Page 10 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Jenny just stared, until Graciela dropped her head. Tears dripped down on the hands squeezed tightly together in her lap.

Jenny watched her for a minute, waiting for the snot. “Don’t you have a handkerchief?”

“I lost it.”

Reaching down, Jenny tore another piece out of her petticoat and handed it to Graciela. “Wipe your nose.”

“Thank you.”

“Look, kid, I know it’s hard right now. You’ve lost your mama, your cousins want to kill you, you don’t know where you’re going or who’s on the other end, you hate me…

” When she listed it out like that, the kid’s life sounded lousy even by Jenny’s standards.

“Well, okay. You’ve been dealt a rotten hand.

But that’s how it is. You have to play the cards you’ve got.

There’s no use crying about it. Tears and snot aren’t going to change a damned thing. ”

The kid didn’t speak. She sat there, head down, her fingers on the gold-heart locket that was pinned to her chest.

An hour later, a man came weaving down the aisle selling greasy tortillas filled with something unidentifiable that tasted like shredded fire. The first bite made Jenny’s eyes water and blistered her tongue.

“Didn’t you cry when your mama died?”

Jenny had forgotten that she’d told Graciela about her ma. “Oh hell, no. I wasn’t around when my ma died. But even if I had been, I wouldn’t have cried. My ma was mean as a snake. Looked like one, too.”

Graciela’s eyes widened. “She didn’t!”

Jenny laughed. “Well, she looked like a snake to me. The meanest woman who ever sucked air. I’m telling you, that woman never said a soft word to anyone in her whole life.”

“Why was she so mean?”

“Why?” Jenny blinked. She’d never considered the why of it.

“I guess I don’t rightly know.” Frowning, she turned her face to the window and sucked on her blistered tongue.

“Maybe life didn’t work out like she wanted it to.

Maybe she didn’t like living in a one-room shack at the edge of a played-out mine, trying to stretch one squirrel far enough to feed six kids.

” It occurred to her that things looked a little different when seen through an adult’s perspective rather than through the eyes of one of those six kids.

“Maybe she didn’t like it that my pa hit her and kept her knocked—” She gave Graciela a long look.

“Kept her with child,” she finished primly.

Graciela turned the fiery tortilla between her fingers. “Did she tell you stories and give you kisses?”

“Huh? Well, I guess not! She didn’t even kiss my pa. Kisses! Huh!”

“Oh.” Graciela placed the tortilla on the seat beside her, then she blotted her lips with the torn piece of petticoat.

She carefully tucked the piece of petticoat inside the cuff of her sleeve, then turned to Jenny and placed her small hands on top of Jenny’s.

She looked into Jenny’s eyes. “I’m sorry you had a bad mama when you were little.

She should have told you stories and given you kisses. ”

Jenny stared at her. Her chest suddenly hurt. “I’m sorry, too,” she said in a strange voice that didn’t sound like hers. She was silent for a minute, then said, “I thought you hated me.”

“I do,” Graciela said firmly, taking her hands away.

That was better, Jenny thought, feeling angry for no reason.

It was a thousand times preferable to be hated than to have a six-year-old feeling sorry for her, for Christ’s sake.

She threw her tortilla out the window, then gazed at the passing landscape.

She hadn’t thought about her mother in years, not since she’d heard that the old lady had died.

And then her first thought had been: Good riddance.

Now here she sat on a train going in the wrong direction, feeling sorry for herself because her mother hadn’t looked like Marguarita, but instead had smelled like despair, and had never told her a story.

Well, crud on a crust. So what? The day Jenny Jones drew aces was the day she’d fall over in a dead faint.

The heat built inside the car, and Graciela’s eyes closed. She sagged against Jenny’s shoulder, then slid down until her head was on Jenny’s lap and her legs curled all tight and ladylike on the wooden seat.

