“The man was just passing by, Irv,” she said. “For heaven’s sake. Really, you’re making too much of it.”

“And you’re not making enough. I’ve lived longer. I’ve learned to be more cautious, less friendly.” He indicated the shotgun. “I’ll teach you how to shoot in case a vagrant, who ain’t so mannerly, comes along when I’m not here watching your back.”

She would be unable to reach the shotgun without dragging something over to the door and standing on it. By the time she did that, her throat could have been cut. So not to give Irv another reason to fret, she didn’t cite that. Instead, she gave a small nod of acquiescence.

He started for the door. “You tend to Pearl. I’ll hang that wash.”

“The wash can wait. I want to talk to you.”

His shoulders slumped as he turned back to her. “If it’s about moving into town—”

“It is. Let’s have this out. Sit down. Please.”

With obvious reluctance, he went over to a lidded barrel on which he’d placed a cushion to form a seat for himself. He often perched there instead of sitting in a chair. Laurel guessed it was easier on his hip.

She sat down at the small table at which they ate their meals. Pearl’s horrible, barking cough had subsided since she’d picked her up. Laurel laid her cheek against the top of Pearl’s head. “Her hair’s damp. I think her fever finally broke.”

“That’s good. She coughed all night long.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hell, Laurel, I ain’t cross over losing sleep.” Watching Pearl, he furrowed his brow. “Pains me to hear that cough. Poor little thing.”

Unwittingly he had given Laurel an opening. “I want to talk to you about a couple of things. Well, three, actually.”

He folded his arms over his middle. “What’s the first?”

“Thank you.”

That took him aback. “What for?”

“That night we showed up here, you could have sent us on our way. You could have put up a real fuss with Derby for springing us on you. You didn’t. I don’t think you’ll ever know how much I appreciated your kindness that night and these two months since. You haven’t complained once about Pearl and me being foisted off on you.”

He snorted. “You could’ve took one look at me and this place and raised more than a fuss, Laurel. You could’ve raised bloody hell, and Derby deserved it.”

They’d buried him in Foley’s municipal cemetery. At the grave site were only the two of them, Pearl, and the undertaker whom Irv had paid an extra fifty cents to read a suitable scripture and say a prayer.

In the weeks following, she and Irv grieved Derby privately, silently, neither speaking of him, because they had no shared memory except for the final few minutes of his life. Neither wanted to reminisce on those.

Laurel’s bereavement had been, and still was, far from pure and holy. It was corrupted by outrage. Were Derby’s last words to her, “You’ll thank me later,” supposed to atone for his cowardly, selfish desertion of her and Pearl, his defection from all responsibility?

Willfully, she tamped down the resentment that continued to smolder even now, two and a half months into her widowhood. If ever she allowed it to boil, it would consume her.

She lifted Pearl off her shoulder and placed her facedown across her knees, swaying them slowly from side to side. “Irv—”

“Is this the start of the second thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s hear it.”

She began by saying that it would be better for all of them to live at least within shouting distance of town. “I’m sure we could find a place to rent. Nothing fancy, but with separate rooms for us. Pearl and I wouldn’t always be underfoot. You’d have your privacy back.”

She looked at the blankets he’d strung up around the mattress. He now slept on a pallet of old quilts which he’d placed crosswise against the door, as far away from her corner as possible. The makeshift curtain served to keep them out of sight of each other during the night, but it was a fragile barrier against the forced intimacy and each other’s humanness.

He didn’t argue her point, so she pressed on. “You could take twice as many jobs if you didn’t have to drive that ten-mile round trip each day. That takes up valuable time.

“And I worry about that truck of yours breaking down and stranding you on some back road. If you went missing, I wouldn’t know where to start looking for you.”

“My truck runs just fine.”

“Then why are you tinkering on it all the time?” When he didn’t answer, she continued. “I’ll find something to do that will bring in extra money.”

He lowered his bushy brows. “Like what?”

She knew that money would be a primary concern. Rightly so. There were jobs to be had working in the oil patches that were sprouting up in northwest Texas, some not far from here. But an older man with a gimp hip and a woman with an infant hardly qualified them to be roughnecks, even if they desired to be.

She would have to come up with something she could do at home. Take in laundry and ironing. Teach illiterate adults how to read. She wasn’t without skills. Or resources.

She decided to admit now that the cash Derby had on him the night of their arrival wasn’t all that they’d had to their name. “I have some cash tucked away that Derby didn’t know about. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, and this is it.”

Her father-in-law took umbrage, but not from knowing she’d secreted money from Derby. “I’ll have you know that I ain’t destitute, and the idea of taking money from a woman, a young widow woman at that, makes—”

“Would you rather Pearl learn to crawl on a dirt floor?”

He scowled and muttered something unseemly under his breath.

“Why do you live here, Irv?”

“Because I like it.”

“You couldn’t possibly like it.”

“It suits me just fine.”

“Well, it doesn’t suit me. I don’t want my daughter growing up in a dilapidated shack with cracks in the walls. Out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everything and everybody. No telephone or electricity or running water. No other children. No other people except for the two of us. What kind of upbringing is that?”