she’d been striking years ago. Now she just looked tired, ragged out in a burgundy bustle ball dress with white lace at the ends of the sleeves and intricate beading of a style fashionable in the seventies.
“Would you excuse me?” Before Ezekiel could reply, she was on her way, stopping finally across the table from the woman in the outdated dress. “May I sit here, Rosalyn?” Gloria asked. The woman smirked, her hair pinned up in a mass of garnet curls, her cheeks rouged.
“If you don’t care what all these hypocrites think, I sure don’t.” As Gloria set her food on the table and pulled out the chair, she couldn’t help but note the thrill of hearing a woman speak her true mind again.
In proximity, Gloria saw that the woman was even more striking but even more ruined. It broke her heart. She thought of her mother, what she might have become had the syphilis not claimed her. “How are you likin the —”
“I don’t do pity too well. What possessed you to come over here?”
“I seen you around.”
“So’ve half the men in this room. And they feign outrage that I dare partake of this feast in their presence, laughing up their sleeves. You know I used to be
“Look, I just saw you were alone.”
“Well, you done your good deed, so why don’t you head back over—” Rosalyn stopped herself, reached out, touched the long blanched scar under Gloria’s bottom lip. “Where’d you work, honey?”
Gloria flushed, took a sip of water. “I don’t . . . anymore.”
“I said when you did.”
“Leadville.”
Rosalyn smiled. “Hell of a place. You’re stunning. Bet the men loved you. What happened to your chin?”
“I had a customer who went insane. Thought we were married, and that I was cheatin on him.”
Rosalyn laughed out loud. Heads turned.
“This town’s in high water,” Gloria said. “Don’t mind my asking, why’ve you stayed? Thought you might’ve gone to Cripple Creek.”
Rosalyn smiled, wisdom and a lifetime of buried rage in her eyes. “Been a whore all my life. I’ll finish out in Abandon and, when it goes, take what money I got, go somewhere where nobody knows me. Where it don’t snow. Buy a house. Tend a garden.”
“Marriage?”
“I’m afraid man’s a species that’s been ruined for me.”
Gloria sliced through a piece of roast.
“How’d you become so respectable?” Rosalyn asked.
“Fell in love with a good man.”
“Not many a those left, are there?”
Now they Black Hawk waltzed, the fiddlers sawing away, the clack of high-top lace-ups and stovepipe boots slamming the floorboards. Looking over her husband’s shoulder, Gloria saw Rosalyn sitting by herself in a rocking chair beside the stove.
“It’s shameful,” she said to him.
“You know who that woman is?” Ezekiel spoke into his wife’s ear.
“Wipe that feature off your face. She’s a human being.”
“Would you have people unriddle your past?”
“Would you have people treat me like I didn’t exist?”
They bumped into the Ilgs. “Excuse us, Sawbones.”
“Merry Christmas, Sheriff. Look at you in full war paint. Ma’am.” The doctor doffed his bowler.
When they’d broken from the crowd, Ezekiel said, “That woman ain’t my concern.”
“Is decent human behavior? You’re gonna dance with her.”
“Damn if I will.”
“Zeke!”
He glanced over her shoulder, whispered, “God bless that man.”
Gloria turned, saw Rosalyn rise to accept the hand of Stephen Cole. Soon the preacher and the whore were stomping together.
NINE
E
zekiel and Gloria walked down the plank sidewalk. It had been shoveled that morning, but a foot and a half of powder had fallen since then. Gloria tucked her gloved hands under the wool of her hooded cape. Aside from the ruckus of the dance hall, Abandon stood in that kind of mad silence that set in during the worst of blizzards. There appeared to be no one else out, and the snow fell so hard, they could see only the nearest streetlamp. Beyond lay only faint suggestions of lantern light.
They arrived at the entrance to the hotel, the door starred with snowballs—the handiwork of bored children. Across the street, there was light in the saloon and they could hear the sound of Christmas carols being played on a broken piano. They entered the dark lobby. There hadn’t been anyone at the front desk since the own er had left
