Page 4 of A Convenient Heart
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“We’re supposed to get married on Sunday. That’s less than a week away. I mean, isn’t it a lark? When I get off the train, she’ll be looking for my hat and coat.” He patted a red flower—a poppy?—in his lapel pocket.
Jack Easton didn’t turn his head from where he sat in the railroad car. He didn’t have to. Between the quiet, mostly empty compartment, a reflection in the glass window beside him, and the acoustics in the arch of the train car, the young man’s conversation with an older gentleman who wore a neatly trimmed gray beard, in the seat across from him, carried perfectly to Jack’s ear.
“She’s a schoolteacher, been in the classroom for years,” the young man went on.
“How many years?” Gray Beard asked.
Both men were dressed in suits—not the best quality, but a sign they were doing all right financially.
“Nine, I think.” The younger man wore a bowler hat that made him look a mite foolish.
Jack favored a cowboy hat, but he’d lost his in a barroom scuffle a few days ago and hadn’t replaced it yet. He riffled one hand through his hair at the empty feeling on his head.
“Nine years in the classroom?” Gray Beard sounded skeptical. Jack couldn’t see his face in the reflection, but he had a clear view of the prospective groom’s face. “Don’t you think she’s a little…long in the tooth?”
It was a rude thing to say, and Jack took offense on the unknown bride’s behalf.
“She’s twenty-five.” But the groom suddenly looked uncertain.
“Or that’s what she wants you to think. She could be lying. She might be forty.”
It seemed to Jack that a schoolteacher would probably be someone upstanding in the community. Why would she lie? Especially when a lie about her age would be instantly revealed when the two met.
“What’s wrong with her, anyway? Why’d she need to get a husband from a mail-order ad?”
The groom obviously hadn’t considered anything like this, and Jack watched in the reflection as the man tugged at his shirt collar and then swallowed hard. “I’ve jumped into this, haven’t I? Maybe I should’ve thought about it longer than I did.”
Jack lost track of the conversation as he watched the landscape change outside the window. The woods and trees they’d been passing through opened up to a plain where everything was dusted with snow. The Laramie Mountains were visible in the far distance, purple shadows against the gray sky.
“Next stop, Calvin, Wyoming!” The conductor’s voice called out, and then the man himself passed through the train car.
Jack had been all over the West in the past few years. Montana, Nevada, Colorado. He’d never stopped in Calvin. Passed through once and judged it too small.
But that’d been…three years ago? Maybe things had changed.
“Perhaps I should go home.” The groom’s voice sounded clear as a bell, and Jack saw that he’d loosened his tie now. He took off his bowler hat and ran his hand through his hair, clearly agitated.
He’d be an easy mark across the poker table. His tells were as big as a brand on a cow’s hindquarters.
“You don’t want to meet her? What if she’s a great beauty?” Gray Beard said. Was the man toying with the groom? He seemed to be playing devil’s advocate now.
“It’s almost Christmas,” the young groom said.
Christmas.
Jack should find a game. Put aside a few dollars and hole up in a hotel room. Shops would be closed during the holiday. Restaurants too.
Jack didn’t have a home to go back to. No one to celebrate with.
And he liked it that way. The nomadic life he lived suited him just fine.
He decided to stretch his legs. Standing up, he slipped his leather satchel over his head and shoulder. He had to hold on to the seat in front of him with one hand as the train swayed and rocked.
Jack strode through the nearly empty train car, then moved through the door at the end and into the next car over.
This one had a small water closet, its door slightly ajar, and was more crowded, with people in almost every seat. Many had packages around their feet or on their laps. Another sign of Christmas.
