by Chloe Garner
“I ain’t no Lawson,” Sarah said around the sugar explosion.
Been a long time since Lawrence had seen sugar, ‘specially in these amounts.
“That’s the truth,” someone said. She turned, chewing aggressively and swallowing hard.
“Granger,” she said. “Thought you’d be counting cans at the shop, makin’ sure everything was there.”
He gave her a quick little smile and pushed his glasses up his nose.
“There’s a problem,” he said, giving Jimmy a quick glance, but keeping his focus on Sarah. “You ain’t married yet. And that was the one job I had today.”
He produced the town registry, and Sarah looked at Jimmy.
“Ain’t it the way?” she asked, and he nodded, taking the pen from Granger and signing, then handing it to Sarah. She signed and gave the pen back to Granger.
“Thank you,” Jimmy said, shaking hands with Granger. Sarah knew there was money in that handshake, and she knew it were a surprise to Granger to find it there, but that was the Lawson way, and Jimmy was damned certain he was gonna bring it to Lawrence.
“Suits you,” Jimmy said, reaching past her to pick up something off of the table. She didn’t give any ground, and he brushed chest to chest against her as he reached, his eyelids raising as he paused, his body against hers, then stepped back again, putting a petite sandwich, whole, into his mouth. “Blood on your wedding dress,” he said around bite.
“Blood and red Lawrence sand,” she said, agreeing. “It’s what I am.”
He shook his head.
“No. It’s what you’ve been. It formed you. It doesn’t have to be what you are.”
She put the last pastry into her mouth and chewed for a long time, watching him.
“You ain’t gonna change me, Jimmy.”
“No more than you do me,” he said with a phantom of a smile, then brushed his fingers off. “You don’t want to stay, do you?”
She looked up and down the table as it continued to recover from the attack.
“Not once they got the guns to hold the fort,” she said. “But, like I said, I’m gonna be the one breakin’ things up tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Jimmy said, making a slick play for her elbow with the inside of his wrist. She let it happen, but she twitched her head to let him know she hadn’t missed it. “I’ve got Petey, Rich, and Wade on roundup, and Thomas on dispensation.”
“Town don’t trust none of ‘em, least of all Little Peter,” she said. Jimmy’s big brother, Peter Jr., had a well-earned reputation as the worst of the bunch. Sarah’d already whipped him publicly, once, and she had a feelin’ it wouldn’t be long ‘fore she had to do it again.
“Thomas has some credibility,” Jimmy said. “And you know he won’t do anything permanent without consulting with you.” Jimmy gave her elbow a gentle but firm pull. “Tomorrow.”
“Should go let the girls out of the shop,” Sarah said. He raised an eyebrow.
“You sure you want to deal with Kayla today?”
“Not gettin’ any better for waitin’,” Sarah said, wrapping Flower’s leading rein around her palm once and walking with Jimmy toward the main part of town.
“Houses held up well, though,” Jimmy said. “We have some glass to replace, and I expect there’ll be damage inside, but they lived up to their reputation.”
“They’re creepy and unnatural,” Sarah said, and he laughed softly.
“They’re the future,” he answered. “You think that about everything that comes to you from the future.”
She looked at him.
“Tell me you prefer that over concrete and wood.”
His mouth twitched inward.
“Not on your life.”
She gave him a big nod and picked up the pace. The town was beginning to rematerialize, now that the shots had been gone for long enough for them to pick up their nerve again, and she didn’t want to be in the midst of the merrymaking to come. Especially not as a guest of honor.
They hit town goin’ as fast as either one of them would go without sacrificin’ their dignity, and Sarah left Flower with Jimmy, knocking on the door to the studio.
“Kayla, lemme in,” she said. “I want my own clothes.”
Kayla opened the door a moment later and her entire body went limp. Sarah waited for the storm to come, as Rhoda and a couple of men Sarah didn’t recognize peeked around the doorway. Rhoda covered her mouth with her hand, but Sarah was almost certain that had been a laugh tryin’ to get out.
“Sarah Todd,” Kayla said. “You are going to pay for this.”
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“What do you figure?” Sarah asked as she lay on the bed in her room, facing Jimmy as he leaned against the opposite bed post. “What does Kayla Lawson do when she’s angry?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“Mostly I’d say she’s a fly against a window, but she was proud of that dress,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to underestimate her.”
“She’s got creativity on her side, that’s for sure,” Sarah said. Jimmy tipped his head to the other side, the subtle signs of amusement draining from his expression.
“You said some of the men who attacked us today were probably living in town?”
“Numbers don’t add up,” she said. “They ain’t been attackin’ the homesteaders since the boys started gettin’ off the trains. No way they been feedin’ themselves out there like that.”
Jimmy nodded.
“I’m going to tell the claim owners that they need to give hiring preference to the people who are in the town registry,” he said. Sarah shifted back to sit up further, working through that one.
