by Chloe Garner
Inge had told her that powerful women wore black. More powerful women wore bright colors, distinguishing themselves from the powerful, a caste unto themselves. Kayla knew this. Sunny would likely recognize it. She had a twinge of hesitation, doubting that the rest of the boys would intuitively understand it, that they would see her making herself out to be a peacock.
But Lise.
Lise in her pale colors, her see-through clothing.
Lise would understand.
Sarah wasn’t fighting for Jimmy. That war was over. Lise had never had him.
Sarah was fighting to prove to Lise herself that Sarah was the matriarch of the Lawson family. Breaking Lise would be a simple, ultimate satisfaction, and it was possible that this dress could do it.
She tipped her head back to look down her nose at her own reflection, then drew a slow breath and started for the door. It opened before she got there and Jimmy came in, pausing to look at her. He was dressed for meetings on the coast as well, sleek fabric, trim cut, well-groomed.
“I never got to take you out of that dress,” he said.
“It isn’t made for it,” Sarah answered. “This is a battle dress, no two ways of looking at it.”
The corner of his mouth came up and he stood for just another moment, then nodded.
“Everyone is here and has been waiting an appropriate amount of time. May I escort you?”
“No,” Sarah said. “But you can come with me.”
He smiled, real and true, and stepped out of the doorway, letting her past. He closed the door behind them and she waited for him, then walked toward the front entrance. They turned the corner to come into view of the dining room - not the entrance Lise had perfected down the main stairs, but Sarah wasn’t trying to walk that set of footsteps. The room went quiet. Rhoda grinned. Kayla gasped, putting both hands to her mouth, then would have been out of her seat if not for Wade’s hand on her elbow.
Sarah went to take her seat next to the head of the table, next to Jimmy’s empty seat, which he came to stand behind.
“Good evening,” he said. “We have a lot to discuss tonight, and the staff are waiting to bring in food. You all know that I’ve never kicked anyone out of a conversation for disagreeing with me, but I will ask you to retire to the sitting room if you are causing conflict just to do it. We are in a serious situation, and I don’t have time for any of you fighting with each other because of ongoing personal issues. Is that in any way unclear?”
Sharp eyes, hard eyes, swept the table and found no responses. Kayla was still staring at Sarah. Sarah gave her a small head shake, and the cheery woman turned to face the table, folding her hands like arm-wrestling herself.
Sarah turned her attention to Lise. The woman was wearing a pale gold dress, absurd in Lawrence, but no more absurd than Sarah’s dress. Sarah had to assume Kayla had made it for her, because it suited her pregnancy, and Sarah could see no other way that she’d gotten it. She sat away from the table, arms over her stomach, with a cool look just waiting for Sarah to see it.
Lise thought she was better than Sarah because Sarah was a backwoods hick in men’s clothing.
Here.
Now.
Sarah had the power. Not only that, though. Sarah had matched Lise for city culture. It didn’t matter that Sarah had known she could, if she needed to. It didn’t even matter if Lise had believed it was possible. What mattered was that, right now, Lise had taken her measurement and failed to find any way to see herself as better, more important, or more powerful than Sarah.
Sarah won.
A kinder person would have been gracious in victory. That wouldn’t have happened, regardless: with anyone else Sarah would have failed to care enough, past the victory, to do anything about it. But Lise. Lise had slept with Jimmy to try to gain power within the family, and this very moment she might have been carrying his daughter.
Sarah had a long history of terrible grudges, and this was one she didn’t see burning out any time. Ever.
She held her gaze on Lise. Not acting. Not demonstrating power. There wasn’t any need. Anyone who has to prove their power has less than they want you to think.
So Sarah just watched as Jimmy spoke words summoning the staff and the dinner.
Lise held her eye.
Strong woman. In all truth. Strong woman.
Sarah turned her head as a serving woman leaned across to put a plate in front of her, then looked over at Jimmy. He still wasn’t sitting. He was watching her.
