Softly Falling by Carla Kelly Page A

keeping her voice low, angry just the same because she was embarrassed.
    He indicated the pictures she held. “Because I’ve been tending these ladies for a few months and I’ve been talking to them. It gets slow here in the winter. Do it for them.”
    “But . . .”
    He nodded to her, his equanimity restored, and held out his hand to Chantal. “Your mama will be wondering where we wandered. Good evening, Miss Carteret. Enjoy that sandwich.”
    She did, crying and eating, and wiping her nose, and then repeating the process until the whole sandwich was gone. When she finished, she went to the lean-to and looked out the window.
    The moon had come up, which made the buildings look less ugly. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes, thinking through her day that had begun with those dratted expectations, and ended with none, or almost none. She opened her eyes and looked.
    Beyond the jumble of ranch buildings was that schoolhouse. She could think of it as isolated, but she could also think of it as looking down on a little community. She only knew three people in the community, or maybe just two. Maybe her father shouldn’t count.
    She was a woman and knew that much wasn’t expected of her. Little Chantal might see her as a lady, but she knew from painful experience that not everyone would. She could stay in this wretched little shack that represented her father’s last chance. She knew that women didn’t get as many chances.
    She looked at the schoolhouse again. “I’ve never taught anyone anything in my life,” she whispered to the window. “I can’t.”
    It took her no time at all to prepare for bed. By the time she had spread out the sheets and blankets, she was starting to shiver. She lay in bed and thought of muskrats and thin cattle, and drift fences and woolly caterpillars, and of a man with a gaunt face and a scar, and a pampered Hereford. Her last thought of the day, after she had dried her eyes, was the view from the lean-to.

C HAPTER 7

    J ack woke up even earlier than usual, staring by habit at the space above his apple crate bureau where he had kept the two pretty women for several months, just because a fool was too proud to ask for his pictures. He put his hands behind his head and lay there, admiring them in his imagination.
    “You there on the left,” he said to the dignified and so beautiful lady, “your daughter should probably be crying her eyes out right now, but I bet she isn’t.” He sighed. “And why not, you ask? Probably because she has few expectations. What happened yesterday has to be one calamity of many, with such a father.”
    He imagined looking at the young girl in the other frame, younger than little Chantal Sansever, but so serious. “Miss Carteret, it appears that your childhood, although spent in comparative luxury, was likely no more pleasant than mine.”
    He had almost hated to surrender the pictures to Lily Carteret, because he had become so fond of them. He had no family, and the two women—one of color and the other of a creamy blend—filled his heart more than he knew at the time. They were ladies of quality but suspended in an unkind world, because they fit no mold.
    “Did I come on too strong last night, practically ordering you to get a plan, and quick?” he asked. He was a good judge of character, learned the hard way during the War of Yankee Aggression as he rose from private to sergeant and then to lieutenant and back to less-than-nobody after the surrender. The six hours he had spent in her company yesterday showed him a woman exercising a certain awe-inspiring calm because that was how she survived the unfairness of her life. He recognized it because it mirrored his own almost thirty-six years.
    Still . . . he should never have disquieted her with his fears of the coming winter. Considering Sinclair luck, he was probably wrong anyway. I’m not wrong , he thought, lying there. I know I’m not .
    Time would tell. Time