Mary's Mail Order Husband

by Lily Wilspur

  Jack watched her. “You really care for him, don’t you? It’s very sweet to see.”

  “Sure, I care for him,” Mary replied. “He’s the only family I have.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to explain it to me,” Jack declared. “I understand perfectly. But other people might not understand so well. What does your new husband think about your father?”

  “I explained all about my father to him,” Mary told him. “I told him Dad and I were a package deal. I told him I wouldn’t marry anyone who wasn’t prepared to help me care for Dad for the rest of his life. So he understands, too.”

  “That was very considerate of him,” Jack remarked.

  “Considerate?” Mary repeated. “There’s nothing considerate about it. I wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t agreed.”

  “But he might come to resent it later,” Jack pointed out. “Then what will you do?”

  Mary looked up at the moon. “I don’t expect Dad to last that long. John will have to come to resent him pretty quickly for it to become a problem.”

  “Your father looked healthy enough to me,” Jack remarked.

  “He looked healthy to you, because you saw him for a matter of minutes at the most.” Mary shook her head again. “He’s a lot weaker than he looks. He can hold it together when he goes out on the street. It’s when he gets tired or hungry or has had a few drinks, or when he’s behind closed doors, that he loses it.”

  “What happens then?” Jack asked. “What happens when he loses it?”

  They turned a corner and the hotel came in sight at the end of the street. Mary saw her father in the lights coming through the windows. “He just loses the ability to control himself. He has tantrums like a child. He gets emotional about meaningless things, and he loses his temper at nonexistent insults, and he bursts into tears when I try to take him home. He usually makes a dreadful scene.”

  Jack listened, but he didn’t smile. “It must be very trying.”

  Mary sniffed and blinked the tingle out of her eyes. She wouldn’t show this strange man just how much her father’s behavior cost her. She wouldn’t let him know how her father isolated her from people who could have been her friends.

  Oh, the life she could have had if she didn’t have to go chasing her father around town all the time, if she didn’t have to watch over him and extricate him from trouble before he got himself into it! But she wouldn’t tell Jack any of that. What was the point? What was the point of telling anyone other than her husband? He could at least share her trials in the time she had left with her father.

  Chapter 7

  Here they were at the corner of the hotel. The music and laughter and the clink of glasses spilled out into the street. Jack slowed to a stop at the corner. “I had a nice time with you tonight.”

  Mary smiled at him. “Me, too. I didn’t want you to come with me, but I enjoyed our talk nonetheless. I hope you have a pleasant stay while you’re here. I might not see you again.”

  “Then again,” he returned. “You might.”

  “I might,” she acknowledged. “How long are you in town?”

  He glanced back toward the hotel. “Indefinitely.”

  She laughed, but his answer annoyed her. “Being cryptic again?”

  “That’s right,” he shot back.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You’ll just have to excuse me for the time being,” he told her. “I have my reasons. You’ll just have to take it on faith that I have my reasons.”

  “Okay.” Why did she hesitate to turn away? Why did her body refuse to leave him?

  He took a slow step toward her. She felt something warm in her hand, and then she realized he’d entwined his fingers into hers. She stiffened, even as a flood of warmth traveled up her arm and spread through the rest of her body.

  She struggled to pull herself away. She glanced toward the windows of the saloon. “I better go.”

  “Just a little longer,” he coaxed. “The evening’s just begun. Your dad will be all right in there just a little while longer.”

  “I really should go.” With an effort, she pulled her hand free from his grasp.

  Just at that moment, the crashing sound of broken glass burst out of the saloon, and a human voice shouted from somewhere inside. Jack and Mary jumped in surprise, and they both turned to see what made the noise. Two or three people jostled around the door. Through the windows, they saw some of the people around the poker tables leap to their feet, and one table overturned. Poker chips and paper money scattered across the carpet.

  A woman screamed, and the people clustered around the door spilled out into the street. Mary started toward the door to find her father. But all of a sudden, the cry went up from inside, “Fire!”

  At the same instant, one of the pane glass windows in the front of the saloon shattered into a shower of glistening crystals. More screams and shouts echoed from the saloon. Above their heads, another window in the front wall of the hotel smashed into pieces, and a woman stuck her head out, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  A flood of people poured out of the saloon, all of them taking up the same cry, “Fire! Fire!”

  Across the street, lights came on in other houses. Mary rushed into the street toward the saloon, calling out, “Dad! Dad!” She fought with all her might to get through the crowd to the saloon but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t force the crush of bodies apart. She dug her feet into the earth and drove herself forward. Nothing she tried brought her any closer to the door of the saloon.

  A strange pain in her arm made her stop to see what the matter was. When she looked down, she saw a hand holding her by the wrist. Closer examination revealed two hands. The pause in her efforts brought her to full comprehension of the situation. Jack held her back from running into the saloon.

  “Let me go!” she shouted above the noise. “I have to get in there. I have to find my dad!”

  “You’re not going in there,” Jack declared. “The whole place is on fire. Look!”

