“Someplace where there’s no snow.”
“I like snow,” Willy returned sleepily.
“You know what a plantation is?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s like a farm. A big farm. Y’ think you’d be happy livin’ on a farm?”
“I dunno. Would you be there?”
“Yes.”
“Would Gussie be there, too?”
Scott’s fingers and the chair paused for only a second, then began their soothing rhythm again.
“No.”
“Then I don’t wanna go t’ no farm. I want us t’ stay here, together.”
If only it were that simple, sprout. Scott closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the reassuring weight of Willy stretched along his trunk. He was loath to move, to break the sweet contentment they’d found together. But he felt a twinge of guilt for asking Willy about his wishes, as if asking the boy to make a choice against Agatha. He hadn’t intended it that way at all. He realized it would be the perfect time to tell Willy the Gilded Cage would be closing soon and all of them would be leaving town. But he hadn’t the heart at the moment, and he thought it best if he and Gussie broke the news to Willy together.
“Sprout?”
When Willy didn’t answer, Scott pulled his chin back and looked down. Willy was sound asleep, his head sagging low against Scott’s chest. Gently, he picked him up, carried him into the sitting room, and laid him on the settee, then stood studying him for a moment: the long dark lashes lying against the fair cheeks; the soft, vulnerable mouth; the skinny neck hidden within the scratchy wool jacket that had worked up nearly to Willy’s ears.
Sprout, Gandy thought wistfully, we both love you. Will you believe that when this is over?
CHAPTER
16
Scott was the only one in the saloon when Agatha entered by the rear door shortly before midnight that night. He sat at one of the green-topped tables, slouched negligently in his chair with one boot crossed over a knee, one elbow hitched on the table edge beside a whiskey bottle and an empty glass. Mechanically, he flipped cards at his upturned Stetson on a nearby chair. Five in a row hit their mark.
The only lamp burning in the place was a single murky coal-oil lantern directly above the table. It threw a pale smudge of light onto the top of his head and gave his eyes an obsidian glitter. Agatha halted at the end of the short hall.
Between cards, his glance flicked to her. “Come in, Miz Downin’,” he drawled in a voice so low it scarcely carried across the room. Flip. Flip. Two more in the hat. She threw a cautious glance at Willy’s closed door. “Oh, don’t worry about the sprout. He’s asleep.” Flip. Flip.
She advanced to the edge of the circle of light and paused with her hands on the back of the battered captain’s chair like the one in which Gandy slouched.
“Sit down,” he invited without rising.
She cast a glance at the cards still sailing toward the hat.
“Oh, sorry.” With a cold grin he stretched to pick up the Stetson from the chair, scooped out the cards, then settled the familiar flat-crowned hat low over his eyes, casting them into complete shadow. His apology held not the slightest hint of contrition as he squared the deck and clapped it down beside the bottle.
She perched on the chair at his right, edgy because of his uncustomary arrogant manner.
“You wanted to talk to me.”
“Wanted?” he bit out wryly. “Neither of us wanted t’ have this conversation, did we?”
“Scott, you’ve been drinking.”
He glanced ruefully at the bottle. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
She grasped the bottle, sniffed its contents, made a disgusted face, and forcefully set it aside. “Rotgut!”
“Hardly. For this conversation I chose the best.” He refilled his glass, then hefted the bottle her way. “Join me?”
“No, thank you,” she replied tartly.
“Oh, of course not.” He clunked the bottle down. “I forgot. Y’all don’t touch the stuff, do y’?”
His drawl was very pronounced tonight. She’d thought at first he was drunk, but she realized now he was decidedly sober, which made his defiant attitude all the more distasteful. She stiffened and brought her chin up.
“If it’s Willy you’ve brought me here to talk about, don’t think you’re going to cow me by brandishing your bottle in my face. I won’t have it. Do you understand?” Her pale eyes snapped and her lips thinned with resolve. “We’ll discuss it sensibly, without rancor, and without alcohol—or not at all.”
His elbow was bent, but the glass stopped halfway to his lips.
“Put it down, Scott,” she ordered, “or I’ll go back upstairs right now. The answer to our dilemma won’t be found in a bottle of fermented rye. I’m surprised you haven’t learned that by now.”
He considered downing it in one gulp, just to appease the unmitigated frustration she never ceased causing him, but in the end he set it down docilely, then slid it to the far side of the table, along with the bottle.
“Thank you,” she rejoined calmly, holding his gaze firmly with hers. He felt suddenly childish, pulling such histrionics when she sat so unflinchingly, ready to meet him on equal terms. “Now,” she added quietly, “about Willy.”
He released a pent-up breath and informed her, “I’ll be closin’ the Gilded Cage by December first.”
The starch left her in one second. “So soon,” she said, mollified. Their animosity evaporated as if it had never existed. The rudeness with which he’d been arming himself, the obdurate primness with which she’d been doing the same, fled them both. As they sat in the dim circle of light they both became defenseless.
“Yes. There’s no sense in us stayin’ when we’re not makin’ any money. We have t’ shut down eventually anyway, so why put it off?”
