Smoke River Family

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Winifred sat rocking in the swing with a sleeping Rosemarie cradled in her arms. She looked up when he closed the front door.

“May I join you?”

“Of course. It’s your porch, and your swing.”

Zane frowned. That sounded unusually crisp for Winifred. Or perhaps he just did not know her well. He settled an arm’s length away and they rocked in silence for a while. He hoped she couldn’t smell the brandy on his breath.

“At breakfast you said you wanted to talk to me about something?” He didn’t really want to talk, but whatever she had on her mind it was better to get it over with.

“Yes, I did. I wanted to... I want...”

Ah. She didn’t really want to talk, either. “We don’t have to talk, Winifred. We could just watch the sun go down behind the hills.” He didn’t like it when a woman “wanted to talk.”

“We do have to talk.” Her voice was oddly flat and a ripple of unease snaked up his spine.

“About?” he prompted.

She bent her head over his daughter, then raised it and looked straight into his eyes. “About Rosemarie. I—I want to take her back to St. Louis with me. I want to raise her.”

He stopped the swing so abruptly her neck jerked back.

“Are you crazy? What on earth makes you—?”

“Think this is a good idea?” she finished for him.

“For starters, yes.” Zane kept his tone civil, but inside he seethed. Suddenly he wished he had another shot of brandy in his hand.

“It is a good idea, Zane. I think Cissy might have wanted it.”

“You know nothing about what Celeste wanted.” His voice was low and angry, and he didn’t care.

“A child,” she continued. “Especially a girl, should have a mother. Cissy and I grew up without a mother, and it was like...like always feeling hungry for something.”

Zane wrapped one hand around the chain supporting the swing and clenched the other into a fist. “I am Rosemarie’s father, Winifred. She is mine. My daughter. My responsibility.”

“But I could give her advantages, living in the East. Good schools. Music lessons. You cannot offer such things out here so far from civilization.”

He counted to twenty to keep his temper from making him say something he’d regret. “What gives you the right to disparage the life I can offer my child? We have a school. I can hire music teachers or art lessons or anything else my daughter needs.” His voice shook with fury and something else. Fear. He could not face losing Rosemarie, too.

“But—”

He waited until she looked directly at him. “Dammit, Winifred, you waltz out here and expect me to give up my daughter to a citified stranger with expensive clothes and high-faluting conservatory training? What do you take me for?”

That hit home. He could see the hurt in her eyes, but he was too angry to soften his words.

“The answer is no,” he shot. “It will always be no. Rosemarie is all I have of Celeste, and I will never—”

“Zane, please listen to me.”

“Winifred, for God’s sake, I love my daughter more than anything on this earth. Nothing, nothing you or anyone else could offer her can make any difference.”

Tears now sheened her cheeks, and while he felt a small hiccup of regret inside his chest, he couldn’t respond. Very slowly she placed Rosemarie in his lap and, keeping her face averted, slipped out of the swing and stepped quickly into the house.

Zane finished two more brandies before Sam called him to supper. Winifred did not appear, and he sent the houseboy upstairs to check on her.

“Lady say she not hungry, Boss.”

“Take her a chicken sandwich and some tea,” he ordered.

Sam folded his hands at his waist. “She not eat it.”

“Take it up anyway, dammit!”

He found he wasn’t hungry, either. His head began to pound with the familiar ache he’d felt ever since Celeste died, and after sitting and staring for an hour at the plate of food before him he stalked into the kitchen, grabbed the warmed baby bottle out of Sam’s hand and plodded up the stairs to feed his daughter.

* * *

The next morning when Winifred entered the dining room, Sam poured her coffee and shook his head. “Eyes look red, missy.”

Winifred brushed her fingers over her swollen eyelids. She had wept most of the night and slept little. “It’s—it’s my hay fever, I expect.” She lifted the cup to her lips.

Sam bent at the waist and tipped his head to peer into her face. “Maybe so,” he pronounced. “Boss eyes look funny, too.”

The houseboy’s keen black eyes glinted.

Winifred took a swallow of coffee. “You don’t miss much, do you, Sam?”

“Miss not much,” he agreed with a grin. “Boss never fool me.”

Nor, Winifred reflected, had she. She huffed out a sigh. Knowing that Zane was distressed did not ease her own anguish. She’d done more than make a mess of her offer to raise Rosemarie; she’d alienated the doctor, perhaps even made him resent her. Lord’s sake, would he prevent her from visiting her niece in the future? She couldn’t bear that.

She clamped her mouth shut and pushed away the plate of eggs and toast Sam laid before her. She couldn’t eat. If she opened her mouth she knew a sob would erupt.

“Must eat, missy. Good fight need full belly.”

She blinked at Sam in surprise. A good fight?

He planted his slippered feet at her side and propped his hands on his hips. “You eat,” he ordered. “Then I teach how to make biscuit.”

“Biscuits!”

Sam nodded. “Next lesson after tumbled eggs.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. All right, she’d eat something.

Sam was as stubborn as Zane.

“Doctor leave early,” the houseboy volunteered. “Go on horse to make home calls. You watch baby, I do washing of diapers.”