“What’s this?” Kayla asked. “I didn’t know we were getting a fancy dinner tonight, too. I’d have worn a better dress.”
“Chef is showing off,” Rhoda said. “All of us here at once? He has to prove it would be worth having him here.”
Sarah smiled, not looking away from Jimmy.
“He’s misunderstood his market, if this is what he thinks he should be using to sell himself,” she said. “Lawrence won’t pay for this. Any restaurant would go broke trying to keep the ingredients in stock without selling anything.”
“Lawsons alone could keep him in business,” Rich said, digging in.
“Your food is getting lukewarm,” Sarah said to Jimmy. She’d recognized it on its way to the table, a gel that most restaurants served cold, but that the high-level chefs served at room temperature to prove they could. It would be flavored with fish or fruit and it would have an acidic sauce that would eat rivers through it. It had been a huge trend in Oxala, though she could see it had evolved since then.
“We are hamstrung by being unable to communicate with the outside world,” Jimmy said, moving around the back of his chair in a swift motion, sitting and pulling the chair under the table behind him in the same motion. Spoons scraped plates, but most of the family watched him.
“You going to lay phone line?” Wade asked. Jimmy shook his head.
“Too easy to sabotage, and too hard to maintain,” he said. “No. We may live like primitives out here, but we all remember that there’s a modern world out there that only rarely relies on wires for anything.”
“You’re planning on satellite communications?” Sunny asked, lifting her head slightly. Sarah took it in without adjusting her posture.
“You can’t get that,” Lise said. “No one can.”
“I can, and I have,” Jimmy said. “It’s just a matter of someone going to Intec and then up to the LaVelle to finalize details and get it launched.”
The men stirred, all four of them sitting forward.
“I’ll do it,” Little Peter said.
“Will not,” Lise said. “You aren’t leaving me like this, not when you could get stuck out there. If you’re going to make me have this baby in this putrid little town, you have to be here when it happens.”
“I’ll go,” Rich said.
“Or I could,” Wade said.
“I’m willing,” Thomas said. That one surprised Sarah. She knew he didn’t like being up in the mountains more than he needed. Glancing to take him in, she saw the exchange of looks. He’d bring Rhoda with him. Ah. Pre-wedding big-city honeymoon.
“It’s Sarah,” Jimmy said.
“What?” Rich asked.
“Why?” Wade asked. “Are you going to send a body guard again?”
“What does she know about satellites?” Lise asked.
Jimmy shrugged.
“She’s the only one of us who’s been to space.”
Silence.
Not even spoons.
“What’s it like?” Kayla finally said. “I’ve heard the colors are more intense, with all that black, behind them.”
“Actually true,” Sarah said quietly, looking over at Kayla. Kayla grinned wide and bounced slightly.
“So exciting,” the dressmaker said.
“When did you go to space?” Rich asked.
“No one gets to go up,” Sunny said. “I tried.”
Sarah turned her head again, looking at Sunny. Never could figure out that woman. Sunny gave her a one-shoulder shrug and w
ent back to eating her gel appetizer.
“Are you going to tell them?” Jimmy asked.
“What were you doing?” Thomas asked.
“I studied international economics at school,” Sarah said. Among other things. She’d picked the biggest things on the curriculum and gone after them as hard as she knew how. She’d been invested in all of her business enterprises, but she hadn’t had a social life to speak of. Even after she’d dropped the accent, people had found her odd, and she’d been too stubborn to do more than alter her speech to fit in. Economics, biology, mathematics… she’d tried to hit all of them hard enough to find her limits.
“Good for you,” Lise said, returning to her own meal. Sarah turned her full attention to Thomas.
“There’s a program, they call it an exchange program, where students from a few universities around the world get to go and work on the LaVelle for a semester. You have to have background in something relevant to the LaVelle’s mission, and economics qualified.” The engineering classes hadn’t hurt anything. “I knew a girl who was accepted into the program,” Sarah went on. Truth was she’d been selling the girl test answers and light party drugs, but that counted as knowing her. “She got pregnant and the slot came open without much warning, and I took it.”
