A Family For Carter Jones

“That boy is the employee?” Carter interrupted.

Instead of answering the question, Jennie backed down the stairs to the wooden walkway and pointed up the street. “You see all those fancy houses, Mr. Jones? There’s not a one of them that doesn’t have a servant of some kind. Gardener, maid, livery man. We have Barnaby. One boy and two women. We run this place. We muck the horses and grow the food. When the pump broke out back, I was the one who fixed it. When the roof leaked this June, I was the one on a ladder patching it up.”

She seemed to gather steam as she continued to talk, her features becoming more animated. Carter was so entranced that he found himself losing track of what she was saying. When she paused, evidently expecting a reply, he could only manage to say, “It does seem a bit unreasonable to classify that boy as a business employee.”

“Well then, tell that to your precious courts, Mr. Jones.” She marched up the stairs past him, her basket nearly knocking the papers out of his hand. “And tell them that if they want to force two orphan sisters, one of whom is ill, to leave their home, they’ll have to come in here with the sheriff and a passel of deputies and carry us out.”

As Carter tried to formulate an answer, she wrenched open the door, stalked inside and slammed it in his face.

“Well, what was he like?” Kate asked.

“Who?” Jennie was kneading bread dough. Lord, it seemed as if she spent half her time kneading bread these days. She couldn’t understand how just three men and a boy could go through so many loaves each week. Goodness knows, she and Kate hardly touched the stuff. Jennie was always too busy or too tired to eat, and Kate had had no appetite since she’d started getting sick early in her pregnancy. Her face had grown gaunt and, except for her now obviously protruding stomach, she was alarmingly thin. Jennie had pleaded, alternating tears and threats, but Kate still refused to be seen by Dr. Millard, which was not only dangerous to her health, but pointless, since by now everyone in town knew that she was with child.

“The new district attorney,” Kate said with slight exasperation. “What’s he like?”

“I don’t know…he’s…he’s just a man. Who cares?”

Kate sighed. “Just because he’s a man doesn’t eliminate him from consideration as a human being, Jen dear. There are good men in the world. Not all of them disappear leaving…problems in their wake.”

“Not all of them are like Sean Flaherty, you mean.”

As usual, her sister’s eyes chilled at the mention of her erstwhile lover’s name. Jennie hated that look.

“Think of Papa,” Kate said after a moment. “He was a good man.”

“He left us, too,” Jennie said under her breath, slapping the bread as if it were Carter Jones’s handsome face. The new district attorney had been handsome, she would admit that much to herself, if not to Kate. But then, Sean Flaherty had been handsome, too, and look where that had led her poor sister.

“Jennie! How can you say such a thing? Papa didn’t leave us—he died.”

Jennie stopped pummeling. Her shoulders sagged, and she gave the ball of mixed dough an apologetic pat. “Yes, he died. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s gone, nevertheless.”

“Well, maybe it’s not Mr. Jones’s fault either that they gave him those papers to bring here. If you’d been a bit nicer to him, we might even have gotten him on our side.”

Jennie used the edge of her hand to chop the mass of dough into loaf-size chunks. “Oh, I’m sure the fancy Haah-vard man would take the side of a couple of unimportant, disgraced, utterly poor women against the whole rest of the town.”

Kate looked gloomy. “I’m the one who’s disgraced, not you. It’s not fair that you should pay for my sins.”

Jennie smiled at her. “My sister, the sinner.”

“I am. I did.”

“You were in love, Kate, and falling in love’s not a sin.” She dropped the last loaf into its pan with a satisfying plop, then added, “It’s just stupidity.”

Kate shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve soured you on men for good.”

“‘Twas Sean Flaherty soured me on men, not you. Not that I ever had much time for them in the first place.”

“Because you never met the right one.”

Carter Jones’s smile flashed through Jennie’s mind. She’d been thoroughly irritated by his smile, but beyond the irritation, she’d felt another sensation. Equally disagreeable, she decided, kind of like the prickling of a heat rash. “There is no right one for me, Katie dear,” she said breezily. “I intend to grow old as a happy and peaceful old maid.”

Jennie finished wiping her hands on the dish towel and hung it on the rack, then turned to look around at their tidy kitchen. “And what’s more, I don’t care how many Mr. Joneses they send after us—I intend to do it right here in my very own house.”

“So what are we going to do about the papers?”

“They can go to the devil with their papers. I’m not leaving here. And since we can’t afford to stay here without the money from our boarders, they’re not leaving here, either.”

