I put an extra stomp in my boots as I marched to the postal office next door. It was hard to put my plan to use if people weren’t where they were supposed to be.

  “Good morning to
you, Mrs. Howard,” Mr. Greene sang out when I entered. His grin stretched, then shrank as he eyed the pants and shirt Ben had given me. They were clean, and that was all that should matter to him, but Mr. Greene wasn’t looking at clean.

  “Good morning to you, Mr. Greene. I have a letter to mail.” I stepped quick, pressed close behind the counter, and waved the envelope to get his attention. Mr. Greene righted, barely managing a smile over his startled expression. I’d never asked, but I was pretty sure the man wasn’t married.

  “You have some to pick up, also. And one for your ranch manager, Ted. Is he still working for you?”

  “Yes, he is. Sort of. I’m doing a lot of the work myself.” A one-armed man and a woman. I could see it on Mr. Greene’s face as he glanced at the work shirt Ben had given me, his hands and arms busy at wooden slots behind the counter where envelopes and notes stuck out like white and beige tongues.

  Mr. Greene slid several envelopes across the counter. I laid the one I was sending to my parents next to the pile, and two cents alongside it. He took the change and my letter.

  “We seen you with that tall fellow the other day. Mr. Miller. Is he helping you, too?”

  “Well, I…actually…” I was here to tell Doc about my marriage. I wanted him to know before the whole town, and telling Mr. Greene was telling the whole town.

  Mr. Greene reached behind him and slid two envelopes out of a slot. “Got a couple for that Miller fellow, too. Came not long after we saw him last. Doc said he’s out at your ranch quite a bit.”

  “Doc said that?”

  “Well, we asked him, being the doctor and all, if he knew where Mr. Miller might be. Asked Mr. Miller myself how to get hold of him, but he was a bit withholding about his whereabouts, if you know what I mean. So do you know how we can get these to him?”

  “I can take them,” I said. “Just put them with the rest of our…I mean Ted’s and my…mail.”