  Mary looked and saw. The blazing white light coming out through the windows wasn’t the gentle lamp light they’d seen when they entered the town. She couldn’t see the bar or any of the tables in the glare. She shielded her eyes from the piercing light. Only then did she fully understand. Flames engulfed the whole lower story of the hotel.

  “Dad!” she screamed. “Where’s my dad?” She tried again to rush into the crowd. Was he here? Had he fled the burning building with the others?

  But Jack held her back again.

  She struggled against his grip, trying to shake him off. He didn’t understand, and he never would. No one would ever understand. She had to find him. She looked around at the people nearest her and spotted a man from the Saddle 8 who looked familiar. “Have you seen Simon Costello? He was in the saloon just now. Do you know where he is?”

  The man gave her one glance and turned back to watching the fire. “He was in there before, but I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  That settled it. She started toward the saloon again. But Jack held her back so forcefully, her wrists ached where his hands held her tight. “Mary,” he called, “Mary, you can’t go in there.”

  “I have to!” she screamed. “I have to find him. He could be in trouble.”

  She took another step toward the door, but a rush of blasting hot air rushed out and knocked everyone backward off their feet. The people standing around watching the fire crawled over each other in their haste to retreat. Some of them screamed and cried, trodden underfoot by others rushing to fall back.

  Mary swam through floundering bodies. All she cared about was getting back onto her feet so she could get to the door of the saloon. Townspeople and guests of the hotel dashed in all directions, shouting to one another to bring water, to fetch the sheriff, to save themselves, to flee the town, and every other imaginable scenario.

  Mary found herself struggling again against Jack’s iron grip on her arms. “Let me go! My dad’s in there.” />
  “You can’t help him,” Jack shouted back. “If he’s still in there, he’s gone. You’ll die, too, if you go in there.”

  “I have to!” she shrieked. “I have to save him!”

  Nothing else penetrated her mind. She’d tended and cosseted her father all these years. She would take care of him now. No one could do it besides her. She would find him and lead him home like a lost lamb.

  Above her head, more windows broke and more people stuck their heads out. Some of them shouted down to the people in the street, begging for help and shouting instructions to carry it out. One by one, one story at a time, the windows of the hotel brightened. The flames inside the building rose from one story to the next, from one window to the next. They danced in every window on the first floor, then on the second floor, growing and rising and spreading higher and higher with every passing minute.

  Chapter 8

  At some point she couldn’t exactly distinguish, Mary found herself face to face with Jack. Even then, she didn’t really see him. She didn’t even really look at him. She only saw the hotel in flames behind him.

  “I have to get in there,” she babbled. “I have to look for him.”

  “You’re not going in there,” Jack repeated. “I’ll go in and look for him. You stay here.”

  “But…” she began.

  “No but’s!” he barked. “If you want me to go in there to look for him, you have to stay here. Promise me you’ll stay here and you won’t try to follow me in there. Promise me!”

  His sharp tone cut through the haze of her hysteria, and she nodded. “I promise.”

  He held her by the arms, staring into her eyes. He must have seen something in them to convince him of her sincerity, because he let her go. He stared at her for an infinite moment, as if he still couldn’t decide whether to trust her word. Then he spun on his heel and strode into the saloon.

  Only after he left did Mary realize what she’d done. She would have run into the building after him, but she just gave her word that she wouldn’t. Besides, the heat coming from every broken window and every door scorched the hair from her face and blistered her skin. How could he stand it in there?

  What had she done, letting him go in there in her place? Now both her dad and Jack were in there, and maybe neither would come out alive. How could she agree to this? And why did she care so much about Jack all of a sudden? She’d only met him a few hours ago. She didn’t care about him. She only cared about her dad.

  And yet the sudden loss of him devastated her as much, if not more, than the idea of losing her father. She’d prepared herself mentally for her father’s death, but not like this, not in a burning building. She’d always expected him to die in his sleep, or in his arm chair by the window.

  But no matter how he died, who would she turn to for comfort? John Webster wasn’t here, and he might not even come. She might not marry him after all, what with one thing and another. He might meet someone on the train that he liked. He might run off with another woman instead of coming to Fort Collins to marry some unknown widow.

  Whose shoulder would she cry on when her father died? Who understood what he meant to her? Who shared the secret of her difficulties and challenges in caring for him?

  Only one person: Jack. He was the first and only person she ever confided in about how much trouble she went to in caring for her father. And she didn’t tell him even half of the whole truth. She’d mentioned off hand that she might not see him again. Now she was facing that devastating possibility in the inferno of the burning hotel.

  She screamed into the roaring flames, but only the hollow thump-thumping of the flames answered her. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to scream for her father or for Jack. So she just screamed, the scream of a wounded animal that can neither fight nor run away.

  The upper windows of the hotel flickered with flames. Some of the people sticking their heads through the windows on the lower floors jumped down into the street. The flames licked up into the roof.