Kate slid awkwardly off the stool where she’d perched to watch her sister’s labors. Jennie refused to let her help much with the cooking anymore. The heaviest job Jennie would allow her was wiping the dishes after dinner. And even then, Jennie herself took over when it came time to put away the heavy pans. For weeks Kate had been too sick to argue with her sister’s proclamations and now, though she was feeling better, she seemed to have adapted to the unusual circumstance of allowing her sister to take care of her. “Are we going to tell them about it?” she asked.

“Tell the silverheels?” The silverheels was Jennie’s nickname for the three miners who had taken rooms at Sheridan House while they hired on at the Longley mine up the canyon. She’d called them that from the first day the three young men had arrived, joking that they hoped they wouldn’t track too much silver dust onto her mother’s prized Persian rug in the parlor. Jennie had laughed and welcomed their business and had never let on to them that a bit of silver dust would be a godsend in the Sheridan sisters’ lives at the moment

“Well, they’ll probably find out about it Especially if Mr. Jones takes you up on your invitation and comes trooping back here with the sheriff to shut us down.”

Jennie felt the pulsing behind her right eye that always preceded one of her headaches. “The sheriff’s away in California. They told me so in town today.”

“Well, they’re not just going to forget about it. Didn’t Sheriff Hammond leave a deputy?”

Jennie fixed Kate with a look. “Lyle Wentworth’s the deputy.”

Kate colored. Lyle had tried to court Kate since they were children, much to the wealthy Wentworths’ dismay. Before Sean Flaherty showed up in town, some people thought Lyle would go against his parents’ wishes and ask Kate to marry him. Kate had refused to see him since she had found out about the baby. “I suppose you could go talk to Lyle,” she said, her voice subdued.

“Me?” Jennie said, her hands on her hips. “I suppose you could go talk to him.”

“Jen, you know I can’t do that.”

“Criminy, sis. Someday you’re going to have to talk to people again. It doesn’t make much sense for us to go through all this effort to hold on to this place if you’re going to shut yourself away in here the rest of your life as if you’d been buried right along with Mama and Papa.”

Kate clasped her hands over her big stomach and looked down. “I can’t see Lyle, Jennie. Please don’t ask me.”

Jennie gave a little huff but didn’t pursue the matter. “I think I will tell the silverheels that those old biddies are trying to shut us down. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

“And maybe you should talk to that Mr. Jones again. He’s a lawyer, right? At least he should be able to tell us what our options are.”

Jennie stared straight ahead as another quick memory of Carter Jones’s striking face flashed in front of her like the image from a stereopticon. How odd, she reflected. Perhaps it was somehow connected to her impending headache.

“I’ll go see him in the morning,” she agreed finally. “Tonight I’m going to let Barnaby help you with the dishes while I nurse one of my megrims.”

Carter Jones sat in his small office and stared at the bookshelf on the opposite wall as if willing one of the leather tomes to magically open up with the answer he sought. He’d been at it much of the afternoon, more time than he could afford to spend on a matter that, after all, was not even his concern.

Zoning ordinances were so new that it didn’t appear that there was much body of law on them. And, though he’d read the court’s decision half a dozen times, he’d been unable to come up with any ideas as to how to render it null. He had no doubt that the self-appointed moral guardians of the town, Mrs. Billingsley, Miss Potter, Lucinda Wentworth and their cronies, would be back tomorrow in full force when they learned that nothing had been done to change the situation at Sheridan House.

Carter threw his pencil down on the desk and pushed back his chair. His stomach was rumbling its disapproval of his decision earlier in the day to skip lunch. He hadn’t felt much like eating after his encounter with Jennie Sheridan. The prospect of one of the Continental Hotel’s shoe-leather steaks was not thrilling, but it would at least fill the hole in his middle.

He leaned back toward his desk to straighten the piles of work. No matter how hungry he was, he wouldn’t leave an untidy office. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, he’d always believed. The pencil he’d thrown in disgust was carefully retrieved and put in its tray—on the used side of the tray, not to be confused with the freshly sharpened ones that he put there every morning.

He ran his hand over the neatly arranged writing instruments with a certain satisfaction. At least it was possible to inject order into a certain portion of his world. He didn’t want to admit how unsettled he’d been by his trip to Sheridan House. He still wasn’t entirely sure why. The girl was pretty. The young boy was engaging. But none of it was his problem.

There was a soft knock at the door. He jerked his hand away from the pencils and said, “Come in.”