Carla Kelly (13 page)

“Jed, I do believe she's been thinking about this for some time.”

“Mama!” Julia said. “We'll buy plenty of muslin for garments too. And there is Iris's quilt to make.” She sat down, tired already. “I don't think there's time between now and March for all this sewing.”

“No problem there,” Mama said with a straight face. “We'll just move the wedding back to June. June is such a lovely month for weddings, don't you think?”

Julia sighed. “Am I already a trial?”

“No more than Iris was,” Mama said, and Julia heard nothing in her voice except amusement this time. “I'll turn my dressmaker loose on your wedding dress. The Relief Society and Spencer's mother have already agreed to make your double wedding ring quilt, and we'll sew the garments.”

“I do believe you've been thinking about this for some time,” Julia teased in turn. “And the temple clothes?”

“Ours to do, as well. Monday, it begins.”

It began with such a vengeance that Papa commented over dinner Monday night that President Taft missed a bet by not making Mama Secretary of War, instead of Jacob Dickinson.

“Jed, how you carry on,” Mama said serenely. “Secretary of War would be no challenge.”

Julia had insisted on being at ZCMI that morning, the moment the store opened. By 8:05 a.m., she had already towed her mother up the stairs to Dry Goods to stand before as lovely a bolt of silk as existed in all the world.

“I noticed it a few months ago, when I was here with Paul,” she explained. Her cheeks bloomed with color as she remembered a previous visit, when her whole aim was to ignore the idea that she was marrying Ezra Quayle.
I've learned a lot since then
, she thought, admiring the fabric. “I believe I have the bosom for it. Yes, a slim skirt, with a lot of drape,” she said.

Mama signaled to the Dry Goods clerk, who started toward them with a tape measure around her neck and a pair of sheers. “You just needed to find the right man. And, yes, a slim skirt with a little kick to the back.” She smiled at Julia. “Sort of like you.”

The things I'm learning
, Julia reminded herself as January rolled through. After twenty-nine years sharing the same house with her mother, she thought she knew her, but Julia began to see another side of the woman she adored, a funny side, a roguish side that must have been kept under wraps all those years.

Of course, in the privacy of her bedroom late at night, when she was restless and couldn't sleep, Julia had to admit there wouldn't have been any reason before now for Mama to tell her such intimate details of her own marriage. Mama wasn't one to dart in with unwanted advice. During one stormy afternoon when snow fell with a fury outside, and they sat so contented in the parlor, doing hand work, Julia finally gathered up enough nerve to tell Mama about that conversation with Paul on the swings at the elementary school.

“After his disastrous first marriage, he wanted to make certain that I knew exactly what goes on between husbands and wives,” Julia said, her face on fire as she calmly embroidered her apron. “He wasn't shy about asking.”

“You're a lucky woman,” Mama said, her cheeks a little pink too. “You can probably bring up any little amorous request and have a willing participant.” She touched Julia's knee. “Not all men are so wise.” She turned back to the larger apron she was embroidering, then just put her hands in her lap. “My dear, I watched Paul pretty carefully during Christmas. Maybe I just wanted to assure myself that he's the husband for you.”

“You did?” Julia asked, charmed. “What did you decide?”

“You know! He likes to sit in the kitchen while you cook and just watch you.”

“I wasn't aware.”

Mama picked up her needle again. “If you don't mind me saying, Jules, when you're in the kitchen with a spoon in your hand and a pot in front of you, you're rather like a fox watching a hen house!”

“Oh, Mama!”

“You are. Paul just tips back in his chair…”

“I wish I could break him of that habit,” Julia grumbled.

“Don't bother trying. Save your reforming zeal for things that matter,” Mama told her. “He always has his eyes on you, and his eyes look so happy.” She stopped sewing again. “I am certain that has not always been the case with a man like Paul Otto.”

“No. Far from it. I'm buying into a hard life.”

“I doubt you'd have it any other way,” Mama said softly. “I could wish you married to a banker like your father, or a doctor or a lawyer, but you want a rancher.” She smiled a shy smile. “I think you want him quite a lot.”

