by Chloe Garner
So everything inside was as it had been, eight years ago when they’d left. Most of the furniture was covered in sheets, because even if people couldn’t get in, the desert dust would, but a small army of people was making its way through the place even as Sarah arrived, cleaning and making the place civilized again.
“Hey guys,” Jimmy called. “Look who I found.”
Peter was the first to appear, named for his father and the spitting image of the man.
Sarah touched her hat, waiting for the remark.
“I didn’t know they’d started dressing in drag here,” Peter said. “Do the men wear the dresses, or just her husband?”
“Hi, Peter,” she said.
“Careful, Petey, she’s armed,” Jimmy said. Jimmy was the second of the boys, six in all, but having an older brother had never really registered for him. Peter was just another Lawson, and they all tended to fall in line when Jimmy spoke. Or at least, they had.
“She used to be such a pretty girl,” Peter said.
“Not a lot of pretty goin’ ‘round these parts, since y’all bailed for the big city,” Sarah said.
“Oh, and she went native.”
“Folk are gonna be real pleased to see you,” Sarah said. He grinned.
“They always are.”
He moved on, and Rich and Wade appeared.
“Sarah,” Wade said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”
“Almost didn’t,” she said. “The house looks fine.”
“Held up well,” Rich said. “Needs some updates, though. A lot of it’s really showing its age.”
“Newest house in town,” Sarah said. Rich laughed.
“I can’t wait. We’ve got so much work to do.”
She frowned, looking at Jimmy.
“I told you we’re doing it right,” he said. “We sat down and talked about this for a long time before we just pulled up stakes and came. If we’re here, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to put Lawrence on the map.”
“Last I checked, it’s already there,” she said.
“She’s not on board?” Wade asked.
“She slapped me,” Jimmy offered. Rich laughed again.
“Wish I had balls like that.”
Sarah looked at Jimmy.
“I’m goin’ home now, ‘cause last I knew, shooting a Lawson was still a capital crime, ‘round here.”
“I’ll call on you tomorrow,” he said.
“I won’t be in,” she answered. His face was still, exposing so little emotion that only someone who knew it as well as she did could see how much that amused him.
––—
She sat at the table drinking tea long into the night.
The Lawsons were back.
Jimmy Lawson was back.
And so was absenta.
She whistled for Dog, who lay down at her feet, taking bits of meat and bread as she offered them to him.
She didn’t like it. The Lawsons just breezing back in as if they still owned Lawrence.
Worse was that she knew Lawrence would turn itself back over to them.
Hell, she’d do the same thing, if it weren’t so personal that they left in the first place.
They were good for Lawrence. Between the muscle the rest of the boys represented and the brain on Jimmy, they could make anything out of Lawrence they liked, much as their father and uncle had done.
But she was Sarah Todd. She didn’t know what that meant, with the Lawsons back.
When the sun came up, she went to bed. She heard Jimmy knock, but she didn’t get up to answer the door.
––—
She rode into town.
Granger’s store was overflowing, and men were toting great canvas bags into it off of the sidewalk. The tavern was festive, men coming and going, cheers audible from the street as men toasted the good fortune of the town now that the Lawsons were back.
Them that toast your victories are like as not to cheer at your hangin’. Sarah knew this, but it still rubbed her the wrong way that everyone was so happy. Lawrence weren’t the happy kind of a town.
“Wouldn’t’a believed it, ‘cept I saw it with my own eyes,” Apex said, falling into step next to her great black horse. His arm was in a sling, but he was well on the way to his pointless prospectin’ again. Sarah had to remind herself that, if Jimmy had his way, it wouldn’t be pointless much longer.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked.
“Lawson house, all lit up again with folk,” Apex said. “Train station crawlin’ with men and luggage and goods. Lawrence alive again.”
“You get around,” Sarah said. A woman was standing in front of the dressmaker’s shop. Sarah kicked her horse, leaving Apex.
“Who’re you?” she asked the woman.
“Kayla Lawson,” the woman said. Sarah bit back her next words. Kayla was in a tight-waisted dress made from expensive-looking pink fabric. She stood with her hands on her ribs like a normal woman would have stood with her hands on her hips. “I’m Wade’s wife.”
“You look like you’re plannin’ somethin’,” Sarah said.
“Going to open this shop and make use of it again,” Kayla said. “May as well. The boys say we’re staying here for a while.”
“Shop ain’t yours to open,” Sarah said. The actual ownership of the property was dubious, since ‘abandoned’ was the best description of it, but it didn’t stop Sarah from being contentious.
“You must be Sarah,” Kayla said.
“Sarah Todd,” Sarah answered. Kayla might have a better name to trade on, but it wasn’t going to stop Sarah from trading the hell out of her own. Lawson was fearsome, but Sarah had put enough bodies in the ground that she weren’t ceding ground to a frothy pink bit of a woman.
“They told me to keep an eye out for you, when I said I was coming down to town,” Kayla said.
“You’re here on your own?” Sarah asked. Kayla blinked pretty eyes at her.
“Of course. No one else is interested in opening a dress shop. Why would they come?”
