Chapter Seven
Seven
Hector, a dog who seldom met a stranger, leaped down from the wagon seat and rushed to Ornetta, who was standing outside her front gate, winding himself around her skirts like an oversize cat and making a whining sound Gabe recognized as pure jubilation.
Lizbet— Miss Fontaine , he corrected himself silently—stood opposite Ornetta, looking as though she’d just been sucker punched. And maybe, judging by her pallor and the slight wobble of her lower lip, she had been.
The sight stirred something fiercely protective in Gabe, something dark and cold and very primitive.
“There now,” Ornetta said, patting Lizbet’s stooped shoulder. “He and that woman are gone now. Everything is going to be all right. You and me, we’ll see to that.”
Lizbet sniffled once, drew back her shoulders and managed the faintest flicker of a smile, along with a brief nod.
He and that woman are gone now.
What did that mean?
Curious, but well aware that whatever was going on here was none of his darn business, Gabe set the brake on the wagon, secured the reins and muttered a few words meant to reassure the horses.
Before he could think of anything to say—the understanding passing silently between the two women now seemed intimate in a way that meant he’d best keep quiet until one of them acknowledged him—the two young children he’d seen the day before came out the front door of that house like broncs sprung from a rodeo chute, their blue eyes wide and their faces pale, like Lizbet’s.
Gabe found himself wanting to scoop those kids up, one in each arm, and promise them everything would be all right.
“They’re gone?” the little girl asked, staring at Lizbet. She was slightly older than the boy, and at least a head taller, but she still looked so small and fragile, standing there on Ornetta’s front porch, that Gabe’s heart pinched. “Father and Marietta are gone ?”
It was then that Gabe realized the child might have been relieved by this news, rather than hurt.
“They’re gone,” Lizbet confirmed, so quietly that Gabe almost didn’t hear her over Hector’s happy yips and Ornetta’s gentle remonstrations to be a good dog and quiet down a bit.
The boy, still in short pants, looked broken somehow. A tear zigged and zagged its way down his small, dirt-smudged cheek. “Father didn’t even say goodbye,” he said, and the pinch in Gabe’s heart became a fissure, widening by the moment.
Lizbet didn’t reply to her brother’s statement.
She simply opened her arms, and both children came hurtling toward her, striking her like logs plummeting off the steep end of a flume.
Ornetta, who had just opened the front gate and passed through it, instinctively reached out to steady Lizbet, but the impact of two flying children nearly sent both women toppling to the ground.
Gabe remained on the sidewalk, not entirely certain what he ought to do, if anything at all. He’d come by to drop off a load of firewood as a kindness to Ornetta and her granddaughter, and he was unprepared for such a storm of emotion.
Hector, typically, suffered no reluctance to join in.
He was square in the middle of the huddle, trying to lick the little boy’s face, then the sister’s.
Suddenly, the boy gave a peal of laughter that nearly doubled Gabe over, right there on Main Street. It reminded him so much of Abigail’s little girl glee when she and Hector used to play rambunctious games on the farm.
Gabe squeezed his eyes shut tight for a few moments, the only way he knew to regain his equilibrium when grief ambushed him, as it so often did.
When he opened them again, Ornetta was watching him, not with pity, bless her soul, but with a kind of quiet recognition, as though she knew what he was feeling and wanted him to know she understood.
That made his throat tighten as painfully as if it were being wrung out like a wet cloth.
“How much are you asking for all that good firewood?” Ornetta asked, still watching him.
Behind her, Lizbet and the children had definitely cheered up; they were laughing and playing with the dog, their earlier sorrows forgotten evidently, at least for a while.
“One of your cherry pies would be just about right,” Gabe answered, and the feeling of dislocation, of standing a couple of inches behind his own feet, lingered.
Ornetta chuckled richly and waved a dismissive but friendly hand at him.
“That wood’s worth a lot more than one of my pies,” she said.
“But I’d be a fool to turn down a deal like that, now, wouldn’t I?
So thank you very much, Gabe Whitfield. You can unload it around back if you will, then come on inside for coffee and cake.
I don’t happen to have a cherry pie on hand, but I’ll bring one to church on Sunday if that suits you. ”
Gabe nodded, tried for a smile and, once again, fell short. “That sounds good. Make sure you hand that pie over before the service starts, though, because I don’t plan to share it.”
Ornetta laughed outright. “I’ll see that you don’t have to, then,” she said.