“Only folk in the registry are the ones with houses,” she said. It was an early design of the registry, intended to keep the transient prospectors from clogging up the list of people who actually lived in Lawrence, but it would turn it into a mandate that the young men buy property just to get a job. Men who were already required to have lodging in town to be employable. “Ain’t no way they got the money for that. And they can’t make the money without the job with the claim.”
Jimmy nodded.
“It’s one way to winnow them down, though.”
“Ain’t enough housing,” Sarah said.
His eyes shifted back to her, now.
“I can fix that.”
Sarah shook her head.
“Your folk don’t trust you enough for that,” she said dryly. “They’ll buy from you, right enough, but when you give ‘em a rule what says they can only pay some boy who paid you for a house… That’s a conflict of interest bigger’n they’re gonna like.”
“I’m Jimmy Lawson,” he said. “I can do that if I want.”
“You’re gonna take money from them that ain’t got none for something they don’t need,” she said.
“Because there are too many of them, and I don’t want them all to stay.”
It was brutal, but as she could see the wisdom in it.
“I’m gonna pick the exceptions,” she said. He pursed his lips.
“Sarah’s list?” he asked. She raised an eyebrow and nodded.
“There are them that deserve it, even if they can’t find some way to cram into a house to please you.”
He shook his head.
“That you still care who deserves it and who doesn’t… after all this time, out here. I don’t know if I’m impressed or disappointed.”
“I don’t know why I’d care,” she answered, and he smiled.
“So how does one get onto this mystical list?” he asked.
“That’s fer me to know,” she said. He actually grinned at this.
“Currying favor,” he said. “That’s the Sarah I know.”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with keepin’ order the way I know how,” she said. “It’s worked for me plenty long, so far.”
He licked his lips and turned once more to face her, slowly sitting up and rolling his feet under his knees to crawl the length of the bed toward her.
�
�Things are going to change, Sarah.”
“Power is power and men are men,” she answered. “Ain’t nothing changin’ about that any time soon.”
“We’ll see.”
--------
They fell asleep in her bed, the covers a tangle from too much wandering back and forth as they talked, but they slept chaste, Jimmy not so much as touching her as they watched each other drift away into slumber.
It was strange being back in this room.
She’d grown up here. Elaine Lawson had taken her in when her mother had died; Sarah had only been a few months old, and Jimmy was a scant month older. When Elaine had died, one of the injustices that informed everything about Sarah’s life, Peter Lawson had sent her back to Clinton Todd, and her life had taken a sharp right turn, but this place, the way the light came through the curtains blue under the high full moon, scattering around the room and all of the things Elaine had given Sarah… Even at only eight years old, when Jimmy had refused to let anyone alter Sarah’s room, his word had been law.
She’d slept here a few times since; she’d been known to sneak into the Lawson house now and again in her teenage years, laying at opposite ends of the bed with Jimmy and listening to his big dreams, mocking him for them at the same time that she’d helped him build them.
He’d started saying, in his later teen years, that she was his foundation, and that - like it or not - he was going to build a fortune and an empire on her.
She’d told him, even then, that if he tried to put that much on her, she was going to shake it off and destroy him, because she wasn’t going to let him hold her down.
She’d loved him.
From the age that she’d known what love was, she’d loved him, and she knew with the certainty of a bird in its own wings that he loved her as well. It just wasn’t ever that simple. It never had been, and after everything, it probably never would be.
She woke at dawn to find him sitting in a chair watching her, his hands folded and his elbows propped on his knees.
“We’re terrible at this, Sarah,” he said.
“Regrettin’ it already?” she asked.
“Don’t speak to me like that. Not in my own house.”
She’d done it to needle him, but it was more of a reaction than she’d expected.
“My house, too, if I’m not wrong.”
“No,” he said, his head twitching to the side. “Not unless I say.”
“You did,” she said, sitting up. “You married me.”
“This is the Lawson house,” he said. “You’re still Sarah Todd.”
“And that scares you, does it? Sarah running around this place, ownin’ it, instead of the subservient Lawson women you brought in with you?”
“Every one of them easier than you,” he said.
“If you wanted easy, you’d’a never come back,” she said.
His jaw worked.
She pulled herself completely upright in bed, putting one arm behind her to keep her sitting up straight.
“Why are you always so difficult?” he asked. “Don’t you see the potential here? What we’re on the verge of?”
“Asked you before, I’ll ask it again. Why do you think I want it?”
“Because it’s terrible here,” he said. “How many men did you bury in the last twelve months?”
Including her best friend after she shot him in the face?
“Too many,” she said without any sense of concession. “You ain’t gonna make it better. I know it and you know it. Same number of men are gonna die, they’re just gonna be nice and private, with you looking over it.”
“There’s going to be money,” he said. “You aren’t going to spend your days worrying over whether everyone’s going to starve.”
“Seems to me the boys at the end of town are right up against that, most days,” Sarah said.
“I’m going to fix it.”
She laughed bitterly.
“By seein’ to it that half of them go right ahead and starve, to leave enough for the rest.”
“You don’t want them here,” he said. “You never did.”