Julia swallowed and watched the green fabric get a little blurry. Funny how needlework made her eyes water. “I do, Mama. Sometimes I want him so much I wonder if I'm a family embarrassment. Is there something
wrong
with me?” There, she said it.
What will Mama think of me?
she asked herself.

Mama laughed. It was a hearty laugh Julia hadn't heard in a long time. She felt herself relax.

“Mama! I mean, some of my married friends…” She looked around and lowered her voice, as if the house was full of disapproving aunties. “They say it isn't much fun for them.” Her words came out in a whispered rush. Julia was starting to wonder if it was easier talking to Paul than her own mother.
Who probably thinks she raised me right
, she thought, apprehensive.

“Pardon me, my dear, but some of your friends are idiots.” Mama kept stitching.

Julia burst out laughing, then lowered her voice again. “So you think I'm normal to… to want that man so much? Not just any old man—
that
one.”

“You're so normal that I'm relieved,” Mama told her. “He's quite a catch. He has the broadest shoulders, and that straight back, and if you don't mind bowed legs, well…”

They laughed together. “I never felt this way about Ezra,” Julia confessed. “I could barely get him to kiss me, and it's hard to get Paul to keep his hands from straying around.”

“Good for him.” Mama touched her knee again. “But thank goodness he's inaccessible on the Double Tipi right now.”

“I suppose so.”

“You
know
so. Just remember this: nowhere is it written that only the men find enjoyment. And if the mood is on you, just wake
him
up in the middle of the night and see what happens.” She stopped. “I'm starting to drop stitches and it's your fault. Let me just say that I have no doubts you and Paul will deal well together.” She stopped to pick out the misplaced stitches. “Where
is
my mind?”

Julia leaned closer and spoke in her best stage whisper. “Mama, do you want me to find an excuse to visit one of my brainless friends tonight? You know, give you and Papa the whole house to yourselves for, oh, I don't know, maybe calisthenics. I hear it's healthy.”

They laughed together, and then Julia laughed harder when Mama said, “Actually, yes. Call your friend,” in total deadpan.

Julia wrote to Paul that night, not delving very deep in the afternoon's conversation, but telling him how delighted she was to see such a playful side of her mother. “‘I thought I had lost a large part of her after Iris died,’ ” she wrote. “‘How happy I am to be wrong.’ ”

She lived for Paul's letters, not that they were anything more than prosaic accounts of the ranch, complete with hiring his two cousins from Wind River, and working when they could on the house, which wasn't often enough to suit him. James was living with the Shumways now, and not a moment too soon. “‘McAtee came on the property yesterday,’ ” Paul wrote. “‘He said he had a steer of mine, but it was one of McLemore's, and he knew it. He looked around and asked about the boy. I didn't say a thing, and he just glared at me.’ ”

“Mama, I'm worried for him,” Julia said, looking up from the letter she was reading aloud—at least, parts of it.

“He's capable of taking care of himself, Jules, and you too.”

She didn't read Mama the next part, where Paul wrote that McAtee asked about her. “‘He had a few too many personal questions to suit me,’ ” he had written. “‘Julia, if you have no objections—and maybe even if you do—I think I'm going to get a dog. I think I'd be uneasy leaving you alone on the place with only Two Bits as a watch cat. Once we're married and the spring work starts, it'll just be you and Charlotte on the place for a week or so at a time. You remember how it was last spring. I don't want to leave you alone there.’ ”

No need for Mama to know that. Also no need for Mama to listen to what made Julia breathe a little deeper: “‘I've turned into the worst grouch. I've got an itch I can't scratch. The boys are ready to hog-tie me and set me on the train to Salt Lake City. That would make the itch even worse. Did you ever meet such a horny toad as yrs truly? Oh, for the late lamented line shack. Julia, I miss you.’ ”

“And I miss you,” she said as she sat in her window seat and watched the snow fall.