Maybe she didn’t disapprove of his not participating in church services after all, the way he’d thought she did. Maybe she’d guessed, in her quiet wisdom, that just showing up on a Sunday morning, clean-shaven and clad in good clothes, was a major accomplishment for him.
Again, Gabe nodded, and before he turned to climb back up onto the wagon seat, his gaze strayed in Lizbet’s direction and caught on hers.
Quiet now, and circumspect, she looked faintly puzzled, but otherwise affable, though she obviously wasn’t going to recover from the children’s upset as quickly as they had.
They were still frolicking with Hector in the grass of Ornetta’s front yard, the three of them caught up in the kind of celebratory brawl meant for kids and dogs and no one else.
When Lizbet looked away, Gabe felt heat rise to his jawline and turned back to the wagon.
He was surprised, therefore, to find Lizbet waiting at the back gate about two minutes later, when he pulled up alongside the high brick wall surrounding that part of Ornetta’s modest property.
Lizbet had pushed the gate open and when Gabe had the wagon stopped and the brake set, she stepped forward.
“It’s kind of you to bring Ornetta firewood,” she said. “The supply is running low, as you can see.” She gestured toward the dwindling woodpile near the back porch. “Thank you,” she added.
“No trouble,” Gabe muttered, ducking his head briefly, feeling shy in a way he’d never been before. “Ornetta’s a good woman. She’s helped a lot of folks in this town.”
With that, he commenced to loading wood into his arms and carrying it toward the pile.
Instead of heading inside the house, as Gabe supposed most women would have done at that point, Lizbet filled her own arms with chunks of seasoned pine and followed.
“You don’t need to do that,” Gabe said, when he passed her on the way back to the wagon for more wood.
“I think I do,” she said, with the slightest impertinent lift of her chin. “Today has been very emotional, as you’ve surely noticed. When things like this happen, I need to do something—well—physical.” She paused there, between one step and the next, and actually blushed. “I meant—”
For the first time in a very long while, Gabe surprised himself by grinning. By wanting to laugh out loud, in fact, though he managed to restrain himself, because the last thing he would have chosen to do just then was to scare Miss Lizbet Fontaine away.
“I know what you meant,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
If he’d been under oath, though, he’d have had to admit that the word physical , as it related to this quietly beautiful woman, revved him up inside.
The ensuing reminder that he was still a flesh and blood man, and not a specter haunting a graveyard, made Gabe glad his back was to Lizbet by then.
After that, they didn’t speak.
They just went back and forth, carrying wood until the pile was high again and the bed of the wagon was empty.
Gabe was sweating by then, covered in dust and smelling of pitch and thinking he’d better sit on the back step to drink the coffee Ornetta had offered earlier. But Ornetta was having none of it.
She wasn’t going to serve a guest on the back step like he was a stranger and a hobo, she announced, instead of a friend and neighbor.
So he went inside, holding the door for Lizbet before entering, and washed his hands and face at the basin Ornetta had ready for him. Lizbet disappeared right away, and he was oddly let down by that, but she came back soon enough, having done ablutions of her own in some other part of the house.
She’d scrubbed her cheeks pink, and damp tendrils of her strawberry blonde hair curled around her face.
He stood until she and Ornetta were both seated at the table, then he sat down directly across from Lizbet. A steaming mug of coffee awaited him, alongside a plate with a big slice of pound cake on it.
The kids, meanwhile, had gone to the backyard; Gabe could hear them playing with Hector.
That dog, Gabe thought, was probably in hog heaven.
The realization saddened him a little; he hadn’t been the only one to miss Bonnie and Abigail. Poor Hector must have wondered—if he could wonder—where they’d gone.
Like Gabe himself, Hector had surely been lonely.
Gabe took a steadying sip of his coffee and told himself to stop inventing canine melodrama.
Quietly, he enjoyed his cake and coffee and studied Lizbet out of one corner of his eye as she and Ornetta chatted quietly about building a fire on the hearth in the front parlor that evening, after supper.
He thought about what a comfort a nice wood fire could be, especially now that the nights were turning chilly, and made up his mind to have one himself.
After he’d unhitched the horses and fed them, herded the chickens back into their coop so the coyotes wouldn’t get them, carried in some kindling, washed up again and eaten something, he’d get a nice blaze crackling in the front room fireplace.
Maybe read awhile.