It was what Jimmy had come to Oxala for. She’d been near broke, for cash, and they’d needed payment before she could go. No way to raise the cash in time, she’d written him.
He’d come through.
“So that makes you an expert on satellites?” Rich asked.
“It means that she knows the crew,” Jimmy said. “They get final say on what we do, up there, and kids who have been in the starship program are all well-paid consultants at shipping companies and communications companies because they know how to get what they want.”
“And then there’s Sarah,” Rich said.
“Can I go with you?” Sunny asked.
“What’s it to you?” Rich asked.
“What’s your interest?” Sarah asked.
Sunny looked around the table, putting down her spoon.
“None of you know what I do,” she said. “Except Jimmy. No one ever asked. Except Jimmy.”
There was silence.
“Well,” Kayla said. “What do you do?”
She had her uses, that one.
“I’m an engineer,” Sunny said. “My father was an engineer, and so was his. My grandmother, back far enough, was an engineer on the LaVelle when it came here.”
“Crew stayed,” Sarah said. “When they got here. They were all still Americans.”
Strange word. Felt weird in her mouth. An idea without a firm concept under it.
“She married one of the colonists. Had to decide between staying with the ship and coming down to the colonies. He was an engineer, too.”
Sarah paused. Wondered if she’d ever heard Sunny use more words at a stretch than that. Was pretty sure she hadn’t.
“May I go?” Sunny asked.
Sarah had no need for a traveling companion. Especially a woman she barely knew. She surprised herself, though, at empathy for someone who wanted to see something in the world when everyone said it would never happen.
She looked at Jimmy.
“It’s up to Sarah,” he said. She gave him a dark look, and his eyes sparkled at her. He knew. Read it right there on her face. She hadn’t been careful enough to keep it out of sight. And now she was either going to have to be mean for its own sake or she was going to have to let the entire family know she was vulnerable.
This, on the night she’d finally vanquished Lise.
“I can’t promise they’ll let you aboard,” Sarah said. The starship program graduates were always welcome back, but they didn’t exactly get a guest list.
There was a quiet shift to the room, as the family struggled to figure out who they wanted to be watching, Sarah or Sunny. Smart money would have been watching Jimmy, but Sarah hadn’t ever given any of them that much credit.
“Get me aboard that ship,” Sunny said. “Please.”
Sarah sighed.
“Fine. She’s coming with me.”
Jimmy nodded, then raised a hand. The staff came in and switched out plates, taking Sarah’s un-touched fish gel and replacing it with a structure of crisped vegetables that was somewhere between a bird’s nest and an unlit campfire. Underneath it was a lake of yellow sauce. Sarah had no idea what it was, and she didn’t care.
“I thought we were here to talk about the houses,” Lise said, breaking apart her dish and dipping the pieces into the yellow goop.
“They aren’t going to be complete by the time the flood hits, more likely than not,” Jimmy said.
“Will we ride it out, down in town?” Thomas asked. Jimmy shook his head.
“No. You’ll all be here, like we were before the auction.”
“Some of us, anyway,” Lise murmured. It didn’t matter that Sarah had won the war. They both knew it. Lise was never going to just let Sarah be the powerful woman at the table. Lise would never get it back, but she was going to keep fighting. Sarah ignored her. Jimmy put his fingers over his mouth, watching Lise as she went back to eating, and Sarah just about came over the table at him, dress and all. It was one of his oldest tells, his hand trying to keep his mouth from forming an expression, happy thoughts like a pleasant flavor to him.
“You going to tell them why the houses aren’t going to be done?” Sarah asked.
“Hmm?” Jimmy asked, sensing the tidal change but not immediately seeing it coming. She gave him a dark smile, looking at the rest of the table.