“But I’d hoped... I thought you might stay until after Christmas anyway.”
“We’ve talked it over, all of us, and the others agree with me. The sooner we get out the better. We’ll all be leavin’ except Dan. He’s decided t’ stay here and live with his mother again.”
“Where will you go?”
He picked up the glass he’d filled and took an idle sip; she made no objection this time. He rested both elbows on the table and drew circles on the green baize with the bottom of the glass. “I’ve thought a lot about what you said—about layin’ ghosts t’ rest, and I’ve decided you’re right. I’m goin’ back to Waverley, at least for the time bein’.”
She reached across the table and gently squeezed his forearm. “Good.”
“I don’t know what I’ll find there, what I’ll do, but I have t’ go back.”
“It’s the right thing for you to do. I’m convinced of it.” His hat brim dipped slightly and she assumed he’d dropped his gaze to her hand. Immediately, she withdrew it and clasped it in her lap. The silence stretched long. “So...” she said at length, expelling a nervous breath. “We must make a decision about Willy. Do you want him?” She couldn’t make out his eyes but felt them trained on her assessingly.
“Yes. Do you?”
“Yes.” On her lap her fingers gripped harder.
Silence again, while they wondered where to go from there.
“So, what do you propose?” she asked.
He cleared his throat and sat up straighter, toying with the glass but not drinking. “I’ve thought and thought, but there doesn’t seem to be any answer.”
“We could ask Willy,” Agatha suggested.
“I thought of that myself.”
“But it doesn’t seem fair to force him to make a choice, does it?”
He swirled the rye around and around. “This mornin’ after I sent him down with the note, he came back up t’ my office and we... well, we’d had a fight.” He gave her a quick sheepish glance, then concentrated on the glass again. “Truth is, I snapped at him for no good reason. But we came t’ terms and he sat on my lap a bit and we talked—about the plantation. I as
ked him if he thought he’d like t’ live there. First he asked if I’d be there with him and I said yes. Then he asked if you’d be there, too, and I said no.” Gandy looked up, but Agatha’s gaze dropped to the green tabletop. “So Willy said no, in that case he didn’t want t’ go anyplace, just wanted us all t’ stay here together.”
She didn’t move, just sat staring with her hands clasped in her lap. His gaze lingered on her eyelashes, and their elongated shadows reaching down her fair cheeks; her mouth, drooped in sad resignation; her fine jaw and stunning upswept hair, whose red highlights shone even in the murky light; her breasts, restricted by the stiff garnet taffeta of her prim, high-collared dress; and the arms she held militarily at her sides.
“No,” she said faintly, “we cannot ask a boy of five to make a decision like that.”
“No,” he echoed. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
Still staring, she murmured, “What is fair?”
There was no answer, of course. Fairness was a thing neither of them had ever contemplated with such vulnerability before.
He loves Scott so much, she thought.
What would he do without his Gussie, he thought.
Every little boy needs a father.
A child needs a mother more than anything else, and she’s the first one he’s known.
He idolizes Scotty.
She teaches him constantly.
I’m too strict with him.
I’m too loose with him.
Waverley would be such a wonderful place for a little boy to grow up.
It wouldn’t seem right t’ take him away from everything familiar.
Around them, all was still. A winter chill crept along the floor. In the room at the rear a child slept, while Agatha and Scott decided his fate. The decision—either way—would be painful for all three of them.
Hesitantly, Agatha reached for the glass and took it from Scott’s fingers. Her hand trembled and her eyes remained downcast as she raised it to her lips and sipped. Only then did her gaze meet Scott’s.
“We must make an honest assessment about which home would be best for him.”
He deliberated for a minute, his fingers linked loosely over his stomach, watching her. “There’s no doubt in my mind. Yours. I don’t even know where I’ll be settlin’ permanently.”
“You’ll settle at Waverley. I’m sure of it. You must—it’s your birthright, and it would be a wonderful place for a boy to grow up. All that clean air and no rowdy cowpunchers around.”
“But who’d see after him like you do? Who’d keep him on the straight and narrow?”
With a fey smile, she told him, “You underestimate yourself, Scott Gandy. You would. Underneath it all, you’re a very honorable person.”
“Not like you. And you could teach him. You’ve already started, with your constant correctin’ and makin’ him clean his nails and scrub his ears. I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the patience for that.”
“There are schools.”
“Not nearby.”
“And space. All that space. Why, Waverley has so many bedrooms he could sleep in a different one each day of the week. I have only a single room with no such thing as privacy for either of us.”
“But you’re the better influence on him. You make him go to church and mind his manners.”
“Boys need masculine influence, too.”
“Willy’ll be all right. He’s got a lot of spirit.”
“Much of which he gets from you. Why, he’s even affected a bit of a Southern drawl lately.”
“But I have bad habits, too.”
“Everybody has bad habits.”
He didn’t reply immediately, and she felt his eyes probing her. Unsettling. “Not you. Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Fastidiousness can be a bad habit if it becomes fanatic. And sometimes I fear I get fanatic.” She leaned forward eagerly. “Little boys need to... to... scuffle with one another in the dirt, and come home with bruised shins and climb trees and... and...” She ran out of ideas and spread her hands, then let them drop.