  Mary saw and heard nothing around her. She screamed and cried, turning first this way and then that, searching for Jack and her dad and anyone else to help her. No one answered her. The heat from the engulfed saloon dried the tears on her cheeks. They dried even before they fully formed in her eyes to fall.

  She couldn’t stand here much longer. She would have to retreat. Was her own house next door burning to the ground along with the hotel? Where would she sleep tonight? Where was her dad? Was he tucked into his own bed right now? Had she sacrificed Jack for nothing?

  A mighty explosion of fire and flaming gas rocked the bottom floor of the hotel. The timbers of the building quaked, and a blast of superheated air blew out the last remaining windows in the front of the saloon. The whole hotel shuddered on its foundation.

  “It’s coming down!” someone shouted. “It’s about to collapse!”

  The people fell back as one, fleeing down side streets and escaping to other parts of the town. Someone tried to haul Mary back and away from the building, but she remained rooted to the spot.

  The roof of the hotel sagged and folded in on itself. A gut-wrenching, splintering crash rang through the building. Mary let out one more feral shriek before she ran for her life.

  But at that very moment, a solitary figure emerged from the flames, shielding its face with its arm. Mary sobbed and shouted and groaned all at once. Jack staggered out of the saloon, his clothes smoking and his hair wild. Soot and blisters disfigured his face. His eyes met Mary’s.

  She held out her arms to catch him before he fell face first into the street, but he didn’t stop. He threw his arms around her and pushed her back, onto the sidewalk across the street and along it to an alley between two other buildings. He drove her into it, just as the hotel blew itself apart and crashed to the ground in a massive ball of fire.

  Chapter 9

  The doctor leaned over Jack and pressed his stethoscope against his chest. Jack opened his eyes and glanced around the room. “Mary,” he wheezed. “Where are we?”

  Mary dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and tried to smile at him. “We’re in my house. You’re lying on a sofa in my sitting room. The doctor is just having a look at you.”

  “Really?” He glanced at the doctor. “What do I look like?”

  “Hell,” the doctor replied.

  “You stayed in that building far too long,” Mary told him. “You burned your face and hands and hair, and your suit is ruined.”

  Jack tried to look down at himself. “Hmm. I tried to find your dad, but I couldn’t find him. He must have…” He broke off when he saw Mary clamp her eyes shut.

  “Never mind,” she interrupted. “The doctor here thinks you’re going to be fine. He just wants you to take it easy until your lungs clear. He says you may have burned your lungs with all that hot air.”

  “That’s me,” Jack rasped. “I’m full of hot air.”

  “You will be if you don’t be quiet,” the doctor put in.

  “And you may have smoke in your lungs, too,” Mary added. “You need to lie quietly until you heal up.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t find him.” Jack hesitated when he saw Mary shut her eyes again, but then he pressed forward. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want you to think I let you down.”

  “I never should have let you go into that hotel,” Mary replied. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. It was fool-hardy. I should have been prepared for something like this to happen. Dad’s been fragile for a long time now, and I haven’t known whether I’m worried about something happening to him or wishing that it would. I never should have let you endanger yourself looking for him.”

  “It wasn’t exactly your idea,” Jack reminded her.

  “It might as well have been,” Mary replied. “I shouldn’t have been so insistent about someone going in there. No one should have gone in to look for him. I knew it was hopeless when I saw the saloon on fire. I should have accepted it.”


  “It was an understandable reaction,” Jack told her. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “And you can’t blame yourself for not finding him,” Mary shot back. “You did more than anyone had a right to expect. And you did it to set my mind at ease. You must have known you wouldn’t find him. Even if you did find him, you couldn’t save him. But it doesn’t matter. He’s gone now, and I’m moving on with the rest of my life.”

  Even as she said these words, her tears started flowing again. She wiped them away, but they came faster than she could remove them.

  The doctor shot a sidelong glance from her to Jack. He put his stethoscope in his bag and stole silently out of the room. Jack frowned at Mary, who sobbed softly into her handkerchief.

  “Please don’t cry,” he finally murmured. “You make me feel something awful for not bringing him out to you.”

  “I can’t help it,” she wailed. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ve been longing for the day when I didn’t have to take care of him anymore. And now that it’s happened, all I can think of is going upstairs to check on him. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She dissolved into another flood of weeping.

  Jack scowled at her. “Come sit down here next to me.”

  Mary perched on the edge of the couch. Jack took her hand in his and patted it. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you about all of this. There are plenty of people I could talk to. If anyone found out I was unburdening myself to a strange man, unsupervised in my house late at night, there could be a scandal.” She tried to laugh at herself, but only wound up choking on her own sobs.

  “You had to talk to someone about it,” Jack replied. “You’ve been carrying your feelings about your dad around for who knows how long. You can’t keep that kind of thing a secret forever. You had to talk to someone about it. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else.”

  “But I shouldn’t be talking to strange men about personal family matters,” Mary cried. “I should be talking to the parish priest or someone like that—someone qualified to advise me about these things.”