“You should be able to tell,” she said, smiling. “It’s your favorite.”
“Yes,” he said, sniffing the air, “it is’meat loaf!”
“It’s ready,” she said. “Just go upstairs and clean up and I’ll put dinner on the table.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“You should have.”
“I knew you’d be home soon. Go and clean up.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “Next you’ll want to check behind my ears.”
“I’m not trying to be your mother.”
“No,” he said, “you’re trying to be yours.”
Her smile disappeared and she said, “Let’s not go through that again, please?”
“You’re right,” he said, raising his hands in a gesture of supplication. “I’m sorry. I’ll wash up.”
While cleaning up he chided himself for the remark. They had had many hours of arguments over her staying to live with him, and he should have known by this time that further argument was futile. Just like her mother, Serena was doggedly stubborn when she set her mind to something.
At sixty-three Miller felt he still had many years on this earth. He despaired at the thought of Serena staying with him for every one of them. Once he was gone she’d be in her late forties or early fifties, and it would be she who was alone. The thought of his beautiful daughter wasting her youth and then living the final thirty or forty years of her life alone made him shake his head. If only he could think of a convincing argument.
If only she’d fall in love…and all right, old man, he told himself, that’s another reason you want the McCall boys to come home. None of them would remember Serena as anything but a little girl. Maybe when they met her now, all grown up, she’d fall in love with one of them. Lord knew they were strong men and would certainly not beunattractive at this point in their lives. Sam had to be in his early forties, Evan in his late thirties. Jubal, the youngest, would only be several years younger than Serena; it was certainly not an insurmountable age difference.
Miller could imagine the kind of grandchildren a union between Serena and Sam McCall would produce.
“Father,” her voice called from the kitchen. “Dinner is on the table.”
“I’m coming,” he called out.
Drying his hands, he thought,
The taste of the steel gun barrel frightened him, but he left it there, in his mouth, lying on his tongue. His finger tightened on the trigger, and even as it did he knew he would not have the nerve to give it the last, final twitch that would fire the gun, ending his life.
Because he could not shoot himself Ed Collins considered himself a coward. With a sob he jerked the gun from his mouth, catching a tooth on the raised sight and almost snapping it. The pain brought tears to his eyes, tears of pain and of humiliation.
On the one hand he enjoyed the visits of his friend Dude Miller. They had been friends for a very long time, and he now counted Miller as perhaps his only friend.
He knew that since his wife’s death he had become a sour, bitter, unfriendly old man, and Dude Miller was the only one who still came around. True, they were allied together against the onslaught of Lincoln Burkett, but beyond that was something deeper and more important—friendship.
And yet every time his friend left, Collins would pick up his gun and lay it upon his tongue. Miller had also lost his wife, but he’d had the courage to go on with his life, aided by his daughter. If only Ada had been able to give them a son or a daughter, things might be different today.
Ed Collins wouldn’t feel so utterly alone.
He eased the hammer of the gun down and replaced it in his desk drawer. As always, after just a few minutes of trying to pull the trigger, he felt exhausted.
As he dragged his worthless carcass to his bedroom he wondered what took more courage, to kill himself, or to go on living.
“Did you see Mr. Collins?” Serena asked at the dinner table.
“I did.”
“And?”
Miller chewed the food in his mouth, taking the time to choose his words carefully.
“He is a sad, sad man, Serena,” he finally said. “Every time I visit him I thank God for you, for without you I would probably be as sad and pitiful as he is.”
He closed his eyes and spitefully bit his tongue. Even taking a few moments to form his words he had said the wrong thing. For every argument he had ever given Serena for leaving and going out on her own, he had given a powerful one for her staying with him.
Stupid old man, he chided himself.
“This meat loaf is like heaven,” he said, to cover the annoyance he felt with himself.
“Perhaps tomorrow I will take some to Mr. Collins,” Serena said. “Do you think he’d like that?”
“He’d like that, and a visit from you, very much, my girl,” Miller said, feeling a great pride in her.
“Well, if that’s the case,” she said, taking the meat loaf pan up from the center of the table, “don’t eat it all.”
“Hey,” he protested, “I’m not finished.”
“Yes, you are,” she said, walking to the stove. “You don’t want to get fat, do you?”
“What does it matter?”
She turned and stared at him with mock severity.
“Don’t think I don’t see you when you’re looking at the widow Jones, Papa.”
“Ah,” Miller said, “the widow Jones is an old woman.”
“She’s fifty-eight,” Serena said, “and five years younger than you.”
“If I ever took up with another woman,” he said, “it would be one much younger than the widow Jones.”
“Like who?”
“Oh…”
“Never mind,” Serena said, turning to face the oven again, “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Is there coffee?”
“It’s coming.”
Whenever they even joked about Miller and women Serena ended up embarrassed by it—or maybe she was thinking about her own social life.
Where the hell were those McCalls, Miller thought to himself, and in the next moment voiced his thought.
“They’ll come,” she said, her back still turned.
“How can you be so sure?” He asked the question, even though only hours before he had been explaining her logic to Ed Collins.
She carried a cup of coffee to the table. She placed it in front of him and leaned her elbow on his left shoulder.
“No child can ignore the death of a parent, let alone two parents, Pa,” she said. “It cannot be done. They will come, if only to stand at the graves.”
“When they do come,” Miller said, “they’re not going to like what they find…not at all.”
“Well,” Serena said, her voice firm, “that’s as it should be.”
Lincoln Burkett looked up as his foreman, Chuck Conners, entered his office.
“Well?”
“Me and the boys got him bedded down, Mr. Burkett,” Conners said. “He was real upset when he couldn’t get into Louise’s and went right to the saloon. He got real drunk and tried to pick a couple of fights, but the boys got him out of there.”
“Who was with him?”
“Earl Murray, Mike Gear, and Greg Tobin.”
“And they kept him out of a fight?”
“Yessir.”
“See to it that they each get a bonus.”