The woman was unarmed. Her buckboard, when Sarah found it, was halfway down the street, untended. And she was standing here, across the street from the tavern, alone.
“Don’t know what they might have told you ‘bout this place, but it ain’t no place for a lady to go wanderin’ on her own,” Sarah said.
“You do it,” Kayla said.
“I done it for years, true enough,” Sarah said, “but I ain’t never alone, and I ain’t a lady.”
She moved her duster back over her hip to show the other woman her holstered guns, as if she’d missed the rifle.
“I don’t need those,” Kayla said cheerfully, but with an awareness that was unmistakable. “I’m a Lawson.”
“Ain’t everyone gonna know that, ‘fore the deed’s done,” Sarah said. She wouldn’t have normally made veiled threats like that against a woman, but Kayla was more than Sarah was prepared to tolerate, right now.
“They told me to watch for you because I’m supposed to invite you to dinner tonight,” Kayla said. “I told them it’s too soon to entertain. We don’t even have all the kitchen staff in, yet, but Jimmy insisted, and you know Jimmy. He gets what he wants.”
“Indeed I do,” Sarah said. If it had been offered as an olive branch, it was received as a slap. Sarah realized that this two-bit excuse for a wife might actually know Jimmy better than Sarah did, herself. Worse than Jimmy coming back after all this time was his coming back with flighty, air-headed women who knew him well. Kayla flashed her a bright smile.
“While I’ve got you, I was going to try to get someone to open the shop up for me, so I could see what I’ve got to work with, but what I really need is someone to tell me how to get that horse to do what I want.”
Sarah looked down at the buckboard again, running a quick eye over the petite mare hitched to it.
“She’s givin’ you trouble?” she asked disbelievingly. As if to prove the point, the little mare picked up her front h
oof and set it down again delicately, as if the dirt was too dirty for her.
“Horribly,” Kayla said. “I’ve never driven one before, and I can’t seem to get the hang of it.”
“You’ve never...” Sarah said.
City girl.
They had cars and magnetic rail in the cities, clean and fast and swooshing soundlessly along their way from here to there. It was only as you got deeper into the rough country that folk had kept the needful beasts.
“No,” Kayla said. “Wade said he would teach me, but they’re all busy today.”
“You came ridin’ down here with no escort and no clue how to drive a rig?” Sarah asked. Kayla shrugged.
“How hard could it be?” she asked. “Everyone else does it.”
Sarah could have slapped her. Might have, if she hadn’t still been horseback.
“I’ll ride you back,” she said. “But you oughtn’t come here again until you’re better prepared.”
Kayla grinned at her again.
“I haven’t any idea what you mean by that. Can you find someone to let me in?”
That was a bridge too far.
“No. No, I can’t do that. You’re just going to have to wait a spell while I see to what I’m here for.”
Kayla gave the town a scan, then looked up at Sarah.
“There isn’t much to see, is there?”
“No, there ain’t,” Sarah said. “You sit tight.”
She didn’t, in fact, have any specific thing she was in town for, right now, but like hell was she going to let the pink slipper of a woman just show up and tell her what to do. She had half a mind to send her off on her own again, let the bandits or the beasts take her, or the cold. Making it into town was one thing. All paths eventually led to Lawrence, if you followed ‘em long enough, but finding her way back was quite another. She could end up anywhere.
Sarah actually weighed how much she cared about Wade Lawson and his opinions before she rejected, again, letting Kayla go on her own.
Dumber than paper windows.
Sarah went in at Granger’s, evaluating the bounty of the shop as she went.
“What’s all this?” she asked the shop keeper when she found him. “You get a new line of credit?”
“Jimmy set it up,” Granger said, taking his spectacles down and cleaning them. “Says there’re gonna be a lot more folk through, now that they’re back, and I need the stock.”
“Good to have the train,” Sarah said.
“Good?” Granger asked. “It’s the only thing we could have possibly asked for. With the train runnin’ again, I can get stock reg’lar again. No more rationin’ things out and asking folk to do without, for the time.”
His view of the world had always ended at his shop front, and Sarah didn’t begrudge him that. He’d stayed through some truly tough seasons.
“You gonna replace the specs?” she asked, motioning at his glasses. He gave her a squinted smile.
“Don’t know what I’d do with my hands, without ‘em,” he told her and she smiled.
“You tell me if you need anything,” she said.
“That’s what Jimmy said,” he told her, nodding. “Good to have the both of you lookin’ out for us, again.”
The way he said it made it sound like they were together, on the same team, working together. She stopped just short of telling him otherwise.
He looked over at her again.
“Is it true that they found absenta again?”
“Where’d you hear that?” she asked. He motioned vaguely with his kerchief.
“You know, here and there.”
“I don’t know what they found,” Sarah said.
“Don’t know why else the boys would come home,” Granger said. “We’re gonna be a real town again.”
Sarah though of the powder puff across the street, and of what the Lawsons wanted to do to Lawrence. Granger might not have a place, in their vision. Not permanently.
“You know the Lawsons well as I do,” Sarah said. “Can’t ever put too much stock in the motives everyone knows they pro’ly have.”
