Lily’s efforts to kick away the blankets covering her were stymied when Roen threw off the last of his and dropped them on her. Sometime during the night he had removed all evidence of his bed on the floor and it was now lying heavily on top of her. Also, one of the bundling blankets, the smaller one, was suspiciously no longer bundled. Had she done that? Had he?
“Where is Hannah, Lizzie?” she asked. “And why hasn’t she put a brush through your hair? It looks as if you’re wearing a tumbleweed on your head.”
Lizzie’s lower lip trembled slightly as she patted her tangled mat of baby-fine hair. “I don’t want a tumbleweed head.”
“Get my brush and crawl up here.”
Lizzie ran around the bed to take the brush from her mother’s dressing table and climbed onto the bed.
Roen helped Lily free herself and lifted Lizzie into place so the brush could be applied. “You haven’t told us where Hannah is,” he reminded her.
“School. She left with Ham and Clay.”
Lily and Roen spoke in unison, their voices similarly pitched but with different inflections. Roen framed the single word as a question. “School?” Lily’s said it with an exclamation. “School!”
They traded slightly wide-eyed looks. “We overslept,” she said, dismayed. He said the same thing at the same time, but the difference was that Roen was hardly distressed. He had already begun to grin crookedly.
Lily lightly tapped him on the shoulder with the back of her hairbrush. “This is your fault.”
“How is that?”
“I don’t know, but it’ll come to me in time.”
He laughed, tweaked Lizzie on the nose, and got out of bed.
“You have a tumbleweed head, too,” said Lizzie, wincing as her mother tugged at her hair.
Roen plowed his fingers through his crosshatch of hair. “Right. I’ll take care of that.”
“C’mon, Lizzie. We’ll finish this in your room. Your da needs to wash and dress.” Lily looked at Roen over the top of Lizzie’s head. “I suppose you’ll have breakfast at the hotel now.”
He nodded. “It’s better that I meet her in a public place.”
“Witnesses,” she said matter-of-factly. Out of Lizzie’s sight, Lily made the shape of a pistol with her hand and used her thumb to pull back the hammer. She aimed at the ceiling. “Always a good idea to have witnesses.”
“You frighten me, Mrs. Shepard.” But he leaned across the bed and dared to kiss her on the mouth anyway.
•••
Roen sat down at what had been his usual table when he regularly took his meals at the hotel. Abe Butterworth left the frontdesk to chat with him for a few minutes, mainly about the progress he was making establishing a new route. Roen brought him up to date, explained the weather was hampering his progress but that he expected to submit a proposal to Northeast by the end of January. Abe was encouraged by this, imagining his hotel filled to bursting with Roen’s out-of-town hires.
Abe excused himself when Fedora stepped up to Roen’s table. She was considerably less apprehensive about approaching him and stood patiently at his side as she took his order. When she looked him in the eye, he smiled and she actually returned it.
“Busy morning?” he asked, looking around. As long as Victorine showed up, Roen considered that his timing was good. There were just two empty tables, and he was the only single diner.
“Yes, sir,” Fedora said, nodding at the same time.
“So all the rooms are taken.”
She nodded again. “We have two families.”
“I see one of them over there.” He lifted his chin to indicate the table with three children, all of them under ten, and two harried adults who were busy cutting pancakes into manageable triangles.
“Yes. The Mastersons.”
“New arrivals?”
“Not so new. A week, I think. They’re leaving this afternoon.”