“We’re going to make sure that the boys from town have appropriate shelter, instead of speeding up work on your new homes. I kind of figured, if they mattered so much to you, you’d have done them by now, so no rush, right?”
“Thank goodness,” Rhoda said. “I was beginning to worry, from the stories I’d been hearing.”
“What do you mean, everyone else gets put up before us?” Rich asked.
“Why aren’t they fending for themselves?” Wade asked. “We’re Lawsons.”
“Pa wouldn’t have ever done something like that,” Little Peter said. “He always put family first.”
Jimmy was watching Sarah, and she met his gaze level, cool.
“We have to keep our priorities on maintaining a working pool for the mines,” Jimmy said. “Everyone here will be safe and well-fed, regardless.”
“You know, except for the ones who are going to be out there in the dark with all of them, guarding the rations,” Sarah said.
A muscle in his jaw tightened and she raised her eyebrows a fraction, then reached out to crush the entire food sculpture on her plate into the yellow abyss below it. She brushed the crumbs off her palm and resettled in her chair.
“What do you mean?” Wade asked.
“You better not expect me to do it,” Little Peter said.
“He can’t,” Lise said. “I’m going to be here, which means you have to be here.”
“You really think he’s going to be any help at all, delivering that baby?” Sarah asked, and Lise looked up at her.
“No, but he isn’t going to leave me alone with it, either.”
“We have three good nannies here, already,” Peter said. “I don’t see why you expect me to be there at all.”
“Sarah,” Jimmy said, his tone low. “I will ask you to retire to the front room, if I must.”
She gave him a cold, cold smile.
“You do what you need to,” she said. “I’m just advancing the conversation. You were worried about getting to all of it.”
She looked at the kitchen, seeing Tania peeking through, and she raised a hand.
“Please,” she said. “Bring us the next amazing course.”
Tania stepped through, waiting on Jimmy, who gave her a resigned wave forward.
The bowl of exploding yellow vegetable twigs disappeared, replaced with three raw flakes of beef, thin enough to see through, on a
green gremlin leaf.
Sarah looked at that a long time.
“He hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing,” she said.
“It’s very on-trend,” Kayla said. “Or it was, when we left. These knife skills are impressive.”
“You don’t eat gremlin leaves,” Sarah said.
“Is that what that is?” Kayla asked. “I thought it was another breed of lettuce.”
Leave it to Kayla to make lettuce sound mundane.
“You do stew them,” Thomas said, and she glanced over at him, pained.
“They sit at the bottom of the pot,” she said. “You don’t scoop them out. It’s the same as making tea.”
He gave her a little mouth shrug, learn-something-everyday style, then glanced at Jimmy. Sarah turned her head to look at Jimmy again.
His jaw was working and he was watching her. She folded her hands in her lap and sat back against her seat.
Your move, Lawson.
“I am going to need two of you to be at the shelter house, to oversee the rations during the flood. Peevish as she may be, Sarah isn’t wrong.”
“Not me,” Wade said quickly.
“I can do it,” Sarah said.
“No women,” Jimmy said. It was like he was inviting her to be angry at him. He shrugged a fraction, enough for the table to see it. “I don’t care how strong or how well-defended you are, when you go to sleep at night, you lock your doors first. This isn’t going to be a strong enough facility for that.”
“But you’re going to send your own brothers to sit in between all of those vagrants and their supply of food?” Lise asked. “When you wouldn’t let your wife do it. I thought you cared about your family.”
“My family is trained and capable of doing what they need to do,” Jimmy said. “Men need food every day, or else they die. These particular men have been without a woman’s company for much, much longer.”
“Any man who thinks he can take my company without asking is going to find him incapable of ever enjoying a woman’s company again,” Sarah said. “I can do it.”
Jimmy blinked at her, once, slowly.
“All right,” he said. “Who here wants to be trapped in a room alone with Sarah Todd for four to six weeks?”