Granger grinned at this.
“You know those boys better’n anyone,” he said. “Since their pa died, you’re the only kin they got.”
She shook her head.
“Not true. They brought wives.”
Granger’s eyes sparkled.
“Jimmy didn’t seem to have a filly with him.”
She glowered at him, and he retreated back into himself where he belonged. The spirit of celebration was making people foolish, making them forget themselves. If she weren’t careful, it was going to get permanent, real quick.
“What Jimmy Lawson does or doesn’t do is no mind of mine,” she told Granger. “He left, ‘long with the rest of that scourge of a family, and I ain’t fixin’ to have no one match me up with him or any other one of them, just ‘cause we go back.”
“No one would ever match you up with anyone, ‘gainst your will, Sarah,” Granger said. She got the feeling he was trying to be older and wiser than she, but she was in no mood.
“No one does anything, ‘gainst my will,” she told him, and he ducked his head.
“Course not.”
She nodded, then strode out, letting her boots make more noise on the wood floor than they had on the way in. She headed to the tavern.
The men were spilled out into the street, jovial and half-drunk.
Paulie was sitting out on the front porch with a rifle laid across her lap. Sarah touched her hat to the other woman and Paulie nodded back. They understood.
That might have been the worst thing Jimmy had done yet, putting Sarah and Paulie on the same side. Sarah went in.
The room didn’t quiet.
The room always quieted when Sarah went in, but instead, women shrieked and laughed, men yelled and talked and toasted and drank, and no one gave her any mind at all.
Someone had the audacity to run into her.
She didn’t know what she was doing here.
She didn’t belong in the tavern. Never had. She wasn’t the celebratory type, nor was she the drinking-alone-in-public type. Elaine had taught her to avoid the place even as Peter and Grin spent most nights here, on account of the fact that men, when they get good and drunk, they do things they regret the next morning. Best to not let that happen while you’re there, because then you got to hold the grudge, and punish them right for it. Sarah suspected that Elaine didn’t approve of the women here, or at least of Sarah seeing them. Women who didn’t produce a thing in their lives made a living, in Lawrence, like in every other little town everywhere, Sarah suspected, and their numbers rose and fell with the number of unmarried men in any given settlement.
She saw Jezzie over in a corner, black hair piled up on top of her head and dark green dress squeezing her breasts mercilessly higher.
Sarah ordered a drink and sat on a stool, taking her time to drink it while she watched the room. Having established her space, the men gave her the courtesy of an empty stool on either side, and no one ran into her again, but the revelry continued.
“Don’t be too hard on ‘em, Sarah,” Eric, the bartender said to her. “They don’t know no better.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him, then dropped an extra coin on the bar for him and stood.
“They think good times is here,” she said.
“Might be,” Eric said. “But good times don’t always look the way you ‘spect ‘em to.”
She touched her hat and left, giving a few good shoves on the way out, just to make her point. She found Kayla out on the porch talking to Paulie.
“No, I don’t rightly think I need a new dress,” Paulie was saying.
“But when was the last time you got one?” Kayla asked.
“Made one last year,” Paulie said.
“Made,” Kayla said, sounding like she might swallow her tongue. “You made that?”
Paulie looked down at the tough fabric of the dress she was wearing.
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“Wore pretty well, I’d say,” she said. “Will need some patching here soon.”
“Don’t you want to own anything pretty?”
“I do,” Paulie said. Sarah knew exactly what Paulie was referring to, and found the comment off-color.
“I’m leavin’,” she said. “With you or without you.”
Paulie looked up and grinned at Sarah.
“Sarah, here, she could use some prettyin’ up, don’t you think?”
Kayla looked at Sarah with an evaluating eye.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start. She is just so much what she is.”
“Stuck in her ways, is Sarah Todd,” Paulie said. Sarah shook her head and went to go find her horse. She rode back to the buckboard and checked over the little mare, making sure she hadn’t come to any harm on her way here that Kayla would have missed, then waiting for the other woman to disengage from her conversation with Paulie. A handful of men approached her as she made her careless way back to the buckboard, and it was all Sarah could do to not intervene, let the poor fools know whose wife the girl was. They’d find out soon enough. Knowing the Lawson temper, they’d find out the moment Wade put a bullet through one of them who got too familiar.
“Ready,” Kayla said brightly, coming to stand next to the buckboard. “Someone had to help me up, back at the house.”
“There’s a step, just there,” Sarah said, pointing.
“Yes, but it’s not dignified to climb like that.”
“Would it be more or less dignified if I threw you in the back and just drove?” Sarah asked.
“Would you?” Kayla asked, already headed for the bed.
“Get up here and drive your damned cart,” Sarah said, her patience exhausted. “I’m leavin’. Either you can figure it out or you can’t. That’s how we survive out here.”
“No wonder everyone’s so ugly,” Kayla said. That nearly pushed Sarah off the next ledge, where she just went home, but she stuck by the woman, waiting just a moment to make sure she would at least try to climb up into the buckboard before Sarah headed off in the direction of the Lawson house.