“But you just brought ‘em right on in, didn’t you?”
His mouth tightened. He had hard eyes, dark eyes, despite how blue they were, and his expressions were almost all tiny, subtle ideas of thought that you had to be quick to see ‘em. This was real anger, but it was a sort of clever realization at the same time.
“You blame us,” he said.
“Ain’t it all your fault?” she asked.
“It was your friend who found the absenta up in the mountains,” Jimmy said. “The minute he sent it to the lab in Preston, all of this was inevitable. You’d have been out of control without me. We both saw it coming. I came in prepared to do something about it.”
“And you want gratitude for that?” she asked.
“No,” he said. The trap. “I want to hand you the reins to the biggest, most beautiful horse I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I want you to do something with it.”
Dammit. That was her play, the big, absurd horse. He was gonna steal it from her, sure enough.
“You want me to be in charge of the town,” she said wryly.
“We’ve both said it before,” he said. “They trust you, and they only respect us. If we want anything to happen here, you need to be at the head of it.”
“Everything you’re talking about is just going to squeeze the homesteaders out,” she said. “They’re the core of Lawrence. If they go, all you got is transients and remote owners, a few bitty wildcatters who go broke and give it up every few months.”
He shook his head.
“You’re the one with the big fancy degree. You’re the one who saw a mine full of absenta and shot your best friend to keep the secret from getting out. If anyone can figure out how to steer this thing, it’s you.”
“You’re the one throwing up all the crazy changes,” she said. “It wouldn’t need steerin’ if not for you.”
“Isn’t true,” he said evenly. He wasn’t wrong. She just didn’t like seeing it that way.
“You bring chaos with you everywhere you go,” she said, dropping the twang. He shifted his elbows forward.
“I bring opportunity. Opportunity always needs change. You’ve been here too long on your own. You’re afraid of change.”
“Whose fault was it, I was here on my own?” she asked.
He dropped his arms to his sides.
“This? Again? I’m sorry I left you. But I had to. We wouldn’t be any better off, if I’d stayed, and I wouldn’t have the resources to control the situation with all of the miners coming in here to try to find absenta. We might both be dead.”
“But we’d have been together,” she said. He nodded slowly.
“You learned what you needed to know at school,” he said. “I had to go out there and learn it in real life.”
She considered it. It was possible.
“No,” she finally said. “Between the two of us? I don’t think there’s anything anyone could have thrown at us that we couldn’t have handled.”
“What’s different now?” he asked, spreading his hands.
She licked her lips, finding them dry. Just the way things always were, in the desert.
“You left.”
He ran his fingers through his hair in a desperate motion.
“We aren’t supposed to be having this fight. Not again. Not this morning.”
“Jimmy, we’re never going to stop having this fight. It’s who we are now. Why didn’t we sleep upstairs last night?”
His eyes sharpened. Yes. That had been a good question.
“We’re going to Preston as soon as everything here is stable,” he said, standing. “You should put together the set of things you need to take with you.”
“What I need depends on why we’re goin’,” she answered. It was without hardly a thought; the drawl was back.
“Meetings,” he said. “The investors want to see us, want to know that we�
��re making progress toward making the claims actionable.”
“Ain’t our problem that they ain’t got a clue how to make a mine go,” she retorted, standing.
“It is when we can’t start our own mining operation until theirs are going,” he said. “All eyes are going to be on us, Sarah. Watching to make sure we didn’t double-cross anyone or do deals under the table. Any of those claims fail to produce, someone’s going to be here demanding proof we didn’t know it was bad.”
“So you’re gonna go hold hands and tell ‘em what’s what? Ain’t like you, and they’re gonna know that.”
“We took their money,” Jimmy said. “A lot of it. They’re going to expect to see something from us after that.”
“Ain’t never told a prospector how to run a claim, before.”
“You never handed out invitations to high-end clientele before for an investment opportunity, either. Sarah, you’re tough. You’re ruthless. But you’re terrible at people.”
For a moment, a part of her recoiled, willing to believe him, because of their relationship, because of how deep their roots went down, but she sprang back into form just as quickly.
“Like hell,” she said. “You got your people and you think you know ‘em, but if you thought you could do this without me, you’d leave me here.”
The hardness around his eyes told her she’d scored a point. She was right. He wanted her there as backup, as a second opinion, as someone who would watch everyone he couldn’t see.
She was good at that.
They were good at that.
Why were they fighting? Again?
“Being with you is like trying to eat ice cream off a razor,” he said, and she shrugged.
“Ain’t for just anybody,” she said.
He shook his head and turned for the door.
“I’ll be in my room,” he said.
“Is that what it is?” she asked. “You didn’t want me up there because it isn’t mine?”
She dropped the drawl, but there was still an edge to the question. The voice she’d used the last time they went to Preston, the business woman with the sharp wit, a fearsome adversary. One who sat across the table.
Enemy.
He turned to face her, recognizing the voice. What was that? Was that fear?
She held her gaze steady.
