Page 5 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“It came.”
He caught the pages she thrust at him and read through them with that slight movement of his lips, balancing the pocketknife across one knee. His eyebrows climbed higher with every line. By the time he reached the postscript, the grin had already started pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in tar and hung out to dry.” He flipped the ticket over between his fingers. “Boy up and bought you the fare hisself. Didn’t even wait to be asked, just laid down the coin bold as brass.”
Grace dropped onto the crate beside him, tucking her skirt beneath her knees. The afternoon smelled like coal smoke and the sharp green bite of the weeds pushing through the yard’s cracked dirt—the only things that grew here without her help.
“Twelve days.”
Jonah folded the letter along its original creases and handed it back. “Twelve days.”
Something shifted in the line of his jaw, a tightening she recognized. The same look he’d worn the morning after their parents’ funeral, standing in the doorway of the empty front room, already working out how to carry what they’d left behind.
He shook it off quickly. “Well then. I reckon that calls for a celebration, don’t it?”
“Celebrate with what, exactly?”
“With all that fare money we been squirrellin’ away, that’s what.” He stood and stretched. “That Mason fella just gone and handed us back every red cent we scraped together. Way I figure it, that money’s burnin’ a hole clean through my pocket and we got ourselves cause to spend it.”
“Jonah, we ought to put it aside for—”
“Nah, nah, nah.” He spread both arms wide. “Tonight, sister mine, we eat like honest-to-goodness civilized folk. I’m talkin’ proper. I’m talkin’ sittin’-down, napkin-in-the-lap, say-grace-before-the-first-bite proper!”
***
Proper folk, it turned out, ate rice, beans, and a chicken breast from Moretti’s deli on the corner of Tenth Avenue—a whole chicken breast. Between the two of them, split right down the middle on a plate that Grace had to wash three times before using because the mice had gotten into the dish cabinet again. But, sitting there, at the counter they used as a table, with steam rising off the rice and the chicken glistening with whatever magic old Moretti rubbed into his birds before roasting them, it could’ve passed for a feast in any fine dining room in Manhattan. To Grace, anyway.
She tore into her half, and the juice ran down her chin, and she didn’t even bother reaching for a rag. Jonah ate his in three enormous bites and then sat back, making sounds of satisfaction.
“Lord, have mercy.” He licked his fingers one by one with the ceremony of a man savoring his last meal. “That right there’s the finest grub I’ve had since... when did Mama make that stew? The one with the dumplings floatin’ on top?”
“The night before Papa’s name day. She used the last of the salt pork.”
“That’s the one. I must’ve been, what, twelve or so?”
“Thirteen. You’d just gotten tall enough to reach the top shelf, and you kept puttin’ things up there so I couldn’t get ’em.”
“Strategic repositioning, I called it.”
“You called itfunny.I had a few other words for it.”
They sat together in the little, warm pocket of the memory while the evening light turned copper through the grimy kitchen window.
“She used to sing while she cooked.” Grace looked down. “Every single time. Couldn’t stop herself if she tried.”
“Near drove Papa plumb loco, is what it did. Man’d be sittin’ there tryin’ to read the paper, and she’d be in here just a-wailin’ away on some hymn fit to rattle the windows.”
“They weren’t hymns. They were the old songs, from home. The ones Mormor taught her.”
“Hymn, old song, all the same to Papa. Man just wanted five minutes to sit still and instead he got hisself a concert every suppertime.”
Grace gathered up the plates and carried them to the basin, running a thin stream of water from the pump. The pipes groaned and shuddered the way they always did, and for one second, she opened her mouth and let the first few notes of one of those old songs spill out.
A lullaby.
Something about a river and a girl walking beside it, and the melody came back to her the way melodies did, living somewhere deeper than memory, stored in the chest and the throat and the bones.
Jonah’s head came up.
