Joe's Wife

“You know I will.” He leaned forward, and she placed her palm on his chest as though touching him gave her strength. “I’ll do anything you ask.” Did she have last-minute debts to repay in order to go to her resting place in peace? Damn! He couldn’t help her if she needed money. “What is it?” he asked.

“I have a child,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes.

“You do? Where is he? Do you need me to go get him for you?” Perhaps she needed to say goodbye.

“No. She’s here. What I need you to do is...”

“What?”

“I need you to take care of her for me.”

Tye stared at her. “I don’t have much, Lottie. I can help, but—”

“Not money,” she interrupted. “I mean take her. After I’m gone,” she clarified, and blinked back the moisture in her eyes. “Raise her.”

Was she all right in the head? Had her sickness gone to her mind? Tye glanced behind him but Rosa had left them alone. Lottie was asking him to take responsibility for a small person! A kid he didn’t even know. “I don’t know the first thing about a kid. I’m sure she’d be better off with someone else.”

“No!” she said firmly. “She wouldn’t. Nobody else would have her, you know that. She’d end up in an orphanage or worse, and I can’t die afraid of that happening to my Eve.”

“What about Rosa?” He glanced over his shoulder again, as though he could conjure up some help.

“No. She’s getting married. Emery Parks has a brother-in-law whose wife died, and Rosa is marrying him. He already has five children. He wouldn’t take another one.”

“Well...” Tye glanced about the room helplessly. “Surely there’s someone.”

“That’s what I’ve been believing all along. I’ve been praying that someone will want her before it’s too late. Before she goes to an orphan asylum.” She pierced him with a steady gaze. “She’s a child born out of wedlock, Hatch. Folks consider her trash, just like they do me. She’ll grow up just like me, too...unless somebody takes her. Unless you take her and give her a different life. And a name.”

She knew exactly what she was saying to him, and exactly how he’d react. Tye’s own father had been a rancher right here in Colorado. He hadn’t married Tye’s mother, and he hadn’t claimed Tye as his son. More than anyone, Tye knew the stigma of being a bastard. And Lottie was using that against him.

“Nobody’d want my name, Lottie,” he argued. “My name’s no better than hers would be.”

“At least it would be somebody’s name,” she said, her voice stronger than her appearance dictated. “It would show that somebody wanted her. That you wanted her. You’re a good man. I know you’d take care of her, and you wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”

Her urgent pleas hung in the air like the unpleasant smell of sickness and the cloying scent of wax.

“You said you’d do anything for me,” she said softly. Unfairly. And she knew it. But she was dying, and she had a child to look out for.

A trapped sensation made him want to bolt for the door. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. She had to have been desperate to have called on him.

“Go see her,” she urged. “She’s in the room next door to mine.”

He stood slowly, releasing her hand. Her eyes held so much hope. So much fear. So much love for her child. With uncertainty bombarding his mind and a sense of human duty harping at his conscience, Tye walked out of the room to the next one like a man walking toward an uncertain fate.

He took a deep breath, his head not understanding why his feet were going ahead with this monstrous demand on the rest of his life. He didn’t know the first thing about a kid. Sure, he wanted one or two someday, but not until he had a place to live and a wife to give him his own.

What if he didn’t even like her? The door stood ajar, and he tapped his knuckles against the wood.

He didn’t know what he was expecting. Certainly not the fragile, dark-haired angel who sat beneath the window holding a rag doll and looking for all the world like a porcelain doll herself. She raised wide eyes the shade of deep blue pansies and blinked.

Something in Tye’s chest contracted painfully. She looked so small and helpless. “Eve?” he asked softly.

She nodded, and her midnight black ringlets bounced against shoulders he could span with one hand. “Are you Mr. Hatcher?”

“Yes.”

She merely stared at him.

What should he say to her now that he was here? He didn’t have any experience with kids. “Did your mother tell you I’d be coming?”

She nodded again. “I stayed clean till you got here. Me an’ Molly was getting kind of tired of staying clean an’ all.”

“Well, you look very clean to me.”

“Thank you. You look clean, too. Them’s my manners and Mama said I best mind ’em.”

Her piping voice and serious expression enchanted him. He found himself wanting to hear her say more. “How old are you?”

“Five and a half. My birthday’s behind Thanksgiving.”

“Oh.”

The tiny creature hopped to her feet and placed the doll on the bed. Her wrists and hands were as delicate and frail-boned as anything he’d ever seen. A stiff wind would blow her clean to Texas.

He crossed to sit on the corner end of the mattress, wondering what to say next. He glanced at the cloth doll. “Is that Molly?”

She bobbed her head. A smattering of pale freckles across her golden skin reminded Tye of Lottie, but her dark hair and lovely wide eyes were a mesmerizing combination all her own. No wonder Lottie adored her. No wonder she feared for this child’s welfare being placed in the hands of strangers.

Not that he’d ever laid eyes on her before. But the unknown was often more frightening than the familiar, and Lottie’d known Tye for many years. He was the only person she could turn to. The only person she trusted.

How pathetic.

“My mama’s bad sick,” she said, adjusting the doll’s dress and arranging her against a pillow.

What must she think of this frightening situation? She’d grown up over a saloon and only now moved to a house so her mother could die. “I know.”

Eve climbed onto the bed and dangled her feet over the side.

“Sometimes I’m scared to go to her room and see her.” Her silvery voice and tiny chin trembled.

Oh, Lord, what if she cried? What if she asked him something he didn’t want to answer or didn’t know how to answer? “That’s okay,” he said to reassure her.

“She don’t look a whole lot like my mama anymore, but she sounds like her, and she loves me like her.”

Her observation seemed too mature. But he’d noticed Lottie barely looked like herself. Her dreadful appearance must be frightening to her daughter. “She loves you very much.”

“She said someone would come for me before the angels came to get her.”

Tye’s throat closed up tight. He didn’t know how to handle this. He’d seen so many people suffer and die, he shouldn’t have had any feelings left when it came to death. He’d fought and killed with his own hands. He had blocked out recrimination and sorrow. What did he know about a child losing a mother?