One True Love (Cupid, Texas 0.5) (2 page)

“Millie?” Mama grabbed my arm with both hands, crushing the check against my skin. “You want to take my Millie away? She’s my right hand.”

“We would pay her forty dollars a month. She could send most of that home to you since she would be living in maid’s quarters and we’d provide her food,” Penelope explained.

My jaw unhinged. It was an absurd amount of money. Almost as much as my father had made working in the silver mine.

“I just can’t bear the thought of not seeing her every day,” Mama fretted.

“Cupid is just twenty-five miles away,” John said. “We could have the chauffeur drive Millie home to visit you one Saturday a month and come back for her on Sunday evening.”

Me? Riding in a chauffeur-driven car? I almost swooned.

“Oh my. You are so generous,” Mama murmured.

“We owe you a great deal,” John said solemnly.

Mama loosened her grip on me. “It’s up to Millie.”

“I don’t have any experience as a maid,” I mumbled.

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” Penelope said brightly. “I saw how well you handled your brothers and sisters. You have more skills than you realize.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Would you like the job?” Penelope prodded.

I loved my mama and my brothers and sisters with all my heart, but this was a chance for me to get out and see something of the world. Spread my wings. Start my own life.

“Yessmum.” I curtsied because it seemed the thing to do.

“No need for that,” Penelope said. “You’ll soon find out we’re like everyone else. Dirty socks on the floor, dust bunnies under the bed, water spots on the dishes. You’ll work and work hard.”

I pulled myself up straight and tall. “I’m not afraid of hard work.”

“Excellent,” Penelope said. “Then we’ll expect you after a proper bereavement period. Perhaps a month?”

“I’d rather start right away,” I surprised myself by saying. “I don’t do well when I’m not busy.”

“All right then. We’ll send our chauffeur, Charles, to collect you tomorrow.”

And just like that, I had a job.

Chapter Two

I
T TURNED OUT
that the Bossier home was right next door to the Fant mansion. Silas and Margaret Fant had purchased the house as a wedding present for Penelope and Beau in 1916 after the previous owner was killed in the trenches during WWI. I learned that John too had served in the later days of the war, having turned eighteen that same year. That surprised me. I figured as the son of the elite, he would have received a deferment.

“Johnny wanted to serve,” the Bossiers’ cook, Mabel, said proudly when I posed that question.

It was odd, thinking of John Fant as a child called Johnny. He seemed far too worldly and masculine to have ever been anything but full-grown John.

Mabel had been with the Fants for fifteen years before she’d crossed the fence to work for Penelope. “I raised that boy as if he were my own. Gave him his first bite of oatmeal. Baked every single one of his birthday cakes until he went off to war and then on to college.”

Her hair was the color of slate and she wore it twisted in a tight bun at the crown of her head. She been married once, but hadn’t liked it much, and when her husband had run off with another woman, she’d decided that was that. But she flirted with the widowed butcher, because when she did, he gave her an extra ounce of meat, and that made Miss Penelope marvel at how well she stayed within the kitchen budget.

Mabel smelled of the apple cider vinegar that she sipped like a toddy. “Good for the digestion,” she declared, and every time she ate something sweet—which was often three or four times a day—she’d swat her big, fleshy fanny, and flash a toothy grin. “Goes right to my hips, but that just means there’s more of me to love.”

And that made me wonder if she was telling the truth about just flirting with the butcher.

There were three of us who lived in the servants’ quarters behind the manor—Mabel, me, and the gardener, an elderly man named Jorgie, who Mabel swore couldn’t speak a lick of English, but had a thumb greener than God. After she said that, she slapped a palm over her mouth as if she thought she might be struck by lightning for saying it.

Jorgie’s skin was brown and rough as dried shoe leather and he sang lively Mexican songs while he worked. The chauffeur, Charles Billsby, worked for the Fants. Charles quartered at the Fants’ home, but he drove for Penelope and the children just as often as he did for Silas and Margaret, because none of them had ever learned to drive. Beau owned a Graham Brothers stake truck that he used to go back and forth from his gun store in Alpine.

John, of course, drove himself in that dashing Nash roadster.

“What happened to the last maid?” I dared to ask Mabel one day after the first week. I was washing dishes while she prepped the evening meal.

Mabel glanced over her shoulder like someone could be lurking inside the icebox behind her and lowered her voice. “Ruthie got herself into trouble.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, images of gangsters, bootleggers, and gun molls hopping into my head. I had access to daily newspapers and penny dreadfuls in Cupid, and my imagination had gotten the better of me.

“You know. In the family way.” Mabel pantomimed having a swollen belly.

“Oh,” I said, slightly disappointed that Ruthie’s departure hadn’t been caused by something more lurid.