“If you understand all that, you won’t be too fastidious with him.”
It was her turn to study him, though she wished she could see his eyes. She had one last trump card. Playing it, her voice came out more softly, more intently. “I’m not certain I can afford to keep him, Scott. It’s all I can do to keep myself and pay Violet’s wages, even with the sewing machine.”
“All you’d have t’ do is wire me and there’d be any money you’d need.”
His generosity moved her deeply. “He means that much to you.”
“No more than he means to you.”
For a moment they sat locked in the irony of the situation, two people who loved Willy so much they each tried to convince the other to take him.
“So,” Agatha said at length, “we’re right back where we started.”
“It looks that way.”
She sighed and her eyes drifted off to a dark corner of the room. When she spoke, it was wistfully. “A perfect mother, a perfect father—isn’t it a shame one of us must live in Mississippi and the other in Kansas?” Suddenly, she realized what she’d said, and she feared he’d misinterpret it. She shot him a glance. “I didn’t mean—” Her neck grew warm. Her eyes fluttered down.
“I know what y’ meant.”
Flustered, she searched for words to fill the awkward moment. “So how do we decide? We can’t ask Willy, and we can’t seem to agree who’d be better as a parent.”
Zzzt! Zzzt! She heard the sound before she realized what it was: his thumbnail repeatedly riffling the edge of the cards upon the green baize tabletop.
“I have a suggestion,” he said in a low voice that, at another time, under other circumstances, might have sounded seductive. Zzzt! Zzzt! “But I’m not sure how you’ll take to it.”
Her eyes dropped to the deck of cards.
“A single hand,” he went on, “for the highest stakes ever.”
She felt as she had the night she’d drilled the hole in the wall, as if she were contemplating something forbidden and would certainly get caught the moment she began. But who was there to catch her? She was a grown woman, an adult under no one’s mandate except her own.
Not a muscle moved in his entire body, except for the thumb that kept flicking the edge of the deck. Sitting back easily, he watched her battle with her own stern code of ethics. “What do you say, Gussie?”
Her heart seemed to lodge in her throat. “W... Willy’s future, decided by a game of cards?”
“Why not?”
“But I... I’ve never played before.”
“Five-card stud. No draw. Read ‘em and weep.”
A faint line of confusion appeared between her eyes as they raised to his. “I... I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain the rules of the game. They’re simple. What do you say?”
She swallowed and tried to probe the deep shadow cast by his hat brim. “Take off your hat.”
His shoulders flinched. “What?”
“Take off your hat so I can see your eyes.”
After a long pause he removed it slowly and laid it on the table. Her clear, true eyes pinned his cool brown ones with an unwavering look.
“When you and Willy played and the stakes were a trip to the Cowboys’ Rest, did you cheat?”
His brows curled. Then he forcibly smoothed them and eased his shoulders back against the chair. “No.”
“Very well.” She turned all businesslike. “Explain the rules.”
“Are you sure, Gussie?”
“I’ve done everything else this saloon encourages—watched women dance the cancan, drunk rye whiskey, even learned to like the smell of your cigar smoke. Why not poker, too?”
A lopsided grin tipped his mouth. A dimple appeared in his left cheek. Tarnation! She was some game woman! He turned the deck face up. The cards were numberless, difficult to read, but she concentrated hard as he explained the rank of poker hands from highest
to lowest, rearranging the cards to illustrate each: straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair.
“Do you want me t’ write them down?”
“No. I can remember.” She recited the rank, perfectly. His eyes settled on her with undisguised admiration. Had the stakes been lower, he might have made a teasing comment. Instead, he scooped up the cards and began shuffling.
She watched his long, strong fingers manipulate the cards with economical movements. She listened to the crisp snap of the edges meshing before he scraped them together neatly and tapped them into line. The ring flashed on his finger and she recalled the day he’d first come to town—how little she’d suspected his coming would bring her to share a poker table in a dimly lit saloon with him at midnight.
He slapped the cards down before her and she jumped.
“What?” Her eyes flew up.
“You can deal.”
“But I...” Her eyes dropped to the blue-and-white deck. Samuel Hart, she read on the top card.
“Shuffle, too, if y’ still don’t trust me.”
“I do.”
“Then deal. Five cards—one to me, the next t’ you, face up.”
She stared at him as if he’d suggested they remove their clothing alternately. He sat back and drew a cheroot from the pocket of his ice-blue vest, then the gold scissors with which he snipped the end. She watched, mesmerized, while he tucked the scissors away and lit the cigar.
“I never gamble without one of these in my hand,” he enlightened her.
“Oh.”
Silence fell and his smoke drifted to her nostrils.
“Go ahead, Gussie,” he said quietly. “Deal.”
She reached for the cards as if expecting a scorpion to appear from beneath the deck. They felt alien in her hands, slippery and new, yet oddly unthreatening, considering the potential havoc they might bring on her.
She dealt him his first card, without shuffling.
He withdrew the cigar from his lips and reminded her, “Face up.”
Obediently, she turned it over. It bore three black clovers.