Jenny leaned her head against the sooty windowpane, wishing it would open, and thought about the cousins. She needed a plan, because her sixth sense warned they would be on the next train after her. And next time, she wouldn’t have the cowboy to help her.

Thinking of him in her sleepy state, Jenny had to admit that the cowboy had been one good-looking son of a bitch.

Usually Jenny didn’t pay much mind to a man’s appearance.

She just didn’t think about men in terms of how they looked.

But the cowboy had the same kind of eyes as Graciela, blue-green like the sea and fringed with soft brown lashes.

Those eyes had been something to see, startling next to sun-darkened cheeks.

Idly, she wondered how he’d gotten the black eye.

It had started to go yellow so it wasn’t fresh.

He hadn’t gotten it in the fight with Cousin Chulo.

Miles rolled under the train, and her thoughts kept drifting back to him.

The cowboy had the kind of tall, lanky physique that could mislead a person into thinking he might be more string than muscle.

When Jenny first saw him, she’d half figured that Cousin Chulo, who was built like a beer barrel, would drop the cowboy after a couple of punches.

But the cowboy’s wiry form was all muscle, and he had staying power, by God.

At the end, it was the cowboy who was still standing. Jenny grinned, remembering.

She wondered what the cowboy was doing this deep in Mexico. That question led to a consideration of her own situation.

Touching her fingertips to her forehead, she thought about her rig and the freight she’d been commissioned to haul back to El Paso.

Undoubtedly, her rig and cargo had been stolen seconds after her arrest. Mr. Comden would charge her for losing the load of bone buttons if she ever saw him again.

She had to make sure that didn’t happen.

Good-bye Texas, hello somewhere else. It looked like her mule-skinning days were over.

To pass the time, she tried to remember what was inside the shack she’d rented in El Paso, but couldn’t recall anything she minded walking away from. A person like her didn’t accumulate anything of much value. Unlike a certain prissy kid she knew, she was no fricking heiress.

Gazing out the window, Jenny watched a dry little village slip past the smoke-streaked pane. It was about as appealing as the cacti that surrounded it. Frowning, she looked down at Graciela’s head in her lap and wished she could fall asleep that easily.

But her thoughts wouldn’t settle down. Marguarita invaded her mind, and worries about the cousins, and the cowboy kept popping up too.

After a while, Jenny leaned to the bag at her feet, careful not to wake Graciela, and withdrew her battered dictionary.

There was nothing like reading words to settle a fevered brain.

Some of the definitions were like puzzles.

They didn’t make any more sense than the words did.

She had to study them and ponder hard to work out the meaning.

Many of the words she forgot almost as soon as she read them.

But other words sang to her imagination, and she said them over and over, charmed by the sound and wanting to commit them to memory.

Virile (vir-il) belonging to

Virility (vi-ril-i-ty) n. manhood.

“Virile,” she said quietly. A soft word for a hard thing. Pursing her lips, she considered, then composed a sentence using the word. “The cowboy is virile.”

Heat rushed into her cheeks, surprising her. Damned if thinking about the cowboy and virility didn’t make her blush. Embarrassed, she looked around to see if anyone had noticed. There wasn’t a soul who knew her who would have believed she was capable of blushing, including herself.

It was a damned good thing that she wasn’t going to see that cowboy again.

Yes, sir, a damned good thing. She was happy that she and the cowboy had parted ways.

Glad that the odds of seeing him again were mighty slim.

She sure didn’t want to see any son of a bitch who could make her blush. Nosirree bob, she didn’t.

He’d probably forgotten about her anyway.

That kind of man never gave a woman like Jenny Jones a second glance.

And she was glad about that. Yes, sir, she really was.

She stared out the train window and wished that she were tiny and beautiful, wished she could totter along on little bitty feet and wear pretty clothes that a cowboy might notice.

Sighing, she closed her dictionary, then her eyes, trying to decide what she would do when she and Graciela reached Hermita. She didn’t have a fricking idea.