Mabel put up her hand to shield her mouth and whispered loudly, “It was the McClearys’ oldest boy, Marcus.”

“What was?”

Mabel looked at me like I was the densest turnip ever to fall off the truck. “That got her in the family way.”

I nodded. I was a country girl. I knew where babies came from and how they got there.

“ ’Course he couldn’t marry her,” Mabel went on. “His family being who they were and her nothing but a maid.”

“Who
are
the McClearys?”

Mabel clucked her tongue over my ignorance as she had many times during the last several days. “Just the second richest family in Cupid.”

“Oh.”

“Marcus loved Ruthie to pieces, but the McClearys sent her off to have the baby in San Antonio at a home for unwed mothers and sent him off to college in California. Swept their little problem right under the rug. Miss Penelope was terribly embarrassed over the whole thing. She avoided the Ladies’ League for weeks and she’s the president.”

“Why was she embarrassed? It wasn’t her fault.”

“Because she’d allowed that tomfoolery to go on underneath her nose.” Mabel punched the bread rising in the big metal mixing bowl with a sharp, quick jab. “I could have told her. They were bumping and thumping the walls of Ruthie’s room for hours on end—that boy had stamina—but I’m no snitch.”

“I’m sure.” I paused to dry my hands on my apron.

She shook a plump finger under my nose. “Learn a lesson from that, missy. We’re the help. Steer clear of the gentry. ’Less you want to have the same fate as Miss Ruthie.”

But of course, I knew that. Knew the rules of the social classes. Never cross that line or your life was ruined.

Still, I have to admit that I’d taken to gazing out the windows any time I was cleaning a room on the side of the house that bordered the Fant property, hoping for a glimpse of John coming or going. He still lived at home, with the understanding that the house would one day be his and that’s where he’d live with his wife and children. Tradition, I quickly learned, was a big deal to the well-heeled.

Penelope and Beau had two children that they sometimes asked me to watch after. I didn’t mind that at all. I was used to kids and it kept me from missing my brothers and sisters too much.

Miss Adeleine, everyone called her Addie, was five years old and had auburn hair like her mother. She was bright as a copper button, and my first week there she came to me crying because her front tooth was wiggly, but she was too scared to tell her mother because Addie had been chewing on one of Mabel’s cinnamon sticks and she thought that had caused it.

I was honored she came to me. I explained that everyone loses his or her baby teeth and told her a story about the Tooth Fairy, while I quietly slipped my hanky from my pocket, reached up, and plucked that loose tooth out of her mouth before she even knew what I was doing. After that we were fast friends, although Miss Penelope cried because she hadn’t been the one to pull her firstborn’s first tooth, and that made me feel bad.

Ernest was three and still hanging on to his baby fat. He had a chubby round face and smiled all the time, but he did have a stubborn streak, and once that boy balked, there was no persuading him. You just had to pick him up, tuck him under your arm, and take him where you wanted him to go, all the while getting kicked in the side from his pudgy little legs still trying to run away. He was easy to figure out, though, and I learned how to head off the stubborn streaks before they started. Bribery worked like a charm. Give that boy a cookie and he’d do anything.

For the next three weeks, I stayed busy, which was good. Didn’t leave much time for grieving over my daddy. Sometimes though, I’d catch a scent of his pipe tobacco and the loss would go all over me, grabbing my throat and wringing me up in knots. I thought the smell of tobacco was all in my imagination until one day when I was hanging out clothes, the scent drifted over to me on the breeze along with the fragrance of the honeysuckle that grew on the fence row between the two houses. I started feeling pretty melancholy.

Then someone coughed.

I peeked around the sheet billowing in the breeze and spied John Fant leaning against the side of the house, holding a pipe in one hand and shaking out a match with the other.

My daddy had smoked a corncob pipe, but John’s looked real fancy. It had a black stem and a fat, glossy brown bowl that matched his two-tone wing tips. He had a worried expression on his face. I wondered what he had to worry about. He had all the money in the world. I didn’t think he’d seen me watching him, so I went back to pinning clothes.

“Bad habit, I know,” he called out. “I’m trying to give it up.”

I leaned my head back so I could see him from around Miss Addie’s pinafore. He wore only a dress shirt and a vest, no jacket, and he wasn’t wearing a hat either. “I don’t mind so much. My daddy smoked a pipe.”

Bringing up my father killed the conversation and I went back to hanging up clothes, my muscles tense all over.

“Millie,” he called again after a long moment.

“Yessir?”

“Could you come here a minute?”

My heart flew up into my throat. “Here?”

“To the fence where I can see you eye to eye.”

Why did he want to look into my eyes? I gulped, stuck a clothespin on a kitchen towel, and then smoothed my hands against my apron.

