An Angel for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad
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finally said, “I’m sure there’s someone in town with an extra room who would let you—”
“Well, aren’t you in luck, then,” Mrs. Hargrove said with a determined enthusiasm. “Since Matthew hurt his knee, his room will be empty. The doctor says he can’t climb the stairs with his sprain, so I’m sure no one will think anything of it. Besides, the twins are good chaperones.”
Matthew felt trapped and then guilty. The least he could do was provide her lodging. “We’d be honored to have you stay with us for a few days.”
“There’s no one who does this more like a business?” Glory asked. The thought of staying in this man’s room made her feel uneasy. She’d smell his aftershave on the pillows and see his shirts in the closet. “I can pay.” Surely one of those families that wanted a job would take in a boarder for a few nights. “I’ll even throw in a turkey for Christmas dinner.”
“I’m afraid there’s only Matthew and his boys,” Mrs. Hargrove said.
Glory bent her head to start writing her check. “How does one hundred dollars a night sound?”
“One hundred!” Matthew protested. No wonder she had financial troubles. “We’re not the Hilton. Besides, you’d be our guest.”
Glory had finished the check by the time he finished. No wonder he had financial troubles. “I can be your guest and still pay a fair price.”
“No, there’s no need,” Matthew said.
“I insist,” Glory said as she ripped off the check and presented it to him.
Matthew raised his eyebrows at the amount of the check. He supposed it didn’t matter what amount she wrote the check for when it was going to bounce anyway, but three hundred dollars was a lot to pay for several nights’ food and lodging.
“Consider it a Christmas present,” Glory said grandly. “For the twins.”
“They’ll appreciate it,” Matthew said dryly.
Glory flipped her wallet to the plastic section. “You’ll want to see my driver’s license.”
“Henry doesn’t bother. He knows the folks here who write checks,” Matthew said as he took a sidelong look at the driver’s license anyway. He was pleased to see she was Glory Beckett. She might be a bad risk from the credit company’s viewpoint, but she wasn’t a thief. That is, unless she was so polished she had gotten a fake driver’s license to go with her story.
“He doesn’t know me,” Glory said as she moved her driver’s license so it came into Matthew’s full view. “You’ll want to write down the number.”
“All right,” Matthew said as he noted her driver’s license number.
“Good,” Glory said as she put her checkbook back in her purse and turned to walk back to her easel.
“You’re not going to cash those checks, Matthew Curtis,” Mrs. Hargrove demanded in a hushed whisper as they watched Glory sit down to her easel across the store in front of the display window.
“Of course not,” Matthew agreed as he slipped the checks out of the drawer.
Carl Wall, the deputy sheriff, was running for reelection and his campaign slogan was No Crime’s Too Small To Do Some Time. He’d happily jail an out-of-towner for writing a bad check and brag about it to voters later.
Ten minutes later, Glory repositioned the easel. Then she arranged her brushes twice and turned her stool to get more light. She was stalling and she knew it. She suddenly realized she’d never painted a portrait as agonizingly important as this one. The sketches she’d done of criminals, while very important, were meant only for identification and not as a symbol of love.
“Do you want your mother to be sitting or standing?” Glory asked the twins. The two identical heads were studying the bottom of a large display window. They each had a cleaning rag and were making circles in the lower portion of the window while Matthew reached for the high corners, standing awkwardly with one crutch.
“I don’t know.” Josh stopped rubbing the window and gave it a squirt of window cleaner. “Maybe she could be riding a dragon. I’ve always wanted a picture of a dragon.”
“Mommie’s don’t ride dragons,” Joey scolded his brother. “They ride brooms.”
Matthew winced. Susie had been adamantly opposed to celebrating Halloween and, consequently, the twins had only a sketchy idea of the spooks that inspired other children’s nightmares.
“No, sweetie, it’s witches who ride brooms.” Mrs. Hargrove corrected the boy with a smile as she picked up a cleaning rag and joined Matthew on the high corners. “Maybe you could have a picture painted of your mother praying.”
“No,” Matthew said a little more loudly than he intended. His memories of Susie praying tormented him. He knew she would be heartbroken that her death had brought a wedge between him and God, but his feelings were there anyway. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never understand how God could have answered his prayers for so long on the small things like good crops and passing tests but when it came to the one big thing—Susie’s recovery—God had let him down flat. No sense of comfort. No nothing. He’d expected his faith to carry them through always.
Matthew didn’t feel like explaining himself. His arms were sore from the crutches and he hobbled over to a stool that was beside Glory. “I want the twins to remember their mother laughing. She was a happy woman.”
“Well, that’d make a good picture, too,” Mrs. Hargrove said, and then looked at the twins. The twins had stopped wiping their circles and were listening thoughtfully. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
The twins nodded.
“Okay, smiling it is,” Glory said. This Susie woman sounded like a saint, always smiling and praying and baking cookies, and Glory had no reason to resent her. None whatsoever, she thought to herself. “I assume she had all her teeth.”
“What?” Matthew seemed a little startled with the question.
“Her teeth,” Glory repeated. “If I’m going to paint her smiling, I need to know about her teeth. Were there any missing?”
“Of course not.”
“Were any of them crooked?” Glory continued. “Or chipped? Did she have a space between the front ones?”
“They were just teeth,” Matthew said defensively. Why did he suddenly feel guilty because he couldn’t remember what kind of teeth Susie had? He knew her image was burned onto his heart. He just couldn’t pull up the details. “Her eyes were blue—a blue so deep they’d turn to black in the shadows.”
“Eyes. Blue. Deep,” Glory said as she wrote a note on the butcher paper she’d stretched over her easel. “And her nose, was it like this? Or like this?” Glory sketched a couple of common nose styles. “Or more like this?”
“It was sort of like that, but more scrunched at the beginning,” Matthew said, pointing to one of the noses and feeling suddenly helpless. He hadn’t realized until now that the picture Glory was going to paint was the picture that was inside his head. He’d spent a lot of time trying to get Susie’s face out of his mind so he could keep himself going forward. What if he’d done too good a job? What if he couldn’t remember her face as well as he should?
“Pugged nose,” Glory muttered as she added the words to the list on the side of the paper. “Any marks? Moles? Freckles? Warts?”
“Of course not. She was a classic beauty,” Matthew protested.
“I see,” Glory said. She tried to remind herself that she was doing a job and shouldn’t take Matthew’s words personally. “I have freckles.”
Glory winced. She hadn’t meant to say that.
“I