He closed the door and motioned toward a chair
but when she refused it, he went himself instead and
sat down gingerly. She waited for him to speak.
“I want to stay with you until my time’s come,” he
said.
“Impossible.”
He drew a deep breath.
“I won’t be a burden to you. I can take my meals
out, have my clothes cleaned at the laundry.”
“You’re asking something of me I can’t give you.”
“Anything is possible. Hear me out.”
She listened as he told her about the cancer, how
far advanced it was.
“Doc says I won’t make it till spring. But the way
I’m feeling, I won’t make it till next week.”
She hadn’t expected this, even though he told her
the evening before he was dying. It was the sudden-
ness of it that got to her. He seemed a broken man—
not at all the way she had always remembered him.
“Why come here and ask me to do this?” she said.
“We hardly know each other. We’re just kin in name
only.”
“No,” he said. “We’re kin in blood, too.”
“All these years you didn’t bother to concern your-
self with me, but now that you’ve got this trouble you
want me to take care of you. I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m asking you to. Because your father is
asking this one thing of his daughter.”
“No!”
“I want to get to know you before it happens. I
want to get to know my grandchildren. I want you to
know me and I want them to know me. That’s all I
want. And in exchange, I’m leaving you and them
everything I have.”
He reached for a satchel sitting on the floor at the
foot of the bed; even that much was a struggle for
him. He set it on the bed and said, “Open it.”
She didn’t want to, but she did.
“That’s for you and the girls,” he said.
“I don’t want your money.”
“Who else would you want me to give it to? You’re
all the family I have left.”
“I don’t care who you give it to. Give it to the
whores or whoever you spent all your good years
with.”
“Clara,” he said, but she didn’t want to hear any-
thing more from him, turned, and rushed out.
He winced when the door slammed closed behind
her; it had the sound of a gunshot, and the feel of
one, too.
He knew, without knowing how he knew, that they
would be coming for him: men who wanted to make
a reputation by killing him, maybe even some relative
of that boy he and Fancher had shot off the fence, but
surely they would come for him. It wouldn’t matter to
them if they killed him sick like this, or if he would
even have the strength to pull a trigger in self-defense.
The strong killed the weak. That’s the way it was, and
that’s the way it always would be.
He looked at the valise of money—close to forty
thousand dollars for nearly fifteen years of work. He
felt like laughing at the situation. He’d planned on us-
ing the money to go to Mexico someday and buy
himself a small ranch and live out his days in the sun,
possibly even re-marry and have more children. He
laughed because he knew if there was a god, he would
be laughing as well.
He reached for the laudanum. Thank Jesus for the
laudanum, for nothing else seemed to work.
*
*
*
Try as she might, Clara could not get her thoughts off
William Sunday since her visit the day before. She had
the children do their arithmetic followed by a spelling
bee and then let them out to play for recess. She se-
cretly wished she had a cigarette to smoke—a habit
she’d given up when she left Fallon.
She thought about her father, the fact he was dying.
Why should she care, she asked herself. Yet, it wasn’t
that simple. He was right about one thing, they were
blood kin and even though they’d not truly known
each other very well, blood kin still meant something
to her. She watched her two girls playing with the or-
phan child—oh, to be a child herself again. She won-
dered if William Sunday ever felt about her the way
she felt about her girls. Did he ever have such love in
his heart for her, or was he too busy looking out for
his own interest to notice her, much less care?
She told herself she would not care. That if he had
dragged his sick self all the way here to see her, to im-
pose upon her, he had just wasted his time.
The children ran about and shouted and chased
