Page 15 of A Convenient Heart
It must have just hit him that the pageant wouldn’t go on as they’d planned.
“It’ll be all right,” Jack said. “Your Miss Harding will figure something out.”
He’d seen it himself. She was smart as a whip. And from what the boys had described, she was well liked in the classroom.
Paul leaned on his shovel, chin jutted out. “Anyways, we came over here to find out about you. Whadda you do for work?”
“A little of this, a little of that.”
Daniel squinted at him. “What’s that mean?”
The kid was smart too. Or had learned from his teacher. He hadn’t accepted Jack’s offhand answer.
“I travel to different places,” Jack said. “And sometimes I find problems. And I fix them.”
The kid seemed to think on that for a minute.
It was Paul who threw out the next question. “How come you needed a mail-order wife anyway?”
For a tick, as Paul tilted his head just so, Jack was thrown back in time—fifteen years, to when Dewey had worn the same narrow-eyed expression. And then Dewey’s expression had changed as he’d smiled. His eyes had danced.
Are we going fishing tomorrow?
Jack heard the voice from his past as clearly as he did the two boys who were arguing right next to him.
Dewey had been a blood brother only in the sense that they had sworn it to each other after they had nicked their palms with a knife and pressed them together on a muggy summer morning.
Dewey had been three years younger than Jack and, while he might have had an occasional bout of orneriness, had been one of the kindest souls Jack had ever known.
Jack hadn’t thought about him in a long time. It was too painful to recall the memories. And it was only a fluke that he had caught the faint resemblance of Paul to Dewey.
“Can’t have you catching cold.” The gruff female voice came only a moment before a woolen blanket was slipped over Jack’s shoulders.
He blinked away the painful memories and caught sight of an older woman in a drab green dress with at least two more folded blankets in her arms. She was looking at the boys. “You lads need warming up?”
“No, ma’am,” they chorused.
“That’s what I thought. Mr. Jack has been out here all night, while you two’ve only been out for a bit.”
Jack pointed to where Merritt was flanked by two women. “Merritt—Miss Harding has been out all night too.”
“I’ll go to her next.” The matronly woman who’d delivered the blanket was watching Jack with dancing eyes. “She sure did pick a good one. You jumped right in to help when we needed it.”
He was opening his mouth to tell her that she was wrong—that Merritt hadn’t picked him, that he didn’t belong here—but the woman was already gone.
“That’s Mrs. Stoll from the boardinghouse,” Daniel murmured. “Yer lucky she likes you. She don’t like hardly anybody.”
That was the woman Jack would’ve stayed with if he’d been this John Crosby fellow?
Paul jerked his chin toward another woman, this one in her forties, with a coffee pot in one hand and tin mugs in the other. She was passing out a warm drink that would help the people still standing around.
“That’s Mrs. Steele. She owns the café.”
Jack had never seen anything like this. The townsfolk had stepped up to help, not just to stop the fire, but now they were rallying around each other. Figuring out how to fix things, keeping each other warm and fed.
It was like something out of a fairytale. He wasn’t sure he believed in it. He sure knew that he didn’t belong here.
The question was how best to slip away without causing any more trouble.