She fingered the scar on her neck, grateful that the wider ones on her breast and ribs from the burning branch weren't painful anymore. She had been applying the foul-smelling salve from Dan Who Counts, even though Papa reeled around and collapsed in a chair when she wafted into the kitchen in her nightgown and robe one night.

She would have stopped using it, except to her critical eyes, the scars seemed less vivid. Maybe that was only wishful thinking, she decided, as February passed more slowly than it ever had since the Almighty created the earth in six days. What wasn't wishful thinking was the way the noxious stuff did loosen the tension on her scars.

And so she told Paul in one of her many letters, which she knew must be piling up like Melba toast in the Double Tipi post office box. “‘It doesn't hurt to raise my arm now,’ ” she wrote him. “ ‘The scars are more elastic. I could probably even beat you at arm wrestling.’ ”

“‘Not a chance,’ ” he replied two weeks later. “‘I will never play fair, especially with you. By the way, are you ticklish? Yrs, Paul. Really, really yrs.’ ”

“Really, really mine,” she repeated and turned her attention to the snow again.

February was a dreadful tease, cold one day and blustery, and then warm, with water dripping from eaves all over the avenues. Cross-legged in her window seat with a writing board in her lap, Julia spent two days addressing invitations to the wedding.

Next to the kitchen, it was her favorite spot in the house, partly because she could watch for the postman. Paul's letters had gone from “‘Jerusalem Crickets, the snow!’ ” to “‘What? Snow again?’ ” to “‘If I commit to paper what I really feel about the snow, someone at Church headquarters will yank my membership.’ ”

That one made Papa smile. “Something tells me it's feast or famine in Wyoming, when it comes to moisture,” he told Julia one afternoon after he came home from work and found her in the kitchen, practicing wedding cakes.

Cake had become a family joke. For several weeks, she tried a small version of each cake in Miss Farmer's cookbook, until Papa complained that he was having trouble with the top button on his trousers.

“You only need to sample one bite,” Julia told him.

“Agreed, but I'm never sure which bite,” he said, then nudged her shoulder. “You know, if you keep rolling your eyes like that, they'll get stuck, Jules.”

Her twenty-ninth birthday had come and gone. Paul must have found a way to get through that snow-covered canyon, because her present was a whopping large transfer of money from the First National in Gun Barrel to Zions Bank with instructions to buy furniture.

“That house he's building must be the size of the Taj Mahal,” she told her father, when he came home with a copy of the bank transfer in an envelope.

“As a banker, I'd probably advise you to invest it, honey,” he told her. “As the father of the bride, I'd suggest you spend the man's money.”

“Papa, he had a bad year!” she protested.

Papa only smiled. “My dear, as a banker
and
father, I'll relinquish privileged information—after all, you're almost married—and assure you that he's good for it. In fact, when my boss sees a transaction from Mr. Paul Otto, he gets all misty-eyed. Spend it, honey.”

He touched the envelope. “I think you'll find a note in there from Mr. Money Bags.”

The printing was familiar.
Dear Darling, I can just see the disapproving look on your face. Gotcha! I see it this way: Sure I could have bought all this in Cheyenne, but I seem to recall a little miss who only wanted a choice. Get what you want, sport. Yrs of course, Paul
.

“I'll spend it, Papa.”

She did, taking the streetcar with Mama to the furniture warehouses on South State Street, picking out a sofa, comfortable leather chair, and a rocking chair for herself.

“I plan to rock my babies in this,” she told her mother. Julia sat serenely and rocked, thinking of last year's parlor that went up in smoke.

At Mama's suggestion, she purchased two bureaus and a wardrobe, plus an excellent table long enough for a ranch crew, with a corresponding number of chairs, which made the salesman look at her in wonder.

“I run an orphanage,” Julia said with a straight face. “Older orphans.”

And so they are, she told herself, thinking of Matt, Kringle, Doc, and now Charlotte and two new hands Paul mentioned in one of his letters. Her face clouded for a moment, thinking of Willy Bill dead in the fires of summer.