I was scared to walk over there. Afraid someone would see us talking and it would spark gossip. Afraid that if John looked into my eyes he’d see what I was feeling for him. But I’d learned a long time ago it was better to face things head-on than run from them, so I eased over to the fence.

“Yessir, Mr. Fant.”

“Call me John.” He smiled. “Just like you did at the funeral.”

So he remembered that. I felt my cheeks heat and ducked my head. “I can’t call you John,” I said. “It wouldn’t be fittin’.”

“Not in front of people, but when it’s just you and me.”

He said it like there were going to be more times when it would just be him and me. My knees went shaky. I wasn’t going to end up like Ruthie, no sirree. “I think I’ll stick with Mr. Fant.”

“You’re probably right.” He took a long puff off his pipe.

I sneaked a glance at his face.

His gaze hit mine like bacon on a hot cast-iron skillet, and suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath. The urge to turn and run was so strong I could taste it on the back of my tongue, all dry and salty bitter like baking soda.

“I need your opinion on something.”

“Mine?” I couldn’t believe he was asking for my advice. “Why would you need my opinion?”

“It’s about the silver mine.”

Some of the breath I’d been holding leaked out of my lungs. I don’t know what I thought I’d expected him to say, but this wasn’t it.

He canted his head, his eyes still hanging on to mine. I wanted to look away, but just couldn’t. “After the cave-in, after what happened to your father and those other miners, I’m thinking about closing the mine.”

I ran a finger over the white picket fence, loaded with honeysuckle vines, that separated him from me, my fingers moving up and down with the spikes of each wooden picket, the mingling smell of pipe tobacco and sweet honeysuckle wrapping around us. “If you closed the mine, how would your family make money?”

A lazy smile lifted up the corner of his lips. “My family’s got their fingers in a lot of pies.”

“Sounds messy.”

He laughed, and the sound pleased me all the way to the tips of my toes. “It certainly can be. Besides the silver mine, we’ve run cattle out west of town, have a couple of oil wells pumping on a patch of land we own in Pecos County, and we own half interest in a shipping company in Maryland.”

“That sounds like a lot to keep up with.”

“Multiple streams of income. Diversity.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around that, so I just nodded. I guess once you were rich, it wasn’t all that hard to buy into other businesses and get richer.

“Actually, it’s been costing us money to keep the silver mine open. After sixty years of mining, the ore is playing out.”

My daddy had said the same thing about the silver mine. He’d worried about losing his job. “What about all those miners that will be out of work? What about those families that will go hungry?”

“That’s why I’m asking your opinion. The mine is old and I’m afraid we’ll have more cave-ins. We could bring in a crew, shore up the mine, but that will cost a lot of money. Money we probably won’t recoup.”

“So it comes down to dollars and cents.”

“No,” he said. “That’s the dilemma. I know your community depends on the mine. Without it . . .” He shook his head.

Without it, there would be nothing to sustain my tiny hometown.

“The Christian thing to do would be to keep the mine open,” I said.

His eyes searched my face. “Even if keeping it open means more men get hurt or killed?”

I blew out my breath. “My daddy knew what the job entailed when he took it.”

He pushed a hand through his dark hair. “I can’t in good conscience keep it open without restoring the mine.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fant. I can’t tell you what to do.”

“Can you answer me one question?”

I notched my chin up. “I’ll try.”

“Given the facts of the situation, what would
you
do if you were in my shoes?”

“I’d make sure no one else’s daddy had to die.”

F
OLLOWING THAT STRANGE
conversation with John, I had a dream.

In the dream, my daddy was alive and looking like he always did. His thick, straight black hair parted straight down the middle so that it fell evenly on both sides. He had some Comanche blood in him, although he didn’t like people to know since it wasn’t that long ago that Comanches raised hell all through the Trans-Pecos region, but you could see his heritage in his high cheekbones and slightly flat features. He walked with that bowlegged gait that I’d recognize anywhere, and he was whistling his favorite song, Irving Berlin’s “I Gotta Go Back to Texas.”

He was dressed as usual in his silver-dusted work clothes and lace-up boots, and was wearing the worn-out straw cowboy hat that he kept hung on the hook beside the front door at home. The strangest thing was, he was wearing silver bells strapped to his boots and we were standing in the Fants’ backyard.

Joy flooded me and my whole body was atremble. He wasn’t dead! It had all been a big misunderstanding.

“Daddy,” I said, thinking at the time that this wasn’t a dream. “What are you doing here?”

He winked at me. “I always told you, sissy-babe, I’d dance at your wedding with bells on.”

“But I’m not getting married!” I exclaimed, and then I glanced down and saw I was wearing a beautiful white lace wedding gown, like the kind you see in high-fashion magazines, with a long train that my sisters Jenny and Lila were holding fanned out behind me, and I had a bouquet of beautiful red roses with sprigs of white baby’s breath clutched in my hand.