After breakfast, Winifred settled in the library to read, keeping her eye on Rosemarie where she slept beside her in a pink flannel-lined laundry basket. When the baby woke, she sat on the floor beside her and let her play with her forefinger. “Oh, you darling, perfect child, do you know how exquisite you are? You have eyes just like my sister’s, yes, you do.”

She picked the baby up and buried her nose against the child’s soft neck. “And you smell so sweet, like...like a little rose.”

She rocked the soft bundle in her arms until a faint cry signaled the baby was hungry. Before she could stir, Sam laid a warm bottle of milk in her free hand and padded quietly away.

By evening, after she had changed and fed Rosemarie again, Zane still had not returned. After a supper of thick potato soup and hunks of fresh-baked bread, Winifred moved the wheeled bassinet from Zane’s room into her own. If the baby woke during the night, Winifred could tend to her. She hoped he wouldn’t mind.

She lay awake reading the volume of Wordsworth poems by candlelight until long past moonrise, then puffed out the light and closed her still-swollen eyes.

For the next two days she did not catch even a glimpse of the doctor. She knew he came in from the hospital late at night because Sam reported on his activities. And he left the house before she was awake.

To pass the time each afternoon she talked to Rosemarie and let her play with her fingers, fed her and rocked her for hours with a fullness in her throat. Whenever she lifted the baby into her arms, an absurd bolt of joy bloomed inside her chest, and when Rosemarie opened her extraordinary eyes and looked at her one evening Winifred knew she had fallen head over heels in love with her niece.

When the baby was fussy Winifred found herself humming half-remembered lullabies, and when she couldn’t remember the words, she simply made them up. Mornings, while Rosemarie slept, she spent time in the kitchen with Sam. In two days she mastered not only biscuits but pancakes and bread and even piecrust. Piecrust! Just imagine. She might be the only concert pianist in the country who could roll out a piecrust! She couldn’t wait for the next basket of blueberries or blackberries a patient brought for the doctor; she would bake the most delicious pie he ever ate.

Every morning the entry hall filled up with waiting patients, and every afternoon Sam stepped in to send them all down to the hospital because the doctor had left. After two days without a glimpse of Zane, Winifred knew with certainty that he was avoiding her.

At breakfast the following morning, Sam clucked over her like a mother hen. “Doctor visit lady wife’s grave yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“Then come home drink brandy all night.”

The houseboy closed his lips with finality and sloshed hot coffee into her cup. “Boss sleep late today. Go to hospital in afternoon, then see patients here today.”

One of them, young Noralee Ness, brought a quart jar of fresh-picked blackberries. All afternoon Winifred labored in the kitchen over her piecrust, while Sam offered cryptic comments every now and then. “Not more rolling, missy. Make crust like shoe leather.”

The pie emerged from the oven golden and bubbling purple juice from between the lattice strips. Winifred inhaled the fruity scent and smiled. It would be a peace offering for Zane.

By suppertime, Zane still had not returned from the hospital. Winifred ate a quiet, solitary supper with Rosemarie sleeping in her basket on the chair next to her. Disappointment gnawed at her.

She fed and rocked the baby, cut a huge slab of her pie and left it on a plate in the doctor’s office, along with a fork and a napkin. Then she dragged herself up to bed with legs that felt like wooden fence posts. She had made an enemy of Cissy’s husband and Rosemarie’s father. She crawled into bed and pulled the bassinet close.

She closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. Was Zane so put out with her he wouldn’t let her visit again?

In the morning, the bassinet was gone. Winifred sat bolt upright in bed and stared at her closed bedroom door. Zane must have come in while she slept and rolled the bassinet back to his bedroom. At least that meant he was home. She prayed he wasn’t angry with her for moving the baby to her room. And for once she could do what she’d waited days to accomplish, make an apology.

She dressed in a light blue dimity wrapper, hurriedly braided her hair and pinned the coils at her nape and sped down the stairs to breakfast.

Zane rose as she entered the dining room. A telltale smear of purple juice on his lower lip hinted that he’d sampled her pie this morning. Something inside her began to sing.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning. One of your patients brought some blackberries yesterday, so I—”

His dark eyebrows rose. “Are you saying you made the pie?”

“Yes, I... Sam showed me how and—”

His sudden smile startled her into silence. “I’m surprised,” he said. “And impressed.”

Winifred knew she was blushing. The distinctly odd expression in Zane’s gray eyes confirmed it. Instantly she found it hard to breathe. He looked and looked at her without speaking until the flesh on her bare forearms formed tiny goose bumps.

“Winifred?”

“Y-yes?”

Zane watched her eyes widen. They were like Celeste’s, yes, but a shade darker. And at this moment they looked...apprehensive.

“I owe you an apology.”

The morning air was already stifling, and the sun had scarcely cleared the mountains to the east. Perhaps that was why her cheeks were so pink. He loosened his shirt collar in the oppressive heat.

She looked down at the tablecloth, at the door leading to the kitchen, everywhere but at him. He held his breath until she spoke.

“I rather thought I owed you the apology. I had no right to...” She swallowed and looked up at him, her eyes shiny. “Perhaps a child’s place really